Some EA games on Steam come with it, and won’t launch without it. For example Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which it so happens I am playing currently and so I was affected by this bug.

In case it’s useful to anyone in the future there is a workaround to get playing again without waiting for a Proton update. You download the .exe of the current version of the EA app from EA directly, then use protontricks to uninstall the EA app version in your game’s wine prefix. Then again with protontricks you install the version you downloaded to replace it, after which the app should launch and you can sign in again and play the game.

If I’d known Mass Effect LE was forced to go through the EA app this way I’d never have bought it, but alas I got it on an opportunistic deep discount and didn’t play it until well outside the refund window. Live and learn I guess.

The Ender was good when it worked, which it did really well for a year or two after I spent a lot of time and energy getting it sorted. But then things started to go downhill. In the hot end I had the heater cartridge, thermistor and cooling fan all fail separately but fairly close together. I had Z screw runout issues and had to replace the brass nut. The extruder housing cracked and had to be replaced with an aluminum one. Limit switches failed. V rollers failed. It suddenly developed adhesion issues with the glass bed and glue stick I’d been doing for years. Scuffing up the bed didn’t work, replacing it with a new glass bed didn’t work, scuffing the new glass bed didn’t work. I switched to a magnetic PEI bed, that worked but it conforms to the horrific banana shape of the Ender’s factory bed and I can only print on a single quadrant of it at a time because of the massive dips in between the screws.

This is just the stuff I remember from years ago. I enjoyed tinkering and upgrading the Ender in the early days but I’m older now and have other stresses on my time. I just want something that works.

Thanks for the advice everyone. I’ve been researching the suggested printers, though options are somewhat limited in my area and pricing varies to US retail. I’d hoped the Ender 3 price tier had approached a more turn-key experience by now, but it seems pretty hit or miss with the Ender 3 V3 SE as far as I could tell. It looks like out of what’s available the Qidi Q1 Pro gets me what I want and is the best bang for buck in local pricing.

Of course that’s a thing now. Yeah I would very much not like to be locked into a vendor ecosystem.

It’s all motherboard models for certain Intel chipsets, AMD looks to be unaffected: https://thehackernews.com/2025/12/new-uefi-flaw-enables-early-boot-dma.html?

Fedora has a policy of not shipping with non-free/proprietary packages. So depending on what wifi adaptor you have the driver might not be present by default. It’s easily fixed by enabling non-free/third party repos after installation, but the annoying gotcha with wifi drivers is you might not have an alternative way to reach the internet to do that.

Yep. To paraphrase the wise words of Casually Explained:

Adrenaline junkies like skydivers often say something like “I love it so much I’d die for my sport”. In contrast, with bodybuilding dying is the sport.

I know this is a funny jab at BMI, which is an extremely flawed way of determining anything, but actually the risks of being a competitive bodybuilder with single digit body fat percentage are remarkably similar to being morbidly obese. Being natty certainly makes it safer but being jacked and being healthy aren’t the same thing. The people you see on stage at bodybuilding comps are a short step away from needing admittance to hospital.

I enjoyed playing Andromeda, in fact I think gameplay-wise it’s the most fun of any mass effect. But story and character wise it was so mediocre that very shortly after finishing it I couldn’t tell you who anyone was or any of the things that happened.

It might have been better off with a different spin-off name that made it clear it was in the same universe but wasn’t really Mass Effect, because it kinda misses the mark for what those games were about.

Balena started collecting telemetry without disclosing it to anyone, reportedly including information about what images you were flashing. Apart from a general distaste for unconsensual telemetry, I think people were concerned the data could be used for things like helping to de-anonymize TAILS users.

Beat Saber is on Steam and is also the best selling VR game of all time, so yeah I’d say it will work. I’d be extremely surprised if it wasn’t one of the very first games Valve worked on FEX & proton optimisation for.

Where I live grocery stores are a terrible example, all the plant proteins are jacked up in price with marketing about how it’s organic and vegan and will cure cancer yada yada. And then the wheys they sell are blends with low actual protein content and/or poor aminos.

I buy my protein from a bulk supplements supplier, and soy is 75% of the cost of the cheapest whey, gram for gram of actual protein content.

Creatine is still very much a thing, but I think everyone actually knows what it is and what it does and it’s not treated as a magic bullet any more.

Mainly what seems to have changed is that steroids and TRT have exploded in popularity, and a scary number of under 18s are doing it.

Apart from that I couldn’t tell you, it’s all happening on Insta and TikTok now and I don’t participate.

More research isn’t a bad thing, but this really isn’t news. If you’re a nerd who’s into lifting you’d already know that soy protein is a top tier source of all the important amino acids for muscle gain. And it’s cheaper than whey.

It’s also not very popular because the manosphere tells men that consuming it will feminize them. Yes, really. They took the “soy boy” thing very literally and ran with it off the deep end.

People are saying you shouldn’t use AI to identify edible mushrooms, which is absolutely correct, but remember that people forage fruits and greens too. Plants are deadly poisonous at a higher rate than mushrooms, so plant ID AI has the potential to be more deadly too.

And then there’s the issue that these ID models are very America and/or Europe centric, and will fail miserably most of the time outside of those contexts. And if they do successfully ID a plant, they won’t provide information about it being a noxious invasive in the habitat of the user.

Like essentially all AI, even when it works it’s barely useful at the most surface level only. When it doesn’t work, which is often, it’s actively detrimental.

Yes. There are many similarly coloured mushrooms out there, like Cortinarius archeri or Collybia nuda. Mushrooms come in every colour of the rainbow.

True in many cases but not all, and the people managing these populations are almost never directly responsible for the problem. For example the species I now help manage in my country were introduced generations before my birth. Same for the overwhelming majority of the land clearing, it was done before even my parents existed.

I can’t change history, but I can take some responsibility for mitigating the damage of those who came before me.

This sounds exactly like the lies anti-drug proponents tell to try scare people off drugs. Did you know there was a boy who died after injecting just one marijuana?

At least here in Australia, 15A circuits are not very common. Only one of the places I’ve ever lived had a 15A outlet in a shed, which was likely installed by the previous owner for running a welder or plasma cutter, or some other high peak power tool like that. 3.6kW is massive overkill for general household use.

The standard circuit here is 10A, which gives you 2.4kW to play with. It’s been a while, but if I recall correctly that was part of the point Technology Connections was making - that the difference isn’t actually that great between 120 and 240V countries in practice. The change to boiling time from an electric kettle was pretty inconsequential between the two.

I believe he postulated that the real reason Americans don’t have electric kettles was that they didn’t have much need for them. They mostly don’t drink tea, and their coffee is largely prepared using drip coffee makers that heat their own water.

They are carrion eaters, so their mouths are full of nastier bacteria than a dog