Connecting to an AWS egress point for direct connect reduces the egress price (about half) but doesn't eliminate it. It also costs thousands of dollars a month just to have the connection, so it's not great for small operations. :-/
If I'm reading the description correctly, egress from there is 2 cents/GB, while the regular price for egress (less than 10 TB) from eu-south-1 is 9 cents/GB.
I agree that GOG needs to port their client to Linux for all the reasons you stated, but as a workaround you can use Lutris which lets you log into your GOG account and download+install games (Windows games too).
It's not as pain free as Steam, because you sometimes still have to apply wine fixes, but it works well with the most popular games.
1. it doesn't (at least recently?) always do a great job of handling multiple displays, either launching games on my second monitor, which I orient vertically or getting confused about which monitor to use and switching back and forth until eventually the instance (but not the Lutris client) crashes
2. I find myself getting into launcher hell where I'll use a different wine version for one game and when I switch to a different game, it's using this new wine version and stops working
Not sure if Heroic solves these issues but I would try it again (didn't have any luck setting it up initially) if it does
If you are using KDE then there is a global Window rules setting and Heroic actually obey those rules, so you can force to launch a game always on X display, always minimized etc.
I've been using Lutris on i3 with multiple monitors. Enabling gamescope has been extremely helpful. I just get a window that tells the game to render at some fixed resolution, and it is happy to scale fullscreen or any size. I've been using i3's fullscreen toggle, it goes to the current monitor, or I can move it to another with my regular i3 binds.
It looks like gamescope has it's own fullscreen shortcut (super + f), but people complain about it about it going to the wrong display. Maybe your window manager offers a more consistent full screen option like i3 does.
> generate directions like "turn left after the green building"
I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the Los Angeles metro area, Google Maps already gives directions like this. "Turn left after the Carl's Jr.", "Turn right after the Starbucks". I notice it's usually done in areas where street signs are hard to see, but there is a clear landmark for the driver e.g. the golden arches of a McDonald's.
If you use Google Flights[1] to plan your flight, it lists the airplane that will be used for each leg of your trip so you can make sure to avoid flights on 737 MAXs.
The book All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer is an excellent narration of the time leading up to the coup, and the coup itself. I think it's fair to say that a lot of our problems with terrorism at the present all stemmed from this coup in Iran in 1953.
One of the CIA's in-house historians, who the following year went on to become CIA Chief Historian, David Robarge, wrote this review of All the Shah's Men in 2004: https://www.cia.gov/static/all-the-shahs-men.pdf
> In All the Shah's Men, Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times sugests that the explanation may lie next door in Iran, where the CIA carried out its first successful regime-change operation over half a century ago. The target was not an oppressive Soviet puppet but a democratically elected government whose
populist ideology and nationalist fervor threatened Western economic and
geopolitical interests. The CIA's covert intervention—codenamed TPAJAX—preserved the Shah's power and protected Western control of a hugely lucrative oil infrastructure. It also transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences at least as far ahead as the Islamic revolution of 1979—and, Kinzer argues in his breezily written, well-researched popular history, perhaps to today.
Nearly 20 years ago already, this was an admission of a coup against a democratically elected government, instituting an "absolutist kingship", with "unintended consequences".
All of this used to be available in HTML before the recent CIA website redesign.
People would do well to read old books, and even watch old television news programs and documentary programs like those from CBS, all the way back to the 60s, before thinking that this wasn't in some sense, common knowledge, at least among those who attempt to be knowledgeable. One great success of the CIA has been that this and a litany of similar events have been hiding in plain sight, and that it is "conspiratorial thinking" just to remember this stuff.
Edit: switched to archive of old.reddit.com