Something Random

[Mercutio]

Bethesda has always been the Fallout-Ruining Bugfest Nightmare Reason to Hate All Gamepads and Consoles to me but Nadia has spent about 6% of her entire waking life in Bethesda games. She actually pointed out that she has even more time than her Xbox numbers since she also played on her dad's Steam and Xbox accounts and on Nintendo Switch.

For what it's worth, I also hate Blizzard ("We copy Games Designer's Workshop products, but poorly!"), Valve and any company that thinks I need another specialized launcher to play single player games. At least GoG makes their bullshit optional. Oh wait. I also hate Nintendo. Fuck Nintendo, whose best device has all the CPU horsepower of the best SoC nVidia had available in 2014, yet won't make their bullshit legally available for anything that doesn't have their logo on it. And also the company that has displayed genuine innovation in actively making gamepads even worse than all the other pieces of shit that make gamepads. It's basically like winning the award for molesting the most children. Definitely not a contest anyone should be trying to win.

Basically all of Gaming sucks unless it's a Baldur's Gate game or something Microprose made in 1995. I'm just enjoying the fact that my partner is actually agreeing with me about that for once.

 

[LunarMist]

Yeah, Bethesda as we knew and loved them is dead.

I've not been there in many years, but it was a nice area though expensive.

 

[Mercutio]

The video game ruining assholes of that name do their video game ruining in that very place. I am in fact sure that this is the process by which Bethesda makes games, only very slowly and with some kind of extra metrics awarding the most bugs and/or child molestations.

For what it's worth, I love the DC area. My father would go through stretches when he had obligations there when he was in the Navy. My family spent some summers around Richmond.

 

[sedrosken]

Merc, I will say that I don't have the virulent hatred that you do. I think it's that I'm just too young to really remember these studios back when they weren't primarily motivated by being able to sell 2387432194873209847 copies on launch day simply because there wasn't that many people in the market full-stop. I do more or less share your opinions but on a relatively recent scale and for different reasons.

Blizzard have been chasing the dollar since they got their first taste of WoW subscriptions and I honestly think they wanted to make Diablo a subscription game as well back with Diablo III with how monotonous it is. I loved Diablo and Diablo II, and they completely shat on the people who made their company what it is with that hunk of garbage. Bethesda hasn't learned how to use a different engine for their mainline products in over twenty years now, though I will say it's ironic that they handle id properties better than their own. The last time it was acceptable to use a NetImmerse derivative would have probably been 2008, maybe 2010. That their corporate culture is toxic isn't especially surprising to me, though it is a special sort of sickening. Activision would have you pay 60 dollars for a COD game that came out 10 years ago, so they suck too.

Valve I won't say that I flat-out hate simply because they've come closer to make gaming on Linux a reasonable proposition than anyone else with their refinement and packaging of WINE and DXVK, but Steam is a far cry from perfect, that's for sure. Their recent pivot to leveraging a steamwebhelper task to do everything is ridiculous and annoying and makes it a gigantic hog on anything made before ~2018, not to even get into how much of a security nightmare it is. All it should be doing is downloading games, showing a list of games associated with my account, and launching games. Handling the DRM if it needs to, which frankly needs to be a lot more rare than it is presently. I will however say their curious aversion to the number three and making their own games anymore is interesting. I guess the sirens call of being a middleman and making money for essentially nothing was too delicious to ignore. The Steam Deck is a neat piece of hardware but it's vastly overpriced even if it's single-handedly driving adoption of Linux gaming.

GoG also frustrates me because it has to be easy to just distribute an ISO for the original release of a game, though for some I'm sure there are legal problems. I don't mind having the repackaged game for modern systems, but give me a copy of the original for the platform it was meant to be on, too! The patches often literally make the games impossible to run on their original platform by dragging and dropping, though DOS games usually come out unscathed given their judicious use of DOSBox. I find the new icons really tacky and I think they should be optional in the installer, meaning you use the originals if you opt-out. Which I would. Every time.

Nintendo would likely have a lot fewer people calling for their heads if they stopped trying to make emulation illegal except for when they do it. They'd have to make money hand over fist if they, you know, sold ROMs on their website and let you run them in an emulator of your choosing. Figure out a way to authenticate which ROMs you own, if you must, but this current bullshit of buying a game in Virtual Console one generation, being completely unable to transfer the same game to a newer generation console, and then being copyright claimed for uploading gameplay footage and giving Nintendo free advertising needs to stop.

I'm not a fan of their hardware, and I'm even less of a fan of how they turn around and make money hand over fist for hardware that was current about ten years ago, no price drops at all (do you remember when the Game Boy was, like, 50 bucks? New?) but nothing holds a candle to how pissed I am about having replaced the left analog in my Switch Lite that I bought three years ago for one game, three times. I already loathed them but I was willing to give them one more chance since my sister had a game she wanted to play with me on there. I had maybe 20 hours total in the game and all of a sudden after 5 hours in it was stick drifting back when Nintendo was refusing to acknowledge that was a problem. If I'd had a normal Switch I'd have docked, bought a Pro Controller, and live and let live, but they in their infinite wisdom refused to allow the lites to dock. So after opening the console and replacing the stick three times in as many months, with the final time serving as the death knell for one of the speakers, I abandoned the platform. I would still rather pirate a game of theirs and run it in Yuzu than ever hand them another red cent.

I don't think their controllers pre-Wii U were even all that bad -- built Tonka tough if the amount of people putting Wiimotes through their televisions was high enough that they had to provide straps. The GameCube controller was ergonomic and interesting in a way that nothing else has managed to touch since. The Nintendo 64 is a creaky plastic nightmare but it was the first consumer console to give you an analog stick so one could say they were trying. The SNES controller is considered the pinnacle of 2D console designs for a reason.

 

[sedrosken]

Well, the Athlon XP build has kind of evolved into its final form: I found a reasonably-priced example of the Geode NX 1750, or in other words, a heavily, heavily binned Thoroughbred AXP nominally clocked at 1400MHz at 1.25v for a TDP of 14W. It came from Germany and arrived quite a bit before it said it would, ten or so days early actually.

This build has been a bit of a rollercoaster. I actually thought you guys might have been right to trash ECS at first, when I was fighting some wicked instability -- it wouldn't even boot into Windows XP setup half the time, much less complete a memtest run. But I thought about it, and the last rig I put together with that power supply also had issues... That was powering my Katmai PIII build, actually, and I had strange instability problems there too. But I couldn't figure out what the problem was... voltage rails looked fine, but like clockwork the ECS board would be fine on the test bench (with a different supply, natch) and fail when mounted in the case.

This is the first time I've ever had a Seasonic power supply fail on me, I guess, and it's the most modern part of the build, being a mid-2010 SS-350ET. The limits of this build are actually shaped around that power supply, a newer one with lower current ratings on the +5v rail, so if I wanted, I could actually swap in a much more powerful CPU now. But I find the whole "performance per watt" angle of this build to be very interesting, so now I'm massively underutilizing an era-appropriate 350W Antec unit with much, much more juice on +5v and even some on -5v, which I'm told for an ATX supply is practically unheard of since no one implements it and even less runs on it anymore.

This board is a little strange, but it's got the spirit. Not much in the way of overclocking options other than forcing a front-side bus frequency, even with a third-party modded BIOS flashed that unlocked more options than just 100/100 and 133/133. Said modded BIOS also let me cinch down the timings on my RAM, which is helpful since it's 400MHz RAM that can run very tight timings at 266. No voltage selection, no multiplier forcing. Trying to use the software control with CrystalCPUID is funny -- it can clock down, but not up. Insert sad music bite here. It does indeed only take up to 1GB of RAM -- using 1GB modules shows as 1GB total and it fails a memtest run. An interesting limit, but XP does fine on a gig of RAM, so whatever.

I actually have much more granular control over my FSB frequency in software, since SetFSB does support the clock generator my board's using, but I find the 143/143 setting in the BIOS to perform better while still being rock-stable. This overclocks the CPU by about 7% to ~1500MHz, which is fine, since every single mobile CPU gets overvolted on this board. The 1.4/1.45v chips all get 1.6 which is notably less than stock for the desktop parts, so it's not just feeding it desktop voltage. The 1.25v chip I'm using now gets 1.44. It's strange. It also thinks the Geode is another mobile Athlon XP, which, it essentially is, but at stock it completely mangles the PR rating, while overclocked it signs on as an 1800+. For a frightening moment after a BIOS reset, it thought it was a mobile Athlon 4, because it was clocked at 100/100 for safety and the CPU was at 1050MHz at that frequency.

My Ti4200, thanks to my cooling mods (big 120mm fan bracket in front, copper heatsinks on the VRAM), takes Ti4400 clocks and asks for more, though the CPU can't really feed it -- even the mobile 2200+ I was using at first bottlenecks this card, even when overclocked to 150/150 for ~2GHz. I vastly underestimated the Ti4200, but I'm not about to build an Athlon 64 rig just for it -- this'll do fine. It spanks Tualatin and costs less than half as much as it would have, so as far as I'm concerned the build does its job.

 

[sedrosken]

As proof that my life is a comedy, I've used up this year's allotment of good luck and found a Antec Plus 1080 case at a thrift shop. And it has a build in it! A funky dual-Athlon MP build using an MSI K7D Master-L. It has dual 2000+s and a gig of DDR RAM, and, get this, a Matrox Parhelia. For what I paid for it, I'd have been happy to just get the case, but I got a whole neat build out of the deal! I'm throwing a copy of XP on there right now. It kicks my Geode's butt, however, it needs more than three times the watts to do it, so I still have a reason to use the Geode and all. It'll be faster in some ways, slower in others, and it'll have its own purpose in the lineup.

 

[LunarMist]

I keep receiving what sounds like faxes on my VM for 60 sec. each. I didn't even know that faxes still worked.

 

[jtr1962]

I keep receiving what sounds like faxes on my VM for 60 sec. each. I didn't even know that faxes still worked.

Does anyone still even use a fax these days?

 

[LunarMist]

I didn't think they were allowed, but who knows.

 

[Mercutio]

Does anyone still even use a fax these days?

My company maintains a fax number 100% because of a dingbat secretary one of our customers uses. She's in her early 70s and she's impossible to train in any way, shape or form. Someone told her to send a particular report by fax 30 years ago and she's been dutifully printing out the report at her PC with her personal printer, then carrying it over to fax it on the document center that could just as easily email it to us or that she could just email us directly.

She says she's too old to change how she works, so even though several people have shown her how to attach a file to an email, she still prints it out and then faxes it. We tried getting rid of the fax line. She didn't notice that the reports weren't being delivered because it's not her job to look at the delivery confirmations. So now our customer just pays an extra $30/month for my company to keep an efax account. I don't know why they keep this woman around. Maybe she's someone's mother-in-law?

 

[sedrosken]

I still support several businesses with fax lines and machines. Fun fact, PCs were able to fax directly back in the day, that was half the point of most modems, but I don't recall seeing anyone ever use it. Such a shame, really.

Speaking of landlines, I've been thinking about getting with our company's VoIP provider to see about buying a line for an ATA device for myself and my nefarious experimental uses. Some of my stuff doesn't have a NIC and no method by which to add one, they only have a modem or serial port for communications. It'd be fun to experiment with. I got pricing, but no one got back to me as far as getting one and I haven't pushed the issue as I'm currently in the Chicago area seeing my folks. (@Mercutio , I'm in Huntley right now if you know where that is.) I flew into Midway last Thursday and leave on Sunday.)

 

[Chewy509]

I still support several businesses with fax lines and machines. Fun fact, PCs were able to fax directly back in the day, that was half the point of most modems, but I don't recall seeing anyone ever use it. Such a shame, really.

Puts hand up, yep did that back in the day, 20-odd years ago. It was awesome to print to the "Fax" and have to send directly from the PC.

Speaking of landlines, I've been thinking about getting with our company's VoIP provider to see about buying a line for an ATA device for myself and my nefarious experimental uses.

Just be warned, if ordering a VOIP service (as opposed to a real PSTN service), you want to confirm that the service is suitable for fax and data services. There are a few different protocols used in VOIP, and things like compression and jitter can play havoc with faxes to the point that don't work or you can only get very low data bates (600bps only, instead of 33.6K).

Fax is pretty much dead in Australia at this point, as most of the residential and SMB services are now pure VOIP and not configured for fax/data services.

 

[LunarMist]

I used the MS fax function plenty of times in the late 90s with an ISA modem if the Dell, a US Robotix Sporty something. I'm sure you run across those in your archaic builds.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm in Huntley right now if you know where that is.) I flew into Midway last Thursday and leave on Sunday.)

You're basically as far from me as you could be and still be in the Chicago area. It's a not-quite two hour drive from here. Woof.

 

[LunarMist]

I happen to know where that is. Sometimes we spent time in the Crystal Lake which is nearby.

 

[Mercutio]

My datacenter is moving to Detroit at the end of the month.
They've been giving me a sweet deal on my 1/2 rack rental for almost a decade and now I have to decide if I'd rather let all my stuff move beyond easy access or if I'd rather have my hosting costs more than double.

Today is not a good day.

 

[LunarMist]

What's the big deal? So your managemtment needs to cough up some money.

 

[sedrosken]

I happen to know where that is. Sometimes we spent time in the Crystal Lake which is nearby.

My mom did a fair bit of her growing up in Crystal Lake. I was born in Elk Grove myself, we lived in Itasca for a while, then Romeoville, then my dad and I moved down to Kentucky.

 

[Mercutio]

What's the big deal? So your managemtment needs to cough up some money.

The colo rental is in my name. I only pay $350/month for 21U and I don't pay for power. Most colos charge between $80 - $100/1U.

 

[sedrosken]

Well it's probably for the best that I'm so far away Merc, apparently the allergies I was fighting with a day or so after landing was COVID. I must have picked it up at the airport, or so my Mom says. I feel like an idiot and a horse's ass. I got over it fine by Tuesday, but my Grandma is freaking out over it and Mom was miserable all of Tuesday.

 

[Mercutio]

You just can't catch a break, can you?
Hope everyone is current on their vaccinations.

 

[sedrosken]

Yep, everytime I try to do right, I'm wrong.

Everyone's current and they got their latest ones a couple weeks before I showed up in preparation for the worst. Just sucks that the worst did in fact come to pass.

 

[LunarMist]

Today if the Freitag part 13.!

 

[sedrosken]

I traded the Parhelia off to a friend of mine who can appreciate it better -- I got frustrated with the drivers and being unable to disable vsync for love nor money. It also benchmarked worse than a GeForce3 Ti500, absolutely pathetic for something that was coming out before the Radeon 9700 Pro. The Athlon MP is instead getting one of those weird Radeon 9550s that shipped with 256MB of RAM for some weird reason. The friend I traded the Parhelia to is sending me one -- it's a very late one actually marketed as an X1050 but it's still an RV350 die with the 9550 clocks, so it still counts IMO.

Having 256MB of VRAM guarantees a 128-bit bus on these cards, and I'll never VRAM-starve any game this machine can run, so that's nice. This very late card also uses GDDR2 memory instead of plain DDR, so I can literally clock it as fast as the memory controller will allow for and it'll ask for more. The RV350 itself is the same chip used in the 9600 (non-XT) and it can easily do those clocks and then some -- I've seen folks hit 425MHz on the core, though I personally will be surprised if I manage any more than 350. Considering the stock clock is 250MHz on the core, that's plenty.

As for why I'm not using the 9600XT I think Coug sent me years back, I still have it, and it still works well, but the fan on the cooler died and I replaced the entire cooler with a gigantic passive job from Zalman. That cooler interferes with heatsinks on the MP board for the voltage regulation, so alas, I can't make use of it here. I also think it's just funnier to clock the snot out of a comparatively budget-oriented card.

Speaking of clocking the snot out of things, my Ti4200 overclocks like a champion, I don't know if I've said here or not. It's doing 4400 clocks 24/7 now, and I've had it as high as 300 core 300 VRAM, (600 DDR), and it was fine. For what I think is an OEM card (it just had a passive heatsink, and stock clock on this one was actually a little lower than normal) it turned out to be kind of a golden sample. I've been too scared to kill the VRAM to try 312 or whatever makes 625 DDR for the true 4600 clocks, but that's purely a personal problem.

 

[sedrosken]

I was borrowing an Omada router from work to test-drive and see if I wanted to buy one for myself, since we had spares (not in box, don't have a cow) and it was almost perfect... unfortunately, there's a longstanding bug/feature request related to DHCP options. I run a PXE boot server, I've got several devices that, due to a lack of optical drive or a dead one, can't really boot any other way. I can set options 66 and 67 however I like, but the client never jumps past the gateway itself to get to a TFTP server, no matter how I defined it.

I guess the move really is going to be a pfSense box.

 

[Mercutio]

For those who were wondering, CougTek did get back to me today by e-mail. Hopefully, he'll pop in and give everyone a status update but if he doesn't, at least we can know he's OK up in the great frozen north.

 

[Handruin]

For those who were wondering, CougTek did get back to me today by e-mail. Hopefully, he'll pop in and give everyone a status update but if he doesn't, at least we can know he's OK up in the great frozen north.

Thanks for reaching out and checking in on him. Glad to hear he's ok.

 

[jtr1962]

For those who were wondering, CougTek did get back to me today by e-mail. Hopefully, he'll pop in and give everyone a status update but if he doesn't, at least we can know he's OK up in the great frozen north.

Glad to hear he's alive and well, and thanks for reaching out to him.

 

[CougTek]

Indeed, I'm not dead yet. And although it took me 3 tries, I remembered my password after ~6 years of absence, so I'm not senile yet either.

 

[Handruin]

Good to hear from you Coug, it's been a minute.

 

[sedrosken]

Indeed, I'm not dead yet. And although it took me 3 tries, I remembered my password after ~6 years of absence, so I'm not senile yet either.

Good to see you again Coug!

 

[CougTek]

Thanks

 

[sedrosken]

Well, I got pfSense going and it was only very annoying. The ISO won't boot from a Ventoy USB and I had to make a special USB just for it with a special USB-specific image, even. After some hiccups with the routing or something being dropped every couple minutes -- fixed with a reboot -- it seems fine. I'm currently fighting with my Dynamic DNS provider to get a custom service for it working in the router, and with my firewall rules to get traffic flowing from my OpenVPN network to the LAN.

The annoying part is that the bit that's usually seventeen and a half pains in my ass, setting up the OpenVPN server itself, was surprisingly easy. I can connect to it and everything. I just can't do anything with that connection because I can't figure out why I'm not routing any traffic from the OpenVPN subnet to the main one and vice-versa. I'd use TAP mode instead and bypass all that garbage but that doesn't support Android clients.

Ah crap, and I need to pull it from the rack and hook it up to a display and keyboard to make sure I set the AC power option to always on so it'll autostart after a power failure.

 

[sedrosken]

Well.

I just learned I don't qualify for the federal connectivity program that was partially subsidizing my cable bill anymore, so to lower it, I took my service down from 500/10 to 250/10. Which was plenty when I first moved in. I'm not sure precisely why or even when I upgraded.

The main reason I replaced my AC1750 running OpenWRT in the first place was because it couldn't saturate my WAN much over 300mbits. The pfSense router does, and I'm glad I have it so I'm not worried about it heading into the future, since I've already got a business AP set up that's so powerful I can get 3 bars of signal out in my car, but I just lost the main reason I bought the new router in the first place. There wasn't anything explicitly wrong with the 1750 aside from being unable to saturate WAN over 300mbits and its weak built-in WiFi radio, both of which are no longer an issue now.

I guess I have it as a backup now?

Got the AC power behavior defined in the BIOS, got my VPN situation working, now all I need to do is figure out why it's not updating my DDNS provider.

 

[CougTek]

Is there a reason you use OpenVPN, which is notably bloated, instead of Wireguard?

Also, did you configure pfSense to use Surricata or Snort to inspect your traffic?

 

[sedrosken]

OpenVPN is just what I used first, know how to get running, and have clients configured for everywhere. I don't have the bandwidth at home for it to really matter either way, I'm working with 10mbps up and everything I have can saturate that easily. That and it looks like Wireguard would require either external packages or a specific server running inside my network -- OpenVPN support was built into my copy of pfSense, along with IPsec and L2TP. Not super interested in overcoming momentum for something that won't even really benefit me. I'm the only one on this network and the only one using the VPN when I'm out of the house. It's almost exclusively for accessing my home server when I'm out of the house. I installed Diablo II on my laptop over it while I was in Chicago.

Thanks for the tip on IPD, though. Not sure I'll go out of my way to use it in my home LAN where I do a great many things that are inadvisable and that any good IPD system would screech in eldritch terror at, but I'll give it a look.

 

[sedrosken]

Oh, and regarding DDNS, I eventually just decided to abandon my old DDNS provider and go with one that was supported natively. I was using Dynu because I'd been using NoIP before this and got annoyed with needing to "confirm" my hostname every thirty days, and Dynu didn't need that. I was manually updating my IP at the time anyway. I eventually finagled a custom service for OpenWRT, but I couldn't get it to work in pfSense for love nor money, and I was tired of fighting with it. The URL I was using was updating fine when I visited from my browser, but using settings that were known to work with pfSense, it just wasn't working from the router. Oh well. Issue's solved now, I swapped over to FreeDNS.

FreeDNS has some... interesting... domains available. I took one under crabdance.com, but chickenkiller and mooo were some others that stood out. I guess having humorous domains is a good way to ensure they're memorable.

 

[CougTek]

I was browsing the forum to see what I missed in the past 6 years. David Drueding is in Denmark now? It's apparently a great place to live, but it must be quite a change from the U.S. How hard is it to learn Danish? Bought a car or always riding a bike, like JTR?

 

[LunarMist]

I'm a huge Marvel comics fan but if anyone told me 15 years ago that I'd get a movie with genuine emotional depth about a raccoon with a machine gun, I would've said that's insane. But here we are. Guardians volume 3 hits all the high Cs.

Today is May the Fourth. In my house, we finished Andor, a show that is on its surface just the backstory to an ill-fated character who is himself just more backstory to Star Wars: A New Hope. Andor is so, so much more than that. It's an examination of the nature of fascism, of revolutionary movements, and how old men send the young out to die in their battles. It is a taut political thriller. I'd put it ahead of Empire Strikes Back, if only because it brings the pot to a boil over the tiniest moment. Not a kid dropping a bomb down a vent, but a town gathered to mourn and old woman. That's the breaking point.

The best storytellers are a rare joy in this world. Tony Gilroy somehow convinced the biggest entertainment company on Earth to produce his examination of reaction to oppression. James Gunn's writing brought characters even hardcore comic fans never saw to greater prominence than decades of cartoons, radio plays and TV shows could for some of DC Comics' most famous characters. Gunn has taken the role as a the creative lead over DC Comics movie properties. Hopefully, he'll have the same success there.

Not everything is high art but we are lucky to have so many great storytellers and wonderful stories.

It looks like the latest of the Marvells has bombed. I'm curious how you compared that to the others.

 

[LunarMist]

I was browsing the forum to see what I missed in the past 6 years. David Drueding is in Denmark now? It's apparently a great place to live, but it must be quite a change from the U.S. How hard is it to learn Danish? Bought a car or always riding a bike, like JTR?

I was browsing the forum to see what I missed in the past 6 years. David Drueding is in Denmark now? It's apparently a great place to live, but it must be quite a change from the U.S. How hard is it to learn Danish? Bought a car or always riding a bike, like JTR?

Something Random

I haven't played D&D since the early '90s, but a friend will be starting a game in about a month that I'm looking forward to joining. I taught my SO at the time how to grind items in Neverwinter Nights and it paid for most of her college. Skyrim consumed at least a thousand hours of my time, and...

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