Sea of Stars is an amazing role-playing adventure, with retro graphics and music that will instill 8-bit nostalgia. It’s very modern in its game design, and filled with really incredible artwork and characters. The gameplay pulled me in from the very start. I enjoyed this game, but parts of it do drag on. It’s a little long in the tooth, and the dialog is a mix of emotional and mediocre. It’s a game that held my attention strongly, but the story is somewhat lacking, and the gameplay does get a bit repetitive.
When going from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, I favored installing things from scratch rather than trying to upgrade things in place. In my university days, it wasn’t uncommon for many of the other students I knew to reformat and re-install their machines regularly. Windows has become more stable long term, although copying a Windows install to a new device sometimes requires 3rd party tools. In the Linux world, it’s much easier to simply copy an entire existing installation to a brand-new system using tools that are often part of the base system in any distribution or USB installation media. The following post is a reference document I often use when imaging new machines.
I bought my 2006 Subaru WRX in the fall of 2017. I’ve traveled over half the country with Nicole (that’s her name). Last year, I started looking at newer Imprezas, but I was concerned with the tracking that’s now being built into all vehicles. General Motors was found selling detailed driver information to third-party data brokers, allowing insurance companies to increase rates and deny coverage based on data car owners didn’t know was being reported. I take my data privacy seriously, going as far as removing Google services from my phone and deleting my mainstream social media. There are guides for bypassing or disabling the permanent cell modem on modern Subaru vehicles, but I decided not to go down that route. I know I’m still being tracked in other ways, but I like to lower my footprint whenever possible.
So I decided I wasn’t going to replace Nicole. After all, she is a Subaru WRX. She’s well maintained, and her interior is in excellent condition. Although not the most high-end sports car for her era, she is fun, fast and occupies a special place in the hearts of many car enthusiasts. So I decided to do some repairs and updates to keep her on the road for years to come.
I had been using a Dell Inspiron 16” with an Intel i7-1260P as my work laptop for a year and 11 months. One Sunday evening, I went to look up information I needed for a Monday meeting and found the laptop had shutdown. I was unable to turn it back on. I tried multiple chargers and high-powered USB-C cables. The power light simply turned amber for a few seconds whenever I pressed the power button. With the laptop completely dead, I pulled the storage (an M.2 NVMe solid state drive) and moved it to a Lenovo. After setting up the GRUB bootloader, I was back up and ready for work on a horribly slow laptop. With the Dell out of warranty (only one year from the factory), I decided to replace it with a Framework Laptop. Even though Framework is slightly more expensive than most major brands, everything on it is user-serviceable. All the options from major brands had RAM soldered onto the motherboard that could not be upgraded. That growing trend was the breaking point that turned me away from the big brands in the laptop market.
I immediately got messages from friends on Saturday following the assassination attempt on Former President Trump. One friend immediately thought that the event was staged. Another said he thought there was a “nonzero” chance it wasn’t staged. One friend has since changed their stance, indicating the simple answer is the most likely. I find it absolutely fascinating that people who have watched a controlled media continually lie to them for the past several years (if not our entire lives) are so willing to believe one of the most outlandishly contrived Hollywood cinema style plots as if it’s 100% genuine. People feel like they have to believe a story, and we’ve been conditioned to believe in heroes and the impossible.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to pick up a copy of Stellar Blade. I didn’t pre-order it, but I was intrigued by some of the controversy surrounding the title, as well as how well such a game would look with Sony’s adjustments. I managed to get a physical copy on opening day. The initial few hours were filled with intense and challenging combat, making me wonder if this would be the first game I started on the PS5 that I wouldn’t finish. I pushed through the early bosses and was met with some very interesting characters, beautiful game art and excellent world-building. It’s a game that has its flaws, and a steep skill curve. Yet, it still ended up being an entertaining game as I stuck with it.
I recently documented how I archived content from creators I subscribed to on Locals. I subscribed to VivaBarnes when they first joined the platform in 2020, and I also subscribed to Louder with Crowder when it switched to Locals from The Blaze. For years, I felt like both had done an excellent job of informing and/or entertaining their audience in some very difficult times. However, both have had their own controversies over the years. Over time, I gained less from the subscriber-only content. The quality of their work has degraded. My own research has found they’ve both been pushing their own narrative stories, sometimes directly opposed to the facts of the events they cover. I don’t regret supporting them, but I think I’ve exhausted the value I received from their videos. This month, my subscriptions end for the only two people I follow on Locals.
I subscribe to two channels on Locals, a creator funding platform that was bought by Rumble. Both of the people I subscribe to produce a lot of content, and there’s no way to consume all of it, especially with Local’s abysmal web interface. In the past, I’ve archived content from The Blaze. The Blaze had a well-designed frontend interface and easy to handle JSON response. This made it almost trivial to archive content. Locals renders most of their HTML on their servers. A considerable amount of scraping and parsing is required, in order to archive their content. I created a tool called arclocals; a Python application anyone should be able to use if they want to archive the content of people they subscribe to on Locals.
I’ve documented my long history of cellphones. My history of tablets is substantially shorter. I’ve been able to get significantly more life out of the various tablets I’ve purchased over the years. In this post, I’m going to show you every tablet I’ve ever owned. I’m only including devices without keyboards. I’ve had some x86 laptops, both personal and for work, that have screens which flip all the way around so they can be used as a 2-in-1. I’ve never really used these in tablet mode, so I’m leaving them out. For the most part I’ve only used tablets for reading novels, comic books and manga. They’re really great for reading, and maybe some light web browsing, but I’ve hardly used them for anything else. In this post I’ll cover the Acer Iconia Tab, Samsung Galaxy Tab S, Microsoft Surface Pro 2, a failed attempt to restore an Asus Google Nexus 7, and finally, the Google Pixel Tablet.
Years ago, I migrated from Google Voice over to a Voice/SMS service called Jmp.Chat. I host my address book using Radicale, an open source CardDav/CalDav server. In order to synchronize contacts between the two, I wrote dav-xmpp-sync, a Python application for CardDav to XMPP synchronization. It’s worked fairly well for a while. I recently did some maintenance: updating dependencies and adding support for SMS/Text groups. The v1.2.0 release is available via a Docker image, and is fully backwards compatible with the previous release.
