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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • Satisfactory: A Tale Of Two Factories

    It was the jankiest of builds, it was the jankiest of builds.

    Sorry, Charles Dickens, but in this case repeating myself is the most accurate way to start.

    This past Tuesday evening, the kids and I finished up the “Tier 8 Products” factory build. Which is to say, we’ve now automated the final three requirements for the final milestone unlock: Turbomotors, Fused Modular Frames, and Cooling Systems. (Electromagnetic Control Rods are built elsewhere for various reasons.) I noted in voice chat at the end of the session that our co-op build was vastly more efficient and elegant than my personal version of this same (basic) factory had turned out. Spud found this amusing, as he sees our version as being quite “full of the jank.” Which isn’t wrong, but there’s janky and there’s janky.

    Please allow me to illustrate.

    Yes, it “needs” supports underneath. We’ll get there some day. There’s beautification to be done all over this co-op map.
    (more…)

  • Migration Yet Again

    It’s amusing to look back on previous server migration posts and realize how long I’ve been a Linode (now Akamai, oh boy) customer. And yet, only a couple of years after the last round of server changes I decided to do it once again.

    Why?

    Mainly because I wanted to get away from the Apache webserver. While it’s the workhorse driving a lot of the World Wide Web even now, it’s showing its age and, well, there’s the whole naming optics thing, isn’t there? And after seeing an online friend rave happily about this thing called OpenLiteSpeed (including how much less of a pain in the backside it is to deal with versus NGINX, the other leading option) I figured, you know what? It’s time for a change.

    So change I have. This site, along with nearly all of my other web-based projects, lives on yet another new Linode/Akamai virtual server, this time without the usual Apache webserver setup. My thoughts on “OLS” itself will have to percolate a bit before I can craft them into a coherent post but in short: It’s quite slick, but its documentation has some glaring holes and it isn’t always easy to search online for fixes to weird problems. Additionally, certain WordPress plugins don’t like it very much. (Or OLS doesn’t like them. Take your pick.)

    It is downright peppy, though, and a breeze to administer. Setting up the reverse proxy for my Foundry VTT rig was actually simpler than it had been under Apache… not that OLS’ documentation made that any easier to figure out, mind you.

    I still have some things to move over before shutting down ‘node3’ but considering I only spun up the new host Saturday morning, to be here midday on Tuesday with nearly everything sorted and settled? I’m happy with this result, yeah.

  • Satisfactory – Harnessing The Atom

    If you’re going to play around with nuclear fission, it’s probably best to do so on a distant planet where (almost) zero humans are endangered by your efforts.

    (more…)

  • Re-ripping The Classics

    On my way to the grocery store yesterday morning I discovered that one of the songs playing on my phone was misbehaving a bit. It skipped forward randomly for most of the first minute or so before settling into something resembling normal playback. In a moment of brilliant forethought I made note of the glitch (thank you, Obsidian) to check on once I got home.

    Sure enough, that song (and indeed every song on its particular album) had been ripped with a barely-out-of-beta version of the Ogg Vorbis codec, which means it hadn’t yet been optimized for decoding in mobile device environments. Then I checked a number of other albums by the same artist and… all but a few were ripped at basically the same time with the same (new then, but obsolete now) codec. Clearly at some point in 2002 I was super busy ripping CDs.

    Guess what I spent yesterday afternoon doing! Ripping CDs again!

    On the upside, I have dbPoweramp‘s CD Ripper software on hand and a solid & reliable LG optical drive to work with. On the downside, some of these CDs are quite old and are showing their age. (Plus, in some cases, there’s actual physical damage. The kids got into my CD collection once when they were very very young…)

    Overall the operation went well, and the only three tracks which indicated failures in the ripping software were tracks I don’t particularly need. (The first is a duplicate bonus track available in remastered form on a different album, and the remaining two are live versions of songs I can probably source elsewhere.)

    Why even bother, then? Because this time I have more advanced codecs available, at higher bitrate (thus slightly better overall quality), and if anything went horribly wrong with my source CDs (further bitrot or an actual physical catastrophe of some sort) I want the (reasonably) best available archival copies I can get. (No, I didn’t FLAC these albums. They’re not important enough to me to justify the vastly increased storage requirement.)

    And now when those songs come up on my phone in the random playlist, they shouldn’t go all glitch-y on me. Priorities, y’all.

  • Satisfactory – Rail Tour Video

    I put this together last weekend and eventually remembered that I should post it here:

    Please enjoy 18 minutes of a train moving along train tracks through video game scenery.

    Note that the rail network shown in this video is far from complete. There’s the planned nuclear power site along the north coast of the Rocky Desert region yet to build, never mind the expansion into the Dune Desert and south from the Oilands. But if I waited until I was “done” building new rail segments in this game, I’d never get a video made at all. So, here we are.

    As a learning experience, making this video also taught me a simpler way to “slide” text on the screen in Davinci Resolve than I’d used previously, cutting the production time on this one down considerably from what I originally expected. I’m not 100% happy with the look of the text itself, however. I think it needed more contrast on the edges to avoid readability issues on complex backgrounds.

    Anyway! Until next time!

  • The State of the Gamer in Mid 2023

    I’ve had zero creative energy this year so most of my spare time is spent watching documentaries (CuriosityStream and Nebula and PBS for the win), listening to music, and playing games. Quite a bit of playing games.

    But not a whole lot of games. Just a few.

    (more…)

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