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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • Home Improvements, Virtual Style

    Every now and then I remember to check under the hood of this thing. I mean, sure, I make sure everything’s patched & current, I check every day on the backup logs, that sort of thing. Based on a sudden urge to find out if I could add a Mastodon feed to the sidebar, however, I ended up cleaning out some legacy cruft.

    No, seriously: The widgets I replaced were marked “Legacy” this and “Legacy” that.

    And then I ran into the fact that the new(ish) non-Legacy version of the Categories widget… lacks a title option. You know, the bit that says “Categories” at the top? The fix for that turns out to be putting the categories widget into a Widget Group and putting the title on that.

    A group of one. Nice design work there, WP folks!

    Anyway, I got that sorted out, added the RSS sidebar widget for my “fediverse” presence, and even got really under the hood and cleared out some old software versions on the server itself. Not bad for an hour’s random effort based on a silly whim.

  • Silly Reasons To Keep At It

    Look, we have to motivate ourselves in the ways that work for us, don’t we? Like, I want to watch the new season of The Dragon Prince, so that’s a reason to keep going. I want to play the new Fire Emblem game due to release in January, and I want to hear the new Mono Inc album which is due to arrive on the same day. (That’ll be a pretty cool day, it’s true.)

    If it keeps me going that many more months longer, that’s what counts, right? Right.

  • Out With The Old, In With The Somewhat Less Old

    If we know each other in person, and maybe even if not, you’ve probably heard me joke about the “Thousand Dollar Alarm Clock.” Heck, I even wrote about it some years ago, as evidenced by the link there. The poor thing’s not quite as old as my kids… but it dates from before the turn of the millennium, so there’s that. I have used it as my alarm clock almost exclusively since the turn of the millennium, come to think on it.

    And then this morning I found the hard way that I’d forgotten to account for the fact that its ancient Windows CE 2.1 operating system couldn’t adjust for a Daylight Savings Time regression (“fall back!”) that had changed dates over a decade ago. Usually I remember that it has the wrong date and adjust it the night before so my alarm goes off on time. (And then re-adjust on the “correct” date. Sigh.) Not last night, though.

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  • Satisfactory: Rocky Start, 2.5 Updates Later

    I got this done, start to finish, in the span of about a week. This included taking yesterday off from work (as an ostensible mental health day, which I definitely needed) to hunker down & finish adding clips, editing footage down to a somewhat-reasonable 39 minutes, and recording my voice-over.

    This meant listening to my recorded voice bits repeatedly until everything was trimmed down and slotted into place. It was every bit as cringe-inducing as you suspect.

    At any rate, here you go:

    All things being equal? I’m actually proud of this one. I took the fact that the game loaded in with a reset/default player avatar and used that to create a kind of narrative path for the video to follow. During the edit, I discovered a couple of other fun things to do along the way.

    It could be better, but I could’ve done much worse, too. Go, me.

  • Satisfactory: Turbopower!

    I picked Satisfactory back up a couple of months ago in anticipation of the Update 6 patch landing on the Early Access branch. Instead of starting yet another new save, however, I decided to keep going on the save I started back before Update 4 landed. This neatly avoided having to climb the tech tree all over again, not to mention it takes advantage of the fact that I deliberately left the Spire Coast region alone the entire time so far. (The developers warned everyone that major map changes were coming to that area.)

    Update 6 and its quality-of-life improvements arrived at the same time that I unlocked my very first ever “Turbofuel” recipe. I needed more electrical supply anyway (the lines on my power graphs criss-crossed a lot more than I was really comfortable with) so I decided to try out the more potent variety of fuel generation.

    Gus? Buddy? You know that the Blender is not your friend, right? No, no you don’t.

    Here’s how that turned out.

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  • Impressions From First Episodes: Fall 2022 Anime

    Remind me to, at some point, backfill my impressions of the Spring 2022 anime season, because it had a lot going on, most of it genuinely good.

    Anyway, since I am actually watching more than merely one or two new “first episodes” this season I figured I should jot down some thoughts. Here goes, listed by the order (mostly) in which I viewed them:

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