greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • Satisfactory: Solo v Cooperative

    I’ve been back on my Satisfactory you-know-what since late last year with no sign of letting up, aided by the kick-off of a co-op savegame with my daughter, who saw me streaming the game one day and expressed some interest. As of last night our multiplayer savegame is at the furthest point along the tech progression I’ve ever been in the game, and today that makes me ponder the differences between the solo Satisfactory game experience and the cooperative.

    So let’s talk about co-op play’s pros and cons. (Not to be mistaken for prose and cones.)

    (more…)

  • Square, Not Squiggly

    Sophos’ excellent Naked Security blog posted an advisory about a vulnerability in PHP, the code engine that basically drives WordPress sites like this one (among other things), so this morning I decided to update.

    And then I decided to upgrade.

    See, we’ve been running on PHP 7.4 since the latest server migration. That’s two major releases back from the current, as PHP 8.1 came out late last year. In due time, nobody was going to be checking for security problems in that version anymore so I figured it’s better to upgrade now rather than find out that I should have after something’s gone horribly wrong.

    Of course a version bump always includes the chance that some older piece of code won’t work right, and sure enough several of the sites I host fell down after the change.

    Quacked Panes fell down because there was still a set of squiggly brackets instead of the now-required square brackets in a part of the Webcomic plugin. (If you’re curious: Line 426 of webcomic/lib/transcribe/filters.php in the plugins directory. It’s a five-second fix of a short, simple line of code.)

    My son’s website fell down because of a YouTube plugin that hadn’t been updated in seven entire years. I simply removed that plugin directory from the WordPress file structure and huzzah, the site loads again.

    Both of our PmWiki sites fell down because, well, they were a bit out of date and that’s on me. A quick unpack of the latest installation files into the website directories solved that in a hurry.

    My Foundry VTT server wasn’t affected because it doesn’t use any PHP. On the downside, every server reboot results in my having to manually launch the silly thing, which… isn’t the worst situation, it’s just annoying. pm2 save, my ass.

    While I was goofing around in the server anyway, I also updated some backup settings (can’t ever go wrong making sure that your backups are good!) and performed some general tidying-up. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday morning… other than the moments of panic when I realized how many websites had fallen down, of course…

  • In That Quiet Ordinary World

    Let’s be clear: The following is of extremely limited amusement value. Laser-targeted, you might say, to a small handful of individuals on the planet.

    And yet here we are.

    With apologies to current and past members and fans of both Genesis and Duran Duran.

    Thank you for your time and please enjoy the rest of your day.

  • A Staging Share for Automate

    Three years ago, my employers left the Kaseya remote management system behind and migrated to ConnectWise Automate (formerly known as LabTech before the CW juggernaut bought it up, along with a variety of other acquisitions). While there are large benefits to being on this new system, such as not having been part of a gigantic supply-chain malware attack, we do miss a few things from the Kaseya system. Kaseya’s agent status indicators were far superior to Automate’s indicators, its agent software installed and updated far more reliably than Automate’s does, the agent software could be removed via the remote management system, and Kaseya featured a built-in staging share function.

    We used the heck out of that share system, mostly for patches but also for other kinds of software deployment. We’ve just kind of gone without that functionality in the years since, but every so often we lament the loss and wonder if there’s a solution.

    So this month I’ve started building one. In the stupendously unlikely event that another Automate admin is looking to do something like this, here are the building blocks I’ve put together.

    (more…)

  • Winter 2022 Anime – The Few Shows I’m Watching

    Yes, I still watch anime. Just not as much as I used to, and not the same kind of stuff that I used to. Here’s a quick run-down (alphabetically, for lack of a better sorting order) of what I think I’ll be sticking with through the rest of the season:

    (more…)

  • The Things We Do For Nostalgia

    I could have played a current game, a new game, or not played a game at all.

    But, no. I installed Might & Magic VI, a musty old RPG-type game from the late 1990s. I downloaded the strategy guides and maps from the site I used to rely on way back when (I’m glad it still exists!). And I plowed through the “loot the game developer’s offices” map trick to get a bit of a monetary and gear head-start on things.

    Is it every bit as janky as I remember? Oh yes. Is it a game from the days before everyone realized that WASD makes a better keyboard movement setup than the arrow keys? Sadly, yes.

    Did I have fun mowing down lizard men and Followers of Baa once my party all had bows equipped? Definitely yes.

    I’ve no idea if I’ll keep at this for very long, but hey, it made my evening pass rather pleasantly, all things considered.

Calendar

March 2026
S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  

My Links