In the beginning, there was Fire Emblem: Three Houses and it was good.
Well, wait. That’s not entirely accurate. Let’s try this again.
(more…)Author: Karel Kerezman
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Good Logging
Fediverse user “c0debabe” posted thus, this afternoon:
Bad logging is worse than no logging because then there is false hope that the info you want might actually be there.
https://hackers.town/@c0debabe/109667298320413659And that inspired me.
It’s unusual for me to use an existing, well-known template. Enjoy this rarity. Look, I am a delight, okay? Also, I might as well get something useful out of that year I spent living deep in “spotted owl makes good eating” country as a teenager.
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Barking Up The Wrong Mailbox
Mail delivery today consisted of one (1) envelope.
Hand-written address, which certainly stands out from the usual pile of machine-generated credit card offers, bank account offers, and similar “please give us your moneys” material.
But… I have no idea who this person is. Okay then! Get the envelope safely into the apartment, use my handy-dandy letter-opener, and inside… there’s a letter. Shocking, I know!
Hand-written letter, which (after the heading & salutation) begins thus:
“I am a local neighbor and part of a large group of volunteers taking time to share some encouraging words and news.”
V. L. (full name omitted because I’m not a complete jerk)Uh… huh. Okay.
There’s something else in the envelope, what could that be…?
Aha. A leaflet from the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Now, I am not here to shame someone for spending their time carefully hand-writing a letter that, I’m sure, they meant in all the well-meaning earnest goodness of their heart. However. It was at that moment that I knew I’d be doing two things in rapid succession: Writing this post, and shredding the envelope and everything in it.
Nothing personal, stranger. But all your efforts brought was a few minutes of amusement. Please enjoy your life and avoid darkening my mailbox ever again.
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In Search Of A Trackball – Sanwa Gravi
I queued this one up in advance so I’d have a post to start off the new year. (Be proud of me, dammit!)
Of course, since I’m posting this mere days after receiving the trackball named in the subject field of this entry, you can probably guess that I’m now awaiting my third trackball purchase of the past few months.
The Sanwa Gravi is (more or less) a Japanese company’s rework of the venerable Microsoft Trackball Explorer. It’s comfy and familiar and is very close to being a very good input device overall.
Too bad that this is not one of those cases, like a game of horseshoes or chucking hand grenades, where “very close” is “good enough.”
My first problem was the stiction (“stickiness,” basically) of the ball itself. It hitched or got fully stuck a lot. Oddly enough, the solution to this was… swapping out the ball for the one in the Elecom. Stiction problem resolved!
Unfortunately the other problems couldn’t be solved, no way no how. Firstly, the only way to program the rightmost two buttons (which default to issuing “forward” and “back” commands to your web browser, a “feature” I did not “ask for”) is to install the special software. Great, I did that, can I turn one of those buttons into a double-click? I love having a double-click button.
Those are the Mouse Function options available for programming a given button. Also, I could program a button to execute a program or send a command to my media player. Just… no double-click. Well, okay then. So I just turned those two buttons off entirely. But speaking of buttons… I then noticed that the left-click button sometimes… doesn’t. Click. Or it’ll click and kind of forget that I’ve been holding it down for a reason, and sometimes then remember again. Imagine you’re drag-and-dropping something, or drag-selecting a bounding box around stuff, and the mouse decides you didn’t really intend to do that. That gets very frustrating, very quickly. And I do a lot of drag-selecting because I make screenshots almost every day, usually of specific parts of my screen. (Lightshot is great for this, by the way.)
What’s worse, the mouse driver seemed to go to sleep after a minute or so of inactivity. I’d be typing, or watching a video, or whatever, then go to move the mouse pointer… and nothing would happen until I tried again, then it’d behave like it’s supposed to.
Who in their right mind programs their mouse driver to go to sleep? Of all the things on a computer that need an inactivity timer, the mouse is just about the last of them.
So I’ve ripped out the drivers for the Sanwa, and there’s a new device on order. I just have to hang on for a couple of weeks for it to arrive. Maybe the third time really will be the charm…?
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Satisfactory: 2022 Co-op Year End Tour Video
The video I mentioned in the previous post? Here it is:
Arrak-ish. Dune… desert biome. Look, I’m bad at naming things sometimes, okay? I hope that we all get to have more fun, less stress, more health, less catastrophe, more prosperity, less misery in the year to come.
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Silly Things To Do With Video Editing
I’m working on a tour video for our three-person co-op Satisfactory game. I recorded the footage Tuesday night. (We took the week off for various reasons, so I used that time to let the Space Elevator shipment production accumulate a bit.) For lack of anything better to do and not wanting to actually Do Game Stuff without the others, I started a video project.
Last night I completed the editing-down. Tonight I started the text overlay process, and decided I’d take this chance to learn something new (to me) in DaVinci Resolve: How to pin text to an object on the screen. Tracking, in other words.
It’s a learning process, but for the sake of this one joke I feel like it was worth it:
Yes, I used that garish color combination on purpose. I mean, why not? Mind you, I could have used a fancier method and achieved smoother, better-looking results. But for a quick throw-away joke? It’s fine.
Hopefully I’ll have the full tour video up by the weekend.