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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: November 2024

  • Satisfactory: Water Reclamation

    Satisfactory: Water Reclamation

    When you break past the point of sending the Phase 3 shipment up the Space Elevator in 2024’s Golden Joystick Award Game-of-the-Year-winning Satisfactory, what you’ve mainly done is unlocked the twin titans of the mid-to-late game: Aluminum and Uranium. I have a couple of posts about nuclear power in the archives, and yes I’ll need to revisit that topic at some point because things have changed with the advent of Version One Point Oh. Today, however, I want to talk about waste water reclamation, a key part of the Aluminum production process.

    Let’s get into it.

    (more…)

  • Another New Look: 2025

    Things look a bit odd over here, don’t they? No two-column layout, no randomized header image (yet, maybe).

    Here’s the thing: Hemingway was a very good website theme, I liked most everything about it, but it’s long in the tooth and was eventually going to become fully obsolete. The inevitable march of technology, or something. So upon the advice of professional website designers, I’m… using the new Twenty Twenty Five default WordPress theme.

    (And yes, using WordPress is a fraught choice in and of itself nowadays, for certain reasons we’re not going into at the moment. At least I’m self-hosted.)

    I have a lot of fiddling and fussing to do, so expect things to look a bit odd for a while. Or, like, forever, depending.

    Wish me luck making sense of this bold new scheme.

  • Satisfactory: Waste Management

    The core focus of Satisfactory is on automating the production of things. Iron products, steel products, aluminum products, all of these things need factories to extract the raw materials and turn them into fun and useful objects. In the process, however, you end up with leftovers and other unwanted fillers of inventory, such as plant matter and the remains of hostile creatures. Once you’re past the early game stages and no longer need biological gunk to power your empire, nor do you need spare ingots and whatnot, what do you do?

    You sink them for Awesome Shop tickets, of course. And the best way to do that is with a fully automated waste management factory.

    I later changed the sign’s text to “Trash 4 Tix” because I’m clever like that. Also please note that this bin faced the wrong direction at the time of this screenshot. Whoops.

    I completed such a build this weekend, and here’s how it went:

    (more…)

  • On-Condition-Al

    I’m not going to go into all the boring technical details, but today I faced an immediate need to change a particular local account password across hundreds of machines, ASAP. For all the computers still in our old management system, that was easy (albeit tedious) since I’ve already built the rigging for that, years ago.

    In the new system, though? The one we’ve only started migrating clients to in the last few weeks? I had nothing.

    By pure luck, however, earlier in the morning I’d found a way to use Conditions in Policies to trigger scripted actions on a faster timetable than the “once per day at a precise time” scheduling option otherwise available. Handy! Thus I incorporated the technique into the password-change system. The flow goes something like this:

    1. Create a new Custom Field, single line of text, to be populated by the password change script once the needed steps are completed. Value will be in ‘YYYYMMDD’ format, so 20241108 for today’s event.
    2. Create the script that does the thing. Test it. Test it some more. Fix the things that turn out to be wrong once you put it into production. Hmm, wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Anyway.
    3. Go into the Policy for the type of system (Windows Workstation, for instance) that you need to do this for. Add a Condition, which is the mechanism for triggering an alert state. Set it to see if the new Custom Field value is not set to the current day’s event value, and if the condition “triggers” then have it run the script.

    And weirdly enough, that’s all there is to it. For future events all I have to do is edit the script to change the local account password and update the Custom Field with a new event value, then set the Policy’s Condition to look for that event value. As machines check in online and “trigger” the Condition, the script will run. Fully automated.

    This is the fun part of my job. Mind you, having to do it under high-pressure conditions in a hurry took a lot out of me today, but… I did get it done.

  • What did you (anniver)say?

    Some games come and go with the seasons, like most of the “gacha” type mobile games. Others fit a very specific niche in one’s life and can stick around for ages. Case in point for the latter: Gems of War, which is celebrating 10 years in operation. I started playing shortly after it launched, which means two entire residential addresses ago.

    Dang.

    Unfortunately, the team behind the game seems to be phoning it in lately. The “improvements” tend not to be such at all, they’re getting more obvious about just wanting people to pay them money for no meaningful reward (in or out of game), and… well, then there’s the quality control:

    “Anniversay” Week, eh?

    Come on, y’all. At least try.

    Adding insult to mockery is, of course, the fact that this reward system relies on a bunch more in-game grinding to get absolute scraps of “rewards.” At no point have they done something like, say, gift the playerbase a nice chunk of in-game currencies to thank us for ten years of loyalty. Nope, it’s just “glad you’re still here, now grind for a pittance. GRIND, WE SAY.”

    Or “we anniversay,” if you will.

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