Taken from my DOSBox Livestream. The commentary has been stripped from the video for those who wish to enjoy this old screen saver in its original form.
Computing
Production Diary: Linux Bromance
I’m almost done sorting through the Broforce footage. I have about another half hour’s worth to sort through and then I can move onto tearing up the Crash Bandicoot Trilogy footage. I’m stopping myself now because I know that once I continue I’ll be up later than I should be. :v:
On the subject of my own productions I’ve done some more testing,and I’m pretty much ready to start my next set of SFM animations under Linux. I’ll probably complete the Linux setup of it after I move my install over to a new SSD. I’ve been planning it for awhile now, but since I’ve been spending more time under Linux I wanted to get it off of a mechanical drive and onto something faster. I love Linux on my NVMe, and while Mint boots up pretty quickly on my 7200rpm drive, it is beginning to show it’s old age. I’ll probably do a clean reinstall when the drive arrives then move everything over to it at my leisure… gotta love hot-swap.
It’s kinda funny… All these years I’ve been wanting to move my editing suite to Linux, and after all these years of people telling me that it wouldn’t happen I’m almost right where I want to be. Now if I could just ween myself off of Ye Olde Photoshoppe things would be cherry. All my audio and video work is done under Linux now, and now thanks to Proton Source Filmmaker too… just so long as I don’t run into any graphical glitches during rendering. I did a test image sequence earlier and it imported just as fast as it did under Windows, and from what I can tell it’s about as stable as it is under Windows too. If this works out I’ll have one large and one less reason not to use Windows anymore…
Oh don’t worry Microsoft, you’re still somewhat useful; it’s just that your list of useful properties shrinks a little more as time passes each day.
DOSBox: In Color
I forgot to post this from the other night:
We traveled back in time to an era where the internet was close to being a thing, the start menu hadn’t been invented yet, and people didn’t have smartphones to distract themselves with while driving. I had fun showing off a really old install of Windows with some After Dark screensavers. I kinda wish these would make a comeback, it was always fun to have something silly to look at in the background.
Minor setbacks
I was going to do some more polishing on my video tonight, but tried to compile the latest RC candidate for OBS and totaled my Mint install. Rather than sort through what went wrong it would be faster for me to do a clean install and then follow it with an image. On the bright side I backed everything important off using my portable Linux drive. I’ll see about doing a reinstall tomorrow or maybe over the weekend depending on how the chips fall. I should have made an image before experimenting, but things have been running so smoothly when I’ve compiled other programs… Still, it was bad on my part. If I wanted to I could work on my project file under Windows, as I do have Shotcut installed between both OS’s… but it’s late. 😛 Well, maybe just a little trim. :v:
I’m not sure if I want to stick with 18.3 or if I want to venture into 19.1… I’ll probably stick to 18.3 for stability purposes. I guess Windows will be keeping me warm tonight…
This is why I have two OS’s. 😛
More data collecting… for safety
I was handed another hard drive today by a fellow co-worker to recover data from. Thankfully I got all the important stuff off of it, as it seems to be dying at an alarming rate… gotta love those Seagate Barracuda’s. This and the other drive make for a nice quick $50 job that can buy me some inspiration for a good few months.
I’m thinking I’ll lay back in bed and play a play a little more Crash before I crash. I don’t have much time left do do much else, and I feel like I need a little play break before I become too dull. If I have time I’ll start on Episode 3 tomorrow.
The future is Chromium based
Ever have that feeling where you wake up from a nap, or from a good night’s sleep and feel like you entered another dimension? I think I can add this to my top 10 WTF did I wake up to moments.
For the past few years, Microsoft has meaningfully increased participation in the open source software (OSS) community, becoming one of the world’s largest supporters of OSS projects. Today we’re announcing that we intend to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.
Translation: Our browser has sucked since the day of its conception, fuck it let’s go open source!
As part of this, we intend to become a significant contributor to the Chromium project, in a way that can make not just Microsoft Edge — but other browsers as well — better on both PCs and other devices.
Extend, Embrace, Extinguish, EXTERMINATE!
Working with open source is not new for Microsoft Edge. Our mobile browser has been based on open source from its beginnings over a year ago.
Shorter Microsoft: We’ve been lazy longer than you think.
Ultimately, we want to make the web experience better for many different audiences. People using Microsoft Edge (and potentially other browsers) will experience improved compatibility with all web sites,
Shorter Microsoft: Our browser will offer you the greatest things that you’re already able to do on almost any browser that isn’t currently ours. INNOVATIVE!
Not that I care… I’m Waterfox master race.
The Damage Report Thus Far
After further testing it turns out I may either have a problem with my power supply, or graphics card. The power supply is about 7 or 8 years old, though it seems to be running fine. Being this is the oldest piece of hardware in my current setup I’ve taken the liberty of purchasing a newer platinum grade power supply (my current one is bronze grade). It should arrive on Friday… hopefully. If the black screens continue after the fact that tells me it was the graphics card…. and as new as it is I really hope it isn’t the cause of my problems. I’d really hate to RMA the damn thing, though I’ve heard ASUS is better about dealing with RMA’s than MSI. Hopefully it’s just the power supply though, unfortunately I don’t have another system to plug my graphics card into. All the other computers in the house are going to either have an older hardware that won’t support my GPU, or they have power supplies that won’t even turn my card halfway on.
Ugh.
Down the digital rabbit hole of issues
My weekend started out peaceful… I treated myself to an omelette and some toast, made up some green tea and worked on some recent Left 4 Dead footage. Wow… Normally when I edit video footage I have to do a lot of trimming. Like trimming down two and a half hours of Serious Sam footage into two minutes… with our most recent game of Left 4 Dead though? It’s an hour and thirty minutes in length and so far I have about 15 minutes worth of footage with more territory to cover. I believe this could be its own miniseries.
After awhile I finally decided to give myself a break and head into Windows… Just when I thought I made it clear out of Windows Update hell I came across an issue with my microphone. It was recognized by Windows but not a single program acknowledged its existence. After some web searching I found out that if you blanket disable all apps from having access to your mic it’ll completely cut you off (despite that little message on the right telling you that it won’t block the mic from Windows). After fixing that problem I launched Steam and discovered that Shadow Of The Tomb Raider needed an update. Then I changed my mind and settled on Quantum Break instead… that’s when I ran into another problem. After playing for a few minutes my monitors would go black. This happened again at the exact same point in the game. Tomb Raider finished updating and I launched it, same problem. I updated my drivers to the latest ones (because somehow during Windows Update Microsoft oh so kindly installed an older one) and the problem still persists even on the latest beta drivers. I tried Skyrim and that seemed to remain stable, but DOOM 2016 choked just like Quantum Break and Tomb Raider.
That was last night. Today/tonight I ran more diagnostics; turns out it actually wasn’t Windows 10 in this particular case, because upon further testing I could replicate the same issue under Linux. I’ve tried clean installs of Windows and a couple other tricks but merit the same result. The only other thing that’s been done recently is a bios update. I’ll save that for tomorrow, I’ve been bashing my head against this long enough…
I’ll nibble on some clouds and I’ll lay my weary head to rest.
4 Days Later
I’ve been really busy these last couple of days. A co-worker of mine wanted me to look at her husband’s two laptops to see if they could be fixed. I managed to factory reset the first one (and took pity on the poor bloke and installed Waterfox because no one should suffer with Microsoft Edge), and the second one I’m working on at the moment seems to have a bad hard drive in it. Both laptops seem to show signs of being dropped just by reading the hard disk information, with the latter one being the worst of the set. I’m going to recommend for him to upgrade both of his drives to SSD instead of the 5400 RPM drives that currently inhabit both systems, they’ll perform much faster AND won’t be as susceptible to large bumps and drops (and tell him POLITELY to take better care of his shit). :trollface:
Meanwhile at work, one of my co-workers told me that the new Tomb Raider has 1980’s Lara Croft, and when I asked him about it he meant Lara from the original game, then when I told him that came out in 1996 he said he thought the graphics looked “80”s like”. O_O He has now been demoted from nerd to digital dork. :trollface: I was entertained by his excuse of being “just a kid when it came out” to which I replied that I was only one year older than him… then it turned into a conversation about me not looking entirely ancient (despite having white hair). 😛
Speaking of Tomb Raider I did notice that its having quite a sale right now despite only being out for about a month. I’m still a bit on the fence in getting it, mainly because of my own time constraints and using Linux more lately, resulting in another game in an ever expanding library that I still need to sift through. Ohhhh but it is indeed a test.
October is the time for scary stuff, like Windows Updates
It’s a good thing I have Windows configured to not update immediately to the latest update (and an even better thing that I’ve been maining on Mint); this bug sounds a little pants shitting.
Several early adopters of the Windows 10 1809 update have reported vanishing file problems on Reddit, Twitter and Microsoft’s Community forum.
One poor Windows 10 1809 user, Robert Ziko, claims to have lost 220GB of data after updating.
Bunches of people at a couple tech sites that I read have been saying “This is why you should make backups” and yeah, backups are a good thing to do, but you shouldn’t have to live in fear looking over your shoulder in fear of the grim clippy. Hell, in most cases people don’t know how to configure their systems and will be updated unwillingly, not even giving them a chance to perform a proper backup. Most of the time I can’t trust these people with an HDMI cable, why would I expect them to know how to properly configure Windows 10 to not fuck you over?
Fortunately I have Windows 10 Pro, you can set that up to put off major updates by one year. Plus I’ve been making it a habit to only use Windows for things I either haven’t tested under Linux or haven’t been able to setup properly. Feels good to finally reach that point, it was long overdue.