Computing

No such thing as a free lunch, or a set schedule.

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My adoring public need me tomorrow at noon. So my weekend gets to be split up. I hate doing splits, they hurt…

Speaking of work I guess I don’t really talk about it that much anymore. Mostly because it’s pretty laid back compared to every other job that I’ve had. Tonight we had a 9pm release for a couple games; Gears of War and Madden 15. I think we only had two people show up. :v

We’ve also been selling a bunch of small TV’s. I wish we earned commissions because the paychecks would look a lot more nice.

I guess if I had to complain about anything tonight it would be this one guy that frequently comes in. He’s the kind of guy that wants you to literally hold his hand through anything. He’ll just look at the device he buys and throw his hands in the air because it confuses him too much.

He wanted to downgrade his laptop from Windows 10 to Windows 8 because Skype isn’t working properly, in fact he brought his laptop in the other day because he wanted us to solve the problem for him. We confirmed that his audio device was working properly and told him that it was something with Skype itself and gave him suggestions on what to do. So he came in tonight and wanted someone to downgrade it for him. My co-worker who was acting as superior tonight decided to start the downgrade about an hour and 45 minutes before the store closed. It took forever… It had a 1.5 GHZ dual core processor and 4 GB of RAM and the drive was mechanical, not an SSD. He left the laptop with us, and I’m pretty sure that’s not allowed considering that as far as I’m aware he didn’t even buy the laptop from us… and I’m not even sure why my co-worker decided to do this. I hope he doesn’t get in trouble. I wouldn’t have even rolled the system back. I would have just told him to go online and search for instructions on how to do a rollback. Oh wait… I did tell him to do that the other day when he brought it in. I guess reading is too hard.

Hopefully the rollback goes ok. I’ve been reading up on Windows 10 and rollbacks and it hasn’t really been going as smoothly as planned. Needless to say I’m going to distance myself from this situation as much as possible. It’s pretty cheap of people to come in and expect us to do computer maintenance for free. If you bought the computer from us that’s one thing. But otherwise it isn’t something we are being paid for, and you’re an idiot if you think you’re special enough to warrant our help. No thank you, we don’t get paid neeeearly enough to put up with that bullshit.

Just when I switch to FireFox I find this out…

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So this isn’t looking very good for FireFox users…

Mozilla has announced a new Extension API for Firefox browser called ‘WebExtensions‘ that is compatible with API used by Blink-based Chrome and Opera browsers, and they want to deprecate current Firefox XPCOM/XUL/XBL APIs from 12 or 18 months from now.

I’m hoping Seamonkey gets fixed before this happens, or that the developers get the more important plugins like NoScript working under the new FireFox. I don’t see why they’re doing this, the one saving grace of FireFox is the giant library of addons you can choose from. And now they’re going to try and be more like Opera and Google Chrome? There’s a reason why people use FireFox and Seamonkey, and that’s to not use Opera and Google Chrome. I’m not the only one with a gripe about this either.

I’m all for change and everything, but this is like the changes that have been done recently to Windows 10, or someones favorite Linux distribution, unnecessary and annoying.

Time for a new browser

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Seamonkey has been pissing me off lately with a couple bugs. When I watch a video for the first time and want to adjust the volume the video freezes. Another bug and this the most annoying one, whenever I download a file it randomly fails and I have to retry. Most of the time I can get it to work on a retry, but with certain downloads it requires me to redownload a file more than twice… and that’s a waste of bandwidth and time that I don’t need. Another bug and this seems exclusive to my CentOS 7 install is the inability to play audio within the browser… So I’ve made the switch to firefox.

It’s gonna take some getting used to, not a whole lot though since it’s fairly similar to seamonkey, and that makes sense since they’re both under the mozilla umbrella. I installed my usual selection of plugins (FlashBlock, NoScript, etc), and installed NewsFox as my RSS reader. At some point I’ll get around to installing Thunderbird.

I can tell I’ll need to get used to FireFox’s aesthetic. But it shouldn’t be too difficult.

Fedora is dead, long live CentOS

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I decided to give CentOS a try, and so far I haven’t had any issues or regrets. If I can’t find anything I can easily find it on a repo, this includes proprietary video drivers and mumble. I couldn’t find seamonkey but that’s a no brainer to install even without a repo.

Last night I burnt the “Everything ISO” onto a dual layer disc and tore into it today. It came with Gnome classic, which I always enjoyed before Gnome 3 came along to be the Metro interface for nix.

After the install I tried to download yumex, but no avail. A small interwebz search pointed me to a handy repo where it’s installed, followed by another search that lead me to video drivers. Then I installed Steam and did a test launch with Half Life 2. I was happy.

I see that my library expanded quite a bit since I’ve last played games under Linux. I’m up to 87 total out of the huge collective.

All my ducks tux seem to be in a row at this point.

Yesterday was a good day.

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Woke up yesterday to an auction for a laptop, unfortunately I lost… Decided to shake it off and wander into town to do some errands. It was nice n’ sunny at least. Finally scheduled a hair appointment at a new place, hopefully it goes well next week. Also made a deposit then went out for some sushi that I owed myself. It was called The Samurai and it had cucumber, some tempura prawns and it was topped with crab and a spicy teriyaki sriracha sauce.

Then I came home and backed off the rest of my files so I could prepare for the new motherboard. So far it’s been pretty smooth, other than the front USB ports are acting strangely. I’m hoping it’s some driver issue. I still have a bunch to install. I’ve only covered the Win 7 install, some drivers and other refinements. I still have plenty of programs and organization to take care of, then I can install Fedora 21 and get that setup. I’ll probably be distracted for awhile. Not only with that, but with an auction I actually won tonight. 😛 I’m going to be the proud owner of an ROG G750JS-TS71. I also ordered a Samsung 256 GB SSD, and hopefully I can find a regular 2 TB drive later on for the 2nd drive bay. In the meantime I’ll rough it on the 1 TB.

So all in all I had a very relaxing day off, probably one of the better ones I’ve had lately. Oh, and I saw the new chatroom a certain someone made in Mumble… All I have to say was that I got more done on my mask today. One more coating or two and I can add some straps for my face.

I’m gonna go try to not dream about things relating to that set of stuffs.

Upgrades Upgrades Upgrades

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It seems I’ve found someone who wants to buy a gaming laptop, so I spent the entire night researching a worthy upgrade. I looked between Asus and MSI and have come to the conclusion that Asus would be the better one to stick with for now. While I don’t like how I can’t take out the GPU and upgrade it to a different one the ROG series laptops run much cooler. Asus ROG series laptops have good vents in the back of their laptops whereas with the MSI ones tend to be on the sides. Some of them are on the back and the sides, but the vents are smaller.

I’ve also decided that at the very least I’ll invest in a laptop that has an NVidia 8xx GPU or higher so that I’ll have DX12 support. Although I don’t see myself using Windows 8 or 10 anytime soon it’ll at least be nice to futureproof myself a bit. The G74SX held up more than awesomely over these last couple years, definitely got my moneys worth out of it. I only have to lower my settings in a few of the newer games. That 560m was a great card.

So between the new motherboard and new laptop I’ll be busy for awhile.

Let the butthurt begin: XBox Live will be free for PC gamers on Windows 10

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Yep, that’s not a typo. Microsoft is making XBox Live a free thing for Windows 10 users.

Now, it may seem unfair that the XBox users have to pay and PC gamers don’t. However they did make the mistake choice of buying the console all ready and willing. Whereas on PC you have to pick and choose the best hardware for your gaming experience instead of just getting it all in one box. Hell even choosing between GPU’s, processors, ram etc takes more thought than choosing between the XBox One or the PS4. Microsoft also has to apologize for the horror that was Windows 8 by luring people to Windows 10 with Direct X 12 and “Hey! We’re finally thinking about you PC Gamers! So here’s some free XBox Live!”

Of course I have no intention of using XBox Live let alone jumping to Windows 10 on launch day. I’ll do what I’ve always done and let the others beat the hell out of it until I find a reason to upgrade. In the meantime Win 7 and Linux are the way to go for what I do.

Post Valentines Day Open Thread

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I didn’t really celebrate Valentines Day this year, much like the other years. I spent it with friends and family which is always nice. I was monitoring my server traffic and noticed that we hit a new record of 31 people across all servers! I even had to up my cinema server slots from 12 to 24 and add in reserved admin slots. We’ve been getting more popular lately. In fact we’ve been looking into a more powerful dedicated server box to relocate everything to.

Although in the meantime the hardware should do well enough to hold us over. Just can’t put up anymore servers in the meantime… and I have quite a few server projects that need to be carried out once the new server is acquired (as soon as they come down in price). Plans for a Starbound Server, a goof off Mann vs Machine and an experimental Shoutcast server are on the fabled to do list.

If you’re on Linux/Unix/Mac you might want to watch out for “ShellShock”

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Friend of mine linked this in our mumble chat this morning. It’s an exploit found in nix systems that lets people remotely take control of your system using Bash.

The flaw has been found in a software component known as Bash, which is a part of many Linux systems as well as Apple’s Mac operating system.

The bug, dubbed Shellshock, can be used to remotely take control of almost any system using Bash, researchers said.

Experts said it was more serious than the Heartbleed bug discovered in April.

Keep an eye out for a patch on your distro of choice.

Open Thread

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Ugh… Too tired to talk about work. Between people having a raging hard on to get me cashier trained and the annoying redneck tourists I’ve been slowly waiting for my vacation to start so I can stay the fuck away from there and hopefully get my name around to some other lines of work.

On a brighter note I did come home to my computer in a brand new case all ready and waiting for me (with an Icy Dock!) It was nice of my dad to surprise me like that. I’ll post pictures of it soon. I’m currently planning to get different accessories for the tower. Unfortunately I have to get a new media bay since it won’t fit properly, but at least they’re cheap. Might also get a 2nd Icy Dock so I can swap another set of drives.

Oh, and forgot to mention it but I got MOUL running under Linux through Wine the other night. I was bored and figured… why not? It runs quite nicely. Maybe next I should install premiere pro and see how long it takes for my distro to do a complete meltdown.