Technology

Happy Birthday, Steam Deck!

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I’ve only had my Steam Deck for about half a year now, but it’s been daily driver status since the day it arrived back in August! In case you happen to be in the market for a handheld PC, here is a list of regularly played games on Deck:

  • Abyss Odyssey
  • Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night
  • Commander Keen (Complete Pack)
  • Cloudpunk
  • Crash Bandicoot: N.Sane Trilogy
  • Dust: An Elysian Tail
  • Freedom Planet 2
  • Horizon Zero Dawn
  • ICEY
  • Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series
  • Okami
  • Outland
  • Overload
  • Portal Reloaded
  • Shantae: Half Genie Hero
  • Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed
  • Spyro Reignited Trilogy
  • Super Tux
  • Trine
  • Yakuza 0

I seem to have a better time playing Metroidvanias when I’m on the go, and it also handles most of the 3D games I throw at it – even modern ones! My back has gotten tired of lugging a gaming laptop around for daily commutes. It’s easier to just pick it up and play whatever you want in the palm of your hand with just a button press, and in some cases it even doubles as an effective hand warmer and social shield from asshats.

I’ve been wanting a handheld gaming system for years, and the nice part is that I don’t have to rebuy any games. I can even download them directly from my desktop!

Overall: I give the Steam Deck 9 Sub Sandwiches out of 10!

Social Butterflying

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I’ve been keeping tabs on Mastodon for the last week, and so far I’ve been enjoying it! They rolled out an update yesterday that allows you to translate a foreign post (or toot! as they call it) with the press of a button! Now I can understand what people around the world are saying, whether it be someone from Japan wanting to chill, or if it’s someone in Mexico questioning if potatoes are more fattening than bread. You do have the option of only allowing certain languages, but I’m fine with all of them active. It’s interesting to see perspectives from around the world, and it shows me there’s a bigger picture.

I’m still planning on building my own instance. It will not be open to the public to join, but those who are allowed will still be seen by the other instances if they so choose. I’ve been seeing instances get temp blocked for having too many asshats join up just to be asshats until the admins get their instances under control.

In the meantime I have been experimenting with a new plugin that will allow me to automatically cross post to Mastodon. I’ve only used it once, it seems to work for now. The only thing it doesn’t post is an image from a blog post, but other than that it’ seems to work right out of the box. I might look more into other plugins once I get my instance up and running, give the devs time to update their plugins.

Goodbye CentOS. Long Live AlmaLinux!

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As of this post I’m officially up and running on the new AlmaLinux webserver! All databases are pointing to their proper locations, the new Guild Of Slackers website is up!… kinda. I’m doing a bit of redecorating before I go live with it. 😀 I’ll probably unleash the wiki once I finish my plans for the main website — it’s basically going to be a web-portal of sorts, showing group information and our lines of communication (Discord, Mumble, Steam Group etc). I don’t see much of a point in making it a group website like before, especially since most people use the above mentioned for communication purposes. Then I still have to do the gameservers… then I can take a break from dependency hell and get back to focusing on the more artsy digital stuff.

Weekend Open Thread

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I’ve been spending the better part of the evening trying to diagnose a problem friends’ gaming computer. As it turns out, the memory controller is borked on the motherboard, and I’m going to recommend to them that if they’re going to change motherboards that they might as well upgrade the processor too. As it is the hardware dates all the way back to 2014. I’ll have to go over the details with them tomorrow, and come up with a potential upgrade plan.

Live & Learn: Gaming Monitor Edition

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I discovered over the weekend that my Acer VG270U P isn’t capable of HDR over DisplayPort, and if I switch to HDMI I can get HDR at the cost of the framerate. I didn’t know this at the time of researching, but this monitor has DisplayPort 1.2, which is incapable of true HDR output. I just figured since this was advertised as a 2020 gaming monitor that it would have DisplayPort 1.4, or at the very least 1.3.

It’s sad given this monitor is barely half a year old. I’m thinking I’ll put it back in its box and store it for emergency use, like if I have a monitor die and need a backup. This just gives me an excuse to go shopping for a 4K monitor I guess. 😛 Unfortunately I’m finding that the monitors are, like many other electronics at the mo, are being scalped for a profit because we live in a world of assholes with too much money. I’m not sure how long it will take me to track something down, but I figure with the 6800XT proving itself on the 4K proving grounds it would only be right to get a matching monitor. Then I can start delivering 4K content for YouTube! 😛

Pining For Pine!

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One of the many things keeping me from investing in a proper smartphone is the severe lack of control for the end user; you either have to sign up with Apple or Google if you want to use any apps, or you sideload all of your apps from an outside source (which can be risky if you don’t know what you’re downloading). I want a phone that functions like all of my other devices, and when Android was announced in what feels like an eternity ago I thought it was a novel idea to carry around a Linux powered phone. Of course, Android is just Creepy Uncle Google’s competitor against iOS, a version of Linux turned evil by those who claimed not to at one point. If there was a smartphone that offered the same level of customization without rooting/jailbreaking I would of have jumped on the smartphone bandwagon an eternity ago… and now something interesting this way comes.

I’ve been following Pine64 for awhile now, and so far the PinePhone seems to be the most viable option. It doesn’t offer much for the built in camera, but I wouldn’t really be using a phone for a camera when I prefer using kick ass cameras, but I do admire the idea of having physical kill switches for the microphone and camera functions. Of course, the best part for me is being able to swap out a MicroSD card with any Linux OS of my choice! By default it comes with Manjaro, and powered by KDE Plasma for the interface. I’m not ready to drop the cash on this project just yet though… I like the idea, but it’s still in the beta phase. I’ll be keeping an eye on things, and if it meets my standards in reviews I’ll snag one before it rolls out of beta. I would like a phone that I could just update via a main repository (and any other swag) like under typical desktop Linux.

That said… I am in need of a watch! and the smartwatch business never really interested me for a lot of the same reasons that persist with smartphones and most tablets: having to sign up for shit. FitBit, Apple, and others all track your steps and other analytical data that your device is capable of picking up. I’m well aware that the PineWatch isn’t as sophisticated as such other devices, but for what I want a smartwatch is going to be overkill. Give me something that tells time, tracks steps, and lets me program the shit out of it! The watch itself is a decent $26 at the time of writing about this, and if you want to do extra level tinkering, you can also purchase the devkit version containing a regular watch and an unsealed version for you to perform mad science experiments upon. For now I don’t think I don’t think I’ll be doing anything outside of swapping firmware depending on what version of infinitime the watch is running. I’ve also been hearing good things about WaspOS, as well.

I’ll do a follow up once the latter device is in my possession. 😀

Reason 498603986 For Not Installing Windows 11

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If you haven’t been paying attention; Windows 11 has been recently added as an optional upgrade to Windows 10 users clinically insane enough to upgrade to an open beta… especially if they have an AMD CPU.

Microsoft’s chief product officer Panos Panay once said “If you’re a gamer, Windows 11 was made for you.” Unfortunately, a couple of days after launching, it’s turning out to be something of an unwanted gift. Besides being blamed for Far Cry 6 crashes and deterring an entire cloud gaming service, Windows 11 is now causing performance drops on AMD chips as well. That’s according to AMD themselves, who announced in a support post that updating to Windows 11 could cause a 3-5% performance drop in some applications as well as a 10-15% drop in “games commonly used for esports.”

There are currently two problems; L3 Cache Latency, and Microsoft forgetting how to utilize AMD’s core scheduling technology. There was a similar issue that took place years ago under Windows 7 with AMD’s “Bulldozer” processors, but in this case it’s entirely an issue with Windows 11 not working properly. The L3 Caching issue is kind of interesting; what is so different between 10 and 11 to cause such a performance loss?

Either way I spent most of my time under Linux these days… so. 😛

In Other News: Windows Update Still Sucks

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It’s a good thing I spend about 97% of my time under Linux, plus also run a neutered Win 10 Pro install. This recent update sounds like a special level of fuck to those who were unfortunate enough to have it forced through an update.

The latest offender was “Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. – SCSIAdapter – 9.3.0.221”, a Windows-recommended driver for AMD users. The problem? The driver was stopping some users’ PCs from booting, and the patch has since been pulled from the Windows Update list.

But the real problem here, as noted by Windows Latest, is that Windows Insider users had already flagged the driver as being dodgy. It was bad enough that users had to resort to some command line kung fu to nuke the update, which is a whole nightmare that nobody should have to go through.

Of course, this only affects owners of systems that run AMD motherboards. If I ran a typical Windows 10 install where it updated to the latest of everything this would have knocked me offline. This is why I spend most of my time under Linux. I can update at a time convenient for me to make sure I have enough time to fix shit if things happen to go awry. 😛

My Linux Surface Pro Arrived!

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My Surface Pro 6 arrived today! It only took me a couple hours but I have a KDE Plasma spin of Manjaro running on it, with the custom surface kernel even! I did run into a couple of peripheral issues, as the touch screen doesn’t work until you install the surface kernel provided here. Fortunately I still have my old gaming keyboard, and I used my Steam Controller as a mouse. 😛 After getting the custom kernel installed I focused on installing my usual programs and tweaked the overall aesthetics. I’ve been wanting to do something like this for years, and it’s nice to have finally achieved it painlessly.

My next goal will be to take my Kindle HD8 and see if can sideload a different OS on it. I’ve read that it can be done, but if you’re not careful you can do some serious damage to the system. Having a better tablet makes me less fearful of nuking it, that and the HD8 was only a dollar. 😛