Leave a legacy.
My current job that I started last summer has been a godsend in every way possible. With this has also come some fringe benefits: Computers and hardware they don’t want. Fast forward a bit and ended up scoring a nice old Sandy Bridge Xeon and upgrade my gaming desktop!
Now my best friend has always harped about my Bulldozer CPU being a big of a slug and hurting my graphics’ performance. I didn’t pay much attention when I should have because he was right.
Managed to snag a Canon Rebel t3 and have been tinkering a bit. So here’s some cat photos!
Auto adjustments for the first photo, then a couple other odds and ends:
The last is fully adjusted with shadows/lighting and a couple other tricks. It’s nice to get back into the photography stuff so hopefully there will be more soon!
Smart Home.
The new buzz words of 2017, and now 2018. You’ve all seen it. Products lining ads in webpages and flyers for Black Friday of last year touting “Google home!” and “Amazon Echo/Alexa!”.
I personally have tried a number of these basic items and have fallen in love with the simplicity of a smart home. Just don’t think about it too much or you might get a little weirded out…or a lot.
Steam had a sale on their Steam Link device over Christmas and the following week. I picked one up for dirt cheap and figured even if it wasn’t that great, it wouldn’t be more than a few bucks lost.
I got the unit in the mail last night and was impressed immediately with the packaging: It all looks like a nice retail box and set up, not just some brown box that’s bland.
The install/set up is incredibly simple. I plugged into the unit into power and into another HDMI on my TV. Plugged in a mouse into one of the 3 USB ports on the Steam Link, and went through a simple set up which prompted for an update and restart. All total, this might have taken 20 minutes.
Once this is done, you go through some prompts on your computer used for streaming to this which involved confirming a PIN code quick and setting up a new Audio driver (Steam Link can play audio over the TV from the computer!) for streaming to itself. I will say, getting the full sound bar usage off my desktop PC system has been wonderful.
Now, I ran into a couple snags with some games but this was a a mod issue with Fallout 4: Fallout 4 Script Extender (F4SE) uses a custom launcher which isn’t supported properly by Steam. To fix this, you go into Steam and “Add a non steam game”. Browse and find the F4SE launcher/binary, add it to your library and you can now launch it from the Steam Link properly!
Overall, I love it and how simple it is. I’m using a wired Xbox 360 controller and it works great, even over WiFi (AC, 5GHz) and there’s very little lag or latency. Definitely recommend checking it out!
Ingredients:
Boil macaroni until al dente (will fully cook in crockpot). Drain.
In sauce pan, mix shredded cheese and cut up butter stick, and cook on low heat until melted and creamy.
In the crockpot, mix everything together then put macaroni and cheese sauce in. Stir.
Set cooker on lowest setting for 3 hours, stirring every 30 minutes.
Due to a late birthday gift, I ended up with an updated graphics card in my main desktop gaming rig; I can finally stream while playing games without massive FPS loss. Check me out!
Specs on current setup:
Hope to see you guys in when live!
I’ve wanted to use SSL for a while now on my sites to better encrypt traffic and logins on the site. Unfortunately doing this nuked my previous server and had to be restored from backups. As such…
I went through and migrated all hosts from this system to utilize SSL as default using a permanent redirect. The whole process was a bit intense at first but was extremely rewarding. Thankfully, Let’s Encrypt makes this a very simple process:
Add to this a WordPress plugin to allow everything to migrate from host to host, and some fancy internal DNS resolving and everything is now moved over and encrypted. It’s a good feeling seeing the “Secure” posted next to the URL now. Cheers!
A little background: I get these ideas once in a while that eventually come to fruition after a couple months of brainstorming and tinkering. I’ve had the idea for a while of having a central way to maintain my fleet of Linux servers I host along with Windows if possible. In the past, I used ssh keys to login and run updates. It worked pretty well but I’d like a way to remotely run and/or monitor these. Enter IRC…
Continue reading “Overly complicated ideas: IRC command of servers!”
A little background:
I’ve been building and tinkering with computers since I was about 12, when I got my own laptop and desktop both from garage sales and began swapping parts, doing OS upgrades from floppy disks and doing whatever I could to tinker with them. Fast forward almost two decades, and I’m still at but on a much larger scale.
I’ve learned some hard lessons in the couple decades of tinkering with computers. One of the biggest is data loss. Like everyone else, I didn’t worry as much as I should have and it cost me…