Postspage

0x19 I use Arch btw

It’s July 2025, little over a month since my last post.

Last time I ended with the declaration that my new PC would be using Linux.
What I didn’t tell you was that I had already installed Linux on the new PC by that point. I was writing that very post from the new PC!

Like many newbies to Linux, I agonized over what distro to use, how can I know what is right?
My prior experience with Linux is mostly following cookbook-style recipies for setting up Ubuntu VPSes, and then mostly leaving them to do their thing.
I did some research, and started to feel like I could put distros on a sort of scale of user-friendliness, with Mint on one end, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and Manjaro in the middle, and Arch to the DIY-and-dont-f-up side. But where do I fit on that scale?
I don’t mind a little DIY, heck, I get kicks out of doing something “sweet”.
I want to game, so good compatibility is a must.
I will be running fairly new hardware, so good support is needed.
And I want as little bloat as possible.

Well, Arch is DIY, it’s Valve’s choice for their handheld gaming device, it’s rolling release and gets support earlier than many other distros, and in being DIY it has very little bloat. So looks like a good fit!
But the most interesting argument for Arch came from a feeling I was getting from seeing a lot of people who outline their distro-hopping journey, many seemed to settle on Arch Linux. That suggests to me that there is something there, and that I too would likely end up on Arch sooner-or-later anyway!
But is it to hard to start with? Can I break into it or will it break me.
I finally asked some friends and colleagues, one in particular said Arch would be a good fit for me.

So that’s a lot of stars aligning for Arch Linux.
It is settled then! I will try Arch first, and if it doesn’t work out then I’ll just run some other distro, right?

I will have to disappoint the the stereotype purist out there, I used archinstall.
In my defense, I really wanted to get a system up and running, to make sure that the parts that I had bought weren’t defective or anything. I did go back to read the steps for a manual install on the wiki. And hopefully I can win back some credibility by doing a manual install anyway later on (see below).

I chose to use Wayland, as it appears to be the future. LightDM because it is minimal. KDE Plasma as it is a windows-like experience. I also installed Hyprland to have as an option and to experiment with.
Hyprland confused med initially, so I have let that rest for the time being, and stuck with KDE as my daily drive for now.

I was surprised to see that it did not take long at all for me to start feeling at home!
Once you have your password manager, a text editor, a file browser, your files, and your browser of choice, then you’ll quickly forget that you are running another OS entirely!
There are still some unpleasant reminders that I run into frequently, such as not having working Auto-Type from my password manager. Apparently that cannot be done in Wayland at present. The other thing is me not yet being as used to Gimp as I was to Paint.net, but at least that is something I can expect will sort itself out in time. Although I could probably make Paint.net work with Wine, I opted to switch as I would rather use something that runs natively, and use the opportunity to learn something more well known and more feature complete.

I did have an issue where sometimes, perhaps about 30% of the times that I boot and log in to KDE, I get an indefinite black screen. No response to switching TTY or anything. I reached out on the newbie forums and got excellent help. We believe it to be a race condition between LightDM and Wayland, and… it’s a problem that is documented on the Wiki. I did and still do read on the wiki after I did my archinstall, but not knowing what to look for was the problem, I suspected hardware or driver issues and was looking in the wrong place! If I had done a manual install of LightDM, then I would have to read the LightDM wiki page and would likely have seen the troubleshooting section mentioning this potential issue with the particular software combo I was running.
Lessons learned
1 – If you don’t install it yourself, you’ll miss the little edge cases that are in the wiki.
2 – It’s in the wiki!

Other issues I’ve seen include sometimes getting volume set to zero on the right audio channel after boot or resuming from sleep. Haven’t seen that happen again since I uninstalled pulseaudio while troubleshooting the black-screen problem above. So once again something that wouldn’t have been an issue if I did a manual install following the Wiki and had to make the conscious choice between pulseaudio and pipewire.
I still have the occasional issue where the right-side display (i run two monitors) shows the mouse cursor offset from it’s real position, though it feels like it is less common now.

But! There are reminders that I’m on a new OS that are positive too!
For example, I love using a package manager to handle software! Any of the usual things I might want is just one command away, once you know what software you are after. Compared to browsing for the right installer and running a setup wizard.

Gaming has worked flawlessly so far as well!
I still have only tried four titles: FTL, Shadow Gambit, Cyberpunk and Divinity Original Sin 2. But not having any issues with these is very heartening! And the future looks brighter than ever what with Linux getting more attention as a serious gaming OS thanks to Valve.
(Well, ok, FTL had one issue, it did not detect my steam saves unless I run the windows version of the client via Proton… ironic that the only game to have an issue would be the one that has a native Linux client)

Right, so what more can I tell you?
I’ve run some experiments with Stable Diffusion on the new PC, but details on that will have to wait for it’s own post.
I got some cheap IKEA shelves to put on my desk, so I can stash away my keyboard and laptop underneath and simultaneously keep letters and notes on top of it. Even more desk-space!

One thing I have noticed as my recent search history starts to skew my Youtube suggestions that way, is that there are a lot of content creators out there switching to Linux during these last 12 months. Biggest profile is Pewdiepie. And I am seeing a lot of content creators covering Linux now that were simply invisible to me before.
I am aware of the context bubble that Google creates around each of us, but rarely is the switch this noticeable.
Should I de-google too? I might, but replacing Youtube is a hard one.

As I’m starting to feel comfortable and secure on my new PC, I’ve put the old one up for sale, and started to look through my wardrobe for old hardware to repurpose or throw out, because I’ve been bit by the Linux bug and have a bad case of tinkeritis right now!
I found an old laptop from 2007. Tried bringing it with me on vacation with a USB to see if I can install Arch on it. That one ended up in a catch22 where I need internet to get some very specific wifi drivers so I can get internet… Nah! I deleted all partitions and ran shred on the disks, then I sold it for about $10.
I found another old laptop, this one was from 2015. For some reason I could not get it to detect and boot from USB, but I saw network boot was an option, how hard is it to set up PXE-boot?
Well, in theory it is particularly hard on Linux. But in practice it only takes two commands, one to install pixiecore, and one to tell pixicore to host a default Arch-image. No configuration necessary. I run them on my new PC, and the laptop picks up the PXE and boots into a live environment same as if I had used the USB, no hassle.
Awesome!

Now, for my redemption. For this laptop, I will install it on an encrypted disk, using only wifi (once I’m past PXE that is), and I will not resort to archinstall. And you know what? That wasn’t too bad! Sure you will be tinkering a lot more the first time, but there’s a feeling of understanding your system better as a result of having tweaked the bootloader to run the right microcode and to decrypt a device.
I figure I will use that laptop to experiment with Hyprland, and to use it as test-pilot for any risky changes to my main PC. I have a feeling Hyprland will also be in it’s own post sometime in the future.

Feels good to explore! Feels good to get stuff done!
Now I’ll try and keep up the tempo.

0x18 Taking the plunge

This poor neglected blog!
Last time was a catch-up post for almost a year of missed updates. I was That was july 2018!
Now it’s june 2025, It’s been seven years and… that new PC I was hyped for last time is packed up in the next room, waiting for me to be sure I won’t need it anymore before I sell it off.

While I haven’t been doing nothing, not exactly, I have fallen into a kind of complacency. The kind of tech-exploration that this blog was about have become quite rare as my life settled into a routine.
One interesting thing is that I bought a decommissioned rack-server from work and took it with me home. It’s been resting on a table ever since, becoming even more hoplessly out of date than it already was. The idea was to run VMs on it, but now I’m thinking I’ll just salvage the disks and get some mini-PC to run as a home server instead, less power, less space, less noise.
A lot has happened with RPGs though, mostly Pathfinder, a lot of it as a GM, and one way that relates to tech is that I moved away from Roll20 and I am now running FoundryVTT on a VPS. It is working marvelously! A lot of my free time goes into preparing and running adventures there. (The time spent of RPGs is probably the main reason I haven’t been doing so much tech, now that I think about it.)

Related to RPGs, I too have been exploring the Latent Space of Image Generation, I feel I have enough to say on that topic that it deserves a post of it’s own.

But now there has been a recent big tech development in my life for me to write about!
When I bought my last PC, the plan was that I would keep it for 4 years and then upgrade. After all, I think of myself as an enthusiast and I was high on having a salary! Why wouldn’t I upgrade more frequently? Well… summer 2021 came, and I didn’t feel a need to upgrade. Not really running the latest games anyway! 2022, still fine but I’m starting to say “I should upgrade”. 2023, starting to grumble that “I really should upgrade”. 2024 “I really should…”. 2025, I finally pull the trigger and start looking at parts. Part as an obligation, part as a gift to myself, and part because Microsoft is forcing my hand – but probably not in the way they were hoping.

One thing I notice is that everything is more expensive now, but also things are kinda the same. AMD still does Ryzen with a similar lineup to last time, and Nvidia lineup likewise.
I didn’t put weeks into planning the build this time, trying to just pull the trigger and sort it out from there. I did decide to go bigger this time. where last time I got a 60-series gfx, this time I get a 70-series equivalent… from AMD.
It’s a damn shame AMD won’t compete for the true high end, but 9070xt seems to be where it is at for upper mid-range to lower high-end now. Nvidia is acting like a monopoly, only way they’ll stop doing that is if people start buying more AMD.

So what’s the twist this time? There’s always a gimmick in my PC builds, something I’m trying out, the build before the previous one had two SSDs in a raid0, and last build had water cooling for the CPU. I considered water-cooling also for this new build, I remember saying last time that “I will always watercool my future builds”, due to how silent they are and the cool factor. But there has been a development since I said those words: Years passed, and while the water-cooling has worked without issue for me, I have started to worry. Worrying about how gunked up my loop might be on the inside, worrying about the water level, worrying about if it will start to leak, worrying about air-bubbles in the upper radiator. worrying about how I would empty the loop if I need to, and so on.
There is something to be said for peace-of-mind!
Besides, last time I found an all-in-one kit of pieces for a soft tube loop, this time I couldn’t find any equivalent, so water-cooling would take me a week of research looking at tube gauges, fittings, pumps, reservoirs, blocks… I’m not already plugged into that world so I don’t know what I should look for. It would take a lot of time and effort, it would cost another $1000 (or something), and ultimately it would just give me more to worry about. No thanks.
Also also, for my last build, I was looking to do overclocking. I had Prime95 running for hours to proof my overclock! This time around I wasn’t really feeling like rebooting a bunch of times while trying to find the limits on my parts, only to get a few percent that I will have to roll back in a couple of years.
I kinda went with “no gimmick”, at least physically, and at least for a start. When the build was almost done, I notice that I was just two parts shy from a Whiteout build… Hit it!
And something I had intended for my previous build, but that the store screwed up, was arms with vesa mounts for the display. Well, this time I won’t be denied. So my home setup now has more empty desk. Can never have enough empty desk.

Another consideration is OS. Windows has slowly been sliding downhill, that has been a long time coming and I started to feel it with Windows 7 and how Microsoft wants you to have an account, how they took out their signature games only to sell them back to you, edge nagging you that “it’s good now, honest”, and ads and articles in the Start menu. Microsoft, kinda like Nvidia, are acting more and more like a monopoly. They don’t need to worry about adding new features that are a screaming invasion of privacy, you’re gonna buy the new Windows 11 anyway! Drop support for 10 in October, let’s nag our userbase and remind them that their computer isn’t ready, nevermind that we nagged last week for the last five weeks! Hope you are ready to pay for extended support or to buy a new PC! You’re gonna buy Windows 11 for your next PC anyway…
Well, joke’s on you Microsoft. Linux is starting to look pretty good for daily use, even for your average gamer. And I have been doing a lot of stuff with Linux servers for the past eight years!
My new PC will be a Linux PC

0x17 PGP? Lots of other stuff, over a long…

0x16 Robocop, Vacation, Laziness and Gettin Things Done!

Took some time to get around to another update no?
And here I was on last time to say I probably would not need a deadline! Hah!

So what happened?
Mostly a change of pace at work. I didn’t have the same time as I used to to pursue side projects like this one.

With that in mind, I will reduce my commitments, If I sense that I can’t get anything together that is relevant enough for a weekly post then I will simply hold off untill I have something to say.

So what have I done?

Well, there has been a number of things happening with my nextcloud!
There is now a https redirect to force the use of SSL when visiting the web front-end.
I have set up a cron job that visits the engine regularly, which makes my irregular logins go much smoother since there is no week-long backlogs of tasks for the nextcloud server to deal with first.
I have updated nextcloud twice.
The Nextcloud client is now installed on my home PC and phone. All content that used to live on Dropbox and Google Drive has been downloaded and those two have been abandoned. (Not emptied, just abandoned for now)
The phone automatically uploads new photos, like I used to do with Dropbox.
Cleaned up the repository some, created a shared folder and a publicly linked (hosted) folder as well as a shortcut to access it.

I have worked some .htaccess magic for my image repo, now it automatically tries to find a file by appending .jpg, .png and .gif to the requested filename and redirects there if the URL does not correspond to a file already.
If there is still nothing, it gives you the domain root folder so you can select your image from a list.
Combine that with a custom search engine in Vivaldi and I can now type in “img 42” which vivaldi expands to https://img.corvo.se/42 which the server redirects to
https://img.corvo.se/42.jpg

Nice!

Similarly. I have created a custom “search engine” shortcut for my Etherpad. I just type “pad name” and I get the pad with that name
http://shortpad.corvo.se:9001/p/name

Also newsworthy. I have built a new PC!
The last one was built in Q1 2012 to celebrate my first real job (and salary!). So I tried to make it the best system that I could build for 15K SEK.
Strictly focused on utility was the plan back then, with a simple, clean and opaque chassis, my LAN days were in the past.
The only two “extreme” things about it that I can think of is the two Sata SSDs in RAID0 configuration, and the dual 1080p widescreens.
Corvus was its name, and it has served me well. It is still a tough beast that can handle new releases on medium-high settings.

This new rig was meant to be a magnum opus, the best PC I had ever built. A showpiece that would be allowed to cost what it may. This time it should have all the bells and whistles I can think of.
Side window, LED strips, Water cooling, NVME M.2 SSD, configurable LED-lit mechanical keyboard, a 4K Monitor.
Water cooling is something I have wanted to do since I first heard of it as a teenager. And NVME SSDs are so insanely fast on paper that I just had to test it out!
The 4K was an afterthought, but it is essentially a quad 1080 monitor setup packed into a single monitor! My regret here is not going for >60 Hz when I had the opportunity. But 4K >60Hz are expensive.
Turns out, you don’t notice the increased resolution as much.
The mechanical keyboard feels nice, but in hindsight it is not worth the 1K SEK extra as it was in this case. The lighting is real nice though, and I tell myself that this keyboard, albeit expensive, will probably last for some time.

What else?
I finally found a terminal that can run a pokemon theme!
Some time ago me and a colleague found an app that allows you to set a pokemon background and theme to your terminal windows.
Unfortunately, I work in windows and the application did not work with cmd.
I have come to realise that this is mostly because of cmd not having the necessary features and is not a limitation of the app.
But I found another terminal that is called Hyper, and it has its own pokemon app.
I’m so happy!

I have deleted the server that used to run my email. All in all, it was an interesting experiment, but I honestly have little interest in the inevitable troubleshooting it would require, and being such a critical system on top of that.
So instead I will be running the email through a cPanel server. A shared one for now, but I expect to set up a dedicated VPS or even a machine for it at some point when I stop being cheap.

I have created a ssh config on my work computer that automatically completes the username and identity file for all of my work and hobby servers. A nice shorthand indeed that saves me from doing copy paste on the keyfile names all the time! My SSH now also enforces strict fingerprinting, so that it will refuse to connect to a host that does not have it’s fingerprint in the known-hosts, and saves new ones only to /dev/null.

I think that is it in terms of new stuff.
As for plans. I am abandoning the email server on anaflabet.

I also plan to move the Etherpad to the shared cPanel account if possible. My hope is to make it more easily managed. But it will be tricky since I clearly remember how hard it was to set up in the first place.
Mayhap there is a suitable plugin for nextcloud that can replace it?

The VPN will have to stay on the VPS for now, at least until i figure out something better.

0x15 Etherpad, Dreams and Cyborg policemen

Late again, dammit!

Got an Etherpad up and running on a test-server. Then I crashed it with an webrtc plugin.
Got it back up again by clearing the database and removing the plugin. Then I closed it again.
Installed it on a more permanent server this time and made a subdomain and a redirect to simplify access. IP plus port plus path is a bit excessive.
Have not done any SSL for it yet.

I finished watching Inception.
It is essentially a really good Heist Movie, I mostly find those to be enjoyable, but Inception manages to top most others by extending the climax in an unprecedented way, layering a heist within a heist within a heist within a heist within a heist, with a side order of a heist to salvage the heist! This might sound cheap but the movie does a good job of setting up the pins, explaining what the stakes are and the risks. It’s good!

I watched Robocop. The original from 1987. It’s cheesy, it’s dumb, and it is glorious!
It is also gory and gruesome at places. To an extent that seems excessive, such as when a person is shot 30-50 times, screaming in agony all the way and is still alive afterwards.
Also. How does one survive a clean bullet wound to the head?
Besides that, it is a bad-ass action movie full of cliches and the good old movie feel that is sadly lacking nowadays.

I was also surprised by how much of a cyberpunk story it is, despite being made in a mostly analog era. It brings up tropes like questioning the worth of a man, the rights of someone who is deceased, the power of corporations.

Started watching Robocop 2, more on that in the next post I’d bet. But I have never wanted to see a kid get shot so intensely since The Good Son.

0x14 Vampires, Trains, VPN and Etherpad

Late again. Seems I’m much to occupied on Fridays to get new posts done.

I’ve been playing Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines. This is an old classic that I have played several times before and still enjoy immensely.
I remember my first character being a brawling Gangrel and going in with almost no foreknowledge of the game-world. And I would say that save for the combat in the (obligatory) sewer level and against the two final bosses, the game is great fun. The underpowered nature of brawling sadly becomes very apparent against said bosses though and detracts from the end game. I remember sneaking past all the enemies in the sewers because I could not be bothered to fight the things.
My second character was a Katana wielding Toreador… going all in on celerity. It was fun and less troublesome than brawling.
This time around I figured I would play a Tremere and actually use the magics to get a different playstyle. I have now played through slightly over 75% of the game now and have still not started to depend on my magics. Indeed, I have not even spent a single XP on disciplines! Instead doing a mix of melee and firearms. That’s unfortunate. But I’m enjoying myself! And that’s the best recommendation that could ever be given to a game!

There were still some problems with the trains this week, but they sorted it out before Wednesday. This would have been A-ok if information was not so shoddy during the weekend, making me think that Monday and Tuesday was business as usual while costing an additional hour or two respectively!

Now. For servers, I closed down some of the inactive VPSes to save on resources. There’s no need to hog disk-space and reserve resources that won’t be used for a good while.
Since I closed the first VPS, I had to set up my VPN all over again. I won’t say it has been directly useful, but that’s because you don’t see what you prevent. But I have used it, so it is definitively a keeper. I have also added instructions on how to set it up to my manual. that manual has reached a couple of pages and has therefore been split to a separate document, separate from my notes and TODOs.

I tried to install Etherpad, and it sucked! Not the pad, the install I mean.
The installation requires node.js, the instructions state clearly that you need it installed but not how to install it. Only that it is best if you compile it from source.
That’s fair, they are developing a collaborative editor and not the node.js library. But it quickly becomes a problem because Etherpad is really picky about it!
Fortunately, there are many guides. Sadly, none of them work! They all show how you can install the dependency, node.js, using the package manager, but then when you get to the final step of trying to start the thing it says that node is not installed.
I tried this several times, formating the VPS to start over from scratch every time, trying several other guides. Same problem.
I found someone with the same problem, according to him, the Etherpad install scripts looks for “node” when it should be looking for “nodejs”. There is just a single comment in this thread that says to check the Etherpad documentation and to compile your own node.js instead. Not helpfull, and I will, and it will suck.
So I manually fix the install scripts so that they look for nodejs instead of node. Now it finds node but says that it needs npm, something that you skip when you install node with the package manager. In retrospect, you could just throw in npm with apt-get and continue from here, but at the time it REALLY seems as though Etherpad insists that you build your own node.js. I know package manager was recommended against but why even list it as an option you are just going to block it down the line? Did someone test these instructions?
So I follow the more complicated instructions that involve building your own node.js from source. Turns out there are dead links to overcome to get the source. Fixed that, sorry, node is still not installed, or is not on in PATH.
Nuke the VPS for the fifth time now and added 2017 to my search query for instructions, found another guide, compile node and install Etherpad and I still get “Please install node.js”.
Found yet another guide to do the same thing. Still fails, at the same spot. Found a mention of something called nodejs-legacy, tried installing that with package manager and tried to run Etherpad. It worked! Now it whines about npm again but at least we have made progress. I tried to apt-get npm and then run Etherpad and now it just plain works! There were lots of warnings about deprecated version, which is rich coming from the thing that demands a legacy version of node to be compiled from latest source! But finally there is something online.
I nuked the server one last time, let’s do this with more grace this time.
Amusingly, along the way I also saw the equivalent instructions for installing on windows and it seems dirt simple.
So when Linux people ever wonder why windows users find Linux so damn frustrating/hard/problematic. This is why. Because even when cheating with reformat (no need to clean up) and using guides that detail every single command to be entered. It still fails and you need to spend hours troubleshooting a third party installer or its dependencies.

Finally. This monday I ran my email through another tester and it pointed out that there was a helo <-> rDNS mismatch, the server has several sub-domain to it but the one in the PTR record does not match the one that postfix was configured to use. I still gor a 10/10 score, but it is such an easy problem so why not fix it.

0x13 Trains and busses

So, apparently there was a train chugging along that flipped sideways and mangled the tracks. Throwing commuter traffic into turmoil.
So that’s why there was no entry for last week.

Now, one full week later, stuff is still messy, but at least I can get to the office.

0x12 Dex = Deus Ex in 2D

Seems activity is on a seesaw and this goes up late to boot.

Not really anything to say about servers other than I started installing a Bitcoin wallet, then I saw that it required an order of 100 GB of storage. Sadly, my VPSes are not that wealthy in disk space so I had to postpone those plans.

I did get to play a game in the Easter weekend however, it’s been a long time since I could binge through a game like that and it felt great!
So I played Dex.

Dex is a cyberpunk open-world side-scrolling RPG with some brawler, action and stealth elements.
Before going in, it should be noted that I played the “enhanced” version. Meaning that many of the games famous bugs were long since fixed and the gameplay and UI was a bit more polished. Just goes to show that it doesn’t pay to be an early adopter!

The game does a fantastic job with its environments and atmosphere. The city is a dark and dangerous place, with lots of thugs in the dilapidated areas, and squeaky clean in the upper-class districts. The game makes a good job of creating the illusion of a 3D world in what is a 2D game, being a side-scroller implies a backwards and a forwards direction in left and right respectively, but you start in the middle so both directions are forwards in that sense, in addition the map branches out in more directions by using doors that lead deeper into the screen and leads to a new screen where left is back and right is deeper. There is also an up-down to it all with sewers and tall buildings to explore. In this way, the city is bigger and feels more more complex without feeling too complicated.

The environments are beautifully designed, colorful and feel quite real despite being clearly stylized. My main gripe here would be the pedestrians, there are quite many of them and as long as you don’t stick around for too long it is ok, but when you realize that the same two dogs are running from one end of the level to the other and back again over and over it looses its charm. You also never interact with them and they never react to anything you do or their environment, even if there is a gang shootout nearby!

The soundtrack is beautiful and fits the game perfectly, I like especially the creepiness and subtle danger that I feel from the sewer and chemical factory tracks. I also bought the soundtrack but sadly I cannot recommend it as a standalone product. This is one of those that work perfectly in the background of the game but not so much as something you can listen to while commuting.

The gameplay is a mixed bag. Most of your time in this game will be spent doing side-quests in the vein of Deus Ex or Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, while platforming and exploring every nook and cranny of the city for quest items, XP and credits and talking to delightful and fully voice-acted NPCs along the way. This is a fantastic way to spend your time and is the biggest draw of the game.

XP leads to levels that grant skill points that you allocate into various attributes like hacking, combat skills, health and more. Higher level attributes cost more skill points, but higher character levels give more points on each levelup, staving off the feeling of grinding. The attribute benefits are not excessive, no attribute is mandatory or even feels like an auto-include, except perhaps the 1-drop lockpicking.

Credits allows you to buy weapons and ammo, it also allows you to install cybernetic implants. These implants typically modify your gameplay experience very slightly, but a few are near auto-includes. Improved jumping helps you get to more portions of the game but can also get you killed from falling damage, and the cybernetic eyes can let you spot enemies through walls, though sadly it is togglable and will therefore be forgotten about, you won’t be leaving it on because it tints everything blue. There are also areas that are dangerous without proper enhancements. Such as live sparking wires and toxic gases. These are extremely lethal unless you have the enhancement to completely nullify them. You are never required to pass such hazards to progress through the game, there is always another option, but there is a lot of goodies that you would miss out on. I keep wondering whether getting these enhancements paid off, which i suppose is a good thing because that means the did not pay off too much nor too little.

There is a conversation mechanic that resembles that of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, in that you get three conversation options and if you pick the right one you convince the other person. Supposedly it rewards you for paying attention to *who* you are talking to and what they want and do not want to hear. But just as with DX:HR, it feels quite random, and unlike DX:HR you don’t get a personality-summary at the side that can help you make the right choice. I usually ended up “Solving” these conversation puzzles by trial and error, loading the game up to two times. This causes slight frustration and breaks immersion at a point where I’m the most invested. Fortunately, there are not many of these.

The game has a hacking mechanic that consists of your character telepathically accessing devices and enemies in the environment, while you do this the environment is paused. To hack something, simply move your avatar to the object and press the use key, then prepare to defend yourself from the horde of viruses in a twin-stick shooter minigame until the progress bar finishes. You can hack security devices to disable them or to turn them to your side and you can hack human enemies to stun them for a few seconds or until you hurt them. Hacking enemies like this becomes near mandatory in some places but it is never explained how you are able to hack people who do not have any implants (yes, I think i can assume that a lowlife thug in the anti-augmentation gang does not have any enhancements).

Combat is done either with a gun or with your fists. I played a fisticuffs character and refrained from buying a gun, thinking I would loot one anyway soon enough. Well, it took a while before the first few guns started dropping and with my selection of skills and enhancements I had pretty much locked myself into fist-fighting. From what I got to experience of the firearms however ammo might be a concern. You also need to draw your gun into a weaver style in order to aim and fire, in the meantime your enemies will come running towards you and will break your stance on each hit, thus it is easy to getting swarmed and beaten to a pulp in CC if you are not ready to switch to melee yourself. I used guns only to snipe enemies that were out of reach.
Close combat has a few kinks but is workable. There are only three buttons that matter. Punch, block and dodge. some attacks cant be blocked so you need to dodge, but the dodge always work so essentially don’t bother blocking. Most enemies telegraph their attacks with decent amounts of warning. Some others don’t really and can hurt you a lot with but a single hit. Sadly, with CC you often end up fighting 2-4 enemies at the same time, which (realistically) usually does not end well for you. Higher skill levels in melee unlocks more moves that are focused on controlling your foe, such as a low kick to trip them and a high kick to push them, preferably of a ledge.

There is a half baked stealth mechanic in the game. You are introduced to objects in the near background that you can use to hide behind. From here you can just wait for a patrol to walk by or a sentry to turn around. Sadly, this is the only way to avoid detection that does not involve total invisibility. If however you can sneak up on an enemy you can make a silent takedown-move on all but the biggest enemies. Besides gunshots, there is no noise to worry about, doing a superhero-landing behind an enemy still lets you do a takedown once you are back on your feet. There is also an enhancement that lets you use invisibility cloaks, these seem very expensive to rely on and I could not even get them to work (though I never tried in combat), I probably missed something. There is also a set of armor that you can find that makes your character cloak if she stands still for long enough, this cloak then lets you move around and do some non-combaty stuff without breaking, and it’s free!

Spoilers ahead!
The story is pretty decent except near the end. You are a nobody that is saved by a hacker named Raycast but you are now on the run from the authorities for reasons you don’t know, you meet allies that help you become self-reliant and from there the world opens up for you to do what you please. The story missions are quite few but can be quite interesting, if nothing else they introduce great characters and complex relationships between them. The story sadly starts to take a nose dive near the end. After having destroyed a Master Control Program Mark 2 you are in no subtle terms told that you can access the end-game and leave the open-world city. This brings you to an underwater lab facility where you learn that your character is one of several thousands of clones, some of which, like you, have been unknowingly planted into society. This lab idea is pretty cool and despite being very spaced out it feels plausible, here you discover who Raycast is and you are given a choice. To destroy all clones or to betray him and tell your enemies who Raycast is. There is also a third option that involves erasing all records of the clones so that they will go free. There is an interesting cyberpunk concept here with how Raycast describes that the clones are designed to be pliable and controllable and that is the end-goal of the villains to literally control the world. This is swiftly forgotten about and never mentioned again. Sadly, the third option of sparing the clones has no impact on the ending and is just a less grim version of Raycast’s option, but the game presents it as something completely separate.

No matter what choice you make you escape from the facility with a minisub and you are invited and escorted by the antagonists to the final boss. So, an underwater base, far-fetched but somewhat plausible, what is not plausible is the space-station city that you are brought to! It feels so far out there and does not really add anything, the ocean-lab already evoked the “they are more powerful that we thought” trope, a giant space station just shatters the suspension of disbelief at this point. You are now made to re-live moments that may or may not have happened off-screen to two of your NPC allies, but there does not seem to be a point to them. Is it to show that the villains knew what you were up to all along? Is it an attempt to make the story darker? Is it you dreaming nightmares about your friends getting into trouble? How does the antagonists know the parts they weren’t there for yet still remain unaware of other things like who Raycast is? How come decker is still alive when we saw him get killed? Has the entire campaign been staged by the Crow as a big test? If so, then to determine what? It feels incoherent and like something that was not quite complete but left in the game anyway. Then we get to speak to “The Crow”, and kudos to the game for subverting my expectations. The Crow is built up as being a mysterious and dangerous woman, but she is revealed to be old, dying and frail. She has been looking for a successor that can do what she could not, merge with Helios I mean Kether to become god. She babels at you for a bit then you dive into cyberspace to beat the original Master Control Program Mark 1 and then you get to select your ending.

And the endings mostly suck. If you betrayed Raycast, you can choose to take over the Complex, ruling earth from aboard the space-station-city, becoming the new Crow and spitting out some pretentious poetry that was also present before the start of the game. This would be an ok ending if only it was shown what becomes of the world, the clones, the friends that you betrayed and so on, but all we get are a few stills that repeatedly imply that you are in charge now.
The middle ending is available to both paths, you merge with Kether. You get an epilepsy inducing cutscene in blue and white showing stills of your character for a few seconds, then credits. Nothing said about whether it worked, whether you went insane as Hammond warned, nothing about what became of… everything. This is a concept that I am very interested in and we get nothing so I was quite disappointed.
The good ending is only accessible if you destroyed or freed the clones. You use this opportunity to destroy the Complex. The ending shows a still of your character moving through the crowd while a news reporter talks about unethical human experiments and repercussions for the companies involved, stating that the clones are among us, no one knows who they are but that they are people. This ending is the best of the three but is not quite there.

All in all, I had a great time with Dex. The combat before you are free to roam sucks, and so does the endings, but the exploration and sidequests was great fun, the world and characters are beautiful and interesting, I only wish there was more!

0x11 Happy Easter

A short week, what with easter and some saved up excess work hours.

I re-installed my mail server yet again, to know for sure how it works and how to do it again, just in case I need to do something to fix it in the future.
I messed up a config file this time but copied it from another source to fix that. I Also learned that setting up for multiple domains on the same mail-server requires more steps and is trickier than i would have guessed. I amde an attempt but could not get DKIM running with my improvisations, and some reading suggested that there is more to be done with postfix as well. We are learning!

In fact…
http://www.postfix.org/VIRTUAL_README.html
Seems there is a lot more to learn.
I’m thinking maybe I’ll keep the two domain on separate machines. Would like to configure multiple on same at some point, but after three installs I’m pretty anxious to ship something.

We’ll see what I do over the easter-weekend, but i bought a few new games recently. Hacknet: Lanyrinths, Dex and Hard West. So there’s that…

0x10 New mail

Last week I mentioned World Backup Day and that I would take a look at my home situation. Not much has happened because I apparently already back up nearly all my irreplaceable files to the cloud. That the cloud happens to be DropBox for now is a later concern.
That said, I *really* need to clean up on my laptop that I currently use for commuting entertainment. There are several trees of folders and backups and some undoubtedly hold valuable project files and memories.

I also saw another movie. Up.

This is a movie I wanted to see because I got hooked on an unusual piece of hype. And now I am sad. They said that the movie would be slow and old-fashioned, and that it would distance itself from the loud and frantic style of so many other kids films… It was a lie! This is about as generic and noisy as kids movies get. And what’s even worse is that the twists are predictable and bad.
The story stars an old man who has just lost his beloved wife to old age and instead of checking in to a retirement home he decides to turn his house into a dirigible and fly it to a waterfall in South America that was significant to him and his dead wife.
And this is where the movie started going south. See, there is this kid, that embodies every single stereotype there is for an annoying kid character. He has an annoying voice, annoying habits, annoying personality, is generally useless and it is obvious that he is supposed to be annoying but it is only because the script says so.
NEWSFLASH! ‘Deliberately annoying’ is still ‘Annoying’!
Then we introduce the macguffin, a rare bird. The comic relief, a talking dog. The villain’s henchmen, an army of talking dogs and the main villain, the old mans childhood hero. You know he’s the villain because he has an army at his command and a wealth of resources compared to our protagonists, including a big gray blimp, that and he looks like a villain. One can usually tell.

Nevermind that this guy was a grown man when our elderly main character was ten, and he is somehow still alive after having hid from the civilized world for decades. The villain is after the macguffin because it will clear his name and restore his fame, so to hammer home just how despicable and ruthless the villain is the bird is of course one-of-a-kind and somehow also a mother of three.
Here is where the movie fails even on its own terms however. Things constantly happen for no reason! The kid is terrified of heights… at least in the beginning, not so much later on when it is convenient. But for whatever stupid reason he decides to stay on the porch of a house as it is very slowly shown to rip loose from the ground and very slowly lift. He had more than a minute to get off safely after the balloons were deployed, and plenty of auditory warning before and during liftoff. The house drifts into a storm shortly after leaving city limits, the old man is knocked out and when he wakes up the kid has steered the house to South America, because suddenly he has figured out the controls and would rather steer to another continent that to go home… because it’s convenient for the plot! But they not only end up in South America, but in the very exact neighborhood that the old man was looking to land the house. Which also happens to be the place where the villain and the macguffin reside. The main villain is not handled consistently either, he is out for vindication after having been falsely accused of having forged his discoveries, so he actually has a very understandable motivation when you think about it, but every other character, including the protagonist who was a big fan, is shown to think of the villain as being despicable. The villain is also shown to be remorseless about killing people who get in his way, this feels very arbitrary and, again, conveinent for the sake of plot. Basically, he is a villain because the script says so. The protagonist also has a relatable goal, he seeks to fulfill the childhood promise that he made to his wife but everything goes awry for him, the kid and then the bird and the dog are always slowing things down by complicating matters, sometimes arbitrarily. When the protagonist finally snaps and says that everything is the kid’s fault (and he is actually right! None of this would have happened if it were not for the kid) the scene is played as if the old man is being unfair.
So I don’t have a very high opinion of this film, but frankly what should I have expected? A movie about an old man that flies away with his house, the end? That’s all I knew of the plot before watching it. But to be fair, the scene where the old man’s heart melts and he decides to go help the kid and save the bird is pretty convincing and did not feel quite so forced as such scenes go.

I find myself wondering what would have happened if the movie decided to not have a villain, like in the Polar Express, and just be a nice whimsy adventure. Take some risks you know? Like old movies used to. What if the kid had not arbitrarily decided to stay aboard a house at it lifts off? Or if the kid was actually as competent as his collection of badges would suggest. Would the old man successfully evade the storm? Would he land the house at the right spot and then from there run into his childhood hero and together they catch the bird only to find the roost and they decide to let the bird go?
A slower, more unique and old type of film that does not feel like a big lie. I think I would rather watch that.
2/5

So, servers then.
I started up a couple more VPSes, this time with more of a plan. And I retraced my steps in setting up an email server with postfix and dovecot. And despite having done so once before I got stuck, but I think my email client is to blame this time. Apparently there is a difference between “Force SSL” with port X and “Use SSL on special port” with port X, and this messed up my working environment and made me consider switching clients. Then I solved it and it was as if nothing was ever wrong in the first place.
Anyhow, I now have @anaflabet.net running on another server. The old one is still running but nothing points to there anymore.

There are 5 new VPSes in total and i have plans for each of them. More on these in later installments.