Las Vegas is in the Mojave desert. Hydrate you moron.
Insightful
Nexus 5: Bootloop? No! Sticky Power Switch!
Sly’s Nexus went into a boot loop this afternoon while we were at Burrito Village. I’ve got her on the stock OTA image so no booting to a recovery image for us, which would have been so easy to fix.
No instead, I did some quick Googling and discovered that, over time, the power button the Nexus 5 is prone to getting ‘sticky’ to the point that the power will continue to cycle so it looks like a problem with the kernel but it’s not. It’s strictly mechanical.
More after the jump….. Continue reading “Nexus 5: Bootloop? No! Sticky Power Switch!”
Thanks for the Birthday Wishes
All You Can Eat KFC?
Would anyone reading this actually go for all you can eat KFC?
I’m so very conflicted by this; on the one hand I’m trying to decide if it’s worth it to leave work on time (that’s a post for another occasion) and stand in line to get all I can eat KFC. On the other, I think it would be incredibly disrespectful to my wife.
Sly spends so much time and thought putting together healthy meals for her and I that actually partaking of an ‘All You Can Eat Chicken’ scenario would probably set me back months in my healthy eating regimen. It’s been a tough slog for her, coming up with things that I would not mind eating regularly. Lots of salad, lots of skinless, boneless chicken breast. Lots of it. Many chickens died to supply our dinners.
So I don’t have a problem saying I enjoy chicken. I’m normally a big fan of Chicken on the Way (Poulet En Route!) or even Cluck and Cleaver for my fried chicken fix. But I really don’t think I’d be happy eating my weight in KFC. Can you even call that chicken in the real sense? Perhaps more of a colloquial sense?
Anyways, if you’re in Calgary on 17th Avenue (and 12th Street SW) in the Beltline on Wednesday and you can stomach it, stop by for all you can eat KFC. What could go wrong?
Salient
Throughout my adult life, I’ve battled with sleeplessness. I won’t call it insomnia because I’ve never gone days on end without rest. If you see a post early morning (like this one), you can rest assured that I was just unable to decide if tiredness was on the horizon.
No, my M.O. is sitting in front of the computer until all hours because I know that if I try to lay my head on a pillow, I’m going to stare aimlessly at the ceiling while my head grinds with things I need to do, plans that need hatching, protocols that need following and contingencies that need development.
I’m a worrier; I’ve always been a worrier but it’s the worry that keeps me and those around me (relatively) safe most of the time. I think of scenarios that might not necessarily need thinking about. Seriously, why would I need to plan out my actions in the event the group I’m wandering around the woods with is attacked by a cougar? Like where the hell does this come from? For the record, it is a scenario I’ve thought about and have a plan for. How ridiculous is that?
This is something that developed in my early 20’s and has been around for some time. People that know me might extrapolate about why it began at that time but I won’t get into that now.
It wasn’t until recently when I was perusing some old episodes of Scrubs on Youtube that I found this song being used as a plot device. It describes one man’s inability to control the worry that pops into his head and how it’s causing him some grief and sleepless nights. Give it a watch/listen.
Yeah, salient.
There’s a bottle of Jack sitting on the shelf yonder that might solve the problem but only introduce a new one.
So I sit at my battle station, clicking away into the night, keying in words, phrases and the occasional sentence coherent enough to share, all the while wondering if my brain will release its grip on my body and give me some fucking rest even if it means waking up with a keyboard imprinted on my face.
Now… what’s on the agenda for tomorrow?
Using Windows 7 or 8.1? Beware Auto Update….
TL;DR: Go here (www.grc.com), download the app, run it and then make selections in the app to be sure you won’t get Windows 10 installed on your system.
Continue reading “Using Windows 7 or 8.1? Beware Auto Update….”
Fallout 4: Survival Mode Activate!
When fixes to the Survival difficulty were announced earlier this year, I stopped playing Fallout. I was playing on Very Hard but the game play seemed so lacklustre. I was walking around, shooting things in the face, doing quests and making the Railroad proud but I wasn’t really feeling challenged. Add to that the fact that the previous version of Survival difficulty just created bullet sponges out of the NPCs, my experience wasn’t as interesting as it could be. These new changes have really gotten me excited and I started a new play through on Friday.
This new mode has changed much:
Eating and drinking are requirements, not options. Not complying will make you sick.
Illnesses and diseases decrease S.P.E.C.I.A.L(Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Agility, Luck) stats and are severe.
Sleeping is now a need. As you gain more fatigue from staying awake, you lose action points and the ability to sprint or attack many targets in VATS. Fatigue also makes you more susceptible to illness
Carrying capacity has been almost halved. Do you pick up the pipe revolver from that corpse or the wood and aluminium she was carrying? Choices, choices!
Ammo has weight. No more pack-horse 3000 cartridges for your mini-gun around any more
No fast travel. You want to go somewhere? You’re walking the entire journey, no short cuts.
Sleep to save. No auto or quick-saving 1 !
That last one is a real bitch, no other way to say it. If you want to save your game, you have to find a bed of some type (sleeping bag, dirty mattress, full bed) and sleep for a while. Your game will be saved when you wake up. Each of those types of beds has different efficiency: sleeping bags will only net you 3 or so hours of effective sleep where a nice bed will let you sleep as much as you like. And you need 7-8 hours sleeping to allow for the other 16 in a day to be productive. Don’t sleep enough over the course of a few days? You’re going to get insomnia and it will lower your stats.
Some of the systems also push against each other: need to use a stim pack? You’ll become thirsty immediately after. Want to get rid of your radiation with a Rad Away? It’s going to lower your immune system and you’ll be more likely to catch an illness.
All of these changes have created a different feel to the game; I’ve been more deliberate, more selective, in deciding to attack a roaming group of mods. Whereas the previous iteration of Survival would have had me dive-rolling into the middle of the group, shooting them all in the face one by one and the maybe, just maybe, popping a healing stim pack or two one or two well placed NPC shots can end a player’s session.
Now I run through the following process for each humanoid encounter: How many in the group? Are any of them on a patrol that I might be able to sneak behind and take out in a stealthy way? Once that’s done, how do I go about killing the ones that remain? Should I set up a couple of mines and lure the NPCs back through the field? Get as far back and high as possible and start picking them off from distance? Whatever I choose, I need to be decisive and correct in all my actions otherwise I’m dead and staring at the reload screen and contemplating the long walk back to where I died.
And I love it. I absolutely love it. There’s a real thrill to the game now and decisions have consequences. No longer can you Rambo through the game carrying five hundred pounds of gear, running and tumbling like there’s no tomorrow. Don’t want to sleep? Don’t have to but you’re going to get insomnia and your stats will suffer and, possibly, could kill you. Don’t have enough water on you for a journey between two towns? Will you drink from the pond you just passed and possibly get parasites or do you suffer through the lowered stats until you can find purified water or get to where you’re going?
I’ve only spent about a dozen hours with it so far and I’ve barely gone out into the now more dangerous Boston area wasteland. It’s not perfect (I’m still not completely sure what is making me sick occasionally even when I’m doing everything right) but I’m definitely having more fun than I was with the old Survival mode.
If you’re still playing it’s time to start a new character, or if you’ve quit playing, I recommend coming back to give Survival Mode a try. At the very least you’ll get a glimpse into what trying to survive in a Post-Nuclear wasteland might be like.
And you’ll get sucked right back into the game again, just like I did. Video to follow.
- There is a mod that allows you to autosave at will. Sort of cheating but some people don’t have it in them to go completely without quick save. ↩
Happy New Year!
Another year comes to a close with me on the computer and my wife sleeping soundly on the couch. I’m not sure I’d have it any other way.
I have plenty of things to be thankful for even though I have a lot of shit going on that just generally sucks. My wife continues being the best thing that ever happened to me, I get a chance to travel ( though not as much as I would like ), I work with people who I enjoy going out with and consuming soju (SSome in Calgary is great) and I don’t particularly mind going into work everyday.
These are all things that I know I should be grateful for; and I am. But like many other people I know, more would be better. More time off, more salary, more enjoyable work projects.
New Years’ Resolutions rub me the wrong way; I don’t like them. Too often people say what they’d like to change without ever actually putting a plan together for how they are going to make those changes in their life. I was one of those people for many years. Then I just stopped making them. Completely.
That won’t change this year either. I’m going to continue doing what I’ve done so far and make slight course corrections as necessary to continue pushing myself in the same direction I have since the Winter of 2008: to give my wife a life that both of us can enjoy to it’s fullest. If I can keep my wife happy, my life will follow.
I wish whoever took the time to read this the very best of 2016 and hope that you get exactly what you work for or exactly what you have coming to you.
Slainte!
Password Security: Get Your Shit Together, Zaal
So I got an interesting email from Google this evening:
The attacker had my password and my gmail account name. The only reason they didn’t get into my account, I think, is because I use two-factor authentication that requires me to input a randomly generated number from the Google authentication app that resides on my phone before it will complete the authentication process and allow full access.
The worrying thing for me was wondering how my password was compromised. I actually put some brain cells behind the process and realized I gotten incredibly lazy in my choice of password since I’d activated two factor. My password was 8 characters consisting of 6 alphas and 2 numbers and three different permutations that I rotate through over the course of a year. I’ve since changed that password, and any others that used such a simple algo and changed it to something I use on other sites which consists of four words that mean absolutely nothing when put together, equal 25 characters in length and are easily remembered.
Still concerned, I visited BreachAlarm.com and discovered that there was a data breach at Xsplit.com back in 2013 and some of that data was only brought to light on the 25th of October of this year. No coincidence that a month later, my email account is being prodded with the hope of taking it over.
The cool thing about most web-based accounts these days (I’ll add that this is in my experience) allow for the main email attached to an account will be notified in the event of a change in account information. Because of this, the attacker really wants to take over the contact email account so they can control the information reaching the target before the attacker’s actions have reached completion.
So I’ll just put this one here, again, for the use of people who may be of the mind that your password needs to be hard to remember. Your password doesn’t need to be complex; just needs to be difficult to guess.
