Henlo everypony, I haven't made many blog posts lately but have had a lot of little things going on that I wanna write about, so this will be a compilation of those.
Swappa da laptop
Last week I swapped laptops with my partner. The bluetooth on hers wasn't working (maybe hasn't for a while, I never check cause I don't really use bluetooth stuff), so she was unable to connect a wireless keyboard we have. I let her use my laptop (asus) for a while, cause I only use it as a quick web browser or for posting here (for which I work from an external SSD anyway, to switch computers easily). When she went the pick up her laptop again the weight difference was really noticable, so I suggested we swap permanently to make things easier. What was my laptop was a mess after testing multiple desktops, and waydroid, and other crap in Debain 12 Xfce+KDE, and it needed a clean wipe/install anyway, plus I can work from any computer idc. Did a fresh install of Debian 13 KDE from the live ISO, assuming it would be easier/cleaner than the DVD ISO (it was). There were a few immediate little issues I needed to fix which I had learned to do while stumbling through Debian the first time around (contrib & non-free repos, virtual keyboard broken on wayland out of the box), but I'll make a separate post about that because the outcome is a very stable and user friendly laptop that will have software support until 2030. As for what is now 'my' laptop, I decided to put antiX on it and use that as a daily driver again. I had been wanting to use antiX again for a while and rewatched this really solid video (also linked on antiX's website) that overviews how to configure many things, as antiX has a lot of config files that allow you to customize it to your liking. After setting it up as I wanted, it sits at about 300MB of RAM, boots very quickly, and just does what I need it to do. Only problem is the wifi doesn't work on the other side of our apartment, which I think might explain the bluetooth problem too, the wireless card might just be on the way out. I only go to that side of the apartment to use a standing desk for long periods of typing (like managing this site), and there are other workarounds I can do.
Gaming
Was obsessed with Snowrunner again a few weeks back, playing hard mode with a friend. I haven't done a Snowrunner specific post before but it is one of my all time favourite games. I am not a car/truck person IRL or big into sim driving games, but there's something about Snowrunner that I really like. The way I see it, it's more of a puzzle game with a skill element. The puzzle elements are the logistics of how to deliver stuff, which vehicles/trailers to use, and the complex offroading, while the skill is centred on how well you apply inputs to solve the 'puzzle' (i.e. how well you drive in this specific style/control scheme). Anyway, after that waned I hopped on a DayZ RP server with some friends which has been fun. Been sinking too much time into doing a town medic character, but I think a server wipe is on the horizon with the next game update. Other than that I have been continuing my slow playthrough of GTA 3, part-way through the second island and some of these missions make me wanna snap my controller in half. Amazing music though and still a very interesting game, more stylized and gamey like GTA 1-2, then trying to be more grounded and 'realistic' like all the following titles (that often end up with derivitive regurgitated movie plots as 'story'). I'll do a post about it when I finish the game. Oh also we finally went and killed the ender dragon in our 5 year old bedrock server world XD, this was fun but we haven't been playing much otherwise.
New site additions
Created the '32-bit support report' as an info dump repository for all things 32-bit PC related. Mostly focuses on operating systems that still provide security support for 32-bit PCs, and any browser I could find that still functions on 32-bit, even in unsupported operating systems. I just linked to it from relevant pages (Alt Tech, Linux/FOSS, Internet), it has it's own RSS feed, anyone can copy it or download it, it's just freely available information that I compiled. I also added a Website Credits/Image Index page that does what it says in the title, I just wanted a single easy to read page to clearly display credits & image licenses. And finally, I overhauled my personal page a bit to add shrine pages for my kitty cats, speaking of
Tangy settles in :3
Tangy has been with us for over two months now and she is much less skittish and far more settled now. This is officially 'her house', she lays around on our armchair (her throne), and is getting more chatty with her meows. She will get up to see us whenever either of us wakes, and likes to lead us to her food so we can watch her eat while patting her. She loves to flop down and roll over to show her belly, sometimes she will grab our hands and do soft 'bunny kicks' then run away at a surprising speed. I mention on her shrine page that she has three legs and all her limbs are a little short/stubby, so the speed at which she runs around our home is often unexpected XD
Other little projects
I finally finished posting all of my old virtual photography backlog to my pixelfed account, and will start uploading new stuff for the first time in like two years. Some of the last photo sets are of places in Second Life that no longer exist or where time-limited installations in the first place, it's inspired me to work on a long post for virbex (my virtual world themed blog) about digital decay and ephemerality. Second Life has a lot of this decay due to their hypercapitalist setup, if you miss a regular payment of server rent your whole world/home/setup gets wiped. And for many hangout spaces (clubs, cafes, residential districts), if they can't keep up payments with donations then they often have to relocate to smaller spots and some eventually fade away. It has really made me appreciate virtual worlds with permanence, like how DeltaWorlds has a lot of backups from ActiveWorlds (while the latter runs itself into the ground), and it's why I became so enamored with Virtual Paradise (another ActiveWorlds-like virtual world). I've started to try building in Virtual Paradise, slowly working on a recreation of 'WebWeave' the 3D chat room from 'Noah and Saskia', a seminal 'life on the internet' TV show from around the time I came of age. I have some other posts I plan to make here about virtualization, and another minecraft worldbuilding one. I am also considering making a whole section of my site dedicated to blogging about 90s-00s sci-fi, but that may take some time because I want to finish watching Babylon 5 first (I'm halway thru season 5, still need to see some of the movies and Crusade). Sorry that this last paragraph is very 'if you know, you know', I just wanted to rant a bit and felt like posting again :)
Thanks for reading!