HakFoo

(Alt: The Drake meme. Upper panel shows him hiding his face from "Securing Customer Data". Lower panel shows him smirking at "Securing Public API Documentation")

Currently using an X11 system, on an AMD GPU; the window manager is FVWM because I'm a nostalgic old git.

I use two screens, and most games tend to full-screen on one.

Had decent enough results with Proton via Steam on many titles. A few of them needed to be explicitly tagged "don't draw a frame around the full screen window" in the FVWM config, and I had a few where movies did that "show a test card instead of video" but no biggie.

I've recently had two harder nuts to crack. I'm using two games with Lutris: The SNK 40th Anniversary Collection (it was $20 cheaper on GOG than Steam at the time!), and Genshin Impact.

Both of them play fine, so long as you keep the mouse within the full-screen capture area. But if I leave the window (say, using a keyboard combination or pulling the mouse outside the capture area), the games go blank.

SNK shifts the black box somewhat off of its original position, and I think Genshin just goes blank.

I experimented a bit with SNK's "wine configuration" options in Lutris.

"Automatically Capture the Mouse in Full-Screen Window": This reduced accidental leave-the-screen problems, but still had failures if you used a keyboard command to switch windows.

De-selecting "allow the window manager to control the window" causes the window to turn into a weird Win95-esque "mini taskbar icon" instead of going black Pressing the "restore" and "maximize" buttons resizes it to near full screen but retains an ugly Win95 style title bar. Once you restore it in that mode, it's actually well-behaved-- you can move the mouse in and out of the window without it breaking (it seems to freeze when you move the mouse away, but that may be intentional) But still, the weird titlebar and it not working that way until you first "freeze and unwedge it" sucks.

Genshin, at least sometimes, could have its black box minimized and restored and come back to life. I've yet to try the Wine tweaks there.

I suspect the common theme might be that the games are trying to deactivate themselves when they lose focus, but not doing so gracefully. ISTR Genshin on Windows would minimize itself if you switched to another task, and I haven't tried SNK on actual Windows. I'm wondering if there's some unified fix that tells the game it's running in a single screen and when the mouse leaves, it just stayed there. There seems to have been some sort of "cage Wine apps in a virtual desktop" feature, but it seems to no longer be supported.

Original parameters: (full body male vampire hunk), (shirtless), (thin necklace), (standing in graveyard), hunk, (long hair), (red eyes), (holding scepter), (wide angle), masterpiece, detailed, (moonlight background), realistic, (wind blown) Negative prompt: (head cut off), (extra fingers), (moustache), (beard), (anime), jeans, female Steps: 20, Sampler: DPM++ 2M Karras, CFG scale: 6, Seed: 3375192227, Size: 704x384, Model hash: 6ce0161689, Model: v1-5-pruned-emaonly, Denoising strength: 0.01, Hires upscale: 3.75, Hires upscaler: DAT x2, Version: v1.8.0

For years, I've had a wallpaper in rotation of the cover of the manhwa 'Rebirth' volume 1, (reference https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347683512i/29540.jpg) featuring the vampire protagonist in the moonlight with a decidedly surly pose.

I've been smashing my 6900XT into the wall trying to get it to spit out something with a similar vibe, but a few more pixels than I can get out of denoising a 800dpi scan of a small book cover. This doesn't quite do it, but the upturned nose and downward pointed weapon (SD seems to go completely off the rails with almost any weapon you ask for, except torches for some reason), convey an interesting contempt for the viewer.

With some cleanup, I get something like this: https://imgur.com/a/9QwQwlW

I've taken to generating batches of 10 thumbnails images at a time, deciding if anything's worth upscaling to wallpaper size, and cleaning up more in GIMP. Upscaling seems to put way more stress on the GPU than generating the original image-- once my machine politely shut itself down which I assume was the way of responding to a thermal threshold trip (~115C peaks)

After scaling, seems like most of the effort is things like trying to add actual eyes instead of dark spots, cleaning up superfluous features, and a lot of reworking mouths.

The wallpaper is one of the standard XBM images included with the X11 distribution (in OpenBSD, it's at /usr/X11R6/include/X11/bitmaps/mensetmanus).

The fonts are the Modern DOS collection (8x8 for the battery status, 8x16 for the terminal). The window titles use the classic bitmap Helvetica which has no antialiasing and gives it a unique "Vintage system" vibe.

I was going to give it a full CDE install, but the build guides don't seem to work right; I might switch to SparkyLinux for this machine because suspending fails just often enough to be annoying.

It seems like there's an infinite supply of standoffish warriors and grim reapers for this community to caption, usually with motorcycles. But what was its original use case?

I jokingly proposed "It's the equivalent of the art on Lisa Frank binders, but for boys." But not really: it's too aggressive to sell to kids whose parents (and likely schools and similar community norm-setters) would veto it, and it's too fantastical for adults; I'd expect if you had it on display at home, it's in the same category of Grown Up Mature Decor Don't that anime wallscrolls or action movie posters are.

That pretty much leaves T-shirt designs for self-described badasses and maybe posters for college dorms-- is there enough of that to fuel this ecosystem? Or is there a community which generates thus stuff out of internal demand (like the furry subculture and high-intensity fandoms)

I've been prepping my home network for the promise of "fibre coming soon" in my city.

That meant wrapping the house in Cat6A like a giant arachnid nest, and having a couple desktops with 2.5GbE on board, but I'm not sure what to do about the routing setup. I have three Ethernet runs to "30cm from the ISP equipment" now.

For gigabit in this scenario, the turnkey solution is any random Wi-Fi/router/firewall box which has 1Gb WAN and four 1Gb LAN ports. But where do you go when you start wanting 2.5GbE?

It seems like the "Wifi/Router/firewall" boxes with 2.5GbE ports are quite spendy, especially if you want more than one LAN port. I know a lot of this cost is because they tend to be the latest-and-greatest in terms of Wi-Fi, with 82 antennae, but that's only a secondary consideration for me with the heavy users on wires. Hell, my smartphone only supports the 2.4GHz band!

It seems like other options include:

• 2-box solution: A slightly cheaper Wifi-Router with 2.5GbE WAN and one LAN port and using a cheap unmanaged 2.5 switch to provide the desired port count.
• 3-box solution: Said cheap unmanaged switch, plus a wired-centric router, and use the old Wifi/Router as an access point only

I'm sort of not thrilled about the two or three-box solutions as they have poor "wife acceptance factor" as they say. A bunch of random boxes that inevitably won't stack neatly and have three big ugly wall warts. Is there some magic product that would fit my needs perfectly I'm missing?

I'm trying to get back into GW2, in large part because it's one of the few MMOs I've liked that actually works well under Linux.

For a frame of reference, my main was a Nord Necromancer with ~33 mastery points, and the three easier-to-acquire mounts. I completed the main story and HoT, and sort of drifted out in the middle of PoF for like two years. Just bought the EoD expansion while it's on sale.

I've got one 20-slot bag and four 15-slots, and maybe 1-2 slots free at any given time. I suspect my problem is less "bag space" per se, and more a hoarding tendency-- crafting items, "turn it into some NPC for a quest" items, seasonal tonics and exchange items. Hell, I still have the Level 80 token that came with the original purchase, because I figured if I skipped to 80, I'd miss the Personal Story.

Is there a good rundown for discard/sell/keep somewhere? One thing I've seen in other games that I appreciate is when they say "these seasonal items are now obsolete and will be deleted/can be auto-sold for trifling sums".

Alternatively, should I just treat this character as a walking treasure chest, park him, and try to shared-slot things of actual value to a new character? Part of me says to fire up a revenant-- I always mean to try it, but I suspect now I'll be disappointed after spending my holiday playing too much Code Vein, where it was the term for "formally speaking not vampires, but, yeah... vampires."

I got a Sylvania-branded strand of 50 "warm-white" LEDs (plus two loose spares) for USD 2.50 at the local grocery store, which I'm pretty sure is cheaper than buying a bag of the bare LEDs would run. They also come in other colours (blue, cool-white, bright red, multicolour)

The individual LEDs come in plastic shells which can be cracked open to retrieve the goodies inside, and have plenty long leads that are folded over to fit the "bulb" mounting.

Picture of a disassembled Duracell 9v battery. Below the terminal assembly is a clear plastic case where you can see six sets of stacked rectangular terminals and fillings.

Writing this up because I haven't seen a proper review.

Note I've only been using the case for about a day so I don't have a strong baseline on thermals; this is mostly about the build experience.

Why I was interested My preference towards cases is very old-school. I like external drive bays, and have no interest in tempered glass or RGB. My long-term daily driver was a Cooler Master HAF XB, which is a delight to build in and offers exceptional expandability for its size.

The one place it's sort of limited is depth for GPU-- I have an ASRock OC Formula 6900XT, and it's 330mm, and you have to remove front fans and carefully wiggle to get it out of a slot. This has resulted in me breaking the stupid clip on my mainboard.

So I had a $125 rebate voucher burning a hole in my pocket and a growing sense that most of the remaining cases with drive bays will be gone in another year or two, so I'd better get one now or it will be gone.

The obvious question Yes, the front panel can be opened over the intake fans. It's a seperate piece held in with like 8 snaps. The pictures on product pages look like CGI, so it's not clear if this is a decorative cut or an actual removable panel. It's sort of unfinished-- a big "B" moulded into it. You could probably cut some mesh or 3-D print something and attach it with magnets for easier removal.

Positives The case's aesthetics, as much as there are any (it's much plainer than old style plastic and metal cases tended to be) are defined by the "five-head" -- the big plastic shell that goes about 3cm above the top of the metal chassis itself. This actually does offer some nice features over the typical "stamped metal with a fan grille drilled in it" top panel: the top mesh element pops out on spring-loaded clips, and that gives you an extra degree of access to the internals from above. Obviously, the intent is to either mount fans there or leave the plastic sound deadeners in place, but this does help with the build.

The drive bays are deep enough for modern optical drives with a bit of clearance, so they aren't intruding into the mainboard area. Both four-bay 3.5" cages can be removed.

The captive screws and pressure springs to retain optical drives work well, but why only two sets of captive screws when there are three bays?

Negatives There are numerous cable management holes, but they tend to be on the small size. My PSU (old Corsair RM1000x) has thick and inflexible cables because there are capacitors built into the cables, and the main ATX cable barely fit through the hole. I was able to get a fairly clean build with some effort though. (By detaching the ATX cable from the PSU and feeding it in that way, you avoid trying to cram the thickest part through the small hole.

Only six standoffs are pre-installed. Three extra are included in the box (I'd prefer four, since many mainboards have 10 mounting holes and you can be pathological). When I went to install the other three, they were not smoothly pre-tapped; a small "nut driver" adapter is provided to mount them properly, but this was frustrating, and since I didn't notice the "nut driver" at first, I ended up fighting with a real nut driver that was too small to provide sufficient torque.

It includes a GPU support, which is cleverly designed-- you can slot it into a rail, screw it down tight, and set an arm to prop the card up. Unfortunately, it was not suitable for the OC Formula 6900XT, a tall, 2.5 slot monstrosity-- you could only barely bolt it in at the edge of the rail, and the arm ends up in a poor position to engage the card-- it's simply too short and would end up having to poke directly into a fan. I ended up using the supplementary bracket ASRock provided with the card.

Neutral The top and front plastic panels are held on with pressure-fit clips, you can pull them off manually. This makes it slightly precarious if you grab the top of the case the wrong way.

It comes with three stock fans which are reasonably quiet, but I hear a mold hum with the case at ear-height. It's probably less noticable when the case is placed on the floor-- with no tempered glass, it's probably safer to kick.

The fans are wired to a rudimentary fanbus (off-low-high), which has extra headers, but are only 3-pin models. I may end up replacing them with my old Arctic P12s and bypass the fanbus so I can get monitoring through the mainboard.

Overall, I found you might not be able to use the most obvious cable routing for some cables, i. e. the front panel USB and audio, due to length and routing needs. This is obviously dependent on the choice of mainboard. I also ended up cracking out my extra-long SATA cables; your routing may be easier, but I had problems with the onboard SATA and optical drives, so I use a M.2 to SATA card to get some ports that work reliably.

The aesthetic is a little weird due to the "five-head" design. While it's very subdued and plain in many ways, the idea that drive bays start a random-looking 5cm from the top of the case resonates strangely with me; it seems like if asked an AI to draw a full tower case. I suspect that it might be possible to coopt some of that space for something more useful, like a card reader, but I'm trying to avoid breaking out the Dremel just yet. The printed-on "Silent Titan" logo is odd; I already bought the case, you don't need to remind me what it is.

Overall The case is serviceable and delivers on most of the important things I was looking for (screaming "IT HAS DRIVE BAYS" in that classic girl "IT HAS POCKETS" style). I suspect many of my issues with the build were due to corner-case compatibility issues.

I'm going to be coming up from the US for a week in a few days. (When I booked the trip back in May, Canada seemed a lot less... flammable :( ) For me, a big part of leisure travel is indulging nerdy fixations in shops that there are no local equivalents for, away from the rest of the family asking "you bought WHAT?" until it's far too late to feel shame.

Any good suggestions for the following? (Extra points given for public-transit easy access; I enjoy a walking- and train-focused vacation)

• Anime goods shop

• Model-railway-centric hobby shop.

• Electronics-surplus shops/long-lived computer shops that have backstock dating to the era of George VI. The sort of place where you might find a LS-120 drive, weird Commodore stuff, or a cache of ISA cards.

• Neighbourhood-style coin shop (the sort of place that has albums for different series, and wouldn't take offense if I'm looking in the $50 range rather than the $50,000 range).

On a related note, I'd like to try to get some of the 1968-1986-or-so nickel "Voyageur" dollars-- do banks typically have caches of them if you ask, or are they definitely something you'll have to go to a coin shop for?

From the description of some random eBay listing. The text reads:

"Shipping: Free Economy Shipping from Greater China to worldwide. See details.
International shipment of items may be subject to customs processing and additional charges. (information icon) Located in: Sofia, Bulgaria"

We spent so long staring at Taipei that nobody noticed when the entire PLA burrowed its way through the Earth and popped up in Eastern Europe!

Hopefully they brought some Belt and Road infrastructure cash. I don't think they've been doing so hot since the Warsaw Pact fell.