I’ve given up posting during the week; my lot now lies with these weekly summaries, and only when I remember to do them or feel that I have enough to talk about to make writing it all down worth while.

3D Printing

I’m not new to 3D printing, having had a resin printer for a few years now, but I’ll be damned if I haven’t whispered “where have you been all my life?” to my Bambu A1 on more than one occasion over the past month.

My crowning achievement at this point is, of course, the “Type II phaser” from Star Trek: The Next Generation. This just came out so damn well that I have been carrying it around the house looking for a place worthy of its display.

I printed a holder for my Stream Deck. Previously, it had been mounted to the top of my HOSAS desk bracket which worked, but I saw these under-desk, slide-away holders and thought they would be so much better. Sadly, my desk has support beams that prevents the contraption from fitting entirely under the desk, but considering the HOSAS bracket sticks out just as far, it’s perfectly fine.

Right now I am in the process of printing a four-tier organizer for my wife’s diamond art beads. Each tier can hold eight different bead categories, allowing each tray to slide out for access. When she saw this she was extremely excited, which is good because printing it is going to wipe out some of my filament and her interest ensures I can re-order on demand.

Dune: Awakening

Life on Arrakis continues. Steam says I have played a total of 112 hours which makes it my fifth most-played game in my library, and that number pales in comparison to the number of hours my friend @CakedCrusader has played. While I enjoy playing with him, he has a habit of hitting the pipe hard which usually results in his progress far outstripping my own.

I recently built my own scout ornithopter which completely transforms the game. I no longer have to drive everywhere and take the bus between trade hubs to cross the desert, but I also can’t carry excess cargo since the scout has no inventory. This has made gathering aluminum difficult as I have to carry it on my person between the Eastern Shield Wall and my main base in EVG.

I have spent so much time trying to stay afloat with the sustenance of materials that I had been neglecting my mission progress, so my goals are now to focus on the many, many missions I have. I need to complete some House missions, and of course all of the class missions that will allow me to put more points into abilities and eventually unlock the capstone abilities to complete the class.

In truth, though, my playtime has waned, not necessarily because of disinterest although the feeling that I had to get back ahead of my inventory woes was wearisome; I’ve been splitting time between Dune and a project, which is my segue to the next section.

Super Secret Project

Real talk: I took some time last week to give this “vibe coding” a try. A while back I used a service called Repl.it to do some online coding, but I found out they had gone all in on AI. This didn’t color my opinion of them; I had long since stopped using their service in favor of just keeping it local, but I have been working on a project idea for a while now and have constantly been hitting mental roadblocks. So I thought that I would throw this service my elevator pitch and see what it could come up with. The results were…not terrible. It did most of what I asked of it, although I had to steer it back into its lane a few too many times and I got so tired of steering it back towards my vision that I just gave up.

The interesting thing about AI for someone like me who is only a middling programmer at best is that it can provide some very interesting insights into how to “do it right”, or at least do it differently, or maybe more efficiently. I kind of liked some of the decisions the AI made in it’s code, so rather than use the code it generated, I just…studied it. Any methodologies that made sense to me I adopted and put into practice when writing my own code from scratch. I didn’t copy and paste anything it generated, but rather just learned from what it threw at me. The thing about me is that I get hung up on “best practices” because I always feel that I’m doing things the long way and never the “best” or “most efficient” way and assume that this results in poor performing code or cul-du-sacs that I trap myself into. I’ve found it hard to find guidance on how to just “code better” that isn’t dripping with judgement and condescension, so this cold and clinical output worked well for showing me some alternatives.

To that end, I’ve made a lot of progress, have re-written a lot of stuff, and as I was trying to take a nap this afternoon I came to an epiphany about a key feature of the project that had been worrying me. I decided to not take that original route and decided to go with an alternative that I think will work just as well for users, and certainly better for me.

Commodore 64 Lives!

My friend @Mindstrike brought this post to my attention last week and I’ll be damned if it didn’t take every ounce of willpower to throw my money into the aether. The C64 was my second home computer and despite the horsepower of the Amiga 500 I owned after the C64, it’s the Commodore that holds a prominent place in my heart and soul. I know that there have been Commodore “shells” out there sporting a tiny processor inside, running some flavor of Linux and boasting more memory than a warehouse full of original C64’s could ever manage, but this version claims to not run emulation and instead is built on some hardware comparable to the original guts of the original device. As such, it can use original C64 peripherals natively, and run original C64 software natively, without emulation. Why this hasn’t been attempted before, I don’t know; I have no interest in a modern computer taking up a tiny corner of a simulacrum of the C64’s shell, and I certainly don’t want to run an emulator on my high-powered, modern PC. I want the Real Deal.

I actually have the real deal right here with me, complete with disk drive and a lot of software, but I don’t have a monitor that I can connect to. This new device has HDMI output, and I swear if I hadn’t spent so much on filament this past month, I’d be launching cash at this endeavor as fast as I could. The only downside is that the viability isn’t 100% secure, since it’s some random guy who purchased the rights to Commodore. Will we see this hit the shelves some day? I really hope so because I’m not above paying full retail for something that can run the Ultima collection and Bards Tale floppies I have sitting on the shelf behind me right now, waiting 15 minutes for the games to load. Those were the days.

BBS Lives?

Speaking of throwbacks, I watched a video on some guys (different “some guys”) who managed to get an 1990’s BBS running on modern day operating systems after figuring out how to compile from source. Why? Why not, I guess. Preservation of software is big news right now, especially with the ongoing “Stop Killing Games” initiative that I have been seeing across my timeline recently. Capitalism sucks sweaty balls, but never more so when it’s actively hostile towards our own history.

I spent a good amount of time dialing into BBS’ in my youth. I was never a massive participant, though. My time was mainly spent playing door games like Trade Wars 2002, not chatting with others, posting messages, or trading files (I got screwed by the latter efforts once, and only once, before I shut down that activity forever). While we have software now that puts those early to mid 1990’s efforts to shame, there’s something alluring about the asynchronous interactions with others, done entirely through menus, that still appeals to me. As many companies are pushing customers towards Discord, the pain-points are obvious: chat that moves faster than we can parse it, the din of dozens or hundreds of voices mixing concerns over one another, and the ephemeral nature of the data that someone, at some point, is going to come looking for because the companies have put it all into this garbage stream have made me yearn for the days when things were slower, when people had a more limited reach, and it seemed that — in hindsight — interactions mattered more.

As if the Universe was reading my mind, I found that a popular BBS package called Synchronet had released a Windows version in March of this year. Not that I’m tied to a Windows version, but we’re talking about bridging a gulf that exists between mid-90’s and now, and the fact that I can just click stuff and not deal too much with files is certainly a draw. Plus I have a pretty decently powered laptop doing nothing. So I installed it and after some basic configuration, was able to connect to it using the terminal. Considering I own a 6 seat license to Trade Wars 2002, I really want to get that hooked in, but haven’t yet returned to the project to find out how to do that.

Is this worthwhile? Would anyone want to connect to a BBS in 2025, and if so, would they do it more than once? Who would people connect with that they aren’t already connected to? Cries of “why do we need another platform” are ringing loud and clear and while I don’t disagree, seeing the initial ASCII graphics appear in my terminal after connecting made me wistful for the days when BBS’ were all we had.

That Other Game

I have nothing to report on Star Citizen this time. I have only logged into the current patch once. I’m waiting for the next patch which supposedly has some PvE content, but whether that’s “PvE(not really, it’s P)” content or not, we’ll have to see.

I feel that the scales have dropped from my eyes after spending so much time with Dune, not because there’s a parallel between Dune and Star Citizen, but because it’s been so long since I devoted as much time to a complete game that works as I had to a game that’s a complete shit-show and works only when a roll of the dice decide that it should. Making matters worse, I keep getting news on the progress of Stars Reach, which I think has progressed more in the past few months than Star Citizen has in the past few years, and that causes me to mourn for the latter all the more. The game is such a train-wreck, and I don’t see it getting better at a speed that can redeem it in the eyes of the public; I’m not sure it can even be redeemed in my eyes, although I’ll always keep the light on for it…just in case.