Over the years I’ve seen many flavours of Windows come and go on my various PCs and laptops. Given I’m determined to drop Windows in favour of Linux, now seems a good time to look back at them all.
Continue reading “A Lifetime With Windows Ranked” 
One of the largest stumbling blocks to switching to Linux permanently is gaming. While Steam is making things a lot easier, you may not want to pay again for a game you already own, and Steam may not accept the key. Getting Windows games working on Linux isn’t as easy as double clicking on setup.exe, but it can be done with Wine and Lutris. Fortunately, I’ve done all the hard work so that you don’t have to.
We will cover installing the original Command and Conquer 3, the Kane’s Wrath expansion, patches, no CD patches and mods with WrathEd.
Once you have the basics of installing a base game, patches and mods, this should give you an idea of how the process works, and how to do the same with other games in your collection.
Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 in October 2025. So ends a decade of a somewhat confused operating system but one we kind of grew to love. But what happens next? Should you upgrade to Windows 11? What other options are there?
Since the server move, from AWS to Google, I had noticed that every now and then, you’d be greeted with a database has gone away type message, requiring a restart of MySQL. This has been bugging me a little and turns out it was a pretty simple fix (that better not be famous last words!) to implement. Thing is, the free servers on Google Cloud are not particularly well specced (funny that). They have about a gig of usable memory and CPU’s that share their load amongst other servers. It’s fine for a small blog with low traffic, such as this. You wouldn’t want to run something that requires numerous threads/users and all sorts going on.
Anyhoo, I realised the server was probably running out of memory, causing the MySQL Server to crash. Whilst upgrading the server, adding more memory is an option, that would take it out of the free tier. To keep things cheap, I am using the hard drive as usable memory; setting up a 1GB swap file which the server can access. Slower than RAM but should fix the crashes.
Started up my Linux dev machine, this morning. Right off the bat, Bluetooth wasn’t working. My bluetooth settings, in KDE, were showing a ‘no bluetooth adapters found’ message; resulting in no mouse. First thing I did was do an apt upgrade on packages, to see if that resolved anything, and rebooted. Nope. Next up I tried removing everything under /var/lib/bluetooth and restarting the bluetooth service. Still nothing. Restarted my machine and went into the BIOS to check it hadn’t somehow been disabled. All looked good there. But still no adapter found. Despite the bluetooth adapter previously working under kernel 6.8.x, I decided to install HWE, in order to upgrade the kernel to 6.11.x, in case something had gone wonky. Nada.
By this point I’d tried several reboots with no joy. This was getting frustrating, as I had work to be getting on with. After about an hour of tearing what little hair I have left out I decided to power down the machine and perform a cold boot…
Bluetooth was back. I paired my devices back in and carried on with life.
Sigh…
It’s been some time since I last properly posted, which, even then, was in acknowledgement that I don’t post a lot. There are good reasons. The main reason was that I wanted to get away from WordPress as, frankly, I hate it, from a developer’s perspective. If you hate a codebase, you’re unlikely wanting to spend time customising it – especially if you’re not getting paid for it. I also had my own css templates ready to completely overhaul the look of the site (and didn’t want to create a theme in WordPress), and had that planned to be built in to whatever next CMS I wanted to use next. It’s not been easy to find a CMS that will suit me. As I work with it daily, for my job, I’d like a Laravel based CMS, with PyroCMS being the front runner. However, development on that seems to be halted, or at least very slow, which doesn’t give you confidence of there being a codebase that won’t outdate very quickly. So I’m still on the lookout for a replacement.
With the above in mind, I was on a data freeze until I had gotten that part of the project done. I really am not looking forward to the data migration to a new CMS, and the fewer posts to move the better. Obviously, it hasn’t materialised as yet, and I have articles I had prepped just sitting in draft, being forgotten about and also outdating. So I should at last try and keep this site ticking over, whilst we wait – as it could be a long wait.
I also wanted to do a server and domain migration. It was getting annoying having to manually update the SSL cert, every 3 months, due to .dev domains not having port 80 access (yes, I know there are plugins that can do this but it’s quicker to do the 3 month manual thing than sort it out). Now I’ve moved to a .net domain, the SSL cert can be automatically renewed. I have also moved to a different server, which will help with running costs.
And life also got in the way. I was recently diagnosed with FND – which is something I have been dealing with for many years, and took a hell of a complaining to even get to see a specialist. It plays havoc with my memory, and ability to think clearly, amongst a host of other things – just great for my line of work. The whole condition can be very frustrating on a daily basis.
So there we are; big plans that kinda went wrong. C’est la vie.
Disclaimer: I actually wrote this post back around October 2022, so things are already pretty out of date. The CPU is still going strongly, at least. :)
I’ve been looking at building a new system, lately. My current one is certainly no slouch, and it was also treated to an AMD Radeon 6800, summer of 2021. Mainly so I could play Microsoft Flight Sim 2020 at high resolutions, with the settings mostly turned up. (Yes, the card was expensive. No, I don’t regret the purchase). This system was originally built back in early 2018. In that time, I upgraded the CPU from a Ryzen 1700 to 3800X and was very impressed with the results.
Continue reading “Ryzen 5900X: One last hurrah for AM4.”
It’s been a little while since I last posted on here. It’s not that I’ve forgotten about it. More that I’ve had a fair few other side projects I’ve been doing. Plus work has been pretty full on, the last couple of months.
Continue reading “It’s Oh So Quiet”A couple of months ago, when I installed the Ryzen 3800X in to my desktop, I noted that, whilst the provided stock cooling was decent, it did have a tendency to get noisy under load. Far noiser than the cooler provided with the Ryzen 1700. It also isn’t all that great at keeping the processor cool; easily reaching the upper limit of 95 degrees celsius, the moment it needed some grunt. I do like a quiet system, so decided I may as well get an aftermarket cooler sooner, rather than later.
There’s a lot happening in the AMD world. Some of the third generation Ryzen chips have just received a slightly faster sibling, in the form of the XT models, and Zen 3, in the form of the desktop Ryzen 4000 CPU’s (don’t get me started on the mobile chip model designation convention) can’t be too far away, with the expected release to be towards the latter of 2020. I’ve been umming and arring about what my next upgrade was going to be but when Amazon cut the price of the 3800x to £280, albeit temporarily, the decision become much easier.
Continue reading “PC upgrade time. Ryzen R7 1700 to R7 3800X.”
