Got quite into War Thunder over the last few days. It's an online MP game with tanks, planes, and naval units. It's free and quite addictive once you get past the initial "too easy" (I think they use bots) missions. I think it’s the first time I'm actually enjoying a non-FPS multiplayer game.

A big plus of it is that you can have a game or two inside 15 minutes. Yes, the TTD can be quite short (you only have 3 respawns per match), but that's ok with me - these games are too much of a time sink. I actually had to delete Delta Force because of that recently, it just took too much time out of my madcap IRL schedule.

Is this a pay to win kind of game? How are they making money if it's free to play?

Reinstalled Mint 22.2 on a backup machine.
Upgrading from 21.3 had many side effects.

It's a mini-itx build but I have a tall and slim case and I'm looking for a square model.
Also, low profile graphics card are hard to find at human prices or abundant in the 710 realm.

A square case would allow bigger cards, like the good old Thermaltake Core V1.

I watched Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git recently.

I am building a home lab, after getting some free 4post server racks.

I got two 24disk shelves off ebay, and they arrived yesterday. I am just about to drive to the hardware store for some bits of steel hardware to help support the back (these racks are not deep enough for the rack slides, so I need something to hold the back of the shelves on the racks).

UCyborg wrote on 2025-09-28, 12:44:

I watched Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git recently.

I wonder why this video is de-listed. Because anyone that doesn't agree with Linus is dumb and ugly? 😁

My first trial run using one of these new-fangled SSD doodads in my main machine, in place of an HDD, has ended rather poorly. I had a new 240GB SATA unit. It worked for a few months, and then it suddenly became very slow. It's now hitting about 200KB/s, so similar to a parallel port ZIP drive, you might say. Connecting it with a different cable made no difference. Connecting it to a different PC made no difference. I downloaded the Netac SSD Tool and ran that, but it detects no problems.

Luckily I still have the 300GB Seagate that was in there originally, with all the same files up until June or so. BTW, VOGONS is throwing 403s again.

I've been having unusually slow Internet over the past few days, but I managed to and get Windows temporarily installed on a junk SSD to see if Linux had bad power management on the Ryzen 9700X and X870 combo. It turned out that Windows had slightly lower idle power consumption, but slightly higher power consumption under load. Neither were enough to matter long-term, but I could measure the difference. I don't know why I keep screwing around with it to reduce power consumption.

While Windows updated for the first time, I went outside. I also had an extended weekend because I suck at watching my time off balances at work.

I also did some shopping for a couple things, which isn't normal for me at all. One was to see if there might be some lower-power hardware that would still be an upgrade over my i5-8500. The other was a type of product that one user keeps trying to promote here, so I'll just say that I spent way too long trying to balance features, performance, and price before deciding not to buy anything because I wouldn't use them often enough.

mtest001 wrote on 2025-09-28, 11:03:

Is this a pay to win kind of game? How are they making money if it's free to play?

I guess it is pay2win to some extent, but not as bad as as World Of Tanks (I'm told). If you pay you can level up your crews and upgrade tanks faster (instantly?) which will give you advantage on the battlefield. Still, there is enough leeway for strategy and thinking to matter, so that the game is still fun even for a freeloader such as myself. Most of the time I die, I feel it’s because I made mistakes, not because the opponent had better gear.

There are also games, like the aforementioned Delta Force, which are completely free to play and also pretty much not pay2win. They make money by selling cosmetics skins, items, etc...

Over a few days, i compiled and configured a new version of OpenWRT firmware for my TP-LINK WDR3600.

I changed my ISP and while the old one used ordinary DHCP on WAN side, the new ISP works with PPPoE. And i found that my router is not able to push more than ~130Mb/s through. I was on OpenWRT 23.05 and i found that 24.10 has some great added options to fix the performance.

So i wanted OpenWRT 24.10, but with my added quirks:
* Patched wifi driver to ignore everything that is programmed in wifi card's eeprom. It is programmed with "US" region which is completely irrelevant to me and causes only problems. I want it to only consider the region i set up in my OpenWRT admin panel.
* Include DDNS and SQM QoS packages into kernel. OpenWRT doesn't leave much flash space for "added packages", but there's plenty of room on kernel partition. And I'm too n00b to create my own partitioning scheme for OpenWRT.

So i created a docker image, that sets up the build environment. Then i checked out their git repository and downloaded the "default config" for my WDR3600. And then i adjusted the config, added my wifi driver patch and then compiled it together.
Today i finished up with all the network separation things. (For example those stupid smart stuff, that requires their vendor servers in the internet - they stay in their own wifi where they only see the internet. They don't even see each other.)

And it works beautifully. I just love how much one can push this ~13 years old router to do the same things as high-end modern enterprise routers. 😁

... wait! Is it "modern" or "retro"?

I miss the old Linksys WRT54GL. This one leans more on the retro side I think.

I made a custom button this weekend in the regular web browser browser I use daily (Pale Moon with Custom Buttons extension) that shuts down computer half-hour from now or puts computer to sleep immediately if you right-click it. Left-click again aborts the shutdown. It took me HOURS to wrap my head around js-ctypes. It doesn't look too complicated in the end, but I'm slow...

In total, 8 WIN32 API functions are called from JavaScript, from 3 different DLLs.