Tootfinder

I'm in Australia right now. I can boot my home PC via Wake On LAN to access my files if I have to. I placed a webcam in front of it so that I can verify that it actually does so.
It's weird seeing my computer 16.500 km away from me. It feels like my own little Mars mission. Especially with how SSH feels at 300-400 ms latency.
And yes, that's a drinking glass I forgot on my desk.
#HomeLab

A thousand years ago, I began to abandon the idea of becoming a lawyer because (without having a clue what I was doing) I installed the now defunct Mandrake Linux with KDE on my PC.
But the feeling of success (and feeling like a real hacker) came when I opened the Amarok player and was able to play 'Comfort Eagle' by CAKE. It worked on right away! Now I feel nostalgic every time I hear it.
Looking back, I think that was a key moment.

Man, I leave my PC idling on Linux and I often forget I have it on because it makes practically no noise. If I leave this thing on while on Windows I can hear the fan going crazy all the time.

@… thanks.
I had the same thought about persistence of non-automatic packages in my very early days (probably with PC-BSD, around a decade ago, before TrueOS), but soon discovered that sometimes:
― accepting an upgrade will remove a required package.
It took years for me to come close to a full understanding of the multi-layered causes of remo…

Windows 11 on my gaming PC has now tried for about a year to upgrade me to whatever Windows 11 version is current and the update process always fails, I'm stuck on 23H2.
Quality software

I am looking forward to my next hardware upgrades so I could contain Windows to a single PC that I'd absolutely need for Windows dependent stuff. I mean, now I am literally signed-in by default in Notepad?? And when I click my profile pic in its toolbar, it has one cheeky "Sign out" option??? I give up coping with this enshittified OS. Microsoft should pay me to use me as a research subject.

They say only the mightiest of systems can handle the journey to Mordor. Tonight, my Linux PC proves its strength! Streaming Lord of the Rings Online and continuing my adventure. Find out what secrets lie ahead! ⚔️ #LOTR #Linux

In my experience, speaking to my computer does not improve privacy, and certainly not when the machine listens to everything and phones it all home.
https://infosec.exchange/@defendopsdiaries/115384105662411639
Sure, accessibility is a benefit, but Windows alrea…

My (inactive) blog reminded me that it’s been 15 years this month that I switched to using #Linux / @… (via #Kubuntu) as my main OS for my PC/laptop.
I also now use

I’m excited to see the return of Steam Machine.
With my experiments of using the Linux Desktop mode with the Steamdeck … this absolutely puts a full Linux server in a lot of homes.
A good spot for a PDS, Tailscale, and a bunch of other things.
https://bsky.app/profile/jaypeters.net

Jay Peters (@jaypeters.net)
If you want some video of the new Steam Controller and Steam Machine (a Valve-made PC for the living room!), check out this that @seanhollister.bsky.social and I made together!

This is a cool video about what made the famous video game "Another World" so incredible when it came out in 1991.
I didn't know how limited the Amiga's graphics capabilities were (it was so colourful compared to my dad's monochrome 286 PC after all!) and the tricks that were used to pull of the vector graphics.
(btw: Mastodon now seems to do previews for youtu.be URLs, not just youtube.com. Neat!)

My laptop a few years ago: being the most powerful of my build machines.
My laptop these days: unable to preprocess C sources fast enough to keep distccd occupied on my PC.
#Gentoo

@… OneKeePass and Secrets are reasonable Linux alternatives. I'm not wild about them, but I use Keepassium on my phone and would like to have an app on my Linux PC that uses the same format.

Currently setting up my new laptop (HP EliteBook X Flip G1i), and so far:
1. The device was delivered with a bundled warranty that already started 50 days ago
2. The supplier delivered a Battery Replacement Care Pack for 3 years instead of 5 years as ordered
Called HP for the warranty precox, had to send the invoice. Agent: "Yeah, it's gonna be about 2 weeks till we correct that."
(OK, Laptop won't leave the house until then)
Wrote the supplier for…

Valve are launching a new controller and a new gaming computer and a new VR headset early next year.
My main question is, don't people release these things in time for Christmas any more? Maybe it's running late.
Kinda need a media PC for the new bedroom in December. Do I want to wait until early next year? Grr. Needs to run two monitors and a projector really too, which may be tricky for a machine with only two video ports.
A VR headset that isn't owned by Facebook will be a blessed relief. Designed to run on Linux? Amazing. Hope it's brilliant.
Don't think I have much use for the controller though. Only really play games in VR these days.
Looks great! Three months too late!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmKrKTwtukE

So i've installed #CachyOS on my main PC and must say that it feels really great. After over a decade on #Ubuntu and/or #Debian based distros,

One of my options for a replacement PC. It will plug into the UPS so that when I lose power, I can do a safe shutdown.
https://flip.it/xKF142

My penguin-powered PC is channeling the Force tonight! Streaming SWTOR and proving you don't need the Galactic Empire to achieve ultimate stability. Come see the smooth frames! #SWTOR #LinuxGaming #StarWars

The Invincible (Multi, XP'd on PC/Linux)
Based on the classic novel, you play as Yasna, a biologist, who wakes up on an alien planet not quite sure how or why she got there. After reestablishing contact with her orbiting Astrogator, she sets off to find her fellow crew on an eerily quiet and hostile feeling planet.
This is a HardcoreTM Waking Sim. Sprint nets you like a 10% speed boost, lol. However my time to credits is 9hrs, so it's not a long game, but it can be SL…

I had completely forgotten the state The Last of Us Part 1 for PC was in at launch. Which explains my surprise when I finally got to it and tried to run my Epic copy on Linux. At least for me and at the moment, the game works only with Proton 9.0-4 (Steam's mark of excellence) and, weirdly, with Wine-10.10. FSR 4 with an RDNA 3 card (again, for me) is impossible - the game crashes hard in every FSR 4 scenario. It's saving grace is it runs great on a native 1440p resolution 🤷‍♂️

Dear IT Friends – We Are Called To Action
If you are like me, you have probably experienced your neighbors, friends and family asking you to help them fix their PCs and give them technical advice. That was always a bit odd for me as I was a big systems guy and relied on our internal IT team for PC advice and support.
But the times are changing, aren’t they?
It feels like we are facing so much new danger. And some groups are definitely targets. In my company our success was…

My mom got a second hand PC with 6GB of RAM, so I went to check her old one to tell her the difference and she had... 2GB of RAM :neofox_nervous:

If you have Amazon Prime, you also have Luna Standard for gaming which includes Hogwarts Legacy for free, an excellent game. I see what Amazon is doing here, making gaming without a game console cheap and lock people in…
For a casual gamer like me, Luna is great, cheap, I can play on my large television or PC etc. Always good performance, no hardware necessary (besides a controller).
#amazon

I know of HX-Tape, but I decided to write my own demodulator to read Epson HX-20 tape data; mostly because I wanted to refresh my #rust skills, but also because I had this realisation it would work as a set of chained iterators. It does (I'm straight from HX-20 ext-cassette to PC audio); I've got a layer that does levels (high/low/0) with hysteresis, that passes it to one that does transiti…

After I long battle against the shipment finally I get the new power supply for my father's PC.
Yay!
#PC #computer #powersupply

Thoughts of Silksong so far: feels friggin' great. I really wish they had "fixed" the map as I wasn't a fan of Hollow Knight's mapping system, but that's my only complaint. It feels like Hollow Knight, plays like butter on the PC and Legion Go, and just a blast.
#hollowknight

Well ripped out the broken CPU cooler in my gaming PC and replaced it with a new AIO and PC works great again (or whatever counts as "great" wrt to Windows 11).
I haven't fully restored the RGB barf inside, working on it; meanwhile enjoy a picture of Eero a few years ago.

Prepared a "new" mini pc for my parents. "New" in terms of, I bought a Refurbed one.
When they like it, I'll - again - disassemble the old one and put the parts on ebay... I guess. Hopefully no electronic waste will be remaining.

Streaming Star Wars: The Old Republic from my Linux PC tonight. My character is on the Dark Side, but the power of the open-source community is with me. #SWTOR #LinuxGaming #TheOldRepublic

In recent weeks, I have been quietly weeding masses of historic stuff. Things from which I'm detaching myself. Now I'm unexpectedly misty-eyed after stumbling across one of my first emails to a FreeBSD list.
2015, late December. PC-BSD, slightly broken or non-functional, but I was motivated.

from my link log —
RF shielding history: when the FCC cracked down on radio interference from computers.
https://tedium.co/2025/10/20/computers-fcc-rf-interference-history/
saved 2025-10-21

RF Shielding History: When The FCC Cracked Down On Computers
The FCC took a hard line on the radio frequency interference that computers created—creating huge headaches for early PC-makers. Why? Blame the CB radio fad.

I've finally organized all my photos in per-date location directories on my PC. However, now I needed to sync the changes back to the phone.
#SyncThing doesn't work so well with such huge changes. So I've figured out I'll just delete it from ST for now, connect via MTP-over-USB, and use rsync on top of gvfs mount. However, rsync started throwing I/O errors.
Okay, nuclear option then. I'll remove all the old files (most of them were moved anyway), and then copy everything over via Thunar. So I've started deleting files via MTP, and it's progressing so slow. Okay, so I stopped that and instead use the file manager on the phone to delete them… but it's also slow. Finally, I've figured out to use #ADB and just do 'rm' from a shell — and that was finally fast.
Now to copy the 25 GiB back… Yeah, I keep all old photos on the phone as a backup.
#Android

FRB 20250316A - A Brilliant and Nearby One-off #FastRadioBurst Localized to 13 pc Precision: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adf62f -> Physical properties provided by Keck Observatory data reveals surprising FRB environment / Origin of Mysterious Radio Signal Possibly Discovered: https://keckobservatory.org/rbfloat/ / https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/origin-mysterious-radio-signal-possibly-discovered

After more than 5 years I've finally written a post on my old blog because this post is longer. It's about my recent success of repurposing old hardware at the office to build a PC with two graphics cards. It hosts two virtual machines and each one has access to a dedicated Nvidia GPU.
With two monitors, mice and keyboards two people could even work on site at the same machine 😎 But this is primarily meant to provide remote desktops for I/O and editorial.

Tonight: Tyria meets Tux! Streaming Guild Wars 2 now, running flawlessly on my Linux PC. Jump in and say hi! #GW2Stream #Linux #MMORPG 🐧 🎅

Yay liquid CPU cooler in my gaming/astrophotography PC failed, tbf it lasted almost 6 years
Gonna rip it out and replace 🤪
Honestly that PC has been working pretty great so far and can still play most stuff just fine

An approximate history of my amateur phone photography:
1. Really poor photos. Unsavory interest in (low resolution) panoramas.
2. Photos get a little better. Sometimes they're HDRs (I suspect the camera app was set to "auto").
3. A new phone. Higher resolution and a gyroscope.
4. Switching to LineageOS, and therefore to #OpenCamera. HDR enabled unconditionally.
5. HDR does not always come great (compared to the stock Motorola app that doesn't work anymore). I enable saving component photos, so I could try getting a better quality combination using the PC. I never manage that.
6. I start experimenting with exposure correction (combined with HDR). Sometimes I do multiple photos with different "Eves" to choose the best one.
7. A new phone. Finally, given even the gyroscope was failing already.
8. I learn that Pixels have "HDR " that gets activated when you do standard mode photos. For a while I do both standard and HDR photos; also I compare the middle component image with the standard mode image. [https://opencamera.sourceforge.io/help.html#faq]
9. Before I reach any final conclusions, I read "What is HDR, anyway?" I disable HDR entirely, instead I save standard mode (i.e. HDR ) raw images (which presumably aren't affected by HDR ) [https://www.lux.camera/what-is-hdr/]. Not that I ever managed to get anything good out of raws.
10. I discover that I can switch the lens. Today I've made my first photos, switching lens to get optical zoom 💪.

Easy Delivery Co (PC)
Get in your Kei truck and chill out, literally, making deliveries to mountain towns in the middle of winter. Can you figure out what's going on around here?
This game performed extremely well on my Garuda Linux PC, without having to use any compatibility tools. In fact the only "complaint" I might have is the achievements never popped. I don't care about those, so it's not a big deal, but something to note perhaps.
I li…

My Sith Lord character is evil, but my OS is pure, reliable open-source goodness. Streaming SWTOR from my Linux PC tonight! Come see how stable the galaxy can be. #TheOldRepublic #LinuxGaming #Stream

May the Force be with me... and my stream! Firing up my Linux PC to stream Star Wars: The Old Republic tonight. Hope to see you in chat! #StarWarsTheOldRepublic #Streaming #Gaming

@…
From my "crushingly dull obligatory tech history" in BSD Cafe wiki:
❮ Former Mac user (1992–2014; AppleSeed programme member 2009–2014). The GUI of OS X 10.10 Yosemite drove me away from Apple. I gradually switched from OS X 10.9.5 Mavericks to PC-BSD. Then TrueOS, then FreeBSD-CURRENT. In the midst of all that, some…

Tho... via Limine it doesn't seem to use UKI according to bootctl? How tf does it work then???
I imagine this is less safe than Lanzaboote then, since Lanzaboote makes measured UKIs, is it not possible to use UKI with Limine?
(terminal window is ssh to my NAS with lanzaboote, vscodium is my PC with Limine)
#Limine #NixOS #SecureBoot #Lanzaboote

Streaming LOTRO from Linux tonight. The game is running so smoothly, you'd think the dwarves of Moria built my PC. Come say hi! #LOTRO #LinuxGaming #Stream

Ho ho ho! Linux Santa has arrived! 🎅 Tonight, I'm streaming Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), delivered flawlessly from my stable Linux PC. Come get your gifts of smooth frame rates and Middle-earth cheer! #LOTRO #LinuxGaming

Streaming some Guild Wars 2 from my Linux PC tonight! Time to dive back into Tyria. Come hang out! #GuildWars2 #GW2 #LinuxGaming

Streaming some Lord of the Rings Online tonight from my Linux PC! Let's explore Middle-earth. Come hang out! #LOTRO #LinuxGaming #Stream

Streaming some GW2 tonight! My Linux PC is ready for adventure. Join the party in chat! #GuildWars2 #Gaming #Streamer

My Linux PC is fully powered and stable for a great night of streaming! Diving into Lord of the Rings Online now. It's going to be epic! #LOTRO #MMORPG #Streamer

My Linux PC is our starship's bridge tonight as we journey back to a galaxy far, far away. Join me for an evening of epic quests, lightsaber duels, and galactic shenanigans in SWTOR! See you on the holonet! #SWTOR #StarWars

Back in the galaxy! Firing up SWTOR on my Linux PC tonight. Get ready to jump into the action. I'm going live soon, so tune in and let's go on an adventure! #SWTOR #LinuxGaming #StarWarsTheOldRepublic

Ready to take on some quests in Tyria! Streaming Guild Wars 2 from my Linux PC tonight. Hope to see you in chat as I explore the world. #GW2 #MMORPG #Linux

Streaming some GW2 tonight! My Linux PC is ready for adventure. Join the party in chat! #GuildWars2 #Gaming #Streamer

The penguin power is strong tonight! 🐧 Streaming SWTOR from my Linux PC. Come see how smoothly the Old Republic runs on open-source tech! Hope to see you in chat! #SWTOR #Gaming #Linux 🧙‍♂️

The TF-6 Striker is up for grabs! I'm live now streaming SWTOR from my Linux PC with drops enabled. Get in here and claim yours! #SWTOR #LinuxGaming #TwitchDrops