This game can be complicated to explain to people, but I’ll try my best. It would be impossible to say I don’t have mixed feeling about it, due to super divisive gameplay. As a whole though, I think I enjoy it more than I loathe it and despite the numerous flaws, I still come back.

The best way to describe this game to someone is “oddly satisfying”. Planning routes through rough terrain, hauling massive amounts of cargo and fighting mules that try to steal it are highlights for me personally, and are what I found to be the most enjoyable. I wish there was more of it. The tedium is unavoidable though. Once the novelty wears off and you start to go through an area time after time hearing the same lines from the prepper’s it gets super repetitive. Once you get a feel for how the BT’s work, it just becomes a roadblock to slow you down. Also the boss fights are extremely easy, but they are the best the most efficient way to clear an area out of BT’s.

I wanted to make some points on why I think it can be worth it to look at older technology compared to what is more current.

• You get to learn from the mistakes/success of the greats.
• You can see the limitations of technology from a certain time period compared to now and how it would be different today?
• As software and hardware gets more mature, more people and more projects come to depend on it.
• The new becomes the old and vice versa. Many ideas are perpetually rehashed and adapted to fit current needs.

I would encourage everyone to think about all the technology they use everyday and base their opinions on it’s merit instead of it’s age or popularity.

Do you have a low speed or spotty network connection

If you have ever tried using ssh from a device with a spotty Wi-Fi connection, you know that the experience can range from less than ideal to downright infuriating.

Sometimes keystrokes are not sent, the latency can be brutal, and your connection may timeout.

Mosh to the rescue :metal:

Mosh is the mobile shell that alleviates the responsiveness problems that plague ssh. Instead of using TCP, it uses UDP so your connection can persist across network changes or putting your laptop to sleep.

Image by enriquelopezgarre from Pixabay

The Problem

I have been experiencing a hard freeze on my first gen Ryzen 1700x system which has been very annoying. This is the kind of freeze where I can’t even drop into a virtual terminal or do an Alt-SysRq.

This happens on both my Debian 10 and Ubuntu 19.04 installs running kernel versions 4.19 and 5.0.0 respectively. It would happen almost randomly but prominently when my CPU was idle and not doing much.

There are a number really awesome tools that can be used to view and validate JSON files right from the command line. As it turns out, one such tool is built right into Python as the json.tool module. Usage is as follows:

python -m json.tool [-h] [--sort-keys] [infile] [outfile]

If a single argument is given, it will validate the file and (pretty) print it to stdout.

This is all good and dandy, but what if I want to edit this JSON file now. I could always write it to an output file and edit that, but that’s just extra steps to take. To bring this trick to another level of handiness, I added this mapping to my vimrc.

What is rsync

We can run the whatis rsync command to get a short description without opening the man page

rsync (1)            - a fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool

Rsync is the ultimate tool for copying files and is loved by many people. It offers many advantages over traditional methods like SCP or FTP which are linear file transfer tools. Rsync checks the delta of files between the source and the destination and only transfers the difference. Additionally it allows an option for easy compression of files before they are sent over the network.