fortyseven

Gonna Skip Windows 11

2021-11-01 

Not going to lie: Windows 11 is giving off some major Windows Vista vibes. But I’ve been working hard on not being one of these “it’s different, so I hate it” guys. So I loaded up a copy of it in a VM and gave it a go.

I’ll skip the details, but: holy shit. What a mess. Lots of little issues. The Start menu has been bombed back to the stone age. There’s no organization. It’s simplistic. Too simplistic.

Frankly, I’m not sure where Windows is headed, but as an OS it feels like all they do is constantly layer new things on top of legacy things and never get around to cleaning up the old stuff. And when they do update something, it’s often missing functionality. (We see this behavior in stuff from Google, as well.)

I’ve described the whole sudden push to 11 as feeling like some higher-up guy at Microsoft got fired or quit, and his replacement is trying to make a name for himself, rushing a new product out the door that he can call his own.

I’m sure I could use Windows 11 and adapt to it… but I’m kind of tired of playing this game.

So I’ll keep my Windows partition on Windows 10. It’s good for a couple more years. Maybe Win11 will get it’s act together by then. Maybe in 2025 I’ll be able to organize my apps again instead of just lumping them into a list and being able to ‘favorite’ a couple things.

Meanwhile, I’ve decided to explore Linux again. A large part of what kept me away from full-timing Linux is that I’m a gamer. It’s a large part of my world. And, well, if you play games: you run Windows.

But the Steam Deck kind of changed everything. I’d learned about all the amazing work Valve did with Proton, and a plan started to formulate.

So I grabbed a fresh 1TB SSD and took the plunge on Friday night.

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

…it’s Monday now. And other than some rough edges here and there, I’m missing… nothing? Or damned well close to it.

I installed Steam and enabled the Proton stuff. So far both Quake and Borderlands: Pre-Sequel all ran fluidly.

Quake is not the most convincing thing, I admit, considering there are native ports easily within reach, but the new update on Steam is only officially for Windows (maybe Mac?). But it ran without complaint.

I’ll try some more later, but if the Steam Deck compatibility rate is to be believed, very little will NOT run.

Crazy.

Even just plain Wine is doing great — Photoshop is working mostly without a hitch. There’s a couple trivial UI things but it otherwise started up out of the box without any tweaks. Literally wine Photoshop.exe on my mounted Windows drive.

That leaves almost nothing to be desired. Though I did have to reboot to play Far Cry 6, but even that’s just because it was running through the Ubisoft launcher — maybe there’s a way around it. And at this point, I believe it.

…

My prior attempts at running Linux as a daily driver have been met with frustration and sacrifice, but in 2021? I’m not feeling that anymore. I feel like the Linux desktop has finally arrived. For me, at least.

2023 Update: Best move I ever made. Long live Linux. Fuck Windows.

Zyxx Transmissions Decoded

2021-10-02 

A friend introduced me to Mission to Zyxx — an absolutely hysterical improvised sci-fi comedy podcast. It’s in it’s fifth season, currently, as we close in on the end of 2021. I’ve JUST hit the second season finale as I play catch up.

One of the many (many!) charms of Zyxx is how it weaves the show’s sponsors into the actual story, however lightly. I tend to find pretty much any advertising incredibly abrasive, even at the best of times. But hawking junk in-universe as various character’s “side hustles”… well, it had me in awe of just how brilliant that was.

One of the advertisers is a sponsor not uncommon to internet media: Squarespace. And to promote them, the folks behind the show created a website — therebellion.space — filled with various bits of propaganda related to The Rebellion — currently the good guys (…?) in a Star Wars “Rebel vs. The Empire”-style dichotomy. (The idea being to show how easy it was to setup a site through them, of course.)

On that site are a number of “intercepted transmissions“… I searched around a bit and was very surprised to see nobody really digging into them. That seems unlikely to me, but here we are.

So let’s go through all five of them (as of this writing) and see what we’ve got…

** BIG SPOILERS AHEAD! **

The First Message

A misdirect right out of the gate — below an inline audio clip lies a series of binary digits barely visible, but you can highlight them with your cursor… (“01010100 01101000…”, etc)

Tools to convert binary into ASCII are a dime a dozen, of course, and inside the ones and zeroes lies the message…

This isn't the encrypted message. Of course we know how to translate binary; we have more droids here than we know what to do with. Honestly, if you're looking for a good B-Class recon unit, we'll give a price well below gray book.

…well, fair enough.

The REAL message, STA#_34R5-Transmission-Log-CYCLE11040499080899-4420-Ra, is an audio clip containing a curious series of blips and bleeps.

You’d be forgiven for thinking you can JUST make out something. But that’s your brain jucking with you. Loading the audio up in Audacity and checking out the spectrogram view reveals…

…a secret message! The full text reads…

*  * RACHEL: WATCH YOUR CARAPACE, THERE IS A TRAITOR AMONGST US! I FEEL IT IN MY CLAWS. THEIR POWER IS GROWING. TRUST NO ONE. - CHANDLER *  *

The Second Message

This one might be my favorite — it contains two different audio files.

Each one, by themselves, sounds like something screamed over a PA speaker in a robot’s version of Hell…

BUT! If you play them both at the same time…

…a voice!

“Your Excellency, it is I, Lieutenant Bordoff. I bow, humbly, before Your Wackness with what I hope is most pleasing news. Zwog Tambouie reports that your order is ready: yes, the device is complete! And he assures us that no one else among The Council has an inkling of it’s existence. Your servant, signing off. […mumbling…]“

The Third Message

This time around, they’ve intercepted an image transmission. Initially, it looks like a bunch of noise…

However, if you bisect the image in half at the red line (A) and place that half OVER the top half (B) with — I think it was a ‘difference’ filter — you end up with a inverted image (C):

On it’s “Print is the Future“-brand bonded stationary, it reads:

Beware! Red plus white equals destruction!

Ominous.

The Fourth Message

The next transmission looks simply like a star field. Maybe some poor jucker’s vacation photo from Hendron IV and they lost their camera?

Not quite. ZOOM, ENHANCE:

There are several ways to draw out these hidden pixels, but just cranking the gamma is is enough. The hidden text reads:

Your Excellency: There are many in the rebellion who eagerly await your rise to power. I shall gladly come to your aid if ever the need arises. Yours, Grand Plutt Sunblighter.

The Fifth Message

The final message (as of October 2021 at least) has multiple steps.

First, an 8×22 monochrome image — too small for Rebellion codebreakers to crack! But no match for our tools — ZOOM BUT DON’T ENHANCE:

It’s worth noting that these black and white pixels are 8 across — a big clue that this is binary. (Hey wait a minute, weren’t they just boasting about their binary cracking skills? 😏)

When we break it down into 22 binary groups:

01101000
01110100
01110100
01110000
01110011
00111010
00101111
00101111
01100010
01101001
01110100
00101110
01101100
01111001
00101111
00110010
01111000
01101110
00110011
01100001
01010111
01100101

…and then feed that into your favorite tool we get a bit.ly-shortened URL leading to a Dropbox account sharing an MP3 audio file…

The clip contains a voice that’s clearly speaking in reverse, so let’s load it into Audacity and spin that sucker around, and…

OH… OH CRAP:

Hey Bordoff!

Got the business cards and I got to say: I am pretty excited to see “Emperor” on them. Me! Little ol’ me! Wow-ee! I can’t wait to start handing ’em out.

Uh, oh, circling back onto kind of our master plan… I cannot wait to kill the rest of the Council of Seven and impose my will upon the entire galactic entity.

Anywho…i just want to say I’m so glad about your participation in this. I will not kill you unless you prove unuseful to me. And then, well, by golly, I probably will.

Oop! Okay, Linda is callin’. I have to get to dinner.

But uh, hey: great chattin’ with ya, and uh, yeah, let’s just touch base later. See how it all turns out.

Alrighty, bye bye.

As I sit here at the end of Season 2, not all of this clicks yet. So it doesn’t feel like too huge a spoiler.

Besides, as they say, it’s just a show. You should really just relax. 😉

Provide Your Own “Jeopardy!” Answers

2021-09-18 

An exceedingly simple recreation of the answer cards seen on Jeopardy!. But it’s worth noting that the modern answer cards aren’t actually a simple blue background, but a surprisingly nuanced barely perceptible gradient. Without it, something looks ‘off’, so hopefully I’ve added just enough here to satisfy. 😉

This isn’t the original font, either, but a recreation… supposedly…

Look, it goes down a weird hole and this is just a fun CSS exercise. 😉

Anyway, the ‘editable’ part of this is a cheat, using contenteditable attribute on the containing div tag.

Review – Space Jam: A New Legacy

2021-07-17 

If they’d called it “Space Jam 2.0” it’d almost be appropriate: “New Legacy” is the same basic premise, but with improvements everywhere.

And maybe a little TRON rubbed in for good measure.

I literally saw the original Space Jam earlier this year for the first time, so I don’t place it on a pedestal. There’s no nostalgia tint for me, outside of basic pop culture references to it.

I liked the original, but overall it felt like a flick of certain era, who’s success was largely boosted thanks to the obvious gimmick involved.

New Legacy, too, is a gimmick film, make no mistake. But in 2021, nothing it does technically, as far as modern audiences are concerned, is “special”. Mixing humans and CGI and classic cartoon animation is old hat by now, and no longer a feat that can carry a film to success, alone.

While New Legacy absolutely pushes as hard as it can into the marketing cross-over spectacle, and the real life/animation gimmick, the actual skeleton of the story that’s draped over is much stronger. It now leans hard to the relationship between a father and son. In fact, it’s central to the conflict both at home, and on the court.

Don’t misread me: it’s still corny as hell, and you have to kind of go in with a certain attitude and accept that it’ll be absurd. But that’s no more or less than what you needed to enjoy the original film.

But overall? I dug it quite a bit. Wasn’t expecting that.

⭐⭐⭐ 1/2

https://letterboxd.com/drfortyseven/film/space-jam-a-new-legacy/

ToneDef 21

2021-06-06 

After a long hiatus, I finally have a good build workflow for Android again — which means I can push out some updates to ToneDef!

Presenting build 21!

This was more of a “proof of concept” build with the beginning of some CI to automate checks, etc.  I’ve already started working on the audio “popping” bug, and looking into some other reported issues. Those are being saved for 22.

What’s new:

  • Added French tones to the ‘extras’ section
  • Added link back to my blog (as seen below)
  • Minor layout updates, including removing action bar from most screens (will remove the rest later)
  • Code cleanup, refactoring, and other behind the scenes updates

Concerning “The Goonies”

2021-06-05 

Finally caught “The Goonies”. Another in a long line of films I knew 80% about but never actually sat down to watch, start to finish.

As good as expected, but I never knew about this downer ending. 😞

Review – The Mitchells vs. The Machines (2021)

2021-05-07 

View post on imgur.com

The Mitchells vs. The Machines just might be my new favorite animated film.

Or at least it slots into my Top 3 with ease. This is possibly the funniest and most creative film I’ve seen in a long time.

The characters take almost no time to get to know and love. There’s an insane energy to the film.

It’s almost like… ugh, this is a VERY strained analogy that I’m not entirely comfortable with, but I can’t get it out of my head: the happily “outsider” vibe of The Addams Family crossed with the family unity of the Belchers from Bob’s Burgers. (Hell, the mom is even named ‘Lin’.) Then mix in a dash of Gravity Falls, and lots of energy drinks.

And then send them all on a road trip to save the world.

The comedy is often quite hyperkinetic but there isn’t a dud in the batch. For a lesser film a fast pace of “random” and pop culture might be a negative, but The Mitchells own it and thread that needle with ease. It never becomes obnoxious.

Honestly, I can’t praise it enough. I LOVED this flick and I’m kind of clawing the desk to throw it on again.

I sincerely hope they consider follow-ups in the style of a “The Mitchells vs….” series, keeping the same writers. Because they’ve REALLY got something special here.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

https://letterboxd.com/drfortyseven/film/the-mitchells-vs-the-machines/

Review – The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

2021-04-24 

Loved everything with Sam and Bucky. Especially Sam’s journey, and the stuff with Isaiah Bradley.

Walker was amazing, too. And not that I don’t think he was beyond redemption, but it was rushed. I mean, he teams up easily with the guys who BROKE HIS ARM and took the Cap mantle from him the last episode (though I get some time has passed).

These two storylines seemed to be the most important parts of the show, and received the most attention.

They were almost perfect.

But everything with Sharon and the Flag Smashers (hey, band name!) felt mediocre. At best, shoehorned in. The best guess I’m hearing going around is that the Flag Smasher narrative possibly centered around a pandemic, and well… given the COVID situation, they had to hastily butcher it up into something… incoherent.

But regardless, it was weak. And unfortunately the entire series wrapped it’s overall narrative on that brittle skeleton.

The real MVP, though? The Baron. Give him his own series, please. Just all Zemo all the time. He was the most fun I had with the show. Unfortunately it felt like he was there just to setup a go at the Thunderbolts later, because he had almost no real impact on the story (his butler’s hilarious moment in the finale aside).

That said, looking forward to a second season, if they do it. The title characters made it worth watching, and I’d happily give it another shot with a new, hopefully better constructed story. One that doesn’t get butchered up in editing like this one appears to have been.

Bring on Loki!

⭐⭐⭐