🗓 Microcosm - 2024 Apr 16-21
🏡 APR 21 2024 19:49
Pulled the attractor from the AC this afternoon and sure enough its coil was fried. Contacts themselves appeared fairly black (with carbon buildup?), but uncorroded and shiny everywhere else. Ordered a replacement and it's supposed to arrive tomorrow.
🏡 APR 21 2024 12:03
Successfully installed the new 24V transformer in our furnace and confirmed that heating and the fan work fine again and aren't drawing excessive current. After lunch I'll take a look at our AC unit and see what the contactors look like as stuck/worn out ones can draw excess current and burn out a transformer.
🧙♂️ APR 21 2024 06:42
Finished 6-3. My last opponent had two of the rare 3 mana Ornery Tumblewrag that they drew in their top ten cards. I removed both but could never get my board going against their removal and a 3/3 ankle biter that did a lot of damage.
⚽️ APR 20 2024 21:33
Destiny Udogie is out for the rest of the season after season-ending surgery. Weirdly announced on his Instagram rather than through club channels. Out for about 3 months so will be missing the Euros as well.
⚽️ APR 20 2024 13:18
Got to ref my daughter's soccer game this morning. It went pretty well and I had the best seat in the house even though they lost 4-7. The best part was being able to speed up deadball situations a little, girls that age are pretty slow about taking corners, goal kicks, and the like.
🧙♂️ APR 20 2024 13:10
First Outlaws Premier Draft going quite well at 5-0 so far with a Selesnya build splashing red for a couple of Gruul (Jolene) and Naya (Annie Flash) cards. Annie has been quite good late game. Jolene is probably not worth it in the deck.
👾⚙️ APR 19 2024 08:26
After some further thought and doing a litte bit more investigation, just having a separate games user account on the MATEbookAir is probably the easiest low effort approach. Turns out Lutris is also very much one-user-centric as well. The play.it project is cool, but not up to date for Crypt of the Necrodancer. I still might give it a shot though.
👾⚙️ APR 18 2024 23:29
Installed Crypt of the Necrodancer on the MATE-book Air and quickly learned that GOG's linux installers are very single-user oriented. Going to try out a few other solutions like Lutris and play.it before I install any more games.
⚙️ APR 18 2024 12:56
Or not. It appears that UTM doesn't support nested virtualization on macOS (intel or Apple Silicon) and snapcraft uses virtual machines when building snaps so if you're working out of a vm you're out of luck.
⚙️ APR 18 2024 09:14
Now that I have a working MATE vm I'm going to try my hand at creating a Decker snap for easy linux installation.
⚙️ APR 18 2024 08:51
Trying out UTM today. In the past I've used VirtualBox, but Oracle's bizarre need to extract licensing fees from users has really soured me on it. I think UTM is way more flexible anyway with its ability to run on Apple Silicon and emulate various architectures.
🏡 APR 18 2024 08:11
On a positive heating note, the little space heaters Mary bought last year to supplement upstairs bedroom heating worked quite well to get our main floor back to a comfortable level after we dropped into the low 60° F range.
🏡 APR 18 2024 08:01
On the furnace front, removed the low voltage transformer last night, opened it up, and visually confirmed that the supply side windings were completely fried (multimeter testing had already indicated this). Ordered a replacement transformer and a new clamp style ammeter I can use to find a possible short on the low voltage side of the transformer. I strongly suspect it's related to the AC since Mary had just switched to cooling mode on the thermostat a day or two before we realized there was a problem.
🍏⚙️ APR 18 2024 07:50
Running OmniDiskSweeper on my work iMac this morning to see where I can free up some storage space.
⚽️ APR 17 2024 15:26
Heh, I intended to have Bayern - Arsenal on in the background and completely forgot. They ended up winning 1-0 and Real Madrid won on penalties so barring some kind of Liverpool miracle tomorrow I think the Bundesliga will get the fifth Champions League spot now.
☁️ APR 17 2024 12:54
So it figures that we would get a week of cloudy colder April weather while I'm sorting our furnace woes out. My office is always fine thanks to all my computers, but the rest of the house is starting to get uncomfortably chilly.
👾 APR 17 2024 07:27
The Fallout series is on sale at GOG for like 75% off right now through the beginning of May so I think I'll be picking up 1-3 and Tactics before the sale ends. I've been enjoying the TV show too much to not start having my own fun in this universe.
👾 APR 16 2024 23:25
Other applications I want to install and get working in a Linux environment: GB Studio, Pico-8, Sunxox, and RPGMaker 2003.
👾 APR 16 2024 23:05
I'd really like to install Asesprite on this Ubuntu-MATE machine as well so I'll have to give compiling it from source a try as well. I'm still fairly annoyed that I bought it on Steam rather than itch.io.
👾 APR 16 2024 22:55
I was thinking that Decker had a precompiled Linux release available for download, but it turns out you have to download and build it from source if you're not a Mac or Windows user. Totally doable, but a project for tomorrow I think when I'm less tired.
🐧🍏 APR 16 2024 10:38
Got things sorted with the old MacBook. Had to partition the drive beforehand with gpartd to get past the update hang. Wireless also didn't work by default so had to install the Ubuntu Broadcom driver (bcmwl-kernel-source) via apt-get. Everything seems to be working fine now though.
🐧🍏 APR 16 2024 07:54
Trying Ubuntu Mate on some old Mac hardware again, but the current installer seems to have a bug that causes it to hang in Updates and other software. I've had good luck in the past so this is a fairly annoying development.
🏡 APR 16 2024 07:41
First piece of the furnace puzzle appears to be a blown transformer. Additional online research seems to indicate that's a symptom of the actual problem, usually some kind of short or failed component that creates too much current draw on the output side and fries the transformer. So I'll be trying to identify that after work. One other clue is that this happened right after Mary switched the thermostat to cooling so I'm guessing it's related to that system. Thankfully we're in the short yearly sweet spot where we really don't need much heating or cooling while I figure this out.