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 To mark the removal of the Print Ship feature in Star Trek Online, here's a post posted previously on my other blog. It's basically a how-to on intercepting the 3D model of a starship in Star Trek Online for your own personal use. Since this feature is going away, sharing this seems okay now with a minimal amount of editing. Previously in Dunny Does Things: using my training as a Certified Ethical Hacker I sniffed the traffic between my computer (running Star Trek Online) and the service they use to print 3D Models of your little ship to capture that model of my little ship. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with the model, but I'm just happy to have it.

 I have no other words for it - Valves Steam Deck is clearly dark magic. They've somehow managed to coax Linux into running a huge chunk of Windows native games without any major issues. They've also somehow managed to do this in a tiny ass portable form-factor. They've built a handheld that is, in my opinion, more comfortable to hold than a Nintendo Switch - even if it is a bit on the chonky side. It's wild, really. That's not to say I fully endorse anyone just going out and buying one - not that anyone *can* just go out and buy one, seeing as there's a huge wait list. But even if there weren't, I wouldn't recommend it to just anyone. This isn't me being a Gatekeeper - I think anyone who'd enjoy owning one *should* own one. No, this is me saying it's not a console, it's a gadget. It's still very rough technology. In the week that I've had it - not even a full seven days as of writing - I've had to reinstall the OS twice. Once...

I originally bought the NVidia Shield because I needed a device that could do HBO Max and Twitch - and one of my consoles.  Like, I don't mind streaming stuff on the console, but the interface for doing so on both the Xbox and the PS4 is garbage so I avoid it when I can. I also really liked the idea of using it for retro-games, since it's got access to some decent emulators via the Google Play store. The problem was it felt a bit jank. The "channels" on the main screen didn't work as expected, and would randomly go away.  Apps would crash - not regularly, but often enough to be annoying.  I got to the point where I was rebooting the Shield weekly, which isn't a huge deal but it wasn't ideal. Chromecasting to it was laggy as all hell regardless of what was doing the Casting - bad enough that I ended up never bothering to use it.  Apps would occasionally launch in a non-logged in state, prompting for credentials.  Force quitting them and relaunching would fi...

This is probably going to be a little dry for a post, but I figure I should document the problems and solutions somewhere, in the hopes that when I have them again I can refer to my notes to fix them - and in the off chance it helps someone else as well. The Setup Nothing super fancy - Using Stream Labs OBS on my rig . The Problem(s) When streaming from SLOBs, I was getting two different, yet related, issues. The first issue was when streaming for any "modern" game, or a game that used the GPU in any significant way, SLOBs was dropping frames like mad. On my end, the frame rate for the game was a steady 60 fps+ (or in some cases, 120 fps+), but SLOBs was not able to get out of the low 10s. If SLOBs was the active window, or the window with focus, it was sending a steady 60fps to Twitch.  The moment it lost focus, the frame rate tanked. The other, related, issue was if I had the webcam active, SLOBs took yet another performance hit. The Troubleshooting I adjusted the priority ...

What is it about typing on an old keyboard that makes everything feel alright? I am writing this on an Apple Graphite clamshell iBook from... sometime between mid 1999 and late 2000. I could try and find the exact year, but I'm not sure it'd be worth it. Suffice to say it's an old machine, but it still runs just fine for what it is. It's not super capable by modern standards - it has wifi, but can't talk to a modern network. It has a browser, but it can't handle modern encryption. It's got an optical drive, but no burner, and can only handle CDs. It has USB, but it's 1.1 and slow enough to make any large files take forever. The monitor is color, but it's limited to a low resolution. Text looks great, but graphics? Eh. But the keyboard! It's a bit small compared to a modern laptop keyboard, but it's nice and springy. The keys have a nice curve to them, they have a decent amount of travel, and it's genuinely comfortable to type ...

Bondi Blue. That was the "in" color for all things tech in the early 2000s. It was the quickest way for a company to show they were at the forefront of new technology without having to put forth much effort. In tech circles at least, the color got its start with the Apple iMac G3, and through some arcane magic (mostly aggressive marketing) the iMac became a smash hit with the general populous. Other devices quickly jumped on the semi-transparent blue bandwagon; everything from USB disk drives to small pocket calculators were made in t mimic the iconic design. Which brings us to the device of the day: The AlphaSmart 3000. The AlphaSmart 3000 was released in January of 2000, and was discontinued in 2006. The device was primarily  marketed towards schools as a way to allow students to write, store, edit, and print text without requiring a computer. The device was, in essence, a portable wordprocesor with a few key enhancements. It had a near full-size keyboard, four line...