Dumb Things with Tech

Irrationally Large Box

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Good Morning Folks. Starting this morning’s post off with a picture of Gracie being super snuggly. It was a good weekend, but a busy weekend. I spent a lot of time working in the garage and set up the first of the storage shelves, and then cleared the room for the next one… which I will hopefully work on today. Essentially I am trying to get all of my wife’s stuff that I just piled in the center of the garage, up on shelves… and get a bunch of stuff that I will never use that has been in the garage for eons, out into a pile to have hauled off. The thing that is fighting against me, is the fact that we are still having 90+ degree days and the garage is a sauna, so I am trying to limit my time out there to hour long bursts of activity. I just noticed I am covered in bruises from wrestling with items that I probably had help putting out there the last time they were moved. I made it work through and got them into the growing pile in my backyard. There is a service we have used before that will haul it off so long as I pile it up for them relatively neatly.

The big move of the weekend however, was setting up a new television… that again was probably too large for me to be handling by myself. One of the last things that we did together was put together this new entertainment center over my birthday weekend back in June. Last week I added to that a riser, that would allow me to put the cable box, and ultimately my Switch 2 and PlayStation 5 under the TV. The entire reason why we swapped out our entertainment center was to eventually upgrade from our 43 inch television to something larger, and I had been shopping off and on for awhile. The problem is… I did not want to ship a television. There is just too much shit that can go wrong in transit, which meant more or less that I was limited to Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Sam’s Club, or CostCo for which my membership had lapsed. I was specifically looking for a 120hz 4k 65 inch television… preferably one with Google operating system rather than Amazon Fire. Most of the ones that I had seen were in the $800 range, but I found one on CostCo that was a 4k 144hz panel that also came with a 5 year warranty thrown in… so I renewed my membership and snapped that puppy up.

So as such I spent a good chunk of the weekend enjoying the new larger television. I watched a few movies on Friday and Saturday, and then got reacquainted with both the PlayStation 5 and the Nintendo Switch 2. I bounced around a lot on the PS5, but on Sunday night I settled in for some long sessions of Super Mario Wonder and the upscaled version of Bravely Default. I actually got into the last one quite a bit, and stayed up later than I had intended. When I finally made it to bed… Mollie was rather cross with me for not arriving in the bedroom at the correct time and screamed at me for awhile as she demanded attention. I figured it is just me now… I might as well enjoy my life in whatever ways I can, and upgrading the TV was one of those simple ways to get some more quality of life easily. It was also one of the projects we had on our radar, and it felt like actually accomplishing something that my wife and I had already planned. There are a few more of those projects that I eventually want to take care of… but they will require significantly more than $400.

Over in Diablo IV, I landed on a set of Chaos armor that actually works well enough for my build. Vasily’s Prayer is pretty much a requirement for making the build feel good, and I had picked up Chaos version of it on both the gloves and chest. I figured it would be easier to swap out the gloves and then find some other item that can replace Rampaging Werebeast. For now I am running Fleshrender and it seems to be working pretty well, because it makes it so Debilitating Roar deals damage to poisoned enemies… and my Pulverize is always poisoning enemies. So every time I roar I am not just getting a survival boost, I am also doing over 4 million AOE damage to everyone that has already been poisoned by my Pulverize puddles. Now I just need to do massive amounts of farming to knock out the remaining achievements in the seasons journey.

Over in Destiny Rising, I finally bucked up and knocked out several seven minute legendary quests so that I could bump up my ascension level. Essentially I got Silver Medals on Jolder, Estela, and Umeko and now I am stalled out again at 19 Ascension until I get a Gold Medal. For the moment I am closest to getting there on Jolder, but the thing that is going to hold me back the longest is getting my light level up past 65000. I need to run another Legendary mission on Jolder where I take zero deaths… and in truth my previous 7 minute run was deathless… but it did not count because I did not have the quest yet. Other than that I need to upgrade the exotic sword and then swap her artifacts to all exotics, and my weapon mods to all exotics… and I THINK that might get me over the light hurdle. Having long grinds though is perfectly fine, and it is going to take a bit longer because I was later starting the game.

Ace and I got together Sunday afternoon and did some more all Ikora nonsense again. We are still seeking the Trikora as Ammo called it during the podcast, but we did have a really successful run. Largely we just followed around the Umeko that we were grouped with and provided supporting fire. Ikora is actually somewhat powerful if you happen to catch players unaware while you still have your abilities active. When her abilities are down though… you just do not have the tools to close the deal. We are past the halfway point in this nonsense though and we just need to do four more rounds in order to knock out her lore item. We also ran a Gauntlet Blitz as Ikora and that was honestly better than I expected it to be. On top of that I introduced Ace to the frustration that is the raid, and we managed to get through that twice. However we did have one run where people who had no clue what they were doing kept grabbing the keys and then sitting on them, so they also know the frustration of when things go south.

I had enough resources to craft an exotic engram and I pulled Polaris Lance, which is a pretty solid scout rifle that I might work on upgrading for Tan-2/Umeko. I am not sure if this is the play over an Exotic Sniper or not, but I remember liking the weapon in Destiny, so hopefully it is also a solid bet here too. The only problem is that Exotic weapons are so costly in resources to keep upgraded, and I just do not feel like I have the necessary resources to build out every single one of them, much like there are heroes that I am just going to completely ignore. I wish the higher you got up in Ascension, the more common some resources got. So that you could get Mythic resources for example much easier than you previously could… or some of the early Exotic resources. However anything yellow…. still maintains a lot of time gated grinding behind it.

I am hoping everything is setting up for a really good week. I know this week is also the start for Legion Remix, but I am not entirely certain how much I will be engaging with that. I am kinda digging playing some console games, so I might be doing more of that in the evenings. Hoping by this time next week… I have the garage more under control and have at least been able to schedule the folks to come pick up in the growing pile in the backyard.

Suspicious Dongle

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Good Morning Folks. For awhile now I have used a wireless headset downstairs with my laptop, and I have come to love it. The only real problem with it is that I wish it were semi-open like the Superlux headphones that I use upstairs. When led me down the path of wishing there was a way to convert a normal wired headset to a wireless one. After a bit of back and forth on mastodon, I found an option that is pretty tiny and weighs almost nothing. There are a bunch of versions of this, but the one that I purchased is from MIPEACE and it essentially hangs off the short cord directly from the headphones as seen in the image above. I thought I would need to attach it somehow to the outside of my headset, but since it is so lightweight it seems to be able to just hang there comfortably. I charged it up last night, and now I am curious if it can get through the entire day on a single charge. I will of course report back how well this works out. I am keeping music running in the background so I know when it cuts out.

I am still a bit all over the place right now, spending time in Diablo IV, New World, and Destiny Rising. If I had to claim a main game right now, it would probably be Diablo IV since I am trying to level up and push into the end game. I am taking it super chill right now. I am sure I could grind up in a single afternoon if I really focused on it, but I do that during Path of Exile leagues… and since I don’t take Diablo near as seriously there is no point not to just slow roll this. The Druid felt sort of awful for the first few levels but now it feels pretty solid. Namely when I got some sort of spirit recovery I have been able to mostly just run around pulverizing things. I have enough defenses that I can largely just gather things up in a big pack and them smash them to bits with my beary goodness.

One of the things that I always wish I did…. while leveling, was focus on the various strongholds. This is one of those things that are nice to have unlocked… but also something that I never really want to go back and do later. So this time around I finally smartened up and that has essentially been my focus. As of this morning prior to sitting down to write this blog post, I have now opened every single stronghold and it got me to level 46. Now I just need to find some other activity to grind out the rest of the levels and start the endgame proper. Other than Strongholds, I have also popped around the map unlocking the various waypoints so that when I do hit the endgame, I won’t be hamstrung by not having a port open while doing events.

Between lunch breaks and this evening, I am going to see if I can hit level 60 and start working on Paragon levels. In theory if I hang out in the hellfire areas it should go quickly enough. I’ve done a world boss and a legions event, but the experience gain there seemed pretty slow. At some point I should probably bump up the difficulty, but really since the same gear drops on the first two difficulties there has not been much of a reason to do it. I think I am tanky enough to handle it without much issue, but I am also exceptionally lazy. I need to probably start running some content that reliably drops legendaries so I can collect the necessary affixes needed for my eventual build. I need to look at the maxroll guide I have been following and seeing which affixes come from dungeons, and then get those knocked out while I am still leveling.

I connected up with Ace again last night. We had not really been planning on doing so, but I just happened to notice that they were online when I was starting to grind out my pinnacle rewards for the day. We ran a handful of strikes and mostly it was just a good excuse to hang out on voice and chat while doing activities. I promise I am not super vain… but I still have to screenshot any time I get MVP at the end of a match, especially if it is as Jolder. Generally speaking MVPs tend to favor those characters that deal large amounts of damage, and/or provides some sort of support benefit. I do find it hilarious that “Damage Taken” is a thing that the game is tracking as something that is good. My job as a defensive character though is to get up in the bosses face and try and get it to focus on me… since I have my health bar and a full over-shield bar most of the time.

I’ve been doing the planetary dailies on Finnala, and while I do not really love the character… It has still been fun. Essentially each of the champions has some sort of activities in their lore panel that it asks you to do. For Nala it is do 10 days worth of the destination daily quests in the Red Sea Rift area. Jolder had the same quest chain and I have already completed hers, so I figured I might as well be knocking them out for another character since I am going to do a set of these every day regardless. At some point though I really need to shift focus on the Jiangshi Metro area because my faction level there is pretty pitiful. That first zone is just nowhere near as well designed as the second zone, so it is way less enjoyable just to run around killing stuff in. When I need to do a bounty… I tend to pop down to Red Sea Rift instead.

I went through the process of setting up Overwolf last night, so that I could start running Aeternum Map on the second monitor. Essentially this allows me to keep up a map that tracks my progress through the world, and also shows me the locations of all of the resource spawn points. I have some zones in the game memorized just from running them so much… for example there is a loop in Brightwood that I can run in my sleep. However they have added a lot of higher tier resources into zones like Edengrove, and I figured I might as well have the map up so I can see if there is something that I want to make a beeline for. I hate Overwolf… so I only keep it running so long as I need it for the purpose of this map. Overwolf is essentially keeping track of your location in the world, and all of the tools seem to rely on it to make the maps interactive.

The positive of the map though is it has led me to explore some areas I probably never would have been. For example there is a cave up near Shattered Mountain in Edengrove that is chock full of Mithril nodes. Sure you have to find waves of the exploding blight mobs… and have to keep waiting on your blight bar to tick down, but I think I pulled almost 1000 ore just from this one location last night in a single pass. Similarly I have made beelines off the path to find other precious nodes while exploring things. One cool thing is that since the level cap is now 65… things like Shattered Mountain are no longer as scary as they once were. I need to get out there and explore a bit more, and maybe take down some of the bosses out there for funsies. Every major boss spawn point… seems to always have a group at it. Over the weekend I did a bunch of kills of Baines at the top of a tower in Edengrove, just because I happened to stumble upon a full party hanging out there. Boss farming was one of my favorite things in this game.

Hades 2 is also leaving Early Access today, so at some point I will probably give that a spin. I am installing it currently so I have it at the ready when I am in the mood to give it a go. I know tonight we will be doing our normal Guild Wars 2 shenanigans. I am hoping the crew is further along in the quest chain so that we can knock out some of the things that you cannot get through running quick play. I already have my Legendary Gloves, so mostly I just want to do whatever I can to help push the others through the process. I feel like I am all over the place right now and having trouble focusing on any one thing in particular. That is probably okay, given how much I hyper fixate on a single thing at a time for weeks.

BackSlash WhoAmI

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Morning Folks! Yesterday Wilhelm Arcturus aka The Ancient Gaming Noob aka TAGN ran a bit of a thought experiment on his blog. He asked the three most common Large Language Models for Chat who he was, and got some less-than-stellar results. However, eventually, Microsoft CoPilot managed to get the correct answer at which point it led to a whole series of questions asked… some of which were given reasonable answers. This of course made me curious what my results would look like, and within minutes I was looking up the pages for the models from Microsoft, Open AI, and Google and asking it a simple question.

Who Is Belghast?

Open AI / Chat GPT

I figured we would start with the most mature of the three, ChatGPT by Open AI. It was simple enough to get into the tool through a web browser and type my simple query. For the most part, it nailed it in one. It indicated that I wrote a blog called Tales of the Aggronaut that is focused on MMORPGs… but that is essentially something you could get from the short description of my website. The bit about the significant following through that feels like freestyle and not exactly something I would agree with considering my dwindling readership over the years. It got a little less on the nose as I asked it additional questions like what games I play… which admittedly it did specifically call out World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. However given that the model is using data from 2022… it is completely missing my obsession over Path of Exile, Last Epoch, New World, Guild Wars 2, or even Diablo IV.

All in all, it was a good effort: B+

Microsoft CoPilot

Since this is the service that Microsoft desperately wants me to give access to my computer… I figured I would turn next to CoPilot. The key difference between CoPolit versus ChatGPT is that Microsoft has decided to give its AI monster direct access to the internet. So when I ran this query again this morning it specifically called out my weekend podcast where I talked about the New World Aeternum debacle. All in all, I like the summary thought and it specifically name-drops Blaugust with a short explanation of what it is. The Twitch bit is a little off the mark because while I technically do have a channel there it has been three or four years since I last streamed to it. The thing I like the most about this is that it specifically links a bunch of relevant things including Aggronaut main page, the Blaugust Announcement from last year, AggroChat and my Twitch page. Where it fell apart was on follow-up questions where it essentially regurgitated back the above paragraph when I asked it what games I played.

Another pretty solid effort thought, but I am giving it a B+ only because I liked its formatting and mentioning Blaugust. The follow-through needs some work. What is weird is that CoPilot seemed to work the best for Wilhelm but it absolutely did not for me.

Google Gemini/Bard

Next up we try Google Gemini which I believe until recently was referred to as Bard. This is the thing that is gobbling up all of our content and serving it up to web browsers without ever sending readers to our websites. The first strike against this is that I could not run it in an anonymous browser session, and had to log in with a Google account… which gave it a headstart in knowing this information. I am apparently a “multi-faceted online personality” and honestly I am not sure how I feel about that. It goes on to break down the things I do… which again everyone seems to be leaning hard into Streaming when I did it enough to get Twitch Affiliate while Elder Scrolls Online was launching and then basically never did it again with any regularity. The weird text formatting is I believe Grammarly complaining about something because it only happened the first time I tried to use it. When I dug down a bit further about what games I play, it gave me some pretty generic answers: MMO Gamer, Variety Gamer, and RPGs.

I think this is the one that I liked the least of the three so I am giving it a straight-up B or maybe even a C+.

Personality and Branding

I was curious about something. I know that I am way more widely known as “Belghast” than I am as the title of my blog “Tales of the Aggronaut”, and as such I think the Large Language Models had a bit easier time honing in on who exactly I was given that I use the same name on pretty much every platform and said the name is not exactly commonplace. While I know Wilhelm by the name Wilhelm Arcturus, I only do so because I have read his content for years. If I were going to tell someone about something he wrote I would probably use TAGN or The Ancient Gaming Noob instead because that is the “brand” that I associate most strongly with him. So Chat GPT was one of the LLMs that struck out horrifically and I decided to give it a test run by asking it who “The Ancient Gaming Noob” is.

Sure enough, it nailed it on the first attempt, because LLMs are ultimately just search engines. They are way more complicated search engines, but at the end of the day, all they are doing is sifting through harvested data and then trying to extrapolate something that looks like an answer based on that data. When you search “Wilhelm Arcturus” you don’t get the blog until the fourth link down. However when you search “The Ancient Gaming Noob” you land on the WordPress blog in one hit. With me, if you search for my name or my blog title you get essentially the same results every time. This is not necessarily an intended effect or something that I spent years of SEO nonsense trying to accomplish, but just something that happened over time. I just figure Wilhelm would have had better results had he started with TAGN rather than his pen name.

Anyways! It was a fun experiment and I figure at some point Wilhelm will read this post so thanks for the idea. It was definitely an interesting journey.

Fauxtify

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Good Morning Friends! This post will go in some directions… so fair warning it might be a weird ride. The abandoning of Twitter and adopting Mastodon/Fediverse as my primal social network has triggered many changes in how I look at the services I use. Essentially I’ve come to realize that I had become solely dependent upon the corporatized internet for my day-to-day functions. This was a weird realization given that I come from the very early days of the web, an era when I very clearly had to host anything that I wanted to use and pretty regularly became that guy that hosted a forum or a website for every friend that needed one. For years I had an entire infrastructure running out of my house that I maintained. However, the migration to Cable for internet access brought with it a loss of the ability to actually use any standard ports for anything… so I started leaning more and more heavily on hosted or corporate services.

Essentially I’ve been on this journey of evaluating the things that I use on a day-to-day basis. Some of these things are attached to my workplace, and I have no direct control over them. Other things however I use on a personal level… and I could migrate to something that I had more direct control over. I’ve started making subtle shifts, most recently I stopped using Google as a search engine entirely and made the move so many have over to the less invasive DuckDuckGo. A few years ago I made a similar migration away from Chrome as my primary browser (though I still have to use it for work purposes) and moved everything over to Firefox on both desktop and mobile. When I needed to rebuild the second machine that I use for various sundry purposes, I did so as a Linux Desktop instead of building yet another Windows machine. I am still uncertain if I can really move my primary machine away from Windows, but so far the Linux Desktop experience has been pretty freaking solid.

One of the services that I have targeted recently is the music streaming service that I use. Honestly, I migrated to Tidal out of spite a couple of years ago when Spotify doubled down on supporting Joe Rogan. I loved using Spotify… it was a universally enjoyable experience. Tidal… while technically higher quality just sucks as a user experience and the discovery engine is tuned for someone who is very much “not me”. So after leaving Spotify… it became very easy for me to consider moving away from Tidal because my buy-in was not nearly as solid. Essentially I am looking to move away from corporate streaming audio entirely. For years I maintained my own library of music, and then with the release of Google Music I just sort of decided it was not worth the hassle. I got lazy and it became too easy to pay a single fee and get access to whatever I wanted. Google killed its music offering by turning to YouTube Music… which led me to migrate to Amazon for a while, before finally landing on Spotify. Each step… I felt like I actually listened to music less often… that is until I started my Mixtape Mondays nonsense a few years back.

We are going to jump around a bit and talk about Plex. Effectively Plex is a self-hosted home media streaming solution, and I’ve been using this for well over a decade now as a way of watching any sort of movie or television series. Before the existence of Plex, I used Windows Media Center to fill the same role on my network and used an Xbox 360 as a streaming client. Essentially I hate the tedium of dealing with physical media. Growing up I loved the Nintendo Entertainment System kiosk that allowed you to play one of many different games with the push of a button, and that led me mentally down the path of wanting to jukebox-ize all of my media. It was because of this that I became an early adopter of digital distribution first with Direct2Drive and later Steam… and of course, I used to rip every single CD and DVD that I got access to. For MP3s I had one of those early Creative Nomad players as my primary consumption means, and for Video, I eventually landed on Plex and what is now 12 TB of shared storage that has upgraded like a hermit crab over the years as I have needed more space.

I have no clue WHY it took me this long… but I had this mental separation between video solutions and audio solutions… when in truth Plex is not just a great video streaming option. Earlier this year I started a project that I have dubbed “Fauxtify” where I am collecting all of my audio in one coherent library and trying to wean myself off of streaming audio as I acquire things I was missing from my collection. This has honestly been really fun as I have started scouring the local thrift stores looking for bits of music that I remember fondly over the years and then ripping it to my local server when I get home. I still hate the storage of physical media, and eventually, I will have to come up with a better solution to that than just cramming it in the closet in my office.

I think what I love so much about Plex as a solution is that with a premium account, I have access to all of my media through their mobile and web apps regardless of where I am currently. The server sitting on my network effectively brokers a secure connection between the mobile device and my server without directly opening up a port on my firewall. Which has led me down a path of pining for more solutions that worked like this. What I really need now is Office 365/Google Apps… but in the Plex model where I can host a local instance of it but access it remotely through apps that broker a connection back home.

All web searches seem to point me toward NextCloud… but it seems to be more of a true self-hosted system where you need to run it over standard ports and expose them through traditional means to the internet. That is not exactly what I want, but I have contemplated setting this up and running it internally just for document storage purposes. This is where I open up a request to my readers. I know many of you also have a penchant for doing dumb things with technology. Is there a solution I am overlooking? What I really want is something that works somewhat like Plex, but for “office” functionality. I could in theory just put NextCloud on the web host that I keep the rest of my public-facing infrastructure on and that may be the road I go down next. At least there I would still have control over it, but I would rather honestly have something on my local network that gets accessed brokered to it from a more hybrid cloud model.

I guess the takeaway is… Mastodon changed how I view my complacency with using the corporatized internet. Another takeaway is “Fauxtify” is working beautifully, and once I flex out my library a bit more I will likely be killing access to Tidal entirely. Now to chip away at my reliance on Google apps.