Category: Stuff

Oh.

Starting November 15th, 2025, Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock and all its DLCs will no longer be available for purchase on any platform. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/544610/view/570395033724780780?l=english

It seems to be currently on sale on GOG so mebbe grab it if you don’t have it yet: https://www.gog.com/en/game/battlestar_galactica_deadlock

That was one of the better space fleet pew pews. Sad to see this going. Guess their license expired. That leaves `X4` BSG mods and `Diaspora` (`FreeSpace 2 Open` mod), of course. Speaking of: There isn’t much talk about `Diaspora` but apparently they are cooking another campaign behind the curtains.

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Visited the Black Forest open air museum Vogtsbauernhof in 77793 Gutach / Germany. This is a huge areal that has several very old farm buildings, that have been carefully de- and reconstructed on this site. There are often also tours, demonstrations or hands-on activities how people used to live in the Black Forest area but as a half-timber nutter I’m mostly interested in the buildings. These are from various periods starting as early as 1407 (though that’s an often refurbished exception).

Shooting any sort of pictures with my smartphone camera was very hard because the insides of the buildings are unbelievable dark and hardly lit. I guess this is driving home a point in itself. Anyway I did my best to improve the photos somewhat with Darktable (not that I have any idea what I’m doing there). Also the galleries won’t syndicate so you’ll have to check the source for the pictures.

Here are some of the pictures that are very dark in reality.

We also looked at plenty of farm equipment, of course. In fact one of the farms is still operated and has livestock around.

One of the most interesting things I found was a “mini house” that is basically of fridge for milk. It utilizes a water stream to keep milk on the inside cold.

Some of these buildings simply look gorgeous on the outside but my kids were pretty certain that they’d not actually want to life in such a building. Beside the darkness on the inside one could also always feel how air makes it inside. There’s always a slight breeze, which is probably nice in the summertime but not so much in the wintertime. Especially with only a few places around to heat the buildings.

One of their major show pieces is probably the Schlössle von Effringen, which is basically a mini castle that has been remade again and again dating back to ~11C.

This is also where I shot most of my pictures. Sadly we were running out of time and I have to revisit this again so look at some things a little closer. And maybe leave the kids at home too. They don’t really have the required patience.

I also rather enjoyed the various kitchens, that were almost all “smoke kitchens” – means the smoke from the kitchen fire was used to conserve food. This is a very medieval thing to do. Sadly the pictures I made don’t do them justice since they are basically black holes, that cameras struggle hard with.

One of the things I enjoyed most are models of various buildings. I made many photos of these for inspiration. Maybe I’ll come back to recreating such buildings in the Rising World game one day.

And last some unsorted photos in portrait mode (ugh, it happens, mkay?)

Website of the museum is: https://www.vogtsbauernhof.de/en with plenty of more pictures and a 360deg tour. Can recommend. Alas bring food along – the restaurants next to the site are rather expensive. Museum is worth every cent though IMHO.

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In October we booked tickets for a ride with this historic steam train. Sadly that didn’t work out as expected. Something broke for the signal manager and the train was not permitted to enter the station and could later not leave it. We basically sat for hours in some waggon until it was announced that they won’t make the roundtrip this day. One way only. That’d have left us stranded so we left the train finally. We did get a full refund of the tickets though so we will try this another time.

Video: Historic steam train “Fiery Elias” leaving the station Korntal (Stuttgart, Germany) in 2025

The locomotive, designated Lok 50 2273, is apparently in service since 1942 with various reconstructions along the… uh… rails? It’s history can be reviewed at https://eisenbahn-museumsfahrzeuge.de/index.php/deutschland/staatsbahnfahrzeuge/dampflokomotiven/baureihe-50/50-2273

Historic steam train “Feuriger Elias”: https://www.ges-ev.de/museumsverkehr/kw/kw.htm

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The Day My Smart Vacuum Turned Against Me by HarishankarHarishankar (Small World)
Would you allow a stranger to drive a camera-equipped computer around your living room? You might have already done so without even realizing it. The Beginning: A Curious Experiment It all started innocently enough. I had recently bought an iLife A11 smart vacuum—a sleek, affordable, and technologically advanced robot promising effortless cleaning and intelligent navigation. As a curious engineer, I was fascinated by its workings. After leaving it to operate for the entire year, my curiosity

❤️ https://codetiger.github.io/blog/the-day-my-smart-vacuum-turned-against-me/

Pretty sure that won’t be the last we’ll read ott. Devices that get bricked when privacy is enforced.

“Ah,” said Mr Pin. “Right. I remember. You are concerned citizens.” He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where ‘traditional values’ meant ‘hang someone’. Terry Pratchett, „The Truth“.

This is one of my favourite quotes from the books and one of the writers that influenced me most while growing up.

List of menu key bindings from a PC game demonstrating various bound buttons with an ungodly long menu entry for each option

Looks like has a broken Input.ini parser resulting in my mappings to be gone on restart. The problem is that some special characters, like a comma, break the INI format used by their controls implementation [/Script/Engine.InputSettings].

Have an example what the game writes to AppData/Local/ProjectWingman/Saved/Config/WindowsNoEditor/Input.ini


AxisMappings=(AxisName="Pitch Axis",Scale=-1.000000,Key=Joystick_ThrustMaster,IncF-16FlightControlSystem_2_Axis1)

The name for the key is something homebrew the game produces based on the controller type (Joystick_ or Gamepad_) and the HID device descriptor name. This example mapped fine ingame but breaks on reload of the game resulting in only ThrustMaster for each mapped control – and that joystick can not be found, of course.

The “fix” is to manually edit the file and add quotation marks for the key:

AxisMappings=(AxisName="Pitch Axis",Scale=-1.000000,Key="Joystick_ThrustMaster,IncF-16FlightControlSystem_2_Axis1")

Now the game finds the proper joystick and all controls are mapped to something like ThrustMaster,IncF-16FlightControlSystem_2_Axis1 again, as expected.

Needless to say that the file should probably be write protected after that – or at least saved again under a different name, because any change to the controls will overwrite this fix again. This problem does probably also happen with other special characters, like the © sign that some vendors are known to use.

Bringing Linux Administration to Everyone: Free Online Course Starting Soon by Jochen LillichJochen Lillich (monospacementor.com)

I had planned to start the cohort-based course “Basic Linux System Administration” later this week. When this cohort unfortunately didn’t fill up, I realized this was the perfect opportunity to do something I’ve wanted to try for a while: offer my Linux System Administration course completely free as a livestreaming experience. Starting this month, I’ll…

♻️ https://monospacementor.com/2025/09/free-linux-sysadmin-course/

Even with Fedora 👌

I Can Spot AI Writing Instantly — Here’s How You Can Too by Evan Edinger (YouTube)
How can you tell if something is written by AI?

Re: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ch4a6ffPZY

I really lost it when YT provided me with an AI summary of this video ticking all the boxes 🤣 Anyway, what others mentioned before: As a non native speaker I feel cooked. I’m already constantly pivoting between English, American and Aussie (that’s my 3 points as we were taught in school btw). Mostly _phrases_ picked up here and there especially from movies but lately also from AI because – (ndash :D) let’s face it: We see it everywhere so it slowly gets adopted to the own lingo assuming this is how people talk nowadays. Kinda similar to the jargon of the youth that always sports their own lingo as well. Anyway, IMHO the more important thing is not really being able to detect AI but being able to understand if there is a human behind a comment, trying to bring a point along, or simply a gorram bot tasked with influencing/advertising.