One of the things about #Linux I love most is it’s flexibility. This may astonish some but I am gaming on my Linux system for approximately 15 years by now. Situation for #linuxgaming improved a lot lately but it was always possible to keep myself distracted 😉
So one of the games I just love to play is XCOM (UFO series). I don’t think I skipped any part and Terror From The Deep will always have a special place in my heart. Anyway, when XCOM was relaunched and eventually ported to Linux by Feral Interactive in 2014 I thought I couldn’t have been happier. Firaxis Games topped this in 2016 with XCOM2 and Feral Interactive once more got the job for the port.
Sadly with all the expansion sets it takes quite a toll on the required hardware. Huge fan of all sliders on maximum and see how it goes and while my box can mostly keep up I notice that I run out of RAM towards the end of the game fast and my machine starts swapping. I’ve 16GB RAM and this game eats it away like children their candy.
I’ve got additional 4GB of swap installed on slow spinning rust disks (legacy) so I notice the moment it starts swapping like hitting a wall. After another frustrated restart of the game I paused for a moment. I don’t know why this games needs so much RAM and frankly I don’t even care. Maybe I’m spoiled nowadays since stuff tends to “just work”.
So I decided to throw more power at it but RAM is expensive and I usually have enough of it for my daily work (or other games). I did get a decent SSD (Solid State Disk) recently tho so it’s #swapfile to my rescue:
swapoff -a
fallocate -l 16G /games/swapfile
mkswap /games/swapfile
swapon /games/swapfile
…and that’s it. I stopped my previous slow swap partition(s), created a new swapfile of 16GB size on my SSD, formatted it as swap partition and activated it. Now I tabbed back into my game and enjoyed the rest of the evening. Let it swap. The SSD can keep up with it. Not minding a few more seconds during loading screens 😀 I’m considerung to add the activation sequence to my “gaming mode” script.
I’m dabbling in #ElectricVehicles for some years by now when I decided to go full electric in 2016. My reasons didn’t change much and it’s time for reflecting on the topic.
The beginning was rough for various reasons. Our local car dealer f*cked up so we shred the initial offer. When we looked around for another dealer we got a recommendation 50km away from home. This one knew his trade, the car and enough of this brand new internet tech to send us a new contract within the hour. Impressed by this we finally ordered our ZE40 #RenaultZOE.
Electrical Error – no service
The suspected starting battery checkout out fine
Piggyback to the dealer. Twice.
Fun didn’t last long tho. We were simply unlucky with the AC/DC converter. It was busted within days and we didn’t see the shiny new car for another ~three weeks.
That was kinda disappointing and I worried for several weeks whether this was really a good decision. There was however no further trouble after this incident for years. I started to get to know the car better due to my daily commuting, experienced various recharging challenges, poked around on the car’s CAN bus, installed a charger at home and… bought another #RenaultZOE.
Probing the charger installation
ODB2 dongle analysis
Second ZOE
This time a used ZE model from 2014 with the smaller battery. It was meant to replace our T3 van, that did see daily action until that for shopping, local errands and family taxi. Today it’s mostly used by my wife and parents-in-law leaving their old ICE car to rust as well. This unplanned acquisition was a direct result of our experiences with the ZE40.
Parents got a Leaf by now
LevelUp from relatives: Tesla
ElectrifyBW days Horb
It’s like a virus and spreads. Once you try #ev there is no going back. #ElectricVehicles are plain fun, elegant quiet and there is this tingling sensation of experiencing the future early. I tinkered a lot on my combustion cars, especially the vans, in my life. And I don’t miss a thing. Whenever I’m back in an traditional ICE car it feels like yesterday. It’s noisy, everything shakes and rattles and it smells of fumes.
It’s a great bonus that there are no fumes emitted at the eye height of my children.
Beko Pharm
This isn’t even about environment considerations. It’s a great bonus that there are no fumes emitted at the eye height of my children, of course. I won’t go into the regulars’ table talk about the negative aspects of #electromobility. They apply to any mobility and “alternate facts” on this topic are debunked on various scientific essays on the net. We all know that cars are and will never be “good” for the environment. We’re countryside. This is as good as it gets.
Great – new snow again
ICE car unused in the wintertime
So yeah, as I mentioned we’re in the countryside. Black Forest to be specific. We get snow here. And this is another plus for the #RenaultZOE. While the old 2014 edition has apparently ~5° less heating capabilities Renault really did their homework starting with the next editions. The older one could really need a seat heater while the new one has enough power that this is no issue. Both don’t need ice scraping though. Pre-heating (or pre-cooling in the summertime) is key here. This can be done by timer, remote, or, if you feel really lucky, by app. This is luxury!
Stuffing our medieaval market equipment
Trip to grandparents
Ikea with the ZOE
The #RenaultZOE had to prove itself as transporter as well. It is simply amazing what can be loaded into this small car. It’s an underestimated space miracle. Especially when the backseats are removed (or at least folded down). I wasn’t sure I could fit everything inside on my first trip to Ikea. So I had to go inside twice to get the rest from the list 😀
Driving EV is plain fun
Having a break at a charger
Having a break without a charger
Needless to say that excursions are also absolutely no problem. My website is proof of this since various articles and galleries here are the result of trips we used the #ev for. Winter, summer, weather, distance, whatever. Chargers or outlets are everywhere, and in most cases we stopped because of the kids needing a break or when we arrived at our destination, and not because the car needed a recharge. So while we ate, or checked out cool locations, the car recharged having nothing better to do at such times anyway. We never stranded and while we carefully watched the available miles and capacity in the beginning we basically stopped caring about this at all. We know it’s always enough [for us].
Chargers at a modern parking deck
Some statistics
Just drive
Battery lifetime. It’s a gamble. I know the datasheets, the promises, the waranty. As a programmer and tinkerer I poke at such things. So here is today’s values for the SoH (State of Health) for our batteries:
ZE 22 kWh (rented) 39.086 km 97% SoH
ZE40 41 kWh (bought) 31.392 km 97% SoH
That is within the expected degrading curves and I’m not worrying too much about this. Just checking it regulary with the CanZE app in the hope to find broken cells early. Usually it’s bad luck if this happens at all. Otherwhise the batteries are doing a decent job here and it’ll probably be years before my 41 kWh battery will see it’s second life as buffer storage. Especially since I didn’t drive nearly as much as anticipated. My work situation changed and I got a lot of home office reducing the need to commute greatly.
So yeah, after several years and plenty of commuted miles to the office, customers, excursions and trips I’d never go back to an ICE. This was the right decision and even cheaper in the long run compared to any of my old cars. The ZOEs are up for any daily challenge for a family of four and even some occasional car sharing.
And yet – sometimes I’m reminded that this is “just” a french car. Seals of the cooling system e.g. suck (and this coolant is freaking expensive). The software, connectivity services (app) and especially the shipped TomTom is/are awful. That includes the scheduled ripoff for programming the RDKS each time. The headlights are really bad and from all EVs I tried over the last years the ZOE has the worst speedup, antenna, power usage and fewest assistants. Cruise control is decent tho. There are better cars. Better EVs. Mayhap even the new ZE50 out now.
Went for a walk with my family today. What was meant as a short walk resulted in an two hours excursion. The forest is an awesome place to be in autumn. While not yet frozen over the winter it’s still rich of life and beautiful colours.
Even the continious rainfall could not ruin this. We had good jackets [that could not quite keep up with my medieaval Pileus (hat)] and boots. Such a long walk was also quite an adventure for the children who somehow managed all of this without [the usual] complaining =)
Visited the horticultural show in Heilbronn 74072 / Germany. It’s amazing how the city could look with more green here and there… and way less cars.
An electric mobil parcel station beside a charging station.
There were a few things of particular interest for me. The first thing is that is is obviously possible to have bees within a city and _many_ people walking right next to the beehive without angering the bees. Didn’t know this is possible.
Bee hives right next to people visiting the show. Some could even be opened to check on the bees.
Next was this FarmBot. It’s a opensource CNC farming machine that basically anyone with some skill can rebuild. It uses some 3d printed assets but the rest is kinda off the shelf stuff. Sadly I got no good picture of it since this late in the year it was not in use any more but the website has all the fancy presentations:
Unexcepted was a group of people on rafts demonstrating the historic trade of Timber Rafting. I’m not sure but I think this particular group is also from Schiltach that I visited severaltimes before. Nice icing 🙂
Historic Timer Rafting
I’m surprised that I found interesting stuff at all. Not much into gardening so it was a pleasant surprise to find so many points of interest on the show. We were even short of time in the end without seeing all of it. Sadly it’s the end of the season so there won’t be further chances for this. Was a great day and I finally did see the finished Experimenta from the outside. Last time I visited it was still under construction.
Visited the Museum Of Everyday Life in Castle Waldenbuch 71111 / Germany. This town is known for it’s chocolate factory of Ritter Sport but it does indeed have a very nice medieaval town core – timber-framed buildings included.
The museum itself is simply great. The place is huge and there is so much to see. It was also a great place for the kids who in opposition to usual museum trips did not just run from room to room. The exhibits really catched their attention and we spent a surprisingly long time inside.
My personal highlight was the opportunity to see the Family Swevia and Reisecen live showcasing their deeds. Two great living history groups that really do put a lot of effort and research in their presentations.
I was late for this party anyway but getting off isn’t that easy.
Cleverdevil has some good pointers on freeing yourself from Facebook but the suggested tool fb-export requires an AccessToken for the Graph API Explorer. For this one has to set up a developer account with Facebook.
That’s not freeing [for me]. That’s entangling even more because this step requires a phonenumber or credit card with Facebook. A step I managed to advert so far.
So yeah, I guess my quest goes on. This may work for others tho.
Visited the 8th Dobler Spectaculum at Dobel 75335 / Germany where we got to hang out with friends from Die Schlegler e.V. – means we were sitting around in their camp, ate their food and relaxed while everyone else was working.
Borrowed a gambeson
Clear rust with oil and sand.
Group unboxing
Just kidding – we helped as well, of course, but ran for the hills when a storm approached 😉 It was nice to hang out on a medieval market again. Something I haven’t done a lot in a very long time.
We revisited Schiltach 77761 / Germany today and this time we were lucky. The Schüttesäge museum was open just as advertised. It’s free to visit and has a donation box.
Beside the framesaw and it’s water mills it also shows the history of Timber Rafting and Tanning in the area. A really small but nice museum.
After some refreshments – it was a very warm day this time – we moved over to the city museum that had a lot of stuff that could be touched or experimented with. A lot of fun for the kids. It also hosts a tiny library with books about the town – including several well known books about half timber by e.g. Manfred Gerner. This one is also free and has a donation box.
One of the most fascinating items on display is the model of the former “Zum Adler” inn (1604), that can be seen from the window of the museum.
Today I run into domain abuse while working on a WordPress project due to a typo in the TLD. A foreign server happily served me the requested files but with spiced content. This looked unsuspicious at first glance.
Now this is something that doesn’t happen every day [to me]. I haven’t touched PHP and WordPress in years so I don’t have a workflow established for this any more. Today I got the job to upgrade some legacy system. So I checked out the project from git, configured some dnsmasq magic and launched a local PHP development server and browser.
I was astonished when the project came up in the zero profile development chrome and the first link I clicked opened a new tab presenting me with some scam ringing all alarm bells. I’m on localhost! And Linux! What happened? Do we have an infected project in our git repository? So I started digging.
This should all point to my local dev domain at 127.0.0.1 that has no public DNS records at all.
Wait, this doesn’t look right. Looks like I made a typo replacing the WordPress WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL in our local wp-config and got a doubled dot de. That’s not going to localhost but it’s still loading JavaScript files. No file came back with 404 – Not Found error so at first glance nothing suspicous happened beside the CSS looking weird. Most files were empty but with some exception – as you can see.
That’s not my expected source.
So I run that IP against the IP Abuse DB and it checked out with various reports including a “took over my blog” report. Yeah, I guess that happens when you’re going to login to your blog. This IP ships any file you request back to you but with it’s own flavoured JavaScript. That’s what happens when you do a typo and someone else is just waiting for this. And it happened to my dev setup since I made a search and replace without enough caffeine in my blood to spot the typo and without bothering to set up SSL and CORS for developing.
Requesting without “subdomain” results in an critical error.
So yeah.. you can throw any domain at this. It will happily serve malware, or spam or whatever it’s up to today. It’s just waiting for a typing error.
The 127.0.0.1 one is fetched by my local dnsmasq
There’s a lesson here. Watch careful what domain you really use. Don’t be lazy and make use of SSL/CORS even in development. I can’t help me from having some respect for this idea and there are probably others doing the same.
I’m dabbling in IndieWeb for some time now but didn’t fully embrace it [yet]. There was no real need since I’m running my own blog for years so I’m already half-way there. It is a thing tho especially for people that are simply tired of not owning their content any more.
I noticed that a lot of publications I wrote myself over the last years are simply forgotten and burried in some silo. Ever wrote an article on say FB? That’s basically lost after just a week. Nobody will ever find or read [or even search for] it again.
It’s similar with publication platforms. They arise and pass by in such a short time nowadays that it’s hard to even keep even track of.
So I decided to revive my own blog. That was when I stumbled about IndieWeb that scratches exactly this itch. Looks like I’m not the only one. Jlelse, for example, seems to go all in (even in a remarkable short time).
