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I wonder for a suited format for a series of log entries for my X4 adventures. Mayhap I should simply edit and append as the story [of my sandbox] unfolds.

Spent most of the day hunting pirates that seem to develop a taste for my ships. The salvaged Cerberus Vanguard is a huge help with this and whenever a pirate surrenders my own support fleet of Minotaur grows. Did I mention that I just love the design of this ship? It’s such a great all-round asset that can even haul some cargo on occasion or act as small carrier.

I also stumbled over another really tiny vault. Took some time to unlock all it’s secrets but I’m starting to get the hang of it.

Raiding a tiny vault

Talking about raiding I had some notable encounters as well. A Raider tried to steal from the current head quarter. That was a mighty stupid idea and the Raider was toast before I even got close to it.

Scale Plate Pact Raider going down in a blaze

And another had the nerve to attack my medium freighters during their duty of making profit. When I finally had enough I called in the fleet and together we started a boarding operation. That was a long and ugly fight mostly because due to a bunch of Xen fighters trashing our party. Lost one small heavy fighter and 45 marines but in the end the ship was ours. Good thing the Cerberus brought a repair drone along to fix the busted engines, by the way.

  • Taking out the engines
  • Docking at the prize after a long battle

I also identified a choking point in Napileos’ Fortune VI where a lot of the pirate traffic seems to originate. It’s an empty and unclaimed sector so I started building an Administrative Center here hoping to get this pest under control.

Claiming Napileos’ Fortune VI

I wonder if it makes sense to start more stations here, because a lot of other huge stations are within 4 sectors of this – the typical maximum distance for auto traders to go – and a lot of traffic is passing through this already.

Oh yeah – and I finally got all the parts to assemble the SINZA device. It’s IMHO not really obvious that it simply activated with Shift+4 because I tried to install it as modification or ship drive first.

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Today I learned about IMA, EVM and TPM on Linux and I feel like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole.

[ 0.784022] ima: No TPM chip found, activating TPM-bypass!

dmesg | grep TPM

Last time I read about this is ~15 years ago and I simply disabled TPM so far since I only remember the concerns from back then about privacy and the impact it may have on free software related to DRM. TrueCrypt also fuelled this believe.

Turns out that TPM is completely passive and can do a lot for me, especially in combination with UEFI and IMA (Integrity Measurement Architecture) or, in fact, with securing personal credentials and even TOTP.

Yes, I read about the ROCA vulnerability, too!

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The refurbished pell compared to the old beam. Cat included.

Some weeks ago I managed to kill my old for good. I never expected it to hold that long at all when I built it back in 2016. To be fair I slacked off a lot over the last year but thanks to recent events forcing everyone to stay at home I stepped up my again.

Don’t train alone, it only embeds your errors.

Vesimir, The Witcher 3

Well, Vesimir is right, but that choice do we have? So I spent the late afternoon refurbishing my fallen .

Preparing new struts. Two old struts were gone. No idea where.

Luckily there was another beam, that was part of the kitchen wall some years ago (#hausbauquatsch), with the same dimensions. I could even re-use most of the old post.

Some of the old screws were broken and I had to persuade the leftovers with a crowbar (I probably learned this in Half-Life ;))

180mm screws again

And that’s it this time. I never came back to adding any sort of dampening mats. Some use carpet or rope. I’ve even seen tires used for this. Somehow I became very fond of flying splinters all over the place though. It’s a very satisfying feeling and I even made a video about this some years ago.

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I played the visual novel game Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. I admit I didn’t even look up the details before when I got all three parts dead cheap as a bundle. I’ve a very faint memory of reading the book/s but that’s all. It looked like a decent point-and-click adventure available for and the idea was to play it via Steam Link in the living room with the kids around. Hint: Don’t do that.

The story is an emotional roller-coaster not shy of splattering blood all over the scene. There are dramatic moments where decisions have to be made [in time] but also peaceful chapters and fun moments. Some have to be spotted and can be missed. The story builds up slowly based on character development and decisions made. Or so it feels. All strings come together in the end and some scenes may change in detail but the overall outcome is probably the same. I’d have to read up on this or do another play-through to be sure though.

It’s not a difficult game. There are no riddles (minigames) to be solved. The only minigame included is some sort of timing game (“quick action”) where one has to click at the right moment. That was mostly annoying but mercifully simply reset the scene when it really mattered so one could try again.

Depiction of a town in 12th century England

The character style may be an issue for some. Animations are not very smooth and there seems to be no lip sync. Sometimes the animations don’t fire at all. The audio however is very good and makes up for this. Music and scenery are awesome. A lot of research went into this, unlike most games, and the depiction of 12th century England looks adequate [to me]. Since this is a hobby of mine I’m really thrown off if this does not match up in games [or movies]. I also catched the vibe of architectural love for cathedrals that I can relate to. While it’s timberframed buildings for me I can certainly understand the fascination. I visited Guédelon some years ago after all 😉

So if you like stories for your do yourself a favour and get this game. It’s worth every penny.

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Oh wow. The @archaeologyuk writes:

All CBA publications are now temporarily FREE to download! From practical handbooks to research reports, dig into our archives and learn something new today. Please consider making a donation if you enjoy any of these publications.@archaeologyuk

https://new.archaeologyuk.org/books-and-publications

That includes

    • Research Reports
    • Practical Handbooks
    • Archaeology for All Series
    • Scottish Burgh Series
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Bulletins
    • Education Publications
    • Other publication

Sadly it looks like their Sharepoint is currently overloaded and throttles new connections. Hope it’ll work again soon. Totally going for Timber–Framed Buildings 😀

Hat tip @VArchGroup

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This is for parents who struggle explaining to children. There’s this really old animated series “Once Upon a Time… Life” from 1986. It shows how our body’s systems, organs and defence mechanisms work. Each episode describes a different part in detail while the battle against viruses and bacteria that threaten the body is never ending. The series was translated to various languages so chances are good you’ll find it for yours as well.

My little ones suddenly wash hands [and don’t cheat while doing so]. This series, and the lesson with hand cream and glitter to show how germs spread, really helped. The kids now have an understanding why washing hands is so important by now.

Examples from the series made it easier for us to explain the current situation to them. Beside that they learned a lot of other stuff as well, of course 🙂

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Today I had to access my computer via VNC. There are several manuals how to enable VNC on a typical Linux desktop nowadays. It usually involves some sort of clicking on Sharing => Enable Screenshare and you’re done. It’s really that easy.

How would I do this however remote when I can not access my already running desktop computer via VNC? SSH is enabled on my machines since most of my work involves jumping and tunneling my way through various networks to get stuff done. Just forwarding X was not enough today.

Turns out this is really easy as well. The screensharing feature on my distribution is done with Vino. That’s an integrated server for and this is exactly what the user starts by enabling the screenshare feature. Since is part of gnome it can be configured using gsettings.

So after enabling the screenshare for testing on my laptop I tested for all existing keys by running this listing:

gsettings list-recursively | grep Vino

It’s really short and basically all settings are no-brainers. Only the password had me wondering but it turned out this is just base64 encoded (and also optional). All that is left is running the vino-server binary in the end. This needs the correct environment variable $DISPLAY set since our target is a running X session. This one we can determine by executing the command w and looking for the TTY in use. Hint: It’s :1 in this case.

 beko  ~  w
  20:35:15 up  5:12,  1 user,  load average: 1,92, 2,33, 2,37
 USER     TTY        LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
 beko     :1        15:24   ?xdm?   2:02m  0.00s /usr/libexec/gdm-x-session --run-script /usr/bin/gnome-session

Oh and you should also not connect with the X11 forward option -X because running the vino-server with this will result in some really funny endless picture in picture mode that I did totally not try out by mistake 😉

Now that I had all the information I needed I hacked together this little script that does this more or less automatically so I can forget about this again [and look it up two years later in my own blog]. It’s really crude and your mileage may vary. It does not account for multiple users or multiple running X Sessions:

export DISPLAY=$(w -oush | grep -Eo ' :[0-9]+' | uniq | cut -d \  -f 2)
echo "Display is $DISPLAY"
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino require-encryption true
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino use-alternative-port false
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino disable-background false
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino alternative-port 5900
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino icon-visibility 'client'
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino disable-xdamage false
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino authentication-methods "['vnc']"
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino prompt-enabled false
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino require-encryption true
#pw is just base64 so basically just echo -n 'awesomeness'| base64
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino vnc-password "YXdlc29tZW5lc3M="
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino view-only false
/usr/libexec/vino-server &
export VINOPID=$!
echo "Try vnc://$HOSTNAME:5900/"
echo "vino-server pid may be $VINOPID"

And that’s it. There is no root or sudo involved.

Example output executing the script

Don’t forget to kill the pid when done 🙂

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Evaluating micro.blog finally myself. All I know of it before was from presentation or FAQ and I recommended it a lot already as your one-stop solution. Time to take a closer look myself. My first trial expired because I never finished the sign up process when confronted with adding credit card information upfront. I hear this is not or no longer required and @manton, creator of all this, kindly reset my trial.

So far I’m pretty impressed. Oh and it’s also powered by – my latest favourite toy I started playing around with 😀

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Oh wow. I’m following @bobmarshall.co.uk for quite some time now but this one beats it all. “Wolf At The Door” is an interpretation of the siege of Stirling Castle in 1304.

There’s also a production video beside the rendered images and a lot of background information on the siege itself. Fiddling with Blender myself I’ve quite some understanding about the process involved so I can’t stress enough how freakin awesome this work is:

https://bobmarshall.co.uk/stirlingcastle/

Featured Image © www.bobmarshall.co.uk as of Bob Marshall’s Non-Commercial Image License Agreement