HakFoo

(Alt: The Drake meme. Upper panel shows him hiding his face from "Securing Customer Data". Lower panel shows him smirking at "Securing Public API Documentation")

The wallpaper is one of the standard XBM images included with the X11 distribution (in OpenBSD, it's at /usr/X11R6/include/X11/bitmaps/mensetmanus).

The fonts are the Modern DOS collection (8x8 for the battery status, 8x16 for the terminal). The window titles use the classic bitmap Helvetica which has no antialiasing and gives it a unique "Vintage system" vibe.

I was going to give it a full CDE install, but the build guides don't seem to work right; I might switch to SparkyLinux for this machine because suspending fails just often enough to be annoying.

I've been prepping my home network for the promise of "fibre coming soon" in my city.

That meant wrapping the house in Cat6A like a giant arachnid nest, and having a couple desktops with 2.5GbE on board, but I'm not sure what to do about the routing setup. I have three Ethernet runs to "30cm from the ISP equipment" now.

For gigabit in this scenario, the turnkey solution is any random Wi-Fi/router/firewall box which has 1Gb WAN and four 1Gb LAN ports. But where do you go when you start wanting 2.5GbE?

It seems like the "Wifi/Router/firewall" boxes with 2.5GbE ports are quite spendy, especially if you want more than one LAN port. I know a lot of this cost is because they tend to be the latest-and-greatest in terms of Wi-Fi, with 82 antennae, but that's only a secondary consideration for me with the heavy users on wires. Hell, my smartphone only supports the 2.4GHz band!

It seems like other options include:

• 2-box solution: A slightly cheaper Wifi-Router with 2.5GbE WAN and one LAN port and using a cheap unmanaged 2.5 switch to provide the desired port count.
• 3-box solution: Said cheap unmanaged switch, plus a wired-centric router, and use the old Wifi/Router as an access point only

I'm sort of not thrilled about the two or three-box solutions as they have poor "wife acceptance factor" as they say. A bunch of random boxes that inevitably won't stack neatly and have three big ugly wall warts. Is there some magic product that would fit my needs perfectly I'm missing?

I'm trying to get back into GW2, in large part because it's one of the few MMOs I've liked that actually works well under Linux.

For a frame of reference, my main was a Nord Necromancer with ~33 mastery points, and the three easier-to-acquire mounts. I completed the main story and HoT, and sort of drifted out in the middle of PoF for like two years. Just bought the EoD expansion while it's on sale.

I've got one 20-slot bag and four 15-slots, and maybe 1-2 slots free at any given time. I suspect my problem is less "bag space" per se, and more a hoarding tendency-- crafting items, "turn it into some NPC for a quest" items, seasonal tonics and exchange items. Hell, I still have the Level 80 token that came with the original purchase, because I figured if I skipped to 80, I'd miss the Personal Story.

Is there a good rundown for discard/sell/keep somewhere? One thing I've seen in other games that I appreciate is when they say "these seasonal items are now obsolete and will be deleted/can be auto-sold for trifling sums".

Alternatively, should I just treat this character as a walking treasure chest, park him, and try to shared-slot things of actual value to a new character? Part of me says to fire up a revenant-- I always mean to try it, but I suspect now I'll be disappointed after spending my holiday playing too much Code Vein, where it was the term for "formally speaking not vampires, but, yeah... vampires."

I got a Sylvania-branded strand of 50 "warm-white" LEDs (plus two loose spares) for USD 2.50 at the local grocery store, which I'm pretty sure is cheaper than buying a bag of the bare LEDs would run. They also come in other colours (blue, cool-white, bright red, multicolour)

The individual LEDs come in plastic shells which can be cracked open to retrieve the goodies inside, and have plenty long leads that are folded over to fit the "bulb" mounting.

Picture of a disassembled Duracell 9v battery. Below the terminal assembly is a clear plastic case where you can see six sets of stacked rectangular terminals and fillings.

Writing this up because I haven't seen a proper review.

Note I've only been using the case for about a day so I don't have a strong baseline on thermals; this is mostly about the build experience.

Why I was interested My preference towards cases is very old-school. I like external drive bays, and have no interest in tempered glass or RGB. My long-term daily driver was a Cooler Master HAF XB, which is a delight to build in and offers exceptional expandability for its size.

The one place it's sort of limited is depth for GPU-- I have an ASRock OC Formula 6900XT, and it's 330mm, and you have to remove front fans and carefully wiggle to get it out of a slot. This has resulted in me breaking the stupid clip on my mainboard.

So I had a $125 rebate voucher burning a hole in my pocket and a growing sense that most of the remaining cases with drive bays will be gone in another year or two, so I'd better get one now or it will be gone.

The obvious question Yes, the front panel can be opened over the intake fans. It's a seperate piece held in with like 8 snaps. The pictures on product pages look like CGI, so it's not clear if this is a decorative cut or an actual removable panel. It's sort of unfinished-- a big "B" moulded into it. You could probably cut some mesh or 3-D print something and attach it with magnets for easier removal.

Positives The case's aesthetics, as much as there are any (it's much plainer than old style plastic and metal cases tended to be) are defined by the "five-head" -- the big plastic shell that goes about 3cm above the top of the metal chassis itself. This actually does offer some nice features over the typical "stamped metal with a fan grille drilled in it" top panel: the top mesh element pops out on spring-loaded clips, and that gives you an extra degree of access to the internals from above. Obviously, the intent is to either mount fans there or leave the plastic sound deadeners in place, but this does help with the build.

The drive bays are deep enough for modern optical drives with a bit of clearance, so they aren't intruding into the mainboard area. Both four-bay 3.5" cages can be removed.

The captive screws and pressure springs to retain optical drives work well, but why only two sets of captive screws when there are three bays?

Negatives There are numerous cable management holes, but they tend to be on the small size. My PSU (old Corsair RM1000x) has thick and inflexible cables because there are capacitors built into the cables, and the main ATX cable barely fit through the hole. I was able to get a fairly clean build with some effort though. (By detaching the ATX cable from the PSU and feeding it in that way, you avoid trying to cram the thickest part through the small hole.

Only six standoffs are pre-installed. Three extra are included in the box (I'd prefer four, since many mainboards have 10 mounting holes and you can be pathological). When I went to install the other three, they were not smoothly pre-tapped; a small "nut driver" adapter is provided to mount them properly, but this was frustrating, and since I didn't notice the "nut driver" at first, I ended up fighting with a real nut driver that was too small to provide sufficient torque.

It includes a GPU support, which is cleverly designed-- you can slot it into a rail, screw it down tight, and set an arm to prop the card up. Unfortunately, it was not suitable for the OC Formula 6900XT, a tall, 2.5 slot monstrosity-- you could only barely bolt it in at the edge of the rail, and the arm ends up in a poor position to engage the card-- it's simply too short and would end up having to poke directly into a fan. I ended up using the supplementary bracket ASRock provided with the card.

Neutral The top and front plastic panels are held on with pressure-fit clips, you can pull them off manually. This makes it slightly precarious if you grab the top of the case the wrong way.

It comes with three stock fans which are reasonably quiet, but I hear a mold hum with the case at ear-height. It's probably less noticable when the case is placed on the floor-- with no tempered glass, it's probably safer to kick.

The fans are wired to a rudimentary fanbus (off-low-high), which has extra headers, but are only 3-pin models. I may end up replacing them with my old Arctic P12s and bypass the fanbus so I can get monitoring through the mainboard.

Overall, I found you might not be able to use the most obvious cable routing for some cables, i. e. the front panel USB and audio, due to length and routing needs. This is obviously dependent on the choice of mainboard. I also ended up cracking out my extra-long SATA cables; your routing may be easier, but I had problems with the onboard SATA and optical drives, so I use a M.2 to SATA card to get some ports that work reliably.

The aesthetic is a little weird due to the "five-head" design. While it's very subdued and plain in many ways, the idea that drive bays start a random-looking 5cm from the top of the case resonates strangely with me; it seems like if asked an AI to draw a full tower case. I suspect that it might be possible to coopt some of that space for something more useful, like a card reader, but I'm trying to avoid breaking out the Dremel just yet. The printed-on "Silent Titan" logo is odd; I already bought the case, you don't need to remind me what it is.

Overall The case is serviceable and delivers on most of the important things I was looking for (screaming "IT HAS DRIVE BAYS" in that classic girl "IT HAS POCKETS" style). I suspect many of my issues with the build were due to corner-case compatibility issues.

From the description of some random eBay listing. The text reads:

"Shipping: Free Economy Shipping from Greater China to worldwide. See details.
International shipment of items may be subject to customs processing and additional charges. (information icon) Located in: Sofia, Bulgaria"

We spent so long staring at Taipei that nobody noticed when the entire PLA burrowed its way through the Earth and popped up in Eastern Europe!

Hopefully they brought some Belt and Road infrastructure cash. I don't think they've been doing so hot since the Warsaw Pact fell.

(screenshot of a rxvt window decorated with a fvwm theme. The title bar is rotated to the left and highlighted in red with white text, and reads 'marada@kalutika:~'.

The window is green-on-black and contains a vim session with the text 'You may not like it, but this is what peak desktop performance looks like.

Each window has a clear, square border around the edge. You know where one window ends and the next begins, and exactly where you can drag to resize them, even if you stack one Dark Mode window slightly ajar of another.

There's a titlebar that has a huge segment which can be clicked and dragged to move the window, rather than tiny icons and a search bar eating up all but a handful of pixels. The active window has a distinct colour you can immediately pick out.

That title bar is mounted on the side, so it's not consuming precious screen real estate when the trend is towards 52:9 aspect-ratio ultrawide monitors whichbarely have enough vertical space for one full-sized window.

It's generated by a Window Manager. Not a Desktop Environment. Not a Compositor. It draws windows and menus, and launches other programs. It does not include a mixer, stopwatch timer, Mastodon feed reader, or half the video drivers. It has a memory footprint of fourteen megabytes, and a configuration file format that hasn't meaningfully changed since Bill Clinton was in the WhiteHouse.

GNOME was a mistake.'

At the time the original 5150 was released, there were already other 8088 and 8086 systems on the market. And it didn't really strain the envelope-- no IBM-exclusive chips, and the whole 8-bit bus and support chips angle.

It undoubtedly succeeded in large part because it was a "known quantity" for commercial customers-- an approved vendor, known support and warranty policies, too big to fail. I know even as late as the mid-80s, Commodore was still advertising "You're paying $$$ more (for a PCjr instead of a 64) because the box says IBM on it"

But I was curious if there was anything that it also offered that was uniquely compelling in the at the moment of launch.

There are a few things I can think of, but I'm a little skeptical of most of them:

• The monochrome display (5151) was very well-regarded; 80x25 of very legible text and a nice long-persistence phosphor. I had one for a while in the 90s and it was quite good even though the geometry was shot. But was it much better than other "professional" machines, particularly ones using dedicated terminals or custom monitors which might also offer better tubes/drive circuitry than a repurposed home TV?

• Offering it as a turnkey package-- there were 8086 S-100 or similar setups far more robust than any 5150, but you were typically assembling it yourself, or relying on a much smaller vendor (i. e. Cromemco) to build a package deal.

• The overall ergonomic package-- I feel like there weren't too many pre-1981 machines that match the overall layout of "modest size, all-inclusive desktop box you can use as a monitor riser, and quality detachable keyboard" A backplane box and seperate drive enclosures would start to get bulky, and keyboard-is-the-case seemed to become a signature of low-end home computers.

If you walked into a brand-neutral shop in late 1981, what was the unique selling proposition for the IBM PC? The Apple II was biggest software/installed base, the Atari 800 had the best graphics, CP/M machines had established business software already.

The KiCAD project is effectively complete (it's a memory card for an 8088-class PC), but it sure makes the workspace look exciting.

The background is one of the New Horizons photos.

I've been using it recently on a machine that formerly used a tweaked version of the "Anonymous Super Turbo XT BIOS" and it offers subtle, modest improvements.

In my narrow experience, it fixed some freeze issues with Civilization when using a NEC processor, and the boot display is clean and more informative.