A New Year, A New Outlook

/

Greetings once again! Alex here. Going for a more positive outlook on job prospects this year, despite the current state of the Tech economy. I have a few things planned in the beginning this year. I’ll likely be going on more road trips this year, as well.

In case you haven’t seen it, click here to check out my page with dedicated links to spreadsheets detailing the status of my yearly projects! Moving on…

Hope everyone’s enjoying the new calendar year with friends or loved ones! I know I did. Love my parents and my childhood friends to bits, and it was great to see them one last time before I change up my end-of-year plans going forward. Will likely drive to see them when I eventually pick up my Aptera at the end of this coming year or beginning of 2024.

On the topic of projects, soon I may be doing a write-up in a blog post or dedicated project page on the Miyoo Mini after mine arrives. I’ll be doing more Steam Deck write-ups as well. This year I’ll also be building an AM5-based open-air desktop in the Streacom DA6 XL as well, and that might be my last desktop build for quite a while. Soon I’ll have an Ayn Loki 8 GB model with a 6600U on the way that I scored for cheap, and I’ll test out running HoloISO on there, after configuring BIOS options to be efficient with battery life.

In the last bit of news for this new year, check out my Linux Gaming reflection that I posted on Medium as a follow-up to my 2020 reflection. Things have changed quite a bit since the Deck was released! Above you’ll see me continuing to relive my childhood as I play through Pikmin 2 on my Deck. OS 3.4 is quite smooth, by the way. Love the initiative Valve is taking to support this machine.

Also, as always, here are some cool things I’ve read around the internet recently:

Finishing up the T440p repairs, attempting to fix Risk of Rain 2 modding this holiday

/

Hello there again everyone! Hope you’re having some happy holidays, for those that celebrate. This week I’ve mainly been working on finishing up the fixing of that T440p I mentioned previously, and attempting to get the r2modman mod manager working again for Risk of Rain 2. On my Nobara and Fedora Linux installs, r2modman previously opened up Risk of Rain 2 with my mods perfectly fine when hitting “Play Modded” however now that is far from the case.

That all said, first let’s take a look at those T440p repairs!

As you can see, I finally got that back panel fastened down with some screws I own!

Next, here we are replacing the LCD since the last one was bad…

…and good to go…nope! Now I’ll put this up on my Projects for Sale page once I replace the screen again. That said, I’ll likely be disabling the store while I’m out of town, then re-enabling it with all the machines I have fixed up and ready for sale when I return the first or second weekend of January. Expect another blog post out around then. I’ll be gone from the 16th of December until the 6th or 7th of January, so I’ll re-enable the store after then, with some new entries from machines I’ve fixed etc.

In other game news, here’s a screenshot of my Core Keeper server’s map! This game is my cozy place, and it’s nice that I have a dedicated server for it now. If you’ve been previously added to my Discord, I’ve pinned the game ID for the server there. Now, on to Risk of Rain 2 modding…

Recently I’ve run into some issues being able to play my favorite game in the way that I wish on Fedora and Nobara, and per my Github bug I made here, I’m experiencing some issues with the r2modman utility I’ve long been using to run Risk of Rain 2 with mods. Going to do further testing these next few days and make another blog post to see if there’s a fix for r2modman running on Linux as an appimage/rpm/deb install so we can get the game running modded again. Going to follow along with troubleshooting r2modman as I get time while I’m with my family. Above is the same video from that Github bug.

Long live my Oryx Pro. The above is a shot of my fourth gen model Oryx Pro, the oryp4 model, running Nobara Linux. Runs fine and graphics switching runs well too. This machine is going to replace the Guest Gaming Xeon machine I was using previously, as a guest gaming setup. As the battery on this doesn’t last longer than 10 minutes, and as parts are becoming harder to find for this machine, it’ll have a place next to the workbench for anyone that comes over who wants to game.

In one last little nugget of info, I’ve acquired an ODROID GO Ultra and I’ll be testing some games on there as well as possibly another tiny handheld that it has been hinted at me being gifted this holiday once I arrive in that part of the country. On the ODROID GO Ultra I flashed the most recent emulationstation image (oddly ubuntu 18.04 based) and if I end up getting a that other little chad handheld, I’ll see about flashing OnionOS on it as I’m told it may be one of the ones to support that. For now though, with the ODROID, we check to see if it can run my n64 and ps1 games from eras past!

To add some cool other things I’ve read about or found recently:

Fixing the Linksys WUSB6300 situation on Nobara/Fedora Linux

/

Greetings there, fellow nerds!

This’ll be a short post. I have a little Linksys wifi adapter laying around that I’d like to use with my prior Guest Gaming Build, however it appears I’ll need a specific driver to get it up and running.

On first startup, with this in the USB port of that desktop, no lights come on and nothing happens. I haven’t updated this machine in a while, so let’s run through some updates! After going from a 5.19.x kernel to a 6.0.10 kernel on the Nobara Linux KDE install I have on there, and restarting the system, no change was witnessed. Now I’ll jump into the terminal here and see about git cloning a certain project to get the kernel modules installed for what seems to be a realtek adapter.

As we can see from the initial effort here, I was unable to get the driver properly installed. Looking deeper into it, there’s some dkms modules that may need to be removed and cleaned up, as it’s not seeing the proper dkms.conf file here.

….actually it turns out I just needed to build the driver manually using that git repo! Things are working out fine now! See below.

Successfully connected to my home network, and am now updating the steam games and other stuff I have on that rig for visitors. Yes, I also unplugged that Ethernet cable afterwards. One thing I’ll have to keep in mind is that I may have to rebuild the driver whenever I install a fresh kernel, but this machine only sees monthly updates, so it should be fine.

I refurbished a T440p! Or maybe the repairs are ongoing…

/

Greetings fellow humans! I’ve been waiting a few weeks for some parts to come in for the T440p I’m upcycling and refurbishing, so someone else out there can continue using this bad boi. While I’ve learned a lot from my various tech support jobs and internships I’ve had during the past 10 years of my life or so, manually fixing modular hardware continues to be calming to my mind.

The current state of things, before rennovations. While this machine was probably one of my craigslist snags in the past two years or so, I found a somewhat-functioning Thinkpad Advanced Dock from a friend’s apartment complex’s e-waste area. That guy just needs a pin bent back into its proper slot and it should connect fine to laptops again. Pic of that below.

Lil pin boyo. If you look at the upper left of the connector, you’ll see the retaining pin that’s bent.

I also have some 8GB modules on hand for upgrading this T440p to 16GB of RAM. Going to give it an isopropyl wipedown next before I start swapping parts. This is the first time I took the CD-to-SATA adapter for this project out of its sleeve, and it looks like it came with a cute little screwdriver as well as screws! That’s cute :)

Changing laptop subjects real quick, above is the Thinkpad X230 I’ve had for a little while. It’s had a keyboard replacement, RAM upgrade, and the like. I will also be putting this up for sale at some point. I think I’ll replace the screen bezel (see bottom left corner) if it isn’t too costly.

Back on the T440p, I went ahead and replaced the CD drive with a SATA slot and a 240GB SSD. If you look real close at the little window-to-sdd-drive from the left of the RAM, you can see that PNY SSD’s serial poking through. Upgraded the RAM to 16GB as well, and swapped out the old 7000 series Intel wifi card for their newer AX201, which should be Wifi 6 compatible. This is shaping up to be a nice lil used machine! I’d say, prior to my moving to a Framework Laptop, this T440p and my subsequent P51 were the most modular laptops I owned.

Also, recently received a free backplate from a friend…but it turns out to have been hopelessly bent…and unable to go on the rear of the machine properly, regardless of bending it back with a vice.

Swapped that bad trackpad.

Here’s a shot of what that looks like from the bottom. As the machine wouldn’t boot with an AX201 card, I kept the original wifi card in there. Might have been due to some BIOS whitelisting. Also now two SSDS are installed!

Also added an i7-4710mq to replace the dual core i5 that was in there. I love swappable processors in laptops! Oh how I miss those days… I’m sorry for the blurry pic here! That was the only one I had before cleaning the rest of the dry thermal muck off, pasting it and screwing the cooler back on.

Since the original replacement back panel to this T440p I wanted to fix was quite bent, I’ve finally replaced it after weeks of waiting!

Here’s the test of Nobara Linux, technically Fedora 36 with newer stacks. As you can see here, the screen is damaged. Once I get a replacement 1080p screen to replace this damaged 768p one, I think I’ll list this project on my store soon.

Giving KubeSail a shot on my Pi 4

/

I received a Pibox in the past from the Kubesail people, but I wanted to try adding an older Pi 4 to my cluster via their instructions.

Per the above recording, this was try number….seven? …at trying to get K3s setup on the Pi OS Lite operating system. It seems the documentation by Kubesail here recommends that.

Looks like running Ubuntu Server 22.04.1 for Raspberry Pi out of the box seems to work better, this time around? I was successfully able to add this test pi to my account this time around. Perhaps they need to update their documentation for getting your Pi synced up with KubeSail to recommend Ubuntu Server? Glad it’s working now. I used the Raspberry Pi Imager on Fedora to burn the image straight to the SSD my Pi is booting from.

Sadly, it looks like the Pi is not showing up in my cluster list after running through their instructions as well as prepping the ubuntu install with the proper modules etc. Seems I have a bit more research to do before I move forward…