Year: 2019

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It would suffice to say aging sucks. But when I stay up late, still get enough sleep, and feel much the zombie in the morning, I can’t help but think it has more to do with how much of my youth was spent with next to no sleep.

So much of my younger days, sleep time fell somewhere between 0400 – 0700 with wake times usually 0900 – 1000. Because in my family if you wanted any peace or needed concentration that meant waiting for everyone else to be asleep. Ironically back then I didn’t consume caffeine either, lol.

Last night was more like 0045 – 0915, or about eight hours of glorious sleep. Pardon me whilst I drain coffee like crazy.

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Special bonuses to running the built in OpenSSH service on your W10 install: being able to SSH in and taskkill a fullscreen game that is stuck.

Because apparently the “Hey, let me freaking alt+tab to taskmgr!” problem remains possible even after decades ^_^.

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Looks like Prey is on sale for $6 over on Steam, or about $8 with both expansion packs.

Can’t say that the game especially tempted me on release but the reviews I’ve read over the years made me consider, might be worth playing. I suppose atg this price and when you make it the PC version, it’s a bit hard to pass up.

Despite my times with the PlayStation 2 and Xbox One, I can’t say that I have ever cared much for using a controller for shooters. For many games, yeah a controller is both fine and kinda nice. But the more precise speed and accuracy becomes necessary: the more I want a mouse ^_^.

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The painful math of availability: when you start calculating the cost of pre-ordering a recent series about to land on disc, versus how much of your wishlist could squeeze into the same price.

I’m a touch tempted to nab the pre-order of That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime Season while the first part of season one is both available and cheaper than release pricing. But at the same time checking my Amazon list: the same price range when you factor in shipping (and Prime) would equal nabbing two series–older ones more likely to disappear. Where as Rimuru might disappear before I get around to acquiring it someday.

Many series see a western releases these days but I’ve generally find availability becomes a problem within the decade. One of my favorites is quite expensive and very scarce if you want the Blu-ray, and the series only aired ~5 years ago; even its license holder only offers DVD versions on their store front :'(. Many older series often I can only find DVD releases if they made a bargain bin recycle or apply a bit of careful hunting. One in particular on my shelf kind of fit both scenarios but over a decade ago, having been adapted from a visual novel that is now ~15 years old and quite damned unavailable today.

This leads me to worrying about how much good stuff might simply disappear.

Actually that makes me think about Robot Jox. As a film that impacted me greatly as a child, I kind of leapt at the DVD offering and was disappointed by the ultra-craptacular release. It was nearly unwatchable. And then bloody amazed when the Blu-ray came out with an excellent transfer–for a film so little known that I never really expected a post-VHS anything to happen.

Sigh. It’s both a good and a bad thing that I don’t buy many discs per year, be it anime or film. Actually, I’m pretty sure Marvel’s release schedule would bankrupt me otherwise, lol.

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At least my battery usage reflects what my tablet has been up to. How much gets sucked up by my music streaming habits is kind of worrisome though.

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Over the years I have uttered many words at the software I deal with, mostly profanity.

I’m pretty sure the loving to hateful words ratio between me and ALSA is about 0 : 1,000,000. Or in short if I ever say “I effing love ALSA”, it’s a pretty safe bet that I’ve been replaced by a bodysnatcher or something.

Generally I have used ALSA directly as much as possible over the years because at the end of the road on Linux systems you will always, sadly, end up with that. But I also find that configuring and living with it tends to be a bitch on wheels of fire the more complicated people make things. Let’s say that ALSA is something I suffer not something I love.

Well, recently I’ve had a bit of a pain in my arse dealing with ALSA, GStreamer, and trying to do audio passthrough. And I’ve learned that I really do like PulseAudio.

mpv is able to do passthrough but that doesn’t suit my purposes, or let’s just say scripting that ain’t my real objective.

$ mpv –aid={track #} –audio-device=alsa/{device} –audio-channels=5.1 {my file with fancy audios}

GStreamer is smart enough to passthrough audio if you send the bits to the sink. Most elements that manipulate audio expect audio/x-raw data like you would get out of your audio decoder. But the sinks can also take other formats–much like my surround system knows how to decode pretty much anything.

What I ran into was alsasink never reporting any of the compressed formats my graphics card supports, after GStreamer tries to decipher what the device is capable of.

Enter PulseAudio!

$ gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=”{my file}” ! queue ! {demuxer} ! audio/x-ac3 ! queue ! parsebin ! pulsesink

Where I had no luck getting this to work with alsasink it was easy as pie with pulsesink.

Deciphering the documentation to configure the default profile for my card via pactl and add the formats I want to passthrough to my surround sound system was a snap that only took 15~20 minutes. Figuring out the device names used for pulsesink based on pactl list was a bit tricker. I spent 2~3 days screwing with ALSA before that.

For bonus points: I could test ahead of time using my laptop’s HDMI port and pavucontrol to configure the outputs, letting me know if this would be possible at all before I started learning how to do it with pactl.

I can’t say that I’m a big fan of the guy who wrote PA, or that I truly gave a flying hoot when the Linux desktop world went to PA and we all threw out things like aRts and ESD. My only horse in that race was I wanted audio to work in applications like mplayer and firefox without having to screw around.

In retrospect: I should have just learned how to use PulseAudio a long fucking time ago instead of dicking with /etc/asound.conf and amixer and all that BS. Because those aspects of PA really do suck less in my honest experience.

And then I find myself remembering FreeBSD and its OSS, in which the only issue I ever really had with audio was whether or not there was an suitable driver for my card, lol.

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Going by my place this far, probably ~140 some pages into That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Vol. 1 (light novel), I can’t help but think there’s still hope for me yet.

When I was a kid, I was the kind that could binge read Dune and its appendexes with Glee. As an adult I find that I don’t tend to consume many books. Much inverted as well, in that as a kid there was always a shortage of novels to read and as an adult my reading list is never zeroed.

Over the past lustrum I’ve generally noticed a pattern of sorts. Where games, TV, or books tend to consume what passes for my leisure time in cyclic spells rather than simultaneously. E.g. for a few months you’re more likely to find me in front of a game than the others; for a few months you’re more likely to find me watching videos than the others; and so on.

For the most part that doesn’t tend to bother me much. My queues are always filled leaving me with the questions of what do I have time for and what do I want to do: not a lack of content. But how wacko the graph of my reading habits would look over the past twenty years or so is kind of worrisome.

Dangers++

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Sigh, floating around the Internet I find there are a lot more light novels translated then I had hoped. In fact there’s even a notable one who seems to have distribution with most major e-book and remaining channels for p-books. Which is kind of nice as I prefer have preferences when it comes to those e-book platforms.

Better or worse danger when a series you enjoyed is also available :/.

I am reminded that the upside to being a kid was always having time to read. The upside to being an adult is having money to buy a book every now and then without having to trade any in at the used bookstore (good luck finding those). The quasi constant is unless there is never enough storage space for physical books.

Sadly, one of my favourite stories originated as a LN series and to my knowledge has never been translated. The anime and manga adaptions did make it over the English, and I have both, but the original source material remains Japanese only and well beyond my parser level :'(.