Month: June 2022

Factorio notes, several hours in

I recently found a new mall blueprint that I like reasonably well. illHam’s Starter Base. It was in the Factorio School’s most recent list instead of the most popular list; but there were things I liked about it. Mostly, I liked that it did all three: red, green, and black science, and, it includes solar panels.

The only thing I don’t really like about illHam’s Starter Base is that the chests are limited by inventory slots and not by inserters controlled by circuits. In other words, each chest has a maximum number of slots enabled, so what limits the count of items produced is the inventory capacity getting full. The problem with this is that sometimes I have too many items in my personal inventory, and stuffing them back into the production chest is denied when the maximum-number-of-slots scheme is in place. So now there are 58 chests that need to be retrofited with red wire to the inserter, and the condition set on the inserter to stop when the count of items in the chest hits the limit. If I have too many items in personal inventory, I can shove them all into the chest with a trivial ctrl-click.

For me, solar panels are too much work / take too long to be done without robots. The quest for robots lead me to Nilaus’ YouTube video Robo Rush; because Robot abuse should not be delayed. Here’s the blueprint string:

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Next, have the robots build red circuits, so I can build roboports. 😉

Lastly, I fight biters really poorly. I’m old, so my brain does not go as fast as young people’s brains. I’m sure doing combat with biters and eliminating their nests is much easier for brains that think quickly. For me, I just die a lot. It is frustrating. But with illHam’s Starter Base and the production of piercing rounds magazines, I can put a perimeter of turrets up and not have to worry so much about biters.

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The problem with this one is that it uses underground belts, which are very expensive.

Wow OpenSuSE is terrible at iPhone photos

At first, it didn’t work. So I did some searching, and found that I needed to add ifuse musmuxd libplist and libimobiledevice. Okay, did that. It still doesn’t work.

I should mention that when I connected the iPhone, Gwenview would recognize a device had been plugged in, but would spit at me that protocol capture:/ was not recognized – both before and after the addition of these packages. This appears to have been a problem seven years ago.

Eventually I find that perhaps digiKam will do what Gwenview will not. Okay, add that.

DigiKam does see the photographs on the iPhone. Great! I should be able to download them now, right?

😝

All attempts to download (backup) the photos result in the question of “to where?” This is very reasonable.

Since this is a new installation of digiKam, there is no Album defined. The download dialog box has a button “New Album” but it does nothing. Probably in a log file somewhere, some programmer wrote out LOL, dumbass.

In the main digiKam window, the Album menu has all items greyed out (including the “New” album choice with Ctrl-N for the shortcut). LOL, dumbass.

Eventually, I learn to do Settings+Configure digiKam, Collections menu and choose Add Collection. Apparently a collection is the same as an album, or not, but it appears I now have a backup copy of one of the iPhone groups of photos. I’m just kind of amazed it was this hard, and by the way, KDE isn’t telling me anything about the progress of files copies (which in the olden days, it would).

Up in the upper right corner, though, is this really cool looking text, digiKam.org which has each letter in the domain name highlighted, from left to right. That’s cool – it’s like a throbber, but for the help button. Other than the Cancel button being lit up on the Apple Inc. iPhone window, I cannot tell if file transfers are happening or not.

And of course, hooray for random crashes while stuff is doing work.

“Free” apps for your smartphone

There has been a long standing piece of knowledge in the computer industry that if you are not the customer, you are the product being sold. That is to say that advertisers are the customer, and the data that the “free” services harvest from you is what is being sold to them.

There’s a reason why you get offers for a free hamburger if you order is from their app (and the like). If you use the app, you collect reward points and get discounts and such.

Oh By The Way

TANSTAAFL

Do be very selective in what apps you install. They are all pretty much data harvesting machines.

Another favorite Factorio blueprint – Automated Artillery Expansion

I did edit it and create a smaller version of my own:

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The original is here: Automated Artillery Expansion – Factorio Master Class by Nilaus

It does have the snap-to-grid option enabled, which means it would have been nice to have done those on the first city blocks. But still, it works fine.

This came from a Youtube series Factorio Master Class by Nilaus.