Author: davidg

Need to print + OpenSUSE 15.3 upgrade – What could go wrong?

I needed to go to a new doctor yesterday. The day before, they had called and left a message that I would also need to bring along a list of my current pharmaceutical prescriptions. I got the bright idea to log in to the online pharmacy web page and print my current list. This is about 40 minutes before I need to step in to the home office to report to work.

It went poorly.

Still, if this is the worst thing to happen to me this month, I am a fortunate man. I’m a fortunate man who cannot print from Linux, but I’m still a fortunate man.

Certainly part of the problem is my fault; I had upgraded from OpenSUSE 15.2 to 15.3. 15.3 was released two weeks ago; I upgraded about ten days ago. This was not enough bake time. I should have listened to my own advice: do less yeet and more tootle. But yeeted I had, so the story unfolds ….

Okay, so I logged in to the pharmacy web page, and used the browser to print. Got no printer noises, but no error about anything, either.

The print driver I’m using is from OpenPrinting.org and it did previously work. I did print something three weeks ago. But today, nada.

Go into the printer manager in OpenSUSE 15.3 and do a test print. No printer noise, but no error alert either. It asks if the print worked; (no) so says do journalctl to see what went wrong.

I don’t like journalctl. It spits at me about permissions, and I used to just be able to just grep a log file – any log file – and search for terms like “error” or “warn” or “cups”. I just want to print, man.

Okay, dig in and find that there is an error with the driver. Reinstall the driver. The driver will not install.

The driver is dependent on LSB. LSB = Linux Standard Base, which was the idea that the various packagers of Linux would all agree on what should be in a base install of Linux (that supports LSB). Software vendors could count on the base packages being there, or worst case say, “this software needs LSB, please install it”.

I had previously installed LSB (to get the printer to work), but now it’s missing. That must have happened during the 15.2 to 15.3 upgrade.

Okay, no big deal: zypper in lsb

Problem: nothing provides ‘/usr/bin/pidof’ needed by the to be installed lsb-foo

Well that’s darling. It’s a bug, and it is fixed in OpenSUSE Factory. I just want to print, man, and it’s now 20 minutes before work.

Okay, go to the fallback position: print to PDF, copy the file to a Winders box, and print from there.

I have Nextcloud client installed and running on most of my machines. Copy the file to my Nextcloud folder. Go to a Windows machine – there are no new files in the Nextcloud folder. Machine is acting wonky anyway, so I reboot (yeet!)

  1. Microsoft decided I needed a Weather widget in my taskbar, so they inserted one without asking. I need to lose some time praying to remove the murderous rage I have toward Microsoft for being so un-invitingly forcefully helpful.
  2. Nextcloud client has an update, would I like to install? Yes, please. What was that about less yeet and more tootle?
  3. Nextcloud client version 3.2.2 is no longer compatible with your older Nextcloud server. Have a nice day!
  4. It is now 10 minutes before work. I just want to print, man; my travel time to the doctor did not pad with lead time for print fixing, and as the famous mage once said: “Outlook not so good”.

Okay, what about the web page version of the Nextcloud server? Right, dang, I forgot I was going to need my physical 2nd Factor authentication key. Back to the living room to get it.

Logged in on the Windows box. The file is not there.

Dang it! The Nextcloud client on my Linux box has the same version problem. Back to the living room, open up the Nextcloud files web portal, do the physical physical 2nd Factor authentication thing and copy the file up. Back to the home office, open the PDF in the Nextcloud files web portal in Firefox and hit the print button. Finally, noise from the printer in the living room.

Put on a shirt and my shorts, get an energy drink out of the refrigerator, and I’ve got 30 seconds to spare.

“One does not simply press print”

Next week, I’m going to install a firewall router!

New toy: Raspberry Pi 4

So of course, the first thing I want to do (after installing Raspbian and applying updates) was to add some aliases and switch the editor and history search commands.

Changing the editor to vim

Changing the editor to vim was easier, once I knew how.

  • Install vim
  • update-alternatives

Vim does not come installed by default on a Raspbian. But adding it is easy enough:

sudo apt-get install vim

I had found someone that said (when thing weren’t working the way I wanted) to sudo apt-get install vim-full ← this does not work! There is no package “vim-full” from which to install. At least not on my fresh-out-of-the-box Raspbian machine.

sudo update-alternatives --config editor

This opened up a list of available editors, numbered for selection, with an asterisk next to the default. It was set to nano, but I wanted vim.

Except that there were two vim choices: vim.basic and vim.tiny

Which one to choose? Neither looks like vim.full to me. 😉

Turns out I wanted vim.basic

Now, I can be in the less utility, and if I want to edit the file (and I already have permission to do so) I can hit the v key and be editing in vim.

Adding some aliases

This was super easy. I created a file, ~/.bash_aliases and added the alias commands to it.

alias ..='cd ..'
alias ll='ls -l'

Changing the history search keystrokes

This one was the closest to what is described in my How to make Ubuntu have a nice bash shell like OpenSuSE post.

sudo vim /etc/inputrc

Find the commented out commands, and uncomment them:

# alternate mappings for "page up" and "page down" to search the history
# "\e[5~": history-search-backward
# "\e[6~": history-search-forward

All I have to do is to delete the “#” character that declares \e[5~ and \e[6~ to be a comment. With vim, this is the x key

Once you’ve been bamboozled ….

Once you’ve been bamboozled, it is almost impossible to become un-bamboozled.

This was from an AskReddit question about “What was the best quote or life changing saying or most profound advice people had heard?” Something like that; but my search did not find the exact entry to cite. One of the answers was this one. It’s great. I mentioned this to a friend of mine; he thought Carl Sagan had said it. Well, essentially yes, but not exactly. Carl Sagan’s quote goes like this:

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/85171-one-of-the-saddest-lessons-of-history-is-this-if

This is well said, but also really wordy, plus throws in a ten dollar word: charlatan. I like the short and sweet version.

It seems to me that the almost the entire USA has been bamboozled about politics.

The Left has been bamboozled that Donald Trump Is A Bad Man.

The Right has been bamboozled that Donald Trump Is A Good Man.

I remember seeing a cartoon not that long ago (within a year or two) that had a King on a balcony with an advisor, overlooking an angry mob. Here it is (I linked to the original source, so you can get to that web page – credit where credit is due):

The advisor was saying to the King: “Oh, You don’t need to fight them – you just need to convince the pitchfork people that the torch people want to take away their pitchforks.”

When I went looking, Google search failed to find this cartoon. I mentioned it to a friend, and he saw it on Facebook. I asked him to forward it to me. From there, I was able upload it to Google Image Search, and then finally find the original publisher. The conspiracy theorist spoiler alerter in me thinks the search engines of the day have de-ranked or removed this image in search results because it spoils the narrative.

The idea here is an intersection between the two old sayings A house divided against itself cannot stand and The People restrain themselves and anxiously hope for just two things: bread and circuses.

The Left is thoroughly convinced that The Right has been bamboozled. The Right is thoroughly convinced that The Left has been bamboozled.

I am convinced both have been bamboozled by the deep state and it’s unholy alliance with mass media. When I say mass media, I’m also looking at you: Facebook and Google and Twitter.

Here’s the thing about Donald Trump: he was never supposed to be President.

The deep state mass media planned to get Hillary Clinton. They thought they earned Hillary Clinton. By knocking out every good opposing candidate, there was no way that Hillary could lose. There was no way that Hillary Clinton could lose against Donald Fucking Trump. Knock out every other candidate, and the election was a done deal.

This was perfect for the deep state, because Bill and Hillary Clinton were already players. They’d played ball before, and were happy to play again. As insiders, their keepers had leverage on them, and as players, they knew their keepers would be comforted with them as lackeys. It was a win-win situation.

But (“oh by the way”) Hillary Clinton was the worst possible candidate for President.

Which is proven out, because she lost to Donald Fucking Trump, dontcha know. Fair and square, she was simply that BAD of a candidate. And to be fair, Donald was actually a very good campaigner, and a master of Twitter trolling. His campaign speeches were super entertaining. The deep state completely underestimated how well Donald would perform.

Donald was an outsider. This was a disaster for the deep state.

Chuck Schumer delivering the deep state warning to Donald Trump to play ball or else (after election but before inauguration).

  • Donald bristled at being told to take his role of lackey. Now the deep state is on his shit list.
  • If Donald made it to a second term, there was no remaining leverage to keep him from ravaging the deep state.

Does it appear to you that Donald rolled over and became a lackey?

The only choice the deep state had was to backstab the sitting President every chance they could get.

Wow did they ever.

The Commander In Chief: that is who the deep state is supposed to obey. Instead, they did everything they could to subvert CIC/POTUS. They became traitors to the rule of law.

And you, dear reader, got taken in by the charlatans that Donald Trump Is A <‽> Man.

rsync is wonderful, but ….

rsync /datastore/61/E4 /newserver/61/E4

is wrong and will mess you up!

Imagine if you will, that you have a whole bunch of data stored on an old server, and you need to copy it to a new server. The rsync utility would be an obvious way to go. There are things about the job and rsync that you might want to tweak, though, and that’s where things get ugly. Part of this is bash’ fault.

Imagine if you will, that your data store is 120 million small files (emails) stored in 256**3 directories. 256 cubed is 16,777,216 sub directories.

The programmer that created the data store to hold all these files needed subdirectories to put the files in. Linux doesn’t really like 20,000+ files in one directory. It would be better to have more subdirectories, with less files per subdirectory. So the programmer started with a loop:

for 00 .. FF mkdir

Then the programmer did a change directory into each of those directories he just made, and did the exact same thing. 

cd 00;for 00 .. FF mkdir;cd ..
cd 01;for 00 .. FF mkdir;cd ..
cd 02;for 00 .. FF mkdir;cd ..
...
cd FF;for 00 .. FF mkdir;cd ..

That gets you to 256 squared, which is 65,536

And then the programmer did a change directory into each of those directories he just made, and did the exact same thing. All 65,536 second level subdirectories got a third level of another 256 subdirectories. That gets you to 16,777,216 which is 256 cubed.

So your file server directory structure might contain this:

/datastore/61/E4/7D

Inside good old 61/E4/7D there might be twenty to thirty files, each one holding the content of an email, or a metadata file about the email. The programmer was pretty good about filling all of the datastore subdirectories to nineteen files each, then twenty files each, then twenty one files each. No Linux system is going to have a problem with twenty one files in a subdirectory.

The only real problem here is if you need to traverse everything in /datastore – this takes forever

Back to the problem of copying everything from /datastore to /newserver. Let’s assume that /newserver in on a different machine, and we are using remote file system mount command to make the remote machine appear to be a local disk (mount point).

You might think the rsync command ought to look like this:

rsync --archive /datastore /newserver

There are two things that make this sub-optimal. First, it is single-threaded. Second, there is no progress feedback.

The single threaded part isn’t so bad; it just means that we are losing speed due to rsync overhead. The server has twelve cores, the network is 10 Gbps Fibre Channel, the /datastore disk has multiple spindles, but rsync was designed for slow networks way back when in the bad old days.

At this point, you might ask “why not do a straight cp -r” (copy command, recursive)? It’s not a terrible idea; but, what if there were a network glitch? The entire cp -r would have to be started over, and every bit already copied would be copied again. This is where rsync shines: if the files in the destination are the same as the source, the copy is skipped. cp -r also suffers from the same lack of progress feedback.

Did I mention that the 120 million files are also 9.3 terabytes of files? I really don’t want to get to 98% done and then have a network glitch cause me to copy another 9.3 TB over, which would be the case with cp -r

The tests I’ve done indicate that four rsync commands, running simultaneously, copied the most data in the shortest period of time in my environment*. More than four rsync commands at once, and I started to saturate the disk channel. Less than four rsync commands, and something is waiting around, twiddling it’s thumbs, waiting for rsync to get busy with the copying again, which it will do, as soon as it finishes up with the overhead it’s working on.

The other problem is a lack of progress feedback. The copy is going to take multiple days. It would be nice to know if we are at 8% complete or 41% complete or 93% complete. It would be nice to be able to compute what the percentage complete is.

Well, how about 64K rsync commands, each with a print statement of the directory it is processing? And if we could run four of them in parallel, we could get the multiple jobs speedup too.

You might think the rsync commands ought to look like this:

rsync --archive /datastore/00/00 /newserver/00/00
rsync --archive /datastore/00/01 /newserver/00/01
rsync --archive /datastore/00/02 /newserver/00/02
rsync --archive /datastore/00/03 /newserver/00/03
rsync --archive /datastore/00/04 /newserver/00/04
...
rsync --archive /datastore/FF/FF /newserver/FF/FF

but WOW would you ever be wrong!

Remember old /datastore/61/E4/7D up there? This format for rsync would put E4 in the source under E4 in the destination! In other words, although the source looks like this: /datastore/61/E4/7D the destination would look like this: /newserver/61/E4/E4/7D

To be done right, the command needs to look like this:

rsync --archive /datastore/00/00/* /newserver/00/00/
rsync --archive /datastore/00/01/* /newserver/00/01/
rsync --archive /datastore/00/02/* /newserver/00/02/
rsync --archive /datastore/00/03/* /newserver/00/03/
rsync --archive /datastore/00/04/* /newserver/00/04/
...
rsync --archive /datastore/FF/FF/* /newserver/FF/FF/

The source needs a trailing slash and asterisk to tell rsync to copy the stuff underneath the source (not the source itself) to the destination (which is finished with a slash).

Enter the problem where bash is a pain in the ass.

Well, before I go there, let me mention that it wasn’t too bad to write a Perl script to write this bash script, and do three things per source and destination pair:

echo "rsync --archive /datastore/00/00/* /newserver/00/00/"
rsync --archive /datastore/00/00/* /newserver/00/00/
echo "/newserver/00/00/" > /tmp/tracking_report_file

The first line prints the current status to the screen. The second line launches the rsync. The third line overwrites a file, tracking_report_file, with the last rsync finished.

So, crank up screen first, launch the bash script, and some number of days from now, the copying will be done.

That /tmp/tracking_report_file gives me a pair of hexadecimal pairs, which I can then use to compute percentage complete. For example, when /newserver/7F/FF updates to /newserver/80/00, then we are going to be just over 50% done.

Heck, I can detach from screen, and I don’t even have to watch the rsyncs happen. I mean that I do need to, but I don’t have to. Better yet, I can take the same routine that converts the pair of hexadecimal pairs into percentage complete and wrap that inside a cron job that sends an email. Progress status tracking accomplished!

But this does not solve the single-threaded rsync problem.

And ultimately, I could not get it done.

What looked to be an okay solution was using the find command, to feed into xargs which could do shell stuff in parallel. I even got as far as getting bash shell variables to create the rsync --archive /datastore/00/00/00 /newserver/00/00/00 part.

Okay, that would be 16 million smaller rsyncs instead of 64 thousand larger ones, but I might even be able to bump up the parallelism to six or eight or nine.

But the serious problem the rsync –archive /datastore/00/00/00 /newserver/00/00/00 command has, is the naive problem: the missing trailing slash and asterisk are going to put the source underneath a destination. I need to put the trailing slash and asterisk on there.

And bash says “that’s a nope”

Trailing slashes and asterisks are automatically culled from output, because (reasons).

Oh well. The find command also spits out the directories it finds in rather random order. My bash script with sequential rsyncs by sorted order means that the last one complete really is some-percentage-of-the-total done. But if find chooses to spit out /datastore/b3/8e/76 instead of /datastore/00/00/00 then my status tracking doesn’t actually work. I would be forced to traverse all of /newserver/ and count which of the 17 million are complete; which would take freaking forever.

Yes, I said 17 million. Did you notice that the programmer that created subdirectories did some of them in lowercase hexadecimal? That happened when we brought in another email system (Exchange). Lovely.

*the last time I did this migration, although it was on a four core box, then.

Microsoft fouled up when they got rid of gallery.technet.microsoft.com

In the real world, people like to find solutions and then link to the solution as a form of documentation. It is a way of being helpful. I can feel good about myself if I help you out (or at least I’m trying to help you out). The result is that there tend to be a lot of forum discussions and blog posts that have a link to a gallery.technet.microsoft.com script that solves the problem.

As solutions go, gallery.technet.microsoft.com was a great idea. People write a script, that script works, so the author donates it to world at large by publishing it (free of charge and disclaiming all complaints about damage). Microsoft benefited because if you knew nothing else, you knew to go search there for possible help. If I’m trying to solve a problem, and I find the solution on gallery.technet.microsoft.com, then I’m helping if I tell people “here was my problem, and I found the solution: foobarbaz at gallery.technet.microsoft.com”

Unfortunately for us, someone at Microsoft felt the need to push the world into complying with their grandiose idea: “Let’s get rid of Technet and replace it with docs.microsoft.com !”

This was a terrible idea.

And no-one at Microsoft was grown-up enough to stop it.

So now, the world wide web is littered with broken links to solutions that used to be helpful, but now go to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/samples/browse/?redirectedfrom=SomethingThatUsedToBeGreatButWeKilledIt

I don’t know what they were thinking, but it was probably someone wanting to pridefully change the world to comply with the way they thought the world ought to be. All they really did is break a previously good thing.

Update to AMD Ryzen 1700 and power sleep failure

I had written about a fix for my machine because it has a slightly older AMD Ryzen 1700 CPU. I recently re-installed an older version of OpenSUSE (wiping out the previous OS drive contents and replacing it). This did what I wanted it to do; but, it also wiped out the fix for the power sleep problem. I went back, and tried to implement the same fix, but it didn’t work. So here’s my note about a better fix.

I still am using the script in /etc/init.d which I named set_c6_acpi_state_disabled.sh

I did have to edit it to invoke python3 instead of just python.

#!/bin/sh 
# ScriptName=set_c6_acpi_state_disabled 
/usr/bin/python3 /home/blah/zenstates.py --c6-disable

zenstates.py can be found here.

But instead of messing with symbolic links to script files in places, I’m just adding a crontab entry to the root user:

@reboot /etc/init.d/set_c6_acpi_state_disabled.sh

XCOM2 is great

I don’t yet have any of the DLC, so I’m playing plain vanilla. But man vanilla is a wonderful flavor! 😀

It’s kind of funny – I didn’t really take to XCOM(1). I’d tried installing it on Steam on Linux, and wow did the mouse control ever not work. Just impossible, so I turned my back on it and muttered under my breath “stupid game” and patted myself on the back for avoiding the trouble.

A couple posts back, I talked about other strategy video games that I tried or liked. Stellaris was definitely a disappointment; so I was looking. Because I was looking for something I liked better than Endless Space and Stellaris, I was going through some game review sites. There was some mention of XCOM2 as “Best Game of 2016” somewhere.

Steam happened to have XCOM2 on sale.

I can tell you are shocked. 😉

Man, this game is good.

The only downside seems to be that it it a little buggy. Sometimes screens just fail, and there is rarely a way to see why or an ability to recover. So I completely understand where people use the Bronzeman mod, because Ironman would make me swear off all games forever if they trashed my game on the final scene. Which, by the way, XCOM2 did. Thankfully, I was able to load the most recent savegame, and then play my way through the ending again. This time, it turns out there are a four page statistics summary that was interesting.

I also see two almost completely black screens where cut-screens ought to go. But there are tiny little dots of white, and sometimes some swirly stuff going on. I kind of wish I knew someone on X Box or Playstation with the game so I could see if there really is supposed to be something there.

But bugs aside, the game play is great. The game is challenging. It is also interesting to try out different strategies and methods. There is a large variety of scenarios, and the timed ones add pressure. The game is just great. 😀

What I would suggest for Fireaxis / Take-Two for XCOM3 is to enhance the character modification process so that I can customize my character faces to look exactly like myself or people I know. So do the whole face customization thing, with 18 face shapes from oval to square to round; let me pinch or spread eyes, ditto the relation between eyes and end of nose, end of nose to centerline on mouth. Twelve different nose styles with 50% – 200% size scale, and yes, even for the mouth, there should be styles (including RBF). Gobs of eyebrow styles, and a better selection of hair colors. BTW, I’m pretty bald, but I don’t shave my head completely. Could that be an option? For the eyes, there should be the ability to set the eyeballs deeper in to, or out of their sockets. Turns out that’s a primary skull difference between females and males: the skull ridge above the eyes. So, can we get that customization? I want to take a picture of myself, and be comparing it to the face sculptor in XCOM3 and keep tweaking the settings until it looks exactly like me.

That would be wonderful.

Web browsers and automation, oh my!

At work, one of my job tasks is e-discovery, which means logging in to an email archive web application, doing searches, and tagging the items that meet the search criteria. The web application was originally written by one guy (I think) and although the back-end stuff is amazing, the actual web pages I interact with are twitchy. There are more than 110 million emails in this archive; and the search and indexing features are great. But the results pages? Sometimes I have to deal with a lot of them, and the smart way to go is automation.

(As I write this, the one automation script is working it’s way through 88 pages of results, and the script tells me it will likely be done in about 15 minutes)

When I say the results pages are twitchy, what I mean is that the buttons on the page move, after they have been clicked. Usually, but not always – and that is dependent on the web browser.

I’m using WinBatch to automate driving the web page. Specifically, there is a start cycle process, where I go through the motions of which buttons to press; but, I don’t press them, WinBatch does. To signal WinBatch that the mouse co-ordinates are correct, I tap the Shift key. There is a super tight loop in the WinBatch script which is recording where the mouse pointer is (it’s a 1000 * 1000 virtual x-y coordinate system). It reads the x-y coordinates, checks to see if the Shift key has been depressed, and if so, it records the coordinates for that button, and then moves through to the location of the next button that needs to be defined.

This works fine if the buttons do not move. But under some browsers, clicking a button moves elements on the web page. I’m sure this is a CSS / Javascript thing that happens because the initial development was all about how to wrangle millions of emails, and not about web page design.

So, under Google Chrome, the web page is the least twitchy. But Google with their Chrome browser are a bunch of rat-bastard bullies, so I can’t really use it. We have an internal (private) domain name, which means our SSL certificates are self-signed. Yeah, Google Chrome hates on that. Most recently, the problem is that the server is old. We ran into a problem trying to upgrade, so we didn’t. But that means the SSL on the web page is TLS 1.2 – to which Google helpfully tells me to go kick rocks.

Okay, what about my favorite browser, Firefox? It is the most friendly when it comes time to just get things done; but, it is the most twitchy. Sometimes the email archive server gets in a state where the web page dialog boxes pop up off screen; this only happens with Firefox. I had actually opened up a technical support ticket with the email archive vendor for this, and they told me to stop Tomcat, Apache, MySQL, empty a cache directory, and start everything back up. That worked, so the vendor never actually tried to figure out what was going wrong. Recently, I’m having to share the server with people doing email exports, so I can’t just willy-nilly bounce the services. If the services have been bounced recently, Firefox works fine. But if it’s been a few days, then I can’t. I don’t want to re-write a portion of my WinBatch script to try to find the top of the web page, then the bottom of the web page, just to support this twitchy behavior by Firefox.

Okay, what about Microsoft’s Edge browser? It’s based on Google Chrome, so it might have better HMTL element layout like Chrome has. Alas, during the loop to track where the mouse pointer is, Edge just really doesn’t like refreshing the screen / sharing anything with any other program (WinBatch). So I could not actually get the location of the buttons on the web pages to play the mouse clicks back later.

Finally, I have tried the Brave web browser. I’m not terribly fond of it. It looks to me rather like a front by Google to try to get people who are suspicious of Google’s privacy violating lifeblood to use the Chrome browser anyway. But, it has the advantage of being based on the Chromium engine (which creates the least amount of twitch).

Nicely enough, it isn’t trying to be the bully that gives me the finger for trying to access a self-signed cert web site over TLS 1.2. I can actually get work done now.

Weirdly, it’s the only browser that causes the “Next” button (to advance to the next page of search results) to twitch horizontally. I need to position the mouse pointer over the “t” in Next, let go of the mouse, and tap the Shift key to set the position. Sometimes the Next button shifts to the right, and sometimes it does not. But if it does, then when the mouse pointer gets played back to the same position, is still over the “N” in Next, and the button press does work.

Civ6 versus Tropico 6 versus Endless Space2 versus Stellaris

Civ6 is my current favorite, although I haven’t been playing it much, because it takes so long to finish a game, and seems a little too much like work.

Tropico was my favorite for a really long time. Early on, the humor in it was great. It still manages to be a funny once in a while. The combination of humor with discovery worked really well. When Penultimo yells at you “Presidente! The people are starving!!!” it really motivates you to figure out What is going wrong‽ How do I fix it‽‽‽

But recently, Tropico has been a bummer. Okay, watching a YouTube video helped me figure out why my previously winning strategy is now a losing one; but, the secret seems to be that unless one executes a perfect strategy of all the upgrades, one loses. I’m not perfect, and this is not fun.

So, I started looking for alternatives. The two I have tried are Endless Space2 and Stellaris.

Endless Space2 is gorgeous. The music is superb. The screen is responsive and smooth. And best of all, there was an excellent tutorial. I played 115 hours of it before looking for something else. Eventually, it seemed to me that I was not going to be able to win, ever. There seem to be two problems:

  • If the Grand Random Number Generator in the Sky took a disliking to you, there was absolutely nothing you could do to fix the problem. Time to quit and start over. This isn’t generally a problem with Civ6; if by mid-game one strategy isn’t working out, you can (usually) switch strategy and still pull out a win. Endless Space2 takes a while to figure out that the initial roll was poor – like 30 minutes. 🙁
  • Rather like Tropico, even with good RNG placement, execution needs to be perfect in order to not lose. I never did win a single game.

That said, one YouTuber said that Endless Space2’s use of the right mouse click as the {back} key is brilliant, and I agree. The game was a pleasure to play, even though I never won. But that I never would win, caused me to give up and look elsewhere.

Enter Stellaris. Although it says it got great scores by people for being a great game, it didn’t work for me.

I did love that Stellaris used the mouse to move the map around by nudging the edges. I had noticed that this was missing from Endless Space2, and found that first interaction with Stellaris pleasing. But nothing after that worked for me.

On one hand, I like Real Time Strategy (RTS) games. Indeed the most exhilarating game I ever played was a LAN game of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 against one of my boys. Thrilling!

And Tropico is an RTS, too, and I like it okay. Perhaps Tropico works for me as a game because the clock runs pretty slow. There isn’t a constant pressure to perform or die. If anything, once you’ve got things set up, then I want to speed the clock up, to see how things are holding together (or not).

I’m old, so Turn Based Strategy (TBS) are more my speed. Civ6 and Endless Space2 are both TBS games.

Although my first interaction with Stellaris was really nice, it quickly gave me two things that annoyed me greatly – first impressions and all that.

  • Wow this game needs a keyboard.
  • The tutorial is terrible.

The need for a keyboard, oh so much keyboard, was not what I wanted. I have a big monitor that I can pull a recliner in front of, and play video games. This works best when the game is mostly mouse driven. I’ve got a Logitech Wireless Trackball Mouse. I don’t have to move the mouse; my thumb moves the trackball. It’s wireless, so I can use it on the arm of the chair, or my leg, or my belly, or even my chest. Needing a keyboard is cumbersome. That first poking around at the interface showed that Stellaris really wants to be driven by a keyboard. Civ6, Tropico, and Endless Space2 all work fine with mouse-only.

The user interface wasn’t great for me, either. They picked a font that has readability problems; the letter “t” for example, barely has any width to the crossbar. Is that a “t” or an “l”? Hard to tell. The text was small, and my eyes are old. Endless Space2 had larger, more legible text, which made it more enjoyable.

If I have to squint to read the screen, that is frustrating and takes me out of just enjoying the game.

The tutorial is terrible:

  • The robotic voice: let’s take the recording of a perfectly fine voice-actor, and muddle it through a robotizing filter so that it is difficult to hear the words. “But it’s so cool!” No, it isn’t. It was like I needed to squint, but with my ears. Well this is unpleasant.
  • Instead of a guided tour, the “tutorial” was nothing except a voicing of the button name. Well that’s unfair: it was a voicing of the button name, and some explanation that this is where the very important (button name) stuff is done. None of the text shown in the tutorial text linked to the related item that was mentioned. (So why color the text differently if it isn’t a hyperlink?) I’ll admit: I had never watched a single YouTube video on Stellaris, never read the subreddit, never opened a Readme doc if there is one. I installed the game and said Yes to the tutorial. And it lead me nowhere. About six or eight steps into the game, it just stopped. So what do I do now? No clue. Well, there was one big clue: the words “PAUSED (space bar)”. Huh.

I figure out that the tutorial was to click on every button and hear the the name of the button. Somehow, I managed to click the speed-up button a couple times (while paused) (which doesn’t have tutorial speech for it) (it is a filled circle with a plus, next to the same with a minus; for all I could tell, I was adding a something to a something else). Eventually I un-pause the game, and it’s throwing an awful lot at me with no time to process it. And … my scientist is dead.

Well this is just peachy keen. Not.

I asked Steam for a refund, which they granted me. I’d only played about two hours of it, and could clearly tell that I wasn’t going to be playing any more of it.

If I wanted to sit at my desk computer and drive the game with the mouse and keyboard, then it probably would have worked. But I work at this desk. I don’t want to play here. And the play machine has a more comfortable chair with no place for a keyboard.

So I’m back to looking for a TBS game which is mouse primary and has a guide-through tutorial. Suggestions?

What are the fools at Facebook thinking?

Banning Doctor Ron Paul? Don’t these idiots know he is one of the few good politicians in Congress?

Doctor Paul is famous for having a sign on the edge of his desk in his Congressional office, designed to stop lobbyists in their tracks: “Don’t steal. The government hates competition”. Any time a lobbyist asks for a meeting and offers to donate to Doctor Paul’s re-election campaign in exchange for a yes vote on some piece of legislation, Ron points to the sign and says “If it was a good piece of legislation, you wouldn’t need to come in here with this bribe. Sorry for wasting your time. Goodbye.” And then he informs his secretary to never book a meeting with that lobbyist ever again.

Ron Paul is famous for voting no on every piece of legislation that wastes your and my tax money. As such, he has gotten the nickname “Doctor No”.

A signature joke by Jay Leno waits until the beginning of the congressional summer break. Then on that day, Jay says “Congress has begun their summer recess. The realm is safe, once again.” Ron Paul is working this problem from the inside.

Ron Paul quote number one: “War is not popular. It may seem popular in the short run, when there appears to be an immediate victory and everyone is gloating but war is not popular. War is not popular. People get killed, and body bags end up coming back. War is very unpopular, and it is not the politically smart thing to do.”

Sure, the congresscritters getting lobbyist money from the military industrial complex will tell you that war is great. Well, it’s great for funneling money into the pockets of the people in the military industrial machine. Quote: “War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures.”

Ron Paul also understands the basic truth of all government. Quote: “Values in a free society are accepted voluntarily, not through coercion, and certainly not by law… every time we write a law to control private behavior, we imply that somebody has to arrive with a gun, because if you desecrate the flag, you have to punish that person. So how do you do that? You send an agent of the government, perhaps an employee of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Flags, to arrest him. This is in many ways patriotism with a gun – if your actions do not fit the official definition of a “patriot,” we will send somebody to arrest you.”

And, we use tax money to pay for that agent. Regarding intervention in Sudan, the quote was “… I have no right – no moral right or constitutional right – to come with a gun and tax the people and say: “I will take money because I want to do good”.”

Quote: “The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence. All initiation of force is a violation of someone else’s rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it’s supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals. Legitimate use of violence can only be that which is required in self-defense.”

This is true for all government action. Government has been described as a bunch of do-gooders, doing good with other people’s money. You can do good with your own money. And then, you aren’t guilty of robbing me of mine.

Here’s another quote about government power: “What we give up on is a tyrannical approach to solving a social and medical problem, and we endorse the idea of voluntarism, self-responsibility, family, friends, and churches to solve problems, rather than saying that some monolithic government is going to make you take care of yourself and be a better person. It’s a preposterous notion, it never worked, it never will. The government can’t make you a better person. It can’t make you follow good habits. Why don’t they put you on a diet? You’re a little overweight, and I think you need government help!” (pointing out the absurdity of the ideas of some about government power).

Quote: “The theory of the IRS is rather repugnant to me because the assumption is made that I, the government, owns 100% of your income and I permit you to keep 5%, 10% or 20%. You’re vulnerable, you’ve sold out. The government can take 80% if they want, which they did at one time.”

I like to make a joke that in a year, working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year computes to 2080 hours. Is it coincidence that the IRS form is the 1040 ? (fifty percent)

Quote: “Freedom is not defined by safety. Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference. Government cannot create a world without risks, nor would we really wish to live in such a fictional place. Only a totalitarian society would even claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal, because it would require total state control over its citizens’ lives. Liberty has meaning only if we still believe in it when terrible things happen and a false government security blanket beckons.”

Doctor Paul voted against the PATRIOT Act because he was only given one hour to read it before the vote, and it was a 400 page bill. That shows he has integrity, even in the face of taking unpopular action.

And the fools at Facebook banned him.

I can only believe that they’ve turned off their brains, and are listening only to the pro-government-growth scare mongers and empire building lobbyists and bureaucrats.

What do they know about Ron Paul? Nothing. But their “friends” say he is a bad man. So they practice a principle which cannot fail to keep them in everlasting ignorance: that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

Shame on you Facebook.