Back To Reality

After scrubbing all traces of HP’s Omen Gaming Hub from my new laptop, it is no longer attempting to contact Google Analytics every three seconds, and my Pi-hole is back to blocking a safe and comfortable 9% of web traffic.

I can find no way to actually contact HP about this, so for amusement I posted a carefully-written question to their community forums. A “Top Expert”, whoring for feedback points, linked to a page on how to manage your company’s Google Analytics account. Gosh, thanks.

(cat-shark and detective are unrelated)

No True Cocksman, episode 3

In the world of Forcibly-retired Adventurer Gets A Girl, apparently the downside of receiving a divine blessing that’s specifically designed to help you train up The Chosen Hero is that you don’t get a lot of time to yourself for things like dating. And since the same is true for tsundere gladiator princesses, Our Couple is fumbling with the basics. Fortunately Rit’s well-displayed giant boobs and eager clinginess are overcoming their lack of romantic experience.

Also, Red’s as-you-know-Bob exposition on how blessings work reveals that their god is a bit of a dick.

(Raphtalia is unrelated, and won’t be back in season until April)

Dear Amazon,

When I see something on my wish list that’s suddenly dropped in price, I now automatically assume that you’re pushing gray-market goods from a shady Marketplace dealer. For instance, the Epson scanner that I’ve been thinking about for medium-format film has been showing up at a 4% discount recently, because instead of coming from you, it’s sold by “BecTech Global” (90% positive ratings out of only 118 total, apparently located in the men’s room of someone else’s warehouse). Or like the Asus portable touchscreen USB-C monitor that I was considering, which is suddenly 24% cheaper… from “BeachAudio” (88% positive ratings, located in a UPS Store). In both cases, you still have it in stock yourself, but you’re promoting a bait-and-switch operation instead.

OneNote no more!

I finally got around to exporting everything from OneNote that I originally exported from Evernote (~750 notes in total, across 16 notebooks). I had to do it from a Windows box with both OneNote and Office installed, so I used the new Win11 laptop. The open-source exporter worked extremely well and produced excellent conversions, with the one hitch being a known bug where some old note-history records would make it barf. The workaround is disabling note history in those notebooks, which I didn’t care about and couldn’t export anyway.

The import into Joplin ran faster than the export, but the sync was slow because it’s encrypted at rest in the cloud (OneDrive, because I couldn’t get WebDAV on my Synology NAS to work with it; they have their own service now, but still support a variety of storage options equally).

I still have some old stuff exported from Yojimbo to EagleFiler, but that just stores things in flat files with a separate full-text index, so I can easily import it into anything when I finally migrate completely off the Mac.

Derry Tsun, Murderhobo

So, since my lightweight little Win11 laptop plays Fallout 4 quite capably, and I haven’t run through the game in a few years, I decided to take it for a very casual spin. And by that I mean setting the difficulty to easy, hacking my stats and hit points and perks from the console, and using the Cheat Terminal addon to auto-unlock terminals and pick locks. I can take damage from radiation and falling, but otherwise I’m more-or-less unkillable, so I can just run around enjoying side quests. Basically, I’m playing as a typical overpowered isekai protagonist. 😁

I did end up getting far enough into the main questline to meet SHAUN!, though.

It’s an interesting contrast to replaying Breath of the Wild, because the decision to fully voice every quest in F4 severely limited their ability to create new content. Some of the voice acting is great, and fits well with the quests, but the bottom line is that adding a single new quest required delivering completed scripts to several voice actors and booking recording time, with a measurable impact on the schedule and download size of the game.

Yes, it can be annoying to hear half a dozen voices just emoting in most BotW quests (“yaya!”), but it meant that they could add a lot more subtitle text in more languages, and the scenes that are fully voiced gain more emotional impact (well, the way the Japanese voice actors performed them, anyway; what little I’ve heard of the English voices makes me glad I switched in the first scene).

Speaking of the new laptop…

I dug out a spare Bluetooth mouse for it, but when I was checking out the MS company store to see if they had anything interesting these days, I saw that they had Bluetooth mice and game controllers in a matching white color, so I picked those up. They have a new white Bluetooth keyboard and numeric keypad, but the keys are mush; I’ve been spoiled by my CODE keyboards with deliciously loud Cherry MX Green keys. Come to think of it, they sell those in white now…

(science pony-girl is unrelated)

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