2026 still isn’t going to be the Year of the Linux Desktop, but…

Posted on December 31, 2025 by baudattitude

…well, maybe it will be my year.  With some caveats.

I spent a lot of time this year working on homelab projects that involved Linux in one form or another – Proxmox and Unraid, Bazzite and Omarchy – and while there definitely have been quirks it has generally been positive.

At the same time, Windows has been getting insufferable.  I already mostly use Windows as a platform for gaming, with all day to day work happening on macOS or iPadOS, but even that minimal exposure has been absolutely grating on my nerves.

I don’t even mind Windows 11 as an operating system, with the strong exception being that every time I try to figure out HDR on Windows it makes me want to throw the computer through the monitor and eliminate the problem in a direct fashion.  It’s just the way Microsoft seems to be going out of their way to make the user experience roughly equivalent to using a cheap subsidized smartphone from a disreputable pay-as-you-go company.  Apps appear on the start menu without me installing them.  I get a weekly nag screen asking me if I want to start backing up to OneDrive yet, or if I would like to connect Windows to my cell phone (I don’t).  Rage-inducing news headlines pop up from the widgets panel.  I make the mistake of leaving a computer turned off for six months, and when I boot it again I get duplicate copies of everything in my OneDrive.  I get really used to running Android apps on my desktop, and then the feature just disappears.

To be clear here, I’m talking about Windows 11 Professional.  Not Home.  I can only imagine the horrors of Home.

And the worst thing is that, when you come down to it, Microsoft’s services are genuinely pretty decent.  I actually use the Microsoft Account sign-in feature.  Copilot isn’t bad at helping fix my shell scripts.  Xbox Live has the whole save game syncing and cross-platform thing down in a way that no other service touches.

But the desktop experience… I can’t even anymore.  I am unable to even.

At the same time, there has been a ton of work happening in the Linux community to break down the last thing Windows had going for it, which was gaming.

Well.  Let’s be honest.  Valve has thrown a massive amount of money at the problem over the last several years, and there are just enough disgruntled smart people out there to put their own two cents in on top of that and now you can make a Linux system play just about any game worth playing.  I acknowledge that I am consciously sorting some of the most popular games in the world into the “not worth playing” bucket by saying this, but eh.

Hence, I put together a reasonably capable AMD-based system and I am going to make a real go of trying to not use Windows at home in 2026. I am already down to only having one Windows system as it is – if possible, I’m going to avoid booting the thing other than to get files off of it as needed.

So let’s talk about the new computer for a little bit, because it’s adorable. The case I used – a Fractal Design Terra – was just a marvel of design and much easier to build in than other small form factor cases I’ve worked with in the past.

It’s sort of a sandwich design, where you install the power supply and motherboard on one side of a central spine and the GPU on the other side.  The side and top panels pop off for the procedure and just snap back into place once you’re ready to button it up.

It looks awfully crowded from the top, and I was concerned about heat, but the whole thing is very well ventilated so I think it will be OK.  It IS a bit of a space heater, though, and I’m certain the cat will eventually discover this.

I have an AMD Ryzen 7 5700G, a 6700XT, and 16GB of memory in the thing.  Basically, it’s PS5-level specs, maybe a little better but there’s going to be more overhead in a general purpose box compared to a dedicated gaming platform.  It’s subjectively a lot prettier than a PS5 anyway.

And, yes, it also cost considerably more to put together than just buying a PS5 off the shelf.

I’m sorry, I meant more than buying a PS5 PRO off the shelf.  Which almost certainly trounces it in performance.  But I can’t play my Steam games on a PS5.

Fortunately all of the parts I used, except for the case, were ones I already had on hand from previous projects.  So it was basically free, from a certain point of view.

For an OS, I waffled a bit between a few Linux distributions.  I had used Bazzite with very good results for some experiments earlier in the year, and I also have a laptop that I have repurposed to run Omarchy for development work.

I eventually went with neither and picked CachyOS.  For the record, I don’t recommend this if all you want to do is set up a game console equivalent system.  Use Bazzite.  I picked CachyOS specifically because I wanted to be able to use Synology Drive to sync the contents of folders between the Linux system and my NAS, and for that I needed to run a Linux variant that was more targeted at desktop users, but at the same time maybe not QUITE as obtuse as Omarchy.

Like, I still haven’t figured out how to copy and paste between terminal windows and the web browser in Omarchy.  It’s a little too much for something where you just want to turn it on and launch Steam.

After some thought, I probably should have gone with Mint as it’s really taken the lead in the category of “Linux for people who don’t want to have to tinker with things too much” but I don’t mind some tinkering.

CachyOS has a neat feature where you can install a bunch of gaming-related software without needing to put any thought into it, so that had me covered for Steam, Epic, GoG and Amazon games.  I needed to do a little more work to get Ubisoft Connect working and even more work to get the Big Fish Game manager working.  The Venn diagram of “Linux gamers” and “Big Fish customers” is basically two circles at opposite ends of a basketball court, so there really isn’t much documentation on making it work on Linux.  The game manager would launch but all of the text would be… screwy, to put it in technical terms.  I wound up trying different versions of Wine until I found one that worked.

Most hardware has been plug and play.  The only real trouble I had was trying to get my Xbox Series controller connected via Bluetooth, because it would appear in the Bluetooth Devices window and sort of flicker between a connected and disconnected state.  Trying to look this up got me a ton of very helpful articles suggesting I install various packages and jump through configuration hoops and one rather small comment deep in a reddit thread saying I should update the firmware of the controller.

I DID need to use Windows for that, because the firmware updater is only available as a Windows Store application.  But once it was done I was able to connect it and use it in games as you’d expect.  I rather think I would have been better served by a nice 8bitdo controller, but again I am working with what I have on hand.

Side note, my Stadia controller works fine with an 8bitdo dongle.  I did have problems where I had like three different wireless dongles plugged in within inches of each other on the back of the case and it made for some interesting interference with my wireless headphones, but I moved some of them to a hub and moved it about a foot away from the case and that seems to have helped.

Side side note: Naturally when I went to download the CachyOS installer and make a bootable flash drive, I reached for Rufus… and then realized that it was probably a good idea if I started my Windows free era by finding a non-Windows tool to make a bootable flash drive.  So now I know about balenaEtcher which is cross platform even.

Anyway.  It’s December 31st 2025!  I’m going to keep track of every time I need to boot a Windows system for something in 2026, and I’ll see how it goes.

 

Posted in linux gaming, videogames | 1 Comment

Lucky Numbers Seven

Posted on December 20, 2025 by baudattitude

By an odd coincidence, I’ve played two games with “7” in the title recently, and both are sort of related to a larger project I have going on.  So I want to talk about the games, and the project, and probably whatever else comes to mind while I’m typing this up.

That’s a polite way to say “Buckle up, I’m going to ramble incoherently for the next few pages.”

After Resident Evils 5 and 6, 7 (Should I say VII?) came as a real shock.  No more mowing down hordes of zombies and zombie-related enemies as Professional Badasses Chris and/or Leon, you’re just a poor sap stuck in a crazy house full of cannibal hillbillies.  And it’s freaky as all get out.  So much so, in fact, that I moved OFF the big screen and onto my iPad where the smaller screen helped to considerably lessen the scare factor.

Oh, side note – big shout out to Capcom for including the iPad version when you buy the Mac version, and vice versa.  With the exception of Resident Evil: Village, they did that for all of their recent Mac ports, and it’s appreciated.

Thankfully, the intensity drops a bit after about the first two hours of the game.  I don’t think I could have played through the entire thing if it had stayed at the same level throughout.

But I did beat it!  Admittedly on easy.

And then I played through the “Daughters”, “Not a Hero” and “End of Zoe” DLC expansions because I wanted to get more of the story.

Two of those expansions are very much action games, which was pretty cathartic after the main game.  They serve pretty well to give a backstory and proper ending for the game, as well, so I’d really consider them mandatory.

And yes, I did say “Mac” because this is one of those rare cases where a relatively modern AAA title is playable on something with an Apple logo.  The last similarly-recent game I tried was Stray, back in 2023, and it wasn’t a great experience compared to the Windows version.  RE7 looked and played great, both at 1080P and at 4K upscaled from 1080P, on my M2 Pro MacBook Pro.

Note: I wasn’t insane enough to try 1440P or 4K native.  And it IS technically a PS4 game so “it looks great” on a laptop from 2023 isn’t that much of a testimony.  But I was pretty happy with the performance.

The other “7” game I played was nothing BUT action, being the latest roller-coaster-ride-with-guns from Activision.

Of the various sub-series under the overall Call of Duty brand, I have really come to enjoy the Black Ops titles the most.  While there have been some stumbles, like the year it completely omitted the campaign mode, they have a completely different feel from the ripped-from-the-headlines Modern Warfare games.  They get to jump all over history and they can get very weird at times.

CODBLOPS7 leans HEAVILY into the weird.  I would put it right up with El Shaddai in terms of never knowing what the next level was going to throw at me, and I would like to be very clear that I am paying it a compliment there.  It starts off with an almost depressingly by-the-numbers sequence where you and your team of heavily-armed buddies (well, not a team really, I’ll get to that) raid some secret laboratory run by Evil Corporation Seeking To Dominate The World Or Something, and then you all get exposed to some sort of crazy virus and then roughly half the levels are just drug-induced hallucinations of the highest order.

My favorite was a level that had you running down the LA freeways, only the the roads were twisted around and all seemed to have their own gravity so you would have cars on the “ceiling” and enemies shooting at you from the walls which were their floors.  It was utterly bonkers and visually confusing in the best way.

Even the levels that didn’t take place inside hallucinations looked GOOD.  Another high point was the Japan level which was all neon and colorful billboards.

Sorry that screenshots from the game are kind of dark, Windows has yet to figure out how to get a decent capture from an HDR display.

I didn’t take many screenshots, because one thing I will say against it is that the attention to little details in the world seemed a little lacking compared to older titles.  No cool 80s tech to get shots of this time.

There was, at least, one scooter.

The other thing that seemed just peak silliness was a hacking mini-game that you run into occasionally.  Seriously, I did not expect a pipe game in the middle of my Call of Duty.

There was also one weird …puzzle? Where you are locked in a room trying to find a passcode to open a door.  It stood out because every other door in the game is either locked until you kill everything trying to kill you or simply requires you to walk up to it and push the “open door” button.  For some reason, in this ONE CASE, they really wanted you to look around this room for a four digit number.

It’s 5912, by the way, or at least it was for me.  Maybe it’s random!

In short, I really enjoyed the campaign… eventually.  It does not start well and it has a weird focus on trying to make you play it in co-op mode, to the point where if you DO dare to play it solo it is a weirdly solitary experience where you are supposed to have three other characters with you, and they talk to you as if they are with you, but you only see them in cutscenes.  Hence the “not a team really” caveat from before.  Also, if you don’t watch the intro movie – you know, the actual lead-in to the story? – there is NO WAY to watch it again and you cannot wipe your entire progress and start a new game.  So when you start this campaign, sit down and watch it because otherwise you are going to be stuck looking it up on YouTube.

Also it needed a title card along the lines of “This story is a sequel to Black Ops II, which you played a decade ago, so maybe go back and look up a summary eh?” but that is a minor point.

I acknowledge that very few people play the Calls of Duty for the campaigns, so my perspective on the game is not particularly applicable to the average player.  For reference, here are my achievements for beating the last four games.  Note the percentage of players who have done the same.

Yeah, it’s not very high.  And it’s not like these are long games!  I am told that if you play the BLOPS7 campaign in co-op mode, it’s like five hours long!

It took me considerably longer solo, but that’s expected.  They really do not want you playing this without three random people from Xbox Live friends.

Anyway!  I really wanted to get through this by the end of the year, because one of my goals for 2026 is to move completely away from Windows.

I already only keep Windows systems in the house for the purpose of playing games, but Linux has gotten considerably better in that regard and CrossOver, on the Mac, isn’t AS good as Proton but is still pretty decent.

Oh, right, that’s the big project I alluded to.  Yup.  After years of apologizing for Microsoft’s less-popular-quirks (I will STILL defend Windows Vista), I finally got broken by a Windows 11 prompt that kept popping up that had the choices of

  1. Yes
  2. “Ask me again in a week”

with no way to say “no, stop asking me and never ask me again”.

If I ever need to use Windows for work, or if Microsoft ever decides to drastically reverse course on their nonsense, maybe I’ll give it another try.

Neither CrossOver nor Proton can play games from Game Pass or from the Windows Store, however, so I needed to knock CoD out before the end of the year.  I only have one more game in that category, which is a moderately-long RPG from Bandai-Namco called Scarlet Nexus.  I should be able to get that off the backlog before the ball drops in Times Square.

Posted in mac, PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

Random thoughts on visiting Japan (December 2025 edition)

Posted on December 14, 2025 by baudattitude

This is just a brain dump of things that stood out from a recent quick trip to Japan.  Not exactly a high-effort post.  Frankly, if I were an LLM I would be embarrassed to be spitting this out.  As a human, I don’t feel shame so that’s not a problem.

Wait, is that supposed to go the other way? Anyway.

First, and this probably shouldn’t have been a surprise to me, but the days of Japan as a “cash only” place seem to be very much behind us.  I landed with only Y1000 in my wallet and immediately went to an ATM to take out Y30000, assuming I would need to make more ATM stops later.

I did not.  In fact, I left Japan with Y6000 in bills, and that was after making an effort to spend some of my cash on the last day.  Nearly everywhere takes Suica or Apple Pay and the rare places that took neither seemed just fine with a normal credit card.

This isn’t 100%!  Do not think you can get around Japan with absolutely no cash!  I have had to rescue a small group of Australians who found themselves at a café in Kyoto with no means to settle their bill!  But in general cash is radically de-emphasized compared to a few years ago.

To continue the theme of money, prices are starting to fluctuate a bit, mostly on the more expensive side. It’s still an incredibly cheap place to visit, thanks to the current exchange rate, but I had the occasional price surprise when I was buying food at a combini or similar.  On the other hand, going to see a movie was Y1400 and I remember plenty of times when I’ve had to drop Y2000 on a ticket in the past.

And a final bit on the topic of money – you can still get Tax Free shopping in a lot of stores.  Some of them have started adding a 3% surcharge to process your tax free purchase, however.  So for those stores it’s still a discount but like a 7% discount instead of 10%.

I am entirely in favor of this because processing a tax free transaction DOES take more time for the clerk at the register, it doesn’t affect locals, and it’s a way for Japan to extract a little extra money from tourists who are taking advantage of the exchange rate.

Akihabara continues to decline.  I mean, it’s still a pretty neat neighborhood if you just want to be surrounded by nerd crap.  But there are so many stores selling the same selection of random crane game and ichiban kuji prize figures and in general I find myself gravitating towards Ikebukuro and Shinjuku for my nerd shopping needs.

Granted, I would never expect to see one of these in the wild anywhere else in Tokyo:

At $300 I legitimately considered it for a solid minute but I did not want to try to get it home.

And of course, if you just want (thing) and do not want to try to hunt for (thing), Amazon is perfectly happy to deliver all the (thing) you could ever want to your hotel.  Less fun than going shopping, I admit, but a time saver.

The area around Shibuya Station is kinda weird now!  Like I know Hikarie and Shibuya Scramble Square have been there for a while but I hadn’t been down there during the day in years.  The skyline is so different.

The view from Shibuya Sky is amazing though.  100% worth the entry fee if you’re there on a clear day.  My entire week was clear skies and usually temperatures around 15C/60F.  It felt like the country decided I needed a special treat.

Continuing with the Shibuya theme, I finally got a window seat at the Starbucks overlooking the scramble crossing!  That was one super minor life goal that I was happy to achieve.

Knowing just a little Japanese remains a cheat code for getting amazing service.  Well, honestly I think you will generally get amazing service in Japan wherever you are but at least looking like you’re making an effort gets you a smile to go with the service.

The Skylark franchise restaurants (Gust, Jonathan’s, Saizeriya etc) are still just fantastic value for money.  I mean, they’re not fancy but they will feed you well for a small financial consideration.

This was a random dinner I had at Gust, which cost $7.12.  I probably should have gotten a salad or you know something with vegetables, so this is a bit of an embarrassing example.

By contrast I had a single café mocha in the hotel coffee shop that cost more.  If you want to save some of your travel money, find your nearest branch of the chain and eat happy.  I guarantee you there is one within like half a mile wherever you are.

That’s probably enough random thoughts for today.  Maybe these will be helpful to someone in the future who stumbles across this post.  Or maybe some random AI bot will slurp them up and repeat them back at someone looking for Japan travel tips.  Either way is fine really.

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In which, I test the limits of “remote work”

Posted on December 13, 2025 by baudattitude

So, a few years ago I wound up flying more than usual and wound up qualifying for United Airlines “Silver Premier” status.  Which is the bottom tier of their frequent flyer program, but which comes with some really handy benefits like extra checked bags and pretty frequent upgrades, at least when flying domestic.

It was handy enough that, after the first year of it, I haven’t wanted to let it lapse.  This has lead to the occasional very silly flight near the end of the year to make sure I’m meeting the requirements to keep it.  Usually I fly to Redding because it’s cheap but involves a lot of flight segments.

Anyway, I spent a lot of 2025 unemployed so I was not doing much flying.  As a result, keeping my silver status was looking really unlikely – it would have meant flying to Redding like 4 times!  I actually have a favorite coffee place there, but it’s not worth the flight by itself.

On the other hand, international flights give a lot more credit towards flyer status, and I do like going to Japan… but there was no way on earth that I was going to get time off at this time of year, especially with little notice.  I am very new to this job and I don’t have the seniority it would take to get a week off around the holidays.

On the (third?) hand… technically I was hired as a remote employee.  And while it’s not strictly speaking legal to work (even remotely) while you’re in Japan on a tourist visa it’s not like I was worried about the police breaking down my hotel room door to tell me to log off the VPN.  So technically I didn’t NEED to take time off as long as I just, you know, kept logging in and doing my job.

I mean, I wasn’t brave enough to get permission to do this.  I’m working on the principle that nobody told me I couldn’t.  Hopefully that will not come back to bite me.

The problem, naturally, being a 17 hour time difference between the place where my job expects me to be and the place where I wanted to be.  I worked the math out, and I would need to be online from 1 AM until 10 AM Tokyo time to keep up my normal shift in the US.

Could I do this?

It turns out… yes! At least for a week.  I’m not sure I would have wanted to try to keep it up any longer than that.  I especially would not have wanted to try to stay on this schedule through a weekend, for reasons that will probably be obvious.

The schedule I was keeping was very similar to when I worked the graveyard shift as a 20-something.  I’d wake up around 12:30 AM, log on to work, put in my shift and then get some living in between 10 AM and 5 PM, when I would crash again.

The reason this worked out for the five days I did it, but would have been a problem if I’d tried to keep it up was, well, there’s probably plenty to DO in Tokyo at 3 in the morning but probably very little of it is anything I would want to do.

Anyway, here were some of my takeaways from the experiment, starting with the things that didn’t go super well:

Firstly, I was expecting to be able to use the in-room TV as an external monitor.  My job is absolutely impossible to do with a single screen and I didn’t want to bring along a bulky-yet-fragile portable monitor.  Finding out that the hotel room I’d booked had a TV that was completely across the room from the only desk was, therefore, a bit of a setback.

Fortunately I had packed a HDMI-to-USB-C capture card, and there’s a free app for the iPad called Genki Studio that lets you use this to use the iPad as an external display.  I only have an 11″ iPad, so text was VERY small, but I made it work.

Secondly, the chair in the room was painfully low.  I wound up stacking every pillow I could find on it to get it up to a reasonable height.

Third, you would think that being in this sort of situation would make you really focus.  It didn’t.  I need distractions during my day and just didn’t have any really.  I wound up eating WAY too much, and a lot of it was junk food.  Towards the very end of the trip, I discovered that there was a supermarket next to the hotel so I was able to actually get some fresh fruit and yogurt instead of combini junk and felt much better about myself.

A side note: The hotel didn’t have in-room microwaves and there was no communal microwave.  Eating my “breakfast” and “lunch” cold was depressing.  Eventually I found that I could take my “lunch” at 5 AM and go and buy something from the nearby 7-11 which had microwaves.

Finally, I was happy to see that there was an ethernet jack under the mirror at the desk I was using to work from, and I’d even packed a USB-C ethernet dongle.  I was less happy to find that the jack was completely dead.  I poked around the room a bit and discovered that I could sort-of get to the infrastructure…

…but even plugging directly into the switch, I was only getting about 100mbps.  Which wasn’t any faster than the WiFi.  So I suspect that they only give each room 100mbps to work with, though admittedly that is PLENTY for Slack and email and the occasional Zoom meeting.

(Oh, on the topic of Slack?  It tried very hard to rat me out.  It was like “this person appears to be in Japan! let’s set their out of office statuses accordingly!” and I had to override it to tell it to pretend I was in California.)

OK, that’s the negatives.  There were some things that were awesome about working those hours, starting with the fact that I would get off work at 10 AM, just as things were opening but before any crowds could form.  That is my new pro tip for Tokyo travel – be at the place you want to be at before 10:30 AM.  Even places like Harajuku that are traditionally wall-to-wall tourists were very navigable at that time, though by noon the crowds had really kicked in.

Also, it’s Japan.  Even only getting a few hours a day was still a really good time.  I ate a lot of tasty food, I bought some cool stuff to bring home, I got to practice my language skills.  I’ve visited often enough that the novelty of places like Akihabara have really worn off, but I do love Tokyo.  Something about the way that 37 million people in one of the densest places on the planet can more-or-less get along without dissolving into chaos makes me feel comfortable.

Plus I saw possibly the coolest thing I have seen yet, and I regret that there was no feasible way to walk into the dealership and say “crate one of those up and ship it to this address in America”

Yes, it’s a goddamn Hello Kitty Super Cub.

And of course the big positive was that it got me the rest of the credits I needed to keep my mileage status.  Probably.  I’m waiting on the credit from the ANA flight from Narita to San Francisco to kick in, but that only takes a couple of days.

 

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Two More Residents Evil Down.

Posted on November 29, 2025 by baudattitude

To continue from my last post on everyone’s favorite zombie fighting series, I can confirm that Resident Evil 5 WAS, in fact, a bit of a step down from Resident Evil 4.  It’s not really an entirely fair comparison, of course, since the RE4 I played was the recent remake while RE5 was the Switch port of the original from 2009 which hasn’t gotten any quality of life updates and also LOOKS like an Xbox 360 game from 2009.

Well, not exactly.  The Switch port runs at 1080P and thanks to an unlocked frame rate hits a smooth 60fps on the Switch 2.  So it’s probably considerably better looking than the Xbox 360 version, but still…

While being a step down from RE4, it’s still a pretty fun game.  I am more of a Leon fan than a Chris fan, but I enjoyed the banter between Chris and Sheva and the frequently over-the-top set pieces.  I also found myself really enjoying the gyro aim that the Switch port brought to the table.  I’m going to have problems adjusting to RE games without that in future.

I understand Sheva hasn’t shown up in the series since RE5, and that’s a bit of a shame.  Hopefully the series makes another trip to Africa, it’s a really underutilized setting in games.

Downsides:  It’s awfully brown.  It’s really really brown.  The sheer number of vaguely brown levels where you just shoot parasite-infested Africans got to me after a while, though the “suddenly, Tomb Raider!” levels helped make up for those.

Also, after the joy of playing suitcase Tetris in RE4, going back to a game with a drastically limited inventory was a bit of a shock, and needing to manage inventory for both Chris and Sheva was a considerable drag.

I followed RE5 up with… well, not RE6.  Actually, I took a detour to 3DS land and gave Resident Evil : Revelations a go, and made it about four hours before I decided to do something else with my life.  It’s not a bad game but the sheer amount of backtracking and the terribly dark and monotonous environments ship hallways just broke me after a while.  I also stumbled across a thread talking about how the last boss was either a nightmare (if you couldn’t dodge) or easy (if you had mastered the dodge mechanic) and pondered the number of successful dodges I’d managed (like, three?) and that was also a contributing factor to dropping it.

Really impressive what they managed to cram into a 3DS game, though.

But after THAT I did move on to RE6.  And it’s not brown.  Like, well, there are brown levels but overall it does not FEEL brown in the same way that RE5 just felt brown.  The game has some tragically low-resolution textures, but even with those it is so much prettier than its immediate predecessor.

Some of the levels made very limited sense, though.  Like the whole medieval catacombs under a random American town thing.  Very cool!  But also very weird.

It’s also got Leon in it. AND Chris.  Something for everyone!  I even enjoyed the Jake campaign and of course more Ada is always welcome.  Getting to play her campaign at the tail end of the other three was a great way to see all of the different stories tied together.

As an aside, I am certain that all of the crawling through ducts you do in the Ada campaign is vitally important to the plot and not just some guy at Capcom’s personal fetish in action.

It’s definitely the “Aliens” of the series, being much more action-horror than survival-horror, but I am putting it high in my personal rankings.

Normally I post screenshots of the various computers seen in these games and speculate what they were meant to represent, but neither RE5 nor RE6 had anything particularly interesting going on in that regard.  Rather I will post a screenshot of some guy’s extremely nice winning mahjong hand.  I’m sure that about five minutes after this guy laid these tiles down he was either (a) turned into a zombie or (b) eaten by zombies, but for those five minutes I bet he was awfully happy.

I think I’ll probably skip Revelations 2, so I’m left with only 7 and 8.  At this point I will drop my entirely non-scientific ranking of the games I’ve played so far:

  1. Resident Evil 4 (Remake)
  2. Resident Evil 2 (Remake)
  3. Resident Evil 6
  4. Resident Evil 3 (Remake)
  5. Resident Evil 5
  6. Resident Evil (Remake)
  7. Resident Evil: Revelations
  8. Resident Evil 0
  9. Resident Evil: Code Veronica

 

 

Posted in 3DS, Switch, videogames | Leave a comment

More adventures in Docker

Posted on November 15, 2025 by baudattitude

Not many homelab posts recently because I started a new job and it was really pretty rough for a bit there.  I’m starting to feel like I’m getting my footing, but the first three months had me kinda regretting rejoining the work force. I’d get off work and just be like, I don’t want to do anything that involves learning.

But I’m feeling a little better now AND I repurposed an older Dell gaming laptop into a machine I could dedicate to homelab stuff by installing Omarchy on it.  And I have been taking this to coffee shops just waiting to have my “I use arch, btw” moment but it has not arrived yet.

But what I have done is solved a problem that has been bugging me for some time and that turned out to be embarrassingly simple.  Thought I’d share!

See, I have an unraid server that is intended to be a test server and not for production use, but I made the mistake of actually setting something useful up on it in the form of a Suwayomi instance, and now my wife uses it to keep track of all the manga/manhwa/manhua she reads on a daily basis.

I want to move this to a more stable server so I can’t accidentally break it, and in theory docker should make that easy, right?  I already have the appdata directory pointed to a volume outside of the container’s virtual disk, I just need to move that over to the new server, spin up a new instance and boom it should just work right?  The Suwayomi team even has a pre-baked docker-compose.yml file for you to use for this.

Well, I did that, and I confirmed that I could spin up an instance of Suwayomi and log into it and everything, and then I pointed it at the appdata folder I’d copied over from Unraid and well..

It did not go well.

So naturally I was like, is it permissions?  Let’s see what happens if we run as root.  OK, no, it’s not that.  But it’s obviously a DB error.  What DB does Suwayomi use even?  How do I find that out?

It wasn’t the solution, but it turns out that Suwayomi uses a DB engine called “H2” which is literally a DB engine written in java that is designed to be embedded in your application so you don’t need to have an external DB server.  I did not know this existed before today, but it seems pretty brilliant.

Anyway, I got stuck in a loop for a while.  I’d point Suwayomi at the appdata from unraid, and it would break, and I’d point it back at the appdata created by Suwayomi if I just let it run and it would work again.

Eventually… EVENTUALLY I decided to log into unraid and see if I could figure out how it configures its docker images.  I already knew it doesn’t use docker-compose files, but I didn’t know what it used.

Turns out they’re xml templates in /root/.docker/templates-user, as an aside.

And I opened the one called my-Tachidesk-Docker.xml and found this:

and then looked at my docker-compose.yml and saw

and swore a bit and changed it to:

…and then pointed the appdata folder for Suwayomi back to the folder from unraid.  And it worked.  Like, I’m not crazy enough to say it’s working flawlessly, but it seems to work and while I still need to test it a bit more I think it may have solved the problem.  It just took several hours of not understanding what was broken, followed by adding seven letters to my docker-compose.yml to fix it entirely.

Also I’m not entirely clear on what the difference is between tachidesk and suwayomi-server.  Until I looked at the screenshots just now I did not realize I was literally pulling from different repositories.

I’m also still a little confused as to why the unraid Docker image uses the “preview” build of Suwayomi instead of the latest release build.  Personally that seems risky?  But I am very risk-averse so maybe I’m just being a stick in the mud here.

Anyway, after I confirm this worked for Suwayomi I’m going to see what other containers I can migrate to their new stable home.  Probably lose a little more of my sanity in the process.  Should be a fun time.

 

 

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Is it “Resident Evils” or “Residents Evil”?

Posted on November 3, 2025 by baudattitude

“Spooky Game Month” is over, with a final tally of 5 games and one lengthy DLC:

  • Silent Hill f
  • Resident Evil (2014)
  • Resident Evil 2 (2019)
  • Resident Evil 3 (2020)
  • Resident Evil 4 (2023)
  • Resident Evil 4 (2023) Separate Ways

And started-but-quickly abandoned:

  • Resident Evil: Code Veronica
  • Resident Evil 0

First off, while I’m going to start Resident Evil 5 next, and I know it’s generally less-well-received than its immediate predecessor, I have to say that I am going to try to give it some slack because I am not sure how anything follows up RE4.  That was a genuine banger of a game, and the Ada DLC just made it better.

Separate Ways also marked an important milestone, in that I have officially graduated from the “Assisted” difficulty level.  I played it on NORMAL which for me is practically hardcore.

I’ll be back to easy for RE5, of course.  I’m not going to overestimate my skill level.

I’m not sure how the original version of RE4 would hold up.  I know it has a slightly more reasonable control scheme than the original trilogy + CV and 0.  Put that on my list of “things to consider trying someday”

Some other takeaways from RE4:  I now understand why “yellow paint” became something of a meme for a little bit there, because someone was just pouring buckets of it all over the game.  Sometimes it was super handy, especially when it came to knowing which of the various very similar-looking crates were just scenery and which could be smashed open for goodies.

…and, other times it was just silly.

Even with playing on assisted mode and even with all of the bright yellow “go here next” indicators, RE4 was still a pretty lengthy game.  So maybe it’s a good thing it never really let me get confused about my next destination.

I also finally get the jokes about “Inventory Tetris”, because organizing your suitcase was just super satisfying:

Oh, one more super positive thing about the game: while there is an inventory constraint, it’s never quite as oppressive as earlier games.  Big shout out to whoever at Capcom decided that quest items could go into a separate inventory that didn’t affect your ability to carry five guns and all the related ammunition for them.

One LESS positive thing: Early on in the game I noticed that my combat knife was nearly broken and obviously the correct course of action was to sell it before it fully broke so I’d get SOME money back.  I did not realize that you were supposed to repair and upgrade the thing over the course of the game, and that having knives in general was really really REALLY important, so I spent like 90% of the game scrounging for kitchen knives and generally in a perpetual state of wondering where my next knife was coming from.

Look, I don’t mind too much that the game let me do something stupid but a little confirmation box would have gone a long way here.

Anyway.  All three of the modern games were awesome, would definitely play again.

Now, for the bit where I critique the computers because apparently this is a thing I do.

Before I do, I’d like to apologize for the weirdly overexposed screenshots from RE2 and RE3.  Windows does not handle HDR well.

Resident Evil 2 and 3 shared a set of computer models.  Not too weird, since they’re set on basically the same night.

In Resident Evil 2 and 3 the police are all using these… I guess they’re kind of all-in-one PCs?  I remember these were a THING at the time, basically PC manufacturers trying to cash in on the iMac craze without realizing what made the iMac so popular.  I think eMachines was one of the biggest offenders at the time.

You also see them in municipal works, like down here below the police station.  This one is particularly weird because it has a different keyboard than you see in other places in the game, and my first reaction was to make fun of it because it wasn’t even plugged in.

And then I took a second look and realized it was a USB keyboard, and it’s quite possible that an all-in-one of this vintage might not have had USB ports yet!

So my head canon is that the guy who normally sits at this station spilled coffee in his keyboard, and put in an order for a new keyboard, and some well-meaning help desk employee dropped off a keyboard that wouldn’t work with this PC… but before the guy who needed a new keyboard could put in a NEW help desk ticket, everyone got turned into zombies and started eating brains.

There’s also a laptop model that shows up occasionally.  Not much to say about it.

Now, while the police in RE2 are stuck with eMachines, Umbrella corporation employees, being evil, naturally get Apple computers.

I couldn’t figure out which specific Mac these were supposed to be, so I reached out to a good friend who has something of an encyclopedic knowledge of all things Apple.  His conclusion was that they are Quadra 610s, just with the floppy and optical drives swapped for legal reasons.

In Resident Evil 3, Umbrella does have this thing that MIGHT be a tower PC?  If so it’s really out-of-place for the time period because it doesn’t have any sort of removable media.

Also in Resident Evil 3, municipal workers got Quadra 610s.  I’m going to be real here, this is an obvious continuity glitch.  Someone’s head probably rolled after this shipped.

Or maybe someone at the train line was working for Umbrella.  Who knows.

Resident Evil 4, unsurprisingly, didn’t have many computers in it at all.  Most of the game has you running around, to be delicate, extremely rural areas.  They don’t even seem to have electricity in a lot of it.

Once you get past that bit, though, there’s a few PC towers.  Well, there’s a lot of places in the game where you just see a monitor and a keyboard sitting on a desk with NO PC attached to them, but there are some places you see PC towers next to the monitors and keyboards.

This is the most 2004-looking piece of 2004 hardware ever.  The 3.5 inch drive.  The mismatched 5.25 inch drive. The weird little baby bump PC case.  I think I may have owned this computer at one time.  CAPCOM I WOULD LIKE MY COMPUTER BACK IT HAS MY STARCRAFT SAVES.

Boring PC towers aside, you also get a good look at this… thing.

And I don’t know what it is, but I love it.  Is that an Apple ADB mouse next to it?  Like, from an Apple //gs?  I am absolutely in love.  No idea what’s going on with the rest of the computer.  I’m sure this was based on, like, some weird Japan-only PC brand that someone lovingly 3D modeled and stuck into RE4 as a bit of nostalgia.

Anyway.  Lots of horror games last month.  Good times!

 

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Resident Evil Zero: Yeah, this ain’t happening.

Posted on October 25, 2025 by baudattitude

After having a generally good time with the remake of the original Resident Evil, and a frankly excellent time with the remade versions of Resident Evil 2 and 3, the next logical step would have been to move on to the remade version of Resident Evil 4.  Right?

Well, I took a moment to look at the series timeline and realized that both Resident Evil: Code Veronica and Resident Evil Zero were actually released after the original version of RE3 and before RE4, so naturally I wanted to play those.

I didn’t last long with Code Veronica.  Like, five minutes in I had decided to just watch a movie version of the storyline off Youtube and get back to it if and when it’s remade.

That left Zero.  All I knew about that one, going into it, was that it was set on a train.  And the train part? It’s pretty awesome.  Sure, managing your limited inventory with no item boxes is a little annoying, but once you pick a general area to drop your spare items it’s not too bad.

Oh, and the fixed camera angles weren’t too bad.  You’re in a train.  Rooms are pretty much straight lines.

I had never heard, not even once, that there were levels AFTER the train.  That should have set off alarm bells.

At first, I was kinda stoked about it – especially once I realized that the training facility is what the Resident Evil level in Nikke was based on!  It was an oddly pleasant feeling to see the place again, from a different perspective.

So I gathered up all of the items that had been scattered around at the end of the train segment, and I carefully ferried them up to the main hall of the training facility, and then I found that there’s a limit to the number of items that you can drop in a room so I picked a couple of other nearby rooms and dropped the rest of the items in them, and I was roaming around and finding new quest items and…

…and then Billy got grabbed by something off screen that I couldn’t properly see because of the camera angles, and I couldn’t figure out how to kill it before it killed him and I got my first GAME OVER and…

…and suddenly I was back in the main hall of the training facility, with all of the items I had carefully gathered and organized still back at the train crash site or scattered throughout the mansion and I was looking at spending probably a half hour just collecting items again and that is where I said to heck with it.

AFTER coming to this conclusion, I took a look at the Steam Achievements for this game.  Roughly 50% of people finish the train level, which I think is surprisingly low considering it’s a pretty quick level and pretty neat.  Less than 30% finish the training facility.  That’s a pretty big drop-off and I am not particularly sorry to be part of it.

I have seen rumors that Capcom is working on modern remakes of both Code Veronica and Zero.  These may just be wishful thinking on the part of fans, but that’s the only way I am ever going to play either of these.

On to Resident Evil 4!

Followup:  OK, I’m 90 minutes into Resident Evil 4 remake, just finished chapter one, and this was definitely the correct decision.

 

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I may have a new rhythm game obsession.

Posted on October 20, 2025 by baudattitude

So, yesterday my wife and I joined some friends to celebrate one of our friends’ birthdays.  They are comfortably settling in to the post-40 club but, like us, refuse to grow up.

So we went to Round 1 and threw money at crane games.  I did very poorly in general, but DID manage to win my wife a very cute Hatsune Miku figurine.

However, during a break in the craning, my wife pointed to a maimai cabinet and asked if I had tried it yet.

And, well, I thought maimai was offline?  But this thing looked like it was up and running with a network connection.  So maybe it’s a new version.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I tried it out and it was a lot of fun and I will be going back to it.  It’s not quite as energetic as Chrono Circle but it has the same sort of round interface that I enjoyed there, minus the circle controller around the entire display that you spin.

However, one cautionary tale:  When I swiped my card to start playing, it prompted me to present an Aime card or continue as guest – and since I’m a nerd and happened to HAVE an Aime card on me, I dutifully touched it to the NFC reader on the cabinet.

What followed seemed like an eternity of creating an account and acknowledging all sorts of event notifications and just screen after screen of making choices from menus that were entirely in Japanese with too many kanji for me to quickly read.  I quickly adopted the strategy of pushing the default option until it let me choose a song, but the next time I go over to Round 1 I will need to actually try to read some of them.

Because, yes, I will be back.

 

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The Seasonally-Appropriate Games Continue

Posted on October 18, 2025 by baudattitude

OK, so since my last post I’ve played the modern remakes of both Resident Evil 2 and 3, after which I finally went through the story for the NIKKE collaboration.  It was probably 20 hours worth of controller time to get through the full Claire > Leon sequence in RE2 and then the single path of RE3.  Most of that was RE2, of course.  I’d heard complaints that the RE3 remake was criminally short, but I didn’t realize just HOW short it was.

I looked it up after the fact, and it looks like they legitimately charged $60 for a game that is like, 5 hours long with a solid half of the assets reused from the RE2 remake.  That’s ballsy!

I paid $40 for the bundle of (RE2 + RE3 + RE4 + extras) in the recent steam sale, and that seems like a pretty good deal.  Adding the remasters of the remakes of the first game and Zero only added another ten bucks to that.  That’s a lot of zombies per dollar.

Anyway.  I’m glad I played through the first three, because that gave me enough information to understand the NIKKE collab.  It seems to have been set immediately after the end credits for 3, in fact.

The story wasn’t too impactful – collaboration stories can’t be impactful, because it’s not like Shift Up can rerun them – but it had some great character moments between Claire and Quiry and especially between Ada and D.  I felt it was definitely worth the time invested in catching up on RE lore.

Also, they’re good games!  RE3 may have been blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-short, but I liked the way it fleshed out the events of RE2 while also doing its own thing.  There were times in both where I found myself cursing the inventory system, but neither was as bad as RE1 and it made finding the assorted belt pouches to give myself more inventory space feel rewarding.

Though I would like to curse whoever came up with the achievement name of “It’s Hip to Add Squares” because I spent ALL NIGHT with the Huey Lewis song stuck in my head, and also the bit where Leon is running all over the police station trying to find two electronic components felt just a tiny bit stretched.

These are minor complaints.

My plan WAS to play 4 next, but looking at the franchise release order I realized that I really need to do Code Veronica and Zero before I get to 4.

It’s been a few years since I owned a Dreamcast and the disc version of Code Veronica, so I went and hunted down disc images, and found a Dreamcast emulator that would run on my M2 iPad, and got it booted, and…

…boy, Dreamcast graphics are pretty rough in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty-five, huh?  And OMG these controls.  It’s not just the tank controls for movement, it’s the B to open the item menu and then X to select items and…

It looks like there is a 2.5 hour “movie cut” of all the game cutscenes and important gameplay on Youtube, and my plan is to watch that to understand what Claire got up to after leaving Raccoon City.  Hopefully Code Veronica gets the remake treatment at some point.

Assuming I make it through Zero, and RE4: Remake after that, I have quite a few other titles in the series already.  From various sales, I own Mac App Store versions of RE: Biohazard and RE: Village, and I picked up the  3DS release of RE: Revelations during the waning days of the eShop.  It looks like the only important titles I am missing at this point are 5, 6 and Revelations 2.  I think they go on sale often enough that I should be able to fill out the library cheap if the urge hits me.

 

 

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