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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In which, I play seasonally-appropriate video games.

Posted on October 12, 2025 by baudattitude

I don’t normally treat “spooky season” as a reason to do anything other than eating my own weight in pumpkin spice-flavored snacks, so it’s not common for me to bust out the horror games this time of year.

That said, there is a new Silent Hill game, and I preordered it, and I was NOT going to do the thing where you preorder games and play the intro when it comes out and then put it aside “for later” and it’s been marked down to 20 bucks or less multiple times by the time you finally see any of the game past the tutorial.

Not that I’ve done this.  But, uh, a friend has.  On several occasions.  This friend is so silly, and so bad with money! Let’s take a moment to laugh at my friend.

So now that we’ve established that, while I didn’t technically pick it out of the Steam library BECAUSE it was a horror game and this is horror season, it’s certainly thematic.

Also it’s a really good experience.  I know there was a lot of drama around having a Silent Hill game that is not set in, well, Silent Hill, but even if this just had the branding slapped on it to move more copies it still delivers everything I want out of a Silent Hill game.

I did have the WEIRDEST damn sensation several times playing it, though.  See, for a good chunk of the game you are wandering through a very rural 1960s Japanese town, and if you ignore the faceless flesh monstrosities and the rot that is slowly consuming everything it’s actually a very pleasant little town.  Like, I would 100% visit this place.  Take pictures home to show the friends and family.  That would be a slide show for the ages.  “Here’s the little corner store that is still selling 100% hand-made dagashi, never mind the mysterious fleshy lumps, and here’s a rice field that has gone through 12 generations of farmers, and if you look in the background you’ll see that there is a scarecrow wearing a school uniform, holding a knife and covered in blood…”

Overall, a bit of a disturbing experience but still recommended.

The ending recommends a second play through now that you know The Big Twist, and I think it’s justified… but I have another thing taking my time before I get back to that.

Specifically, this:

I don’t know why Shift Up decided to do a Nikke/Resident Evil crossover.  I’m not entirely sure it makes sense.  Nikke is pretty much about robot butts, and Resident Evil is not normally considered a sexy game.

HOWEVER.

Previously, I have gone into their crossover events not knowing much about the other characters in the event, and the storylines have fallen a little flat as a result.  But, I looked up the Resident Evil characters featured in this and discovered that they are all from the first RE two games.   So catching up on the series enough to know a little about the characters seemed easy enough.

It’s not that I’ve never played a Resident Evil game, mind you!  In fact, I’ve owned the first Resident Evil for several platforms, going all the way back to the “Director’s Cut DualShock Version” for the PS1.  It’s just that, well, I’ve never really gotten very far in the game.

OK, cards on the table, I’ve never made it to the first item box.  Mostly I’ve just wandered around the first couple of rooms of the mansion, completely lost because of the camera angles and fighting the controls, and I get eaten by birds or something and rage quit.

But it turns out that the PC remaster of the GameCube remake of the original game features a “very easy” mode which effectively neuters all of the enemies and throws ammo and save ribbons at you, meaning that you are not so much fighting the zombies as much as you are fighting the camera and the controls and the godawful inventory system and that stupid one way door near the east wing item box and the miserable miserable experience of needing to backtrack to the last item box because you didn’t bring the correct quest item to rub against the correct shiny spot on the screen and…

…ahem.

Let me just say, if you made it through this game at its intended difficulty level, you have my respect.  That goes double if you made it through the game in any of the American releases, where they bumped up the difficulty to screw over the rental market.   There is a good game here, but man it demands a level of patience that I absolutely did not have in the late 1990s and probably could not command even nearly 30 years later..

Taking a look through the achievements for the game, it looks like there are achievements for completing the game in three hours or less, and for doing it without saving, and for limiting yourself to melee combat, and…

…and I will never be seeing any of these achievements.  Ever.

Anyway, next up is Resident Evil 2 Remake.  Technically, I’ve played a little of this because it was free on Amazon Luna for a month and I put a few hours into it.  I don’t know if I can download my Luna save and apply it to the Steam version, and I’d be completely lost even if I did, so I’ll be starting from scratch.  The game actually lends itself pretty well to that, though, with its two protagonist system.  I can pick Claire this time, instead of Leon, and it should be at least a slightly different experience – and Claire is in the Nikke crossover, so that works out as well.

 

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Why do I do this to myself? Adventures in Apple Mail.

Posted on October 11, 2025 by baudattitude

Sometimes, I manage to shoot myself in the foot badly enough that I feel compelled to document it, mostly out of the hope that someone, someday, will find themselves in the same situation and may be sent here by a search engine.

Today is one of those times.

Let’s start with the background.  About 20 years ago, I bought a Mac Mini and made an iTunes account.  For this, I used a gmail address.

A few years later, I subscribed to Apple’s MobileMe service, which gave me an @me.com mail address.  I haven’t been subscribed to that for a long time.  I kinda wonder if it still exists out there?  I know some people have legacy me.com addresses.  But that’s not important.

What IS important is that Apple would not let me change the email address for my iTunes account to the @me.com address.  I’ve never been entirely clear why, but the gist of things was that you could CREATE an iTunes account with an @me.com address, and you could change the email address of an iTunes account, but there was something about changing it, specifically, to the me.com domain.

Eventually, I got an @icloud.com address, and have moved the majority of my accounts over to that address.  Part of this is because I’m not a huge fan of having my email on google servers, and part of it is because my iCloud email address is considerably shorter.

But I still couldn’t move my iTunes account over to icloud.com.  By this time, it wasn’t an iTunes account any more and had become an AppleID.  Apple Account. They’ve renamed it a couple times.

Then, quite recently, Apple did something on their side and made this possible.  I had a moderate amount of trepidation about the whole thing, but finally went ahead with it last month, to great effect.  As of now, the gmail address is still there but gets a tiny fraction of my daily email and I log in to all Apple services with the iCloud account.

Great success!

However.

See, I am one of those old people who still uses a mail client instead of web mail.  Specifically, I use mail.app since it comes with every Mac and is decent enough.  I’ve occasionally used Outlook, but it’s never seemed to be better enough to be worth having two mail clients installed.

AND, because I get a lot of mail that is not important enough to see in my inbox but not annoying enough to be really called spam, I have a bunch of mail rules in mail.app to send things to folders.  I set these up ages ago and they are a great help in keeping my notification count down.

MOSTLY down.  Look, 152 unread emails is nothing compared to what some of you animals have on your phone RIGHT NOW.

All of this is coming to a point, I promise you.

After I changed my Apple Account to use the iCloud address, these rules broke.  I didn’t know the two things were connected, at first.  It was just that I started seeing a lot of not-quite-spam in my inbox instead of in folders.  Not enough to be annoying…

…until the most recent Prime Day sale, where I bought a bunch of junk that I probably don’t need, and suddenly realized that one specific class of emails I was NOT seeing was any emails from Amazon.  They weren’t showing up in my inbox, and weren’t in the folder labeled Amazon.

So obviously, something had changed with my rules that was responsible for both the unwanted mails in my inbox AND the missing emails from Amazon.  My next thought was to go into the email settings on my phone to fix the rules…

…this was not what I had expected to see.  Suddenly I had no email rules?  But I hadn’t deleted them.  And, to make matters more confusing, I had recently (a) bought a new phone and (b) upgraded all of the Apple devices in the house to iOS 26 / iPadOS 26 / tvOS 26 / macOS 26 / watchOS 26 / did they make any more OS 26s? What do HomePods run?  Whatever those run, if there’s a ’26 version they’re on it now.

So, not remembering that I had recently changed my Apple Account away from gmail, I spent quite a while falling down rabbit holes trying to figure out whether the OS update or the new device had broken things for me, where the heck my Amazon emails were, and – rather more critically – whether this was affecting anything else..

Eventually, I found an enormously-useful thread on Apple’s support forums, and things started falling into place.

See, Mac mail.app doesn’t USE iCloud’s mail rules.  It uses its own, and they’re stored in a plist file in ~/Library/Mail/V10/MailData/SyncedRules.plist.  And thankfully this is a human-readable plist file, because I was able to read it and see that all of the email rules were trying to send emails to a imap URI of imap://<my gmail address>/<mailbox name>

And that lead me to go looking in my gmail account, where I found that there was an Amazon folder – but the amazon emails weren’t in it.  They were, instead, in gmail’s archived email.

I recreated all of my email rules, confirmed that the URIs in SyncedRules.plist now looked like imap://<my iCloud address>/<mailbox name>, and dragged all of the emails from the gmail archive back into my iCloud inbox.  Where they were promptly sorted into my iCloud’s Amazon folder.

So what happened, as near as I can figure, is that new email was coming in that met criteria for “move this to a mailbox”.  Most of the time, this was erroring out because there wasn’t, for example, a “Nextdoor” folder on my gmail account.  Those emails landed in my inbox.

The Amazon emails were being processed because there WAS a folder for them in gmail… but they were being dropped in there with a To: address of my iCloud email, and gmail was moving them to archive because they weren’t addressed to a gmail account.  The end result was, they appeared to disappear.

Also, quite surprisingly, mail.app can move email BETWEEN imap servers.  I did not know this was possible.  It looks like it does it with a copy-and-delete, but I’m not entirely sure.  It fails when trying to move email back from gmail, though – rather than having only a single copy in iCloud, I got a duplicate and there is still a copy in gmail.

Oh, side note.  iCloud’s mail rules are very rudimentary, and I wouldn’t recommend using them at all, but definitely DO NOT use them if you are also using mail.app rules.  There is apparently a high chance of  a Great Disagreement over which takes precedence.

Posted in iOS, mac, random | Leave a comment

One more homelab post. It works, and I’m not sure why.

Posted on August 24, 2025 by baudattitude

There is a particular sort of despair that hits you when you have finally solved a problem, you are looking at all of the notes you took during the process and all of the sources you reviewed looking for solutions… and you come to the conclusion that you have no idea which of the random things you threw at the problem was the determining factor in making it finally work.

That’s where I’m at today.

The short version is that, after I installed Bazzite on to an AMD-based mini PC I had and determined that it worked surprisingly well, I moved on to step two of the project – virtualizing Bazzite so I could run games off my home server without having a computer devoted solely to the task.

Spoiler: It worked!  Eventually.

I was following this as my template, which was close to but not quite a tutorial.

I even wound up using the same GPU he recommended, the AMD W5500.  It’s basically a single slot, lower-power version of the RX580 – not the world’s most up-to-date GPU, but more than enough for my purposes.  It was also only $65 on eBay.

(This is not mine.  It’s a random picture from the internet because I didn’t think to take any photos before putting the side panels on)

The biggest challenge of the whole process was trying to understand PCIe passthrough.  In really basic terms, it’s telling the computer hosting the virtual machines that, while the computer has a GPU plugged into it, it shouldn’t use it – rather, it should let a virtual machine take it over.  That way, Bazzite running in the VM has a real GPU and can actually play 3D games.

I had to set up PCIe passthrough when I initially created my Proxmox server, because I wanted to pass through the SATA controllers to the instance of Unraid I was running and I also needed to pass through a USB port so Unraid would see the USB drive that it uses as its license.  That was actually really easy!  I didn’t have to do any special configuration other than selecting the SATA controller in the system settings for the Unraid VM.

GPU Passthrough was not so forgiving, for reasons that eventually made sense.  See, Proxmox is just Linux.  And, like any operating system, it wants display hardware to put up a user interface, even if the UI in question is nothing more than a black screen with a login prompt.

So, it grabs the GPU and doesn’t want to release it – and, while it’s in this state, nothing else can take it over.  The real problem, then, becomes convincing Proxmox to not take ownership of the GPU.

I am not sure how I eventually accomplished this.  There’s a whole set of steps where you blacklist drivers and unload kernel modules and… in the end it was working, but I could not tell you why.  It may have even come down to needing a monitor plugged into the computer’s onboard video.  (Normally I would run this server in headless mode, with no monitor)  I’m not certain and right now I don’t want to try to undo anything to see when it breaks.

I do get one warning when launching the VM.

I don’t like this warning.  Mostly because I don’t know what it’s telling me.  But it doesn’t seem to affect anything.

Anyway, adding a GPU to my main server did increase the power it sucks down a bit.  It idles at like 80 watts now.  Thanks to living in the Pacific Northwest, that’s only about 3 cents a day in energy costs and I think I can deal with that.

Posted in homelab, videogames | Leave a comment

Practical Applications of Withered Technology

Posted on August 9, 2025 by baudattitude

Another day, another adventure / experiment in self hosting something.

FreshRSS interface, installed as a web app in macOS

I’ve recently gotten a new job, so I’m faced with the bleak prospect of transitioning from a happy unemployed life into one where I need to at least pretend to be beholden to the whims of others for 8 hours a day.  So I’m about to lose a lot of free time and should probably look into ways to use what I will be left with in more intelligent ways.

Starting with: I realized that I spend a lot of time opening various news sites to see if there are new articles that I’m interested in, and then I wind up scrolling through old articles if there aren’t new ones and… well, this isn’t a great use of time.

Enter RSS, possibly the oldest web technology (it dates back to 1999!) that I’ve never really interacted with.  I was vaguely familiar with it as a way of aggregating news feeds, and I have one friend who has sung its praises in the past, so naturally I went to him for advice.

He recommended something called InoReader, and that lead me to my first discovery regarding RSS.  I had assumed that you just installed an RSS client, like you would install a web browser or FTP client, and it went out and checked for articles on your news feeds and served them up to you in a handy list.

This turns out not to be the case.  Rather, the RSS readers I found all assume that you are using a third party service that does the checking and aggregation and then you log into that third party service to read them, and that wasn’t quite what I was looking for.

A few months ago, I probably would have kinda fumed about this and either signed up for one of these services or – more likely – have given up on the whole idea.  That was before I got into the habit of wondering whether there was a way to do it with my own server infrastructure, and less than a minute after having this thought I was looking at the “Apps” tab in Unraid, which is where you can find all of the pre-built docker containers.

A few minutes after that, I had downloaded FreshRSS, done some very minimal configuration (selected a different port since there was a port conflict with another container) and was happily adding feeds… sorta.  Not every site has a handy RSS button – in fact, they seem pretty uncommon, probably for reasons I’ll get into in a minute.

On the other hand, a surprising number of sites allow you to just append a /feed to the end of their main URL to get the RSS feed.  So even if there’s no handy button for it, most sites DO support RSS, if only to a point – and that point extends to the actual content they are willing to present via RSS.  Many sites only give you a tiny article abstract or the first few lines of an article, and some just give you a list of article titles.  This makes sense, though, since naturally they aren’t just putting news up as a public service.  They want you to read their articles on their sites so you see all of the ads surrounding them, and so they get all sorts of exciting click through metrics and can drop tracking cookies on you and so on and so forth.

Which is fine!  It’s good to want things.  Personally, I want to read all of their content for free and never see an ad.  There’s obviously a conflict here.

I haven’t found a total solution for this, but I did find a couple of plugins for FreshRSS that will do things like load webcomics (“Comics in feed“) or try to load complete articles rather than abstracts (“Af_Readability“). Honestly, they haven’t been super effective, but they have improved the experience a bit.  And even for sites where I’m stuck getting tiny excerpts instead of full articles, it’s made it so I can decide whether it’s really important enough to actually click through to the site or whether the info in the excerpt is enough.

This has saved me a LOT of time, and it’s helping me clean up my browser bookmarks as well.

Also, since RSS isn’t giving me the “comments” sections on these articles, I am avoiding getting sucked into rage-induced spirals where I keep reading the absolute dumbest takes, one after another.  Big win!

Now I just need something like this for Reddit, and I need to find a way to keep myself from clicking on the “For You” tab on X.  Both of those would give me a lot of time back.

Update:  It turns out you can add “.rss” to the end of virtually any Reddit URL to create a feed from it.  So, http://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming.rss gives me an RSS feed for that particular subreddit.  It’s not a great reader, but it lets me only click through to the main web site if the article looks interesting.

 

Posted in homelab | Leave a comment