08/03/2021
After a couple of conversations with different mates over the weekend I was motivated to dust off my old GPT-2 scripts and play a little more. Libraries have changed in the near 2 years since I fist dabbled, but by tweaking the requirements I managed to get the AI creative juices flowing again. Finally I made my way to bed last night, treating myself to one last search before bed…
12/02/2021
Cyberpunk 2077 crashes were a pain, it meant reload time in a close to seamless open World As a big fan of the original paper based RPG as a teen, no surprise that I enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077 I started writing this post on the 11th Jan, it’s now a month and a big quality patch later I’ve finished off nearly every one of the side quests, completed just about every…
15/11/2020
And I was so stoked to pick up a PS5 on launch day, all down to a favour from a friend, as I’d not considered acquiring one until 2 days before 🙂 First impressions of PS5 * it’s huge, like PC size * it’s glaring white, and has what seems like a fragile flexy covering * it’s fast, at eveything * it’s quiet, I’ve been use to the PS4 fan…
02/11/2020
Games I’ve been playing post lockdown: * Ghost of Tsushima – the multiplayer options are varied and deep – I screwed up my saves while scoring Platinum, so I can’t start NG+ until I complete it again * Start Wars Squadrons – returned this to EA Games within a week – lack of depth, really underwhelming * Doom Eternal – so tough – not played a game that gets my…
02/11/2020
There’s been a long history of some bots trying to access this blog by trying to access the root & admin accounts & guessing the password, not sure why? This has caused frequent lock outs & even messing up the back end database, preventing the site from loading. It’s not been a real big issue as I’ve simply restored the backup, simples 🙂 The last solution that I’ve applied seems…
14/09/2020
I’ve been having a on and off issues with my PS4 ejecting disks while playing, and even from standby. It’s been little of an issue, although in-turn it has been a catalyst to me pulling the power cord from the rear of the console to keep it powered down. This in turn has lead to the screen that I’m sure you all know well, warning that closing of the console…
29/08/2020
My son has completed all of Paw Patrol: On a Roll, picking up all pup treats, dissed there’s no platinum trophy! This as increased his interest in other games. He’s quite fond of Farm Simulator, and driving tractors into water, then walking around as his chosen avatar. This motivated me to introduce him to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Disovery, he’s now parkouring, galloping, and sailing around ancient Greece. I’m really impressed…
29/08/2020
#GhostOfTsushima meep pic.twitter.com/vp11pdoR7Q — Cobra Kai Yoga (@DataAugmented) August 29, 2020 Finished the main story of Ghost of Tsushima last night; great story, combat & open World adventure… it was cheap too for a new title; not sure if that was to encourage people to buy due to Covid, or that the console is coming to the end of its lifespan, or maybe the studio isn’t gouging as much profit…
11/08/2020
I never much recognise the improvements that are rolled out with WordPress releases, but this one it truly useful; plugins now have the option to auto update 🙂 This closes a potential security hole, although guess there’s also the chance that any updates could break a site :p Good news on the day NZ enters lockdown again, let’s see how long this lasts this time!
02/08/2020
Reading a Reddit post about new a new version of nano being releases, and between the vi/vim sysadmin comments someone mentioned how nano keyboard shortcuts can be edited 🙂 I’ve tried vim many times, and the commands don’t feel intuitive, nano has been the editor I’ve fallen back on since first using Linux; pico as it was known back when I used it at Uni on Unix. Even though I’ve…
02/08/2020
I came across a model that intrigued me enough to trial last night, a machine learning model that speed runs through Super Mario Brothers, cool eh? Here’s the git uvipen/Super-mario-bros-PPO-pytorch Introduction Here is my python source code for training an agent to play super mario bros. By using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm introduced in the paper Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms paper. Talking about performance, my PPO-trained agent could complete…
31/07/2020
Yesterday morning my Son was watching a stream on his ipad of someone playing a Mario game on the Switch. We chatted about it, I’ve introduced him to it in the past, with little interest on his part. Then he requested that we play Mario! I’ve been waiting for this day! 🙂 Now don’t get me wrong, he does enjoy games… although usually watching me play; saying this the only…
31/07/2020
2020 has been a crazy year, and we’re only just over 6 months through this ride! Excited to see what the rest of the year brings with NZ, US elections and referendums… & Cyberpunk 2077; did I let slip how much I’m looking forward to it? 🙂 To tide me over until then I’ve another AAA title that I tried not to build up prior to launch, but I’m now…
14/06/2020
Not sure why I haven’t got around to writing any shell commands / scripts in the past… here’s my first Bash :p Here’s an alias to check which country my VPN is connected to in 3 steps: ifconfig.me call to set IP address to a variable shows the IP address checks the IP variable on whois truncates the output to the ‘address’ output to see location alias whoami=’todays_ip=$(curl ifconfig.me) &&…
Tired of the games I was bouncing between I’ve settled on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey today & am enjoying it as much as the early games in the series. I wanted to enjoy it before, but couldn’t quite get a hang of the combat. However switching to the ‘alternate’ style seems to have done the trick now I have got the hang of countering. Off to explore the Greek islands 🙂
28/05/2020
I checked Pi-Hole a couple of days back as my Twitter impressions have strangely peaked… then dropped away… I had 3 Pi-Hole updates to install, but each failed 🙁 Turns out I’ve been running this Raspberry Pi for so long that I was 2 releases behind current, still on jessie, so I’ve been on a mission to update. It’s a timely process, fingers crossed it looks to be going OK…
24/04/2020
How time flies when you’re having fun, we’re personally really blessed to live in a safe bit of the World, with more than enough space, and access to nature… thoughts with those in more challenging environments. I’ve regrettably bought a digital copy of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, would have really liked a hard copy, but you know things been what they are… sure there will be enough cheap versions knocking…
04/04/2020
Seeing that Uncharted 4 is being given away to PSN users for April, I thought I’d play the preceding Uncharted games first 🙂 I’ve always considered Naughty Dog titles to be a little too linear for my liking, let’s see how this assumption weighs up. Nevertheless, I’m up for giving the first trilogy a while, always heard great things about it; my games buyer use to describe it as a…
27/03/2020
Terence McKenna’s Time Wave Zero concrescence, time speeding up So much happening hard to believe it’s nearly the end of March Maybe this is time passing quickly to compensate for the slow passage that will commence from today 23rd March 2021, when we as a family began our COVID19 self isolation https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/kiwis-go-home-new-zealand-to-go-into-month-long-lockdown-to-fight-coronavirus Everything seems crazy and beyond satire with Trump, and Borris on other side of the Atlantic. Civil Wars,…
19/02/2020
For my birthday my best mate (aka son) presented me with some cash to buy a game. Rather than pick up a transient title that I’d play in passing I ordered the latest kit from HardKernel; the merging of two of my favourite pass times, Linux & Retrogames, then awesome handheld Odroid-Go Advance… & it arrived at the weekend 🙂 It only took half an hour to put together; the…