Q3 2023 Update

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Greetings, all! Outside of hiking and the job hunt, there’s not much to update on here for now, but I am still alive and active!

The original plan was to sell a bunch of self-refurbished and wiped machines on a store here. Turns out I didn’t have enough traffic for that, due to not sticking to a posting schedule, so I went ahead and listed the original Corsair One Pro on a family member’s eBay.

As my Dell G5 5505 is casually experiencing cpu errors in the journal and dmesg logs on a bi-daily basis, I’ve gone ahead and completely wiped both drives in it. If my tinkery friend ends up not wanting it, I’ll probably gut what parts I can reuse out of it and dispose of the hull at an ewaste facility in Denver.

Next, I took the rear panel off the T440p that I’ve used for a good few years. More on my known computer timeline on my current hardware page here. I went ahead and cleaned the little fan, as well as repasted the i7-4710mq I believe it is. Looks like the SSD I had originally added to this customized beast back in the day is still rocking and working fine. Go sandisk!

One downside with the original plastering of stickers this had on the rear of the LCD panel is that isopropyl alcohol + a razor blade seem to cause damage to the rubberized coating that was on here. Now I’m waiting on a decal to cover up this coating and better protect the rear. Once the rest of the chassis for this guy is cleaned up, I’ll do a test install of Ubuntu and a test install of Windows 10 before re-wiping the drive and posting it up on eBay as well.

The next machine after these two that I’m going to work on selling is the old Oryx Pro oryp4 model that I have. It was refurbished by System76 officially in 2022 for me, though I believe it was originally released in 2018- here’s the web archive link for that page.

In the spirit of the original release for that machine, I’ll likely end up listing it with either No OS or Pop!_OS 22.04 preinstalled.
On another note, here are some cool videos and blog posts that I’ve been into recently:

Used Projects For Sale! (also Decky Loader news)

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Greetings, fellow nerdlings. I’ve finally got the store page for my site up and running! While Squarespace makes it easy to set up websites and stores, I ended up futzing around with my images and where to put descriptions for too long, so it took about two months lol.

The store page can be accessed clicking the link above or by clicking the Projects For Sale tab at the top of my site. Help me sell these machines to people that are in need, as well as fund other fun projects along the way!

In other updates, I’ve also had to re-image my Steam Deck due to breaking the UI too often with Decky Loader plugins. It seems that the current pre-alpha build here of Decky Loader is the only one that was booting for me when I was running the Beta channel OS of SteamOS 3 on my deck. That said, the pre-release build was crashing fairly often and I may have installed one too many plugins. Now that I’ve reinstalled a bunch of games and made sure the Chrome shortcut in Deck UI is heading to XCloud properly again, I think I’ll just stick to the VibrantDeck extension that makes your screen look a lot better.

Ignore the clutter on that workbench, I’m about to replace the guest gaming desktop’s wifi adapter with a little nub as well as replace a touchpad on a T440p soon.

Sorry if the above image here seems blurry. This was from when I headed over to the home of GloriousEggroll and we finished working on updating the BIOS for the Upcycle V2 build that I’m now selling in my Projects For Sale store here. We had to upgrade the BIOS about 5 times- due to the many iterations that have been released- and now it’s working perfectly with the faster RAM and GPU that were added. More information via the store listing HERE.

That said, I think I’ll keep the older, likely-less-worth-money Upcycle V1 build that has an old i7-3xxx processor and Radeon 6770 1GB video card, as I don’t think there will be as much interest in buying that as there will be for the Ryzen 5-based Upcycle V2.

The Upcycle V2 system is now back at my place, safe and sound. Just need to re-mount the PCIe-screw-cover that goes into the back and we’re good to go for sale. Note that I’ll be selling it with no OS installed, unless the new owner wants a specific OEM-Installable Linux distro installed. That’ll be the policy for all my hardware, as I won’t be paying for Windows licenses.

After I got the games reinstalled on Deck, and ProtonGE builds installed via ProtonUP for games like Shatterline and Halo MCC, I started running through a Brotato run again as well haha. This is basically a single-player equivalent to Vampire Survivors, except completely written in Godot which is pretty cool. Godot is an open source game engine, and it’s nice to see games on Steam utilizing it.

I also received my Pibox recently! I’m looking forward to working on hosting things once I can get two 4TB 2.5” drives for it. I have quite a bit I’d like to host on it…

Nifty Utilities + The Store

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Hello there everyone! It’s been an interesting month over at casa de la Seibz. Lots of work has gone into fixing up my condo here and there where needed, and replacing light fixtures etc.

Recently I re-imaged my Steam Deck, and made an associated issue for my steam script project over here. I’ll probably work on that more in November as things begin to cool down outside quite a bit and I’m home more often.

I’ve recently been messing around with RetroArch from Steam, installed on my freshly-imaged Steam Deck to see what, if any, changes have been made. I also found a great script from a community member over here for running in Desktop Mode. That script will make sure all available RetroArch cores are installed to your RetroArch install, since not all of them are available on Steam currently.

This helps a ton in enabling Gamecube/Wii emulation along with ScummVM and a few other RetroArch cores that weren’t natively available out of the box after installing it from Steam.

I’ll add below the terminal commands I used to run that script after going into Desktop Mode on Deck and opening Konsole.

cd
wget https://github.com/icculus/twisty-little-utilities/blob/main/steamdeck-retroarch-download-all-cores.sh
bash steamdeck-retroarch-download-all-cores.sh

If you haven’t pinned it to the task bar yet, if you dock the Steam Deck in Desktop Mode, the windows/super key on your keyboard will correspond with a KDE-start-menu equivalent, and then you can search for and open the Konsole terminal from there.

I’ve also done more testing with the inovato quadra, and this little guy definitely seems to be a great little machine for someone’s first internet-enabled desktop, or for emulating some N64/GBA games on portable monitors etc.

Having done some work on the Steam Deck script, I thought about moving my Guest Gaming Desktop’s (more info in a post here) Steam client to Beta mode, so you can just run updates on that Nobara install, and then jump into the new “gamepadui” Big Picture mode that has the Steam Deck UI enabled per the Beta channel now.

As I haven’t updated that desktop in a while, looks like we’re on a newer mesa and kernel release now too!

Soon I’ll have some more images up of my second upcycle desktop build, but a summary of the parts is below

  • Ryzen 5 3600

  • Asrock b350 pro4 motherboard

  • t-force vulcan z 3200mhz 16gb ram

  • XFX RX590 8GB Fat Boi edition

  • 512gb sabren rocket nvme

  • Montech air v100

More news on that build and the status of my store page to come! I’ll be selling that build, my previous upcycle build as well as some Thinkpads I’m working on fixing up to sell as well. Might have some other treats to sell there soon too!