Today I received a printer. I had never had any experience with 3d printing, but so far it seems intuitive. The printer is Kobra 2 Neo. The first thing I tried printing was the canonical 3D Benchy, which turned out really nice. As I'm writing this post, I'm printing a screen protector for the uConsole I have found on the web. The slicing software seems easy enough to use. I haven't modeled anything in 3d in like 10 years, so maybe I'll stick to just printing so far, but I intend to dive into modeling at some point. Happy days! Btw, Beltane blessings! Btw x2, love you, sweetheart

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I've been using the junk PC for a while now, and it's nice. Just to go through the specs: Win7 Ultimate SP1 x64; AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2 GHz; 8 GB RAM; GeForce GT 710 (pls don't be jealous); Among the other games, I've added Stronghold, Warcraft 3(+FT), Plants vs Zombies, Factorio, Nancy Drew - Shadow at the Water's Edge (nonograms and bentos are the best). I have also remembered that I used to have two "games", but more like learning programs, in the '00s for French. I remembered a few things from them, like 3d glossy plastic-looking buttons, puddles of paint to represent the colours, a man saying "bleu foncé" and the option to get a bronze, silver or gold medal with a certificate at the end. I had some mixed blurry memories of the two games and it was difficult to find them. They turned out to be both from Eurotalk. They are beginner level learning apps, but they capture the charm of that era quite well, so I do recommend them if you are even slightly interested in French. They also exist for other languages though. Let me know in the guestbook if you also had this program In the meantime, I have installed Cyberpunk on my main PC and it runs surprisingly well on a server Linux PC.

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Turns out you don't have to be popular to receive tons of spam messages in your guestbook from bots - over the last few hours alone I have received over 20. So I have implemented a couple of ways to stop them, one of which you might experience yourself - a simple math question - we all know clankers can't math, right? Other measures won't affect real people. On a brighter note, I have assembled the junk PC I was writing about below - it's running a Phenom II and Win7, and it's awesome - I have been piling old games onto the SDD, so far I've got L4D, Metro 2033, the first 2 Stalkers, Borderlands, HL2, HoMMIII, Stronghold, Syberia, Assassin's Creed 2, Skyrim, Vice City, San Andreas, LotR BfME2, LotR Conquest (hell yeah!), Spider-Man 2, the first three Harry Potter games, No One Lives Forever 2, American McGee's Alice and NFS Underground 2. So far I was unable to make LEGO Stunt Rally work - it runs, but the cars don't. I have had some problems running Prototype - it crashes as it loads a saved game, but otherwise runs. I'll try to debug as much as possible. Voodoo isn't always the solution.

I have managed to get a retro PC together, but there are 2 main issues with it currently - the HDD is very slow, and XP (even with the latest community driven updates) is too outdated to be realistically useful for gaming. Hence, I will do 2 things - first, I will install XP on an SSD and check the responsiveness of the system; second, I will likely just install a version of Windows 7 on the SSD. I was focusing on XP for nostalgia, which I have somewhat satisfied using the system again, and for Lego Stunt Rally, for which I have found an alternative loader that supposedly works on newer Windows versions

I have been thinking about playing the good old games again. I should clarify that my childhood/adolescence gaming era was in the '00s - '10s, so that's what I feel most nostalgic about. I used to have an NES clone with cartridges, but here I'm talking about PC games specifically. I should also say that my favourite games were mostly not the ones that are generally popular. I had a lot of games that were based on movies and cartoons - like Madagascar, the Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter games, or the second Shrek - and some random ones, the demos of which I had got with the local monthly gaming magazine - like Giants: Citizen Kabuto or No One Lives Forever 2. I also remember random games - like Lego Stunt Rally and Creatures: Village - that I had bought from the local CD store. A lot of these games don't run on modern PCs unless you voodoo them into running through emulators, VMs, graphics cards sims &c. And that kind of voodooing leads to bugs, animations are too fast because CPUs are faster now, and in general it takes some of the magic away. So, I have found my old motherboard with Phenom II still in it, along with the cooler and RAM. I have an old Internet card and a graphics card from that time, which supports DirectX 9 (sorry, didn't meant to flex on you). Basically, I only need a hard drive, a power unit and a case to shove it all into, and I get a somewhat 'retro' PC for Windows XP. I also have an old VGA LCD display, which would also be nice to use for the build. I think I also have an internal CD drive somewhere, I know I have an external one and an external floppy drive. Anyway, I'll let that thought cook in my brain for a bit, purely because that setup needs space in the flat, and I'm not sure I want to allocate it just yet. I'll let it simmer