Category: Computer Maintenance and Repair

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Minecraft Server, Week 5: MineOS

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am finishing this project one way or another ™. Let’s get started!

I’m told that when I encounter a problem and a short, easy solution, I tend to keep tunneling on through the mountain until I break out the other side.

Project history: I spent two weeks generating four weeks worth of content, and now I’m back after two weeks of working on other stuff, and I’m ready to make it work. Somehow.

I came back to Micro Core and tarballed my progress and took another look at those Oracle Java install scripts. The more user-friendly looking one looked to be only for Java 7, and I need Java 8+. The other one wasn’t too hard to get working. I got the .tze and some kind of file with legal in the name. Both went in tce/optional, and… nothing. No successful install, no error messages, just nothing. I reached out to my Micro Core contact, but he was busy with other things, so I decided to change directions entirely.

I will say that in my experience with Micro Core, I mined up a lot of valuable knowledge, but it is time to be water and flow around the mountain.

Enter MineOS.

MineOS is toted as so easy, you can have a proper server for yourself on old hardware, even if you don’t know what you’re looking at when facing anything past what you learned by Kindergarten. I’m sure this will work.

I took my target machine into Third Workshop — mostly so I could have a spot to work without the normal household chatter. I also discussed what should be feasible in terms of my next big project. Before I left, I grabbed a nice, Minecraft grass green DVD to burn, as the MineOS site didn’t mention it working with anything else when dealing with physical hardware.

And my problems began. I left my tablet at home when I sometimes pace around the room with it while continuing to research. When I got there and had everything set up, I put the DVD into my laptop drive and spent several minutes trying to figure out how I was going to burn the MineOS ISO. My go-to tool I thought was installed appearently never made it onto my laptop, and my virus scanner was suspicious when I tried downloading a tool to help with the procedure.

I turned to my target machine. As a dual booted system, I can work on one hard drive while keeping the other safe. I booted it to Ubuntu and looked up a Linux tutorial on how to burn a *bootable* disk, as it turns out that not all disk burners can do that. A short tutorial mentioned a tool called Brasero I could use. It should start automatically when trying to burn anything.

A quick search told me Brasero was not installed, so I had my computer apt-get update. Twelve minutes later, it said there were a number of errors. The repositories must have been having issues or something. For some reason, I tried updating again, to similar results. I moved to my laptop and started writing this blog post, introducing the subject. Might as well use the time I have. When that was done, I told it to install Brasero, and the installer spat back an error, saying it was already installed.

I used a microfiber cloth to clean the DVD, as it looked like years on the spindle weren’t exactly the best for it. I burned it and it booted nicely to an option to install or run a live CD. I told it to install, and was given a command line error code I hardly recognized. The thing didn’t even act like it had the CD drive mounted after boot. That or it didn’t want to give it’s boot media up.

A new external hard drive came to my rescue. I moved the files that came with it into a folder on my laptop labeled as bloatware and used a utility I did have on my laptop already to write the installer to my device. It seemed to work just as poorly.

After I got home, I went to continue working on it, and I forgot to move the keyboard and mouse back to the active tower. As a result, I ended up booting correctly to the setup screen. It was only at this point that I recognized the installer as a fancy terminal program that only looks like it’s in something resembling a window. The clue was from a few strange-looking characters on the ASCII table that looked like some sort of boarder.

I wend back and forth over the machine, formatting and reformatting its poor, old 60 GB SSD. I had trouble with GRUB (GRand Unified Boot loader) not installing, so I had a stint of trying to tie into the one on the Ubuntu drive, but it took reformatting while both drives were connected before it accepted the install, but at that, it said it was unclean or something. I figured I could just go on ahead, as the installer wasn’t very imaginative if you did anything other than what it wanted to do.

During the first-boot config, I entered passwords for both the root and mc users. I ran into trouble with getting the network set up, and that’s about where I am now.

I know I didn’t finish like I said I would. It’s been way too long since I started this project that was supposed to take just two weeks. I’ve learned a ton, but right now, a lot of it feels like it’s going to waste.

Final Question: What are you looking forward to giving for Christmas?

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Minecraft Server, Week 4: Progress Backup

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I’m aiming a digital nuke at my progress on this project thus far. Let’s get started!

By the time this post goes up, I hope to have finished the whole project. As I write this post, it’s a little less than a day before part 2 goes live. I feel like I’ve made the least progress in terms of building a product, but I feel like I’ve made the most in terms of learning.

To recap: Part 1 was about assembling the hardware, Part 2 was about picking and installing Micro Core, and Part 3 was about trying to install Java and some of the things I learned that segment.

My goals for this statement only involved backup and later recovery, possibly in time for a quick transition to a working server. On one trip to Third Workshop, I spent a lot of time pacing and writing things down for what I want to save. I copied those over to a directory in a hard drive and even started on a script to automate their unpacking.

Back home, I found my files were missing. Lesson learned: Don’t trust Micro Core with things you want to keep unless you’ve finished setting it up. They will vanish unless protected.

I’d often have two or three topics I’d bounce around between. While looking for files to save, I went searching through the manual and found a more complete set of boot codes so a few things can live on my hard drive proper. While I’d love to do some possibly destructive testing around with the included file backup tool, I cannot risk it until I’ve finished my backup tools and mitigated the risk for when something breaks hideously.

The exact directory and file you can find your boot codes will vary depending on your bootloader. The Tiny Core Linux wiki has pages on a few of them, and if you ever need to know yours, try using the command “sudo ls -ra / | grep <loaderName>”. Sudo keeps you from getting a bunch of error messages from trying to look in a directory your default user account doesn’t have access to. The ls command forms the core upon which the rest of the command is built on. It means to list the stuff in your present working directory. Options come next with r meaning recursive, or all sub-directories, and a searches everything that’s hidden as well. The pipe symbol, |, acts like a funnel, taking the output of the ls command and feeding it into the next element, grep. Grep sorts long batches of data so it only displays lines containing <loaderName>.

I added a few more boot codes, tying several directories to the SSD. During this time, I learned a lot about what is supposed to go where. If I couldn’t find the answer to a question, I’d reach out to whatever help I could reach without making additional accounts. I almost made one for the Tiny Core forums, but I shied away when it would have involved logging in over an unsecured connection. My guess would have been that the site is so old they never bothered, but I think it’s just the admins not caring.

Progress overall was slow. It took me a day or two to figure out how to properly mount a drive and similarly “umount” it. (The n was left out in favor of a slightly shorter command to type.) It took a live chat session with a knowledgeable person to convince me I was looking at something in /mnt I now believe to be a mountpoint and not the automatically mounted drive.

With an ironically stabilizing system, I once again started development on my script. Each time I went to access it at /mnt/sdc1/restore.sh, I had to use sudo to get through an ownership blockade. Plus, with the geometry of the room, I wasn’t all too sure if one of our dogs was going to march right through the thumb drive. I also kept getting errors involving permission –and later ownership after I discovered the -p option– when trying to copy files there.

My next lesson was about how some disk formats don’t support Linux/Unix style ownership. FAT32 is apparently one of those formats that can, at best, only be faked. Since I was dealing with files owned by both Shadow_8472 and root, I’d need to empty off another thumb drive and research a format for them, or find another way to preserve permissions.

I must have reached out to three, four, maybe even five places for help. Somebody suggested I make a tar archive. I figured, “why not.” After all, I would be dealing with a tarball containing Java anyway.

Tar is an older piece of software with a bit of history. Its name stands for tape archive. Webcomic strip XKCD even ran a strip where they teased it for being so convoluted that sysadmins who have been using it for fifteen years still don’t know it by heart — and those commands were already fifteen years old when said admins started using them!

There are more than a few misconceptions surrounding tar. Just because something is archived, doesn’t mean it’s compressed. Zip files popularized that notion. Compression is basically squishing out repeated bit patterns for convenient transport. Archiving collects several files like papers ready to be bound into a single book. The two processes complement each other nicely, usually giving you a single file that takes up less space than the original files in their entirety.

I have no idea of the full power of tar. I just know that it has loads of features, but most of its users will never use them. I can’t help but wonder how many are totally obsolete, but included for lack of an update, or to maintain backwards compatibility.

Armed with these pieces of knowledge added to my collection, I wrote a pair of scripts to grab an arrangement of files I think I will need when I rebuild. I do have it setup to reinstall Nano and Opencss from the repository, but future versions, if needed, can be migrated to be part of the backup along with files that include things like encrypted passwords, boot codes, the whole Minecraft server directory, and more. It all gets copied into a temporary directory, turned into a tarball, and the temp directory removed.

During development of the backup and restore scripts, I stashed a copy or two on Blinky for safekeeping. I would have used one of my Windows machines, but it was just easier and had the same result to use scp to move the files over ssh between two Linux machines. I also noticed PuTTY having some interesting results when using the cat command to concatenate the contents of a file to the terminal. Normally, it keeps track of who you are logged in as to where and what directory you’re looking at right now. It would seem Raspian keeps track of that for you while Micro Core does not. I also found that using cat to show a binary that isn’t in text form could end up sending a command to PuTTY to change the window title, and even corrupt the header on the command line.

And that about brings things up to date. I changed permissions on the scripts so I have to run them as sudo, but while doing so, I accidentally removed one of them. I just so happened to have a backup courtesy of Nano… somehow. I ended up restoring from the Blinky backup, as it was more recent.

My next step is an irreversible one. I need to drop the nuke and start over with what I’ve saved. With any luck, the next post will be the full rebuild, ending with Minecraft running on Micro Core.

This (half)week’s idea sounded simple enough. Just copy the most important files away from the mess I created when I tried to install Java. One required skill snowballed into another, and before it, I had learned a whole slew of skills needed to slither along in the command line.

Final Question: I’ve been dealing with a lot of old computers lately. How old is the computer or other device you’re using right now?

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Minecraft Server, Week 3: Java

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am once again writing well ahead of the actual publication date. Let’s get started!

As I start this post, I’m still in week 2, and I might even finish this segment in week 2, depending on where a good stopping point is. The following events started early in week 2.

Last week’s post covered installing Micro Core, all the way up to and including a corrupt install of Java. I’m discouraged. I was just one… three… several steps away from finishing this project within my projected timespan of two weeks. I want this server up, but it’s more important to finish correctly. But timetables are near-impossible to stick to when you’re also learning how to use a computer again as if for the first time.

The command line is very different to using a GUI. It’s not toddler friendly, and it requires a ton of memorization. File systems, commands, command flags, file names; during one of my Third Workshop visits, I learned the man command, which brings up a manual for most commands. Micro Core has external documentation, likely for space concerns, so it’s off to the Internet for pretty much anything I don’t get.

Botching the Java install made a big, old mess, and having two copies of the Minecraft jar file made it more awkward when an obsolete backup got involved. I made the decision to nuke the OS and start over. But I didn’t want to just cut it off right there. If I need to start all over, possibly several times, I’m going to want to keep at least some of my progress, after all, I have SSH access from no fewer than three machines, all nicely set up with each one’s public key.

I took it under advisement to start writing a script to rapidly move back in case I need to redo my setup several times. Even if I never use it though, I’ve still learned a lot by dissecting my own work.

For starters, I spent an afternoon and early evening working at a trickle, writing down elements I needed to save. I moved them all to a thumb drive located at /mnt/sdc1, and found I had lost all my progress when I got home and plugged everything in. At least I have a picture of the tiny whiteboard I was taking notes on.

Mastering persistence is one of the greatest and most important challenges to working with the Tiny Core family, alongside finding someone who knows how to do the thing you’re trying to do in a close enough circumstance. With most available documentation aimed at baseline computer-literate GUI users, a GUI native lost in a CLI world has to sift through multiple forums and documents to find relevant answers. If I had to guess, I’d say it feels like a quarter of the Tiny Core help out there talks you through different menus of the default programs while maybe one out of sixteen is a Micro Core specific way of doing things. Note: I think it’s actually closer to one out of eight GUI special tutorials.

Investigating persistence, I learned a lot about the file structure: too much to regurgitate for review here all at once. I’m not even sure it’s even fully digested. The root file directory has a bunch of files, each with an intended purpose. When I reinstall Java, it’s going in /opt, for example. TCL has a special directory called tce where all the packages go for reinstalling everything on bootup. There’s also some network of links I haven’t even begun to explore; I just know they make it possible to pull off running the OS from a couple different files instead of having everything scattered everywhere.

Vanishing files had me for at least a couple days in parallel with other issues. I read that writing files to physical drives makes them persistent by nature. After my work went poof from my USB stick, I toyed with the umount command a bit more. Nothing worked. Eventually, I came across someone on a Discord server who gave me a working example, and made a whole day feel almost worthwhile. I was able to correctly mount my USB drive and edit its actual contents instead of filling a bubble in RAM somewhere to be flushed out when the power goes out.

Sometimes, I don’t even know if something is a general Linux question. My file system has both sda and sda1 as valid directories to look through, even though I have an sdb1 and so on, but no plain sdb, or a plain sdc when I plug a thumb drive in. This one, I don’t know for sure yet, but I think it has something to do with a bad bootcode, where I referenced sda. Now it’s in my fstab (file system table) file and it shows up every time I boot.

Things are all messed up. I just need to nuke it and start over.

Final question: Working with Micro Core has been fun so far, in the same way a video game can be fun, even if it’s super difficult, provided the rules stay the same the whole time. I can constantly feel success in my fingertips, only for the next challenge to pop up over the horizon. Have you ever applied skills you learned while at play in a more serious situation?

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Minecraft Server, Week 2: Installing Micro Core Linux

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I’m continuing work on a server that can take a bit better care of itself. Let’s get started!

Installing Micro Core was a whole unexpected challenge. I learned how to use a few of the boot options, but actually installing? The drive needed to be formatted, no doubt. I eventually gave in and turned to Ubuntu to format the drive. Doing my research, I went with ext4. I later found it was one of the top picks for SSD, but one of the worse ones for USB drives. I won’t pretend to fully understand it well enough to explain, but I think it has something to do with SSD having a limited number of read and write cycles per sector of the disk. The wrong format can overuse one part of the disk and wear it out prematurely.

Since I was booting from a USB drive, the installer I downloaded was having trouble finding the files to install — it may also be because the OS boots so fast, it doesn’t have time to wake up again after copying to RAM. I tried several approaches, including putting a separate disk image on the thumb drive and and failing to locate its path until I just told it to download the install files from the (N)et. Small joke was on me when Micro Core wanted to format its destination drive again.

While I was doing that, I took another look at just how much space I’d actually need, and an archive of several past servers was only 7GB. I removed the HDD with Ubuntu from any plans for this server and possibly onto another future project I’m not ready to announce.

Trying to learn Micro Core is like trying to learn Linux all over again. Imagine visiting a colony, be it a historic colony in the Americas or a futuristic colony on another planet. Each distro would be like a different family. Some distros are closely related so as to be in the same extended family, while others barely ever see each other in town hall meetings. Tiny Core, and by extension, Micro Core Linux feel like they’re across the town from members of the Debian and Ubuntu family I’ve previously met. While the file system feels similar, the shell and default text editor paint a completely unfamiliar face to look at. (Later edit: the Tiny Core family is a fork of a distro known as DSL, which is a fork of Debian, so the more I get to know the distro, the more familiar things show up.)

To date, I’m only familiar with the Bash shell and Nano text editor. Both provide a relatively open and friendly user experience for anyone not afraid of the command line. The Tiny Core family did not build its command line for people afraid of a text interface. With size and speed as priorities, ease of use isn’t given as much priority. The Ash shell is faster and slimmer, while Vim text editor provides a lot more customization opportunities.

Vim scares me. I had to spend hours just trying to figure out how to move around, and now, the only thing making me even consider keeping it around is the difficulty of adding Nano in.

Apt is the usual way you download programs in Linux setups I’m familiar with. Tce is its less well-known counterpart I have to work with. I’m having trouble learning it, likely because I’m looking first online and only looking through the PDF that came with that documents Tiny Core. It also doesn’t help that most TCL documentation seems to assume you’re working with a GUI.

Insuring Nano was properly installed was tough. I spent a whole evening trying to problem solve, thinking my install was corrupt. The best I could figure out was that I had installed Nano while booted to a thumb drive, but it saved to a different place. When I tried to fix it, tce told me Nano was already downloaded and installed while it was unavailable on the command line. A total of three drives were involved, including my first Linux project running Ubuntu MATE.

I tried bailing, but my attempt to wipe Micro Core failed due to the drive being mounted. I wasn’t able to “umount” it (note the lack of the expected first n in umount; that alone took me between half and a full hour to get). And here lies one of IT’s more haunting nightmares: things working when they reasonably shouldn’t. I came down before bed for a last shot at solving a possibly corrupted path somewhere, and Nano decided to work without either the Ubuntu HDD or the installation thumb drive. Nano has since been stable.

SSH is the next step, but I took a little cut in line for Java. I learned a lot during this period. Working with Micro Core, and I’d assume Tiny Core too, is all about managing persistent files. The OS is small enough to get away with basically reinstalling each time, so unless you protect your data, everything is effectively a temporary file. With that said, I doubt I’ll fully understand what all is where until I finish a second or third project. For all I know, this was just a case of Micro Core repairing itself.

From what I can tell, MCL is one of the few distros to ship without a SSH client. I’ll be using OpenSSH. After a full day of slow learning, I followed a list of directions, somewhat following what was supposed to be going on, only to mess up on the last one and have to start all over again. It went a bit faster this time, and I understood even more of what I was looking at.

Moving along into the final stretch of this week’s planned scheduled progress, I’ve downloaded the Minecraft 1.14.4 server file. Let me tell you: the world is not friendly to CLI denizens (denizen: person living in a place they are not a citizen). I had to search hard for how to download anything, and when I found a couple old blog pages pointing me to a little program called wget. They each provided an old URL that no longer works, even if you update the MC version numbers. The official server download page includes a 40 digit number in hexidecimal.

And here, I admit to cheating a tiny, little bit. After failing to manually copy the URL, I turned to my work on bringing SSH online. A quick paste, which for some reason works with a secondary mouse click to a PuTTY window, and the correct URL was woven into the command.

I realized I had only downloaded the Java installer. I spent the day trying to unpack the HTML for the download page as if it were the actual compressed Java tarball. The shell script I found directed me to a URL, and I thought that was the actual URL to plug into wget. The -O option I used robbed me of a vital clue by overwriting the file name and extension. Something worked, and I didn’t realize it was the wrong thing until I used Nano and read the code for myself.

I wasn’t too sure where to stash Java to make it go, so I put it in with the extensions so it wouldn’t disappear while rebooting. I don’t know what happened after that. I ended up with too many symbolic links between files, likely from recursion somewhere. A reboot broke Java. Things are just a little too messy now. I don’t know what’s what anymore. This job isn’t over.

Final Question: Have you ever gone out looking for instructions while the answer was there in front of you all along in manual form?

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New Priority: Minecraft Server

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I’m setting up another Minecraft server, but this time, I’m setting goals a bit higher than usual. Let’s get started!

I am after an automated, headless, dedicated Minecraft server. That means I want a machine that only runs Minecraft, and nothing else. The machine itself will live in a network closet or somewhere where it can have a power cord and Ethernet while I use SSH to get in to change things. I don’t want to have to babysit it, so I want to write a script or two to manage the whole server. The whole idea is to get the maximum amount of performance for Minecraft while spending as little as possible on the OS and other supporting software.

The main bottleneck is RAM. I have 8 GB to work with for now, and that’s fine for running a survival world and a creative world at the same time in Ubuntu, plus a couple tabs in a browser. Both this machine and Derpy have historically been used to host Minecraft servers, but I want to consolidate any running servers into a single machine. To that end, I’d like to see if I can comfortably run three or four servers at once.

Distribution choice is a little more important now. I’m after something as light weight as possible. Unlike the past several months, I’m actually doing progress reports as I go, so I don’t actually know what I’ll have when I’m done. I’m seriously looking at about six distros ranging from Ubuntu Server to Lubuntu to Puppy Linux.

A family Minecraft friend who will likely be playing on the server brought up Linux From Scratch. It’s a resource for compiling your very own distro. It looks fun; it looks educational. I looked up a couple video reviews of it and decided it looks one or two years down the line for me. My goal is two weeks here, and hardware challenges are starting to make me think I may already need to double that.

It turns out there are a bunch of tools for people who want a little more involvement with what’s in their operating system without wanting to go into source code level of detail. All the ones I looked at either have their domains up for grabs or are otherwise obsolete.

There was one more distro this friend brought up: Tiny Core Linux. It aims to provide you with only what you need to get started with a wide variety of projects. To paraphrase their stated goal: add what you need, not demolish what you didn’t ask for. After poking around a bit more, I found another version on their site that nixes the GUI. It’s not like I even wanted one for this project anyway. Micro Core it is until further notice.

I remembered how Derpy used to have this SSD it supposedly used to improve make things go faster. It’s not like it was being used, so I thought maybe I could use it as part of my little project. So I opened Derpy up and pulled it out.

Different computers with open architecture have different schemes of making sure everything stays where it’s supposed to. When I installed Derpy’s present SSD, I didn’t have the correct part to mount it on, so I just put it on what I had and let it be. With the HDD to SSD bracket being freed up, I went ahead and swapped things around. It just took a while to figure out how to get the bracket off.

With the brackets finally swapped, I moved Derpy’s old 60 GB drive to my project computer case and connected it with a SATA cable I had laying around. I think it may even be the one it originally came with. Power was similarly available within the case, but I had to remount the SSD to another position within its bracket so it could reach.

Trying to mount Derpy’s SSD with Puppy Linux

Backing up a little, before I started seriously considering Micro Core, I burned a Puppy Linux live CD. Puppy Linux is another one of those small distros that comfortably loads into RAM.

It’s funny how the sound of a CD drive made me smile. It used to be the sound occupying the boring period between when I started computer time, and when I started actually playing.

I rejected Puppy Linux after I saw office software as well as other stuff I didn’t need included, like a whole GUI environment. Nevertheless, I still used it to verify that I had everything hooked up correctly. It took a while, but I happened across a utility within Puppy that left no doubt. I spent a while trying to see if there’s anything on the drive before I eventually asked my father and he went ahead and told me to just format it.

I know I said I was going to do a more update-style post, but this is running into a longer entry, so I want to split this one. It provides a natural-ish breaking point about here. While I thought I was going to need about two weeks, as of this writing, I’m thinking either three or four weeks total work may be in order. If I break things up like this, I may end up with even more parts. That, or I just spend some of those weeks not doing much but learning what to do next.

Final Question: Have you ever messed around with otherwise junk to turn it into treasure?

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Infrastructure Update

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am going over a few changes to my immediate setup. Let’s get Started!

I’m afraid I have some sad news to start with. I’ve been shuttling BlinkiePie around in my backpack, and it’s finally caught up with me. Some time, some how, I wasn’t careful enough, and the case broke. Some time in the near future, it will likely be getting a dose of super glue, but I’m afraid the base will need to be reprinted. If it does, I will be modifying the case so the screw holes actually line up. If I’m feeling especially adventurous, I may even make it accept multiple models of Pi’s.

I otherwise had a few adventures this week. Neighbors were having work done on their house, and I needed to go out and about. I took Blinkie with me, and tethered it to my phone, as well as my laptop. PuTTY wasn’t fully happy. I spent a long time chasing down the supposedly different server key fingerprint, but I didn’t actually find for 100% sure. Since this is a security issue, I’m not going to share my best guess I’m about 90% sure on.

On Friday, I was expecting to spend a couple hours working on my project while my mother was working at the church, but my laptop politely asked to update like I told it to. I didn’t pay close enough attention, and I found myself stuck there for four hours so I could press F1 about three times during the massive update. I’m thankful I stayed, otherwise I was within a minute of having to leave it over Sabbath, and there are always a lot of people in the church office on Saturday morning.

I won’t say I like the update, but I won’t say it isn’t all bad. On the plus side, Windows now has a system-wide dark mode, a feature I personally find appealing. On the minus side, my laptop’s fairly old, and each new line of code it must run to keep up is that many operations not servicing the programs I want to run.

Speaking of programs to run, I went into the workshop and set up for working on Blinkie over SSH and the command line, but I was advised to install an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). I was even there an hour, and Headcrash, the guy running the place, replicated my present progress while we were talking. He talked me into installing PyCharm.

I came up with the comparison that the difference between IDE’s and command line work is the difference between a graphing calculator and a pencil. The pencil is simple, easy to pick up, and important to understand how to operate before using an IDE. IDE’s on the other hand, take care of a lot of things for you. It blasts you with so much information you don’t know what to look at at first. And the scariest part is setting the thing up. There’s a lot of help out there for my “pencil,” but there’s a lot more to break with an IDE. It felt like I was slipping into a commercial airliner cockpit with only a driver’s license. I’m just glad I had someone there to figure out what was happening when something misaligned.

This week felt like a lot of learning curve walls.

Final Questions: Have you ever used a graphing calculator (outside school)? Do you have any other suggestions for comparison?

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When Not to Fully Backup a Device

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I was going to do an image of my phone without using Root and voiding the warranty, but things have changed, and I want to go into why. Let’s get started!

Modern Smartphones are essentially pocket computers powerful enough to run a program pretending to be a state-of-the-art desktop from around 15-20 years ago. It used to be you had full access to everything when you tethered a device to a Desktop. I used that once to backup my first ever tablet and restore it after some work. Much to the annoyance of more than a few power users, around 7-10 years ago, it became standard practice to lock end-users out of the admin level actions under pain of voiding the warranty or even breaking the law, depending on the device and year.

I sort of understand the reasoning, but I wouldn’t mind a future where I cannot have warranty work done when anything I’ve ever done on the software side of would logically have had no affect on the intended work: for example, if I crack a screen (I tend to end up with the no-ask warranty policy), they would be well within their rights to take it in, plug in their diagnostic equipment, and leisurely return my phone if it tells them it’s ever been rooted.

I’ve had my Galaxy S7 Edge for a while now, and shortly after I got it, it developed a narrow, pink stripe down the right side of the screen. From my experiences and research back then, between a third and half of similar phones have this defect. As I understand it, the warranty was written in a way that encouraged you to keep the phone for a while before doing anything, so it’s been a couple years. This week, I decided I had had enough.

As a side note, since I’ve gotten my tablet, I haven’t been playing games on my phone as much. The one I’m still playing, though, recently got an update, where they started up what look like weekly events with grand prizes if you complete enough challenges. The first event, I played that event a lot. I put more time than I think was reasonable, and I still only got half way up the progressively longer ranks, just short of most of the prizes that are actually worth it. Of course, I could always spend the special currency linked to real money, but that trickles in way too slowly for normal gameplay, and I have zero cash for f2p games, lest I open Pandora’s box. In short, I lost interest because I felt cheated by a disguised pay to win system.

A couple weeks ago, that game would have been enough to give me the drive to make an image of my phone. According to my research, it would have taken a Desktop debugger and some other low-level commands, but there does not seem to exist a currently maintained GUI for what I wanted to do. Now? Now I’ll be happy just grabbing what I can and abandoning my game files hidden behind a wall of admin access.

Final Question: What laws about technology would you change if you had the opportunity?

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Operation: Relocate Desktop

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am more than a tidbit ticked at Windows’ built in remote desktop. Let’s get started!

I’d like to start by saying that Windows Remote Desktop isn’t deserving of a 100% scathing review. It has its purpose. I have concluded it was designed with the tech-savvy Joe who is remoting into his work computer from home or wherever else. As long as you are just surfing the web or using office-type programs, you should be fine.

But as soon as I tried launching Minecraft (I did not test with any other games), the launcher spat out a warning. For context, Minecraft 1.14 was recently released, and I believed they had finally stopped supporting the old launcher and were forcing people to update. The new launcher also crashed the game while trying to launch it, so I spent a day looking into it and getting discouraged over not finding much of anything. I stopped short of updating my video card drivers manually without supervision.

My father finally got the drivers updating, computer glitched, and after several failed attempts, I eventually hooked a monitor back up to it. I was pretty mad when Minecraft launched right away. I pieced together from a few places that 1: Windows Remote Desktop doesn’t use the host’s graphics card like I thought; it loads a basic graphics driver that runs on the CPU. And 2: This graphics driver doesn’t support OpenGL, a library Minecraft needs to run.

Sister suggested moving the whole tower during bedtime worship. I really wanted to fix the solution I was already working on, but it would have been more expensive in terms of time, hassle, and frustration.

Windows Remote Desktop is not a bad piece of software. It was just designed with different goals in mind than I was after.

Final Question: Have you ever had a sure fire project get canceled after it was all done and set up?

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Troubled Laptop Tries to Takes Up a Task

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am working on my laptop again, this time to get it to remote in to my tower and remain stable. Let’s get started!

As of starting to write this post, I still haven’t finished. I have a week before this project is “due,” so I still have some time. But so far, I’ve encountered half a score of problems and solved/bypassed/made provisions for bypassing most of them, the first of which was the laptop not even booting correctly. It brought up the boot menu and refused to boot the hard drive several times until it got sent to diagnostics, where it froze. My father advised I pull the chord, and I booted it again. I had a double take when I spotted Windows loading.

Since both machines are running Windows, and the target machine is Windows 10 Pro, Windows comes with remote access tools built in. I’m using those, as they’ll hopefully run the lowest risk of complications and have more features I won’t have to fight the systems for, like dual screens.

My tower doesn’t seem to like being remoted into. I followed at least a couple tutorials and visited both the legacy control panel and the newer, more touchscreen friendly, settings menu (I do not have a touchscreen for this machine). These sets of settings seem to ignore each other, though I could be wrong. It’s very annoying. I believe it’s what’s keeping me from making a full breakthrough.

In other news, I tried reaching out to an appropriate discord server for my new long-term project, but it seems I’ll need to keep researching to find a complete workflow, or if it’s even possible outside a dedicated studio.

Final Question: I’m just going to re-run my last question, now that I’ve sent another clue: What do you think I am researching?

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Laptop Still in Trouble

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am still sort of in-between two major projects. Let’s get started.

The story so far: A while ago, my red laptop stopped recognizing its power cord. The apparent problem was a piece of the power port breaking off. After replacing the cord and later the internal port, the laptop is permanently tied to its power cord.

My father and I tried to fix it today, more my father than me this time. I loaded an old set of BIOS onto a thumb drive and he flashed them… after the list of updates that is. Even though it looked like the most recent version for my exact machine make I could find, it still complained about it being an older version. Good thing I managed to

My father also tried a cold boot, but nothing ended up working. Hopefully a genuine part will let the battery charge again. Otherwise, either a new motherboard or a new machine may be in the near future.

Final Question: The scope of my project this week was a bit smaller than usual. This is in part because I have been researching for the feasibility of my next big project. What do you think it will be?

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