CaptainSpam @captainspam@social.exclaimindustries.net

Oh, all right, I'll pin a useful toot:

Some amount of this account will refer to my comic, The Dementia of Magic, at https://dementiaofmagic.net. Others may refer to nothing really at all.

Oh. Well, that might explain why the hard disk connected to the Pi was making head reset noises. Turns out the combination of the disk and the TV tuner are drawing more power than the Pi's USB ports can put out. The good news, at least, is that the drive likely isn't bad, and as such, I now have a spare 1TB external hard disk, which I'm sure will be useful for something.

But, time for another NewEgg order, this time for a powered USB hub...

Ford, pls.

I download a file to upgrade the firmware on my car's media system thingy.

1. It wants me to extract this to a blank exFAT USB stick. Fair enough, I guess, but...
2. This is a zipfile. Its contents are primarily tarballs. Which is kinda inconsistently redundant enough, but...
3. The zipfile doesn't have a directory structure.
4. What it has instead are filenames that have backslashes in them.

What. Seriously, what.

The Pi PVR experiment seems to be a success so far, having given it its first real-world test (recording Svengoolie). Notes:

1. I'm getting guide data from OTA signals, and MeTV identifies Svengoolie by the movie name, not "Svengoolie". I can set up a manual schedule to record it anyway, but that loses metadata. Hm.

2. I might need a heat sink. I see the Pi thermometer warning pop up every so often.

3. Sure hope the IR stuff arrives soon, MythTV's interface is a bit obtuse otherwise.

Well, that honks. Apparently Terraria just randomly corrupts your world file once in a while. And sometimes doesn't keep backups?

My brother and I learned this the usual way, of course. Drat. I was kinda liking our ridiculous villages.

There! The USB TV tuner arrived, it interfaces nicely with my Pi, and after some testing, I would say I now have an OTA PVR. So that's cool.

Still some things to work out. Most importantly, how I'm going to do remote control. Linux can't understand the IR receiver on the WinTV-dualHD and MythTV's frontend doesn't like gamepads that might go away during runtime (i.e. Bluetooth devices shutting off when idle). Maybe a generic IR receiver would do the trick...

I had an idea for a project. Problem is, step one of this is making an sqlite database of my music collection. Not that it's all that big compared to some, but it turns out some tracks have very stupidly non-standard uses of some tags.

Also, there's a lot of weird special cases involved, but I'm at least simplifying things for my own dastardly needs. More on this if it goes anywhere. It might not.

Your attention please: Round-trip bus service from Tucson, AZ to Las Vegas, NV will begin November 13th at 10am PT.

https://desertbus.org/

I'll admit, it still does mildly amuse me that if I enumerate the things plugged into the wall near my TV, that list will always include the sequence "[...]ethernet switch, HDMI switch, Nintendo Switch[...]"

At some point, I should either reduce the number of ingredients that goes into my pasta sauce or just admit to myself that I'm actually making more of a stew that I dump onto noodles.

The Pi has arrived and is now configured! But, given what I want it to do, it's not going to be doing much until that tuner shows up. Still, though!

Next upcoming experiment: Raspberry Pi-based PVR for over-the-air TV. Because I like to watch Svengoolie, dangit.

The main part that's on delay is the key element, the USB TV tuner. But, I can at least get the thing set up when it comes in next week. And I could always use more Bluetooth junk, like a keyboard and yet another mouse.

An unnamed beach elf and his doll, both of whom run a muffin tent. I figured I really ought to do more with dollmages in the DoM, and these two are a result of that.

That's all, just five sketches. Enjoy!

An unnamed human who runs a snake meat booth. Her booth and her appearance are both tightly bound to an inside joke between myself and a few friends. Don't worry about it.

An unnamed human/dwarf duo who run a BBQ booth. You haven't seen them yet; just wait'll you see their booth.

An unnamed beach elf who ran a sandwich booth, seen in a narrative montage. I'm not fully happy with the perspective hackery on his cane, but I'm still proud of his ridiculous hat and the sandwich fixin arc.

Madame Boutrix, a wax museum proprietor. She was only seen from the back, controlling one of her wax mannequins, before Alex and Matt decided to walk right on by. I actually had her drawn out in more detail like this beforehand, but didn't use anything else (the other sketches I'm about to dump were made after their respective facts).

So to hopefully get back in action and recover from cabin fever, I decided to draw out a few background characters from recent comics, some of which you haven't seen, all of which were seen literally exactly once, yet I still overthought them anyway when I initially made their scenes. Hope you don't mind about five more toots of this.

Oh, and if you're reading from the widget on the comic website, I don't think images go through for that. You might want to click the link on top.

Well, it's technically my birthday now. For the first time in pretty well my entire life, I'm not able to spend it with my family. Hrm.

I'm given it some thought, and I'm pretty sure that, for the wallpapers I offer on my comic's website, I probably don't *actually* need individual sizes for a given aspect ratio (4:3, 16:9, 16:10), and can likely just offer the highest-quality version and trust that most modern devices can (gasp!) scale bitmaps as need be. Shocking discovery, I know.

The vector season series, I think I'll still want to have raster versions, maybe in addition to actual SVGs.

See, I told you I probably wouldn't use this thing very often.