December 19, 2020

Check out this revival Geocities-esque site where you can browse other people’s sites, cool stuff:

In my spare time, I’ve hacked my PS3 and Nintendo 3DS with custom firmware to load homebrew and similar applications.

The only thing left I would like to consider for the PS3 is how to figure out how to load .iso’s via the NTFS backup external drive I have instead of having to transfer the games to a FAT32-formatted flash drive in such a jenky fashion. I’m pretty sure there’s a Linux utility to convert to .iso, so I think it won’t be too hard.

The result of the hacked 3DS has been awesome, since it gives you access to countless 3DS and DS game backups, etc. The only thing that sucks about the ‘old’ 3DS or ‘o3DS’ series, is that it’s not that great at emulating older systems via Retroarch. There are standalone emulators, but it just isn’t perfect performance. However, you CAN inject game ROM’s into Virtual Console to allow for perfect emulation for GB, GBC, GBA, NES, Genesis, and Game Gear for even the ‘o3DS’. It just takes time to do this via the homebrew tools out there for this purpose from ‘gbatemp’.

I’ve also settled on a Voip setup with an old school phone and am pretty happy that I went this route. Cell phones sucks,and texting sucks. There’s literally no reason why the same person who wants to send you a huge attachment of any kind via text can’t literally open up a internet browser on even the weakest Android phone to send an email with a larger attachment size overhead. Plus, I prefer phone calls, and think anything that’s like texting that ISN’T IRC or something is just a waste of time.

In terms of pet projects, I’m deadset on going the FreeBSD route, and have backed up my Devuan laptop accordingly. I’m a bit 50/50 on if I should keep babysitting the Gentoo VM since its a love/hate relationship.

Though most Linux enthusiasts online will nail you for it, the “Just Works” philosophy sometimes is just better. At the end of the day, when I boot a computer, I don’t want to have to worry about it breaking when I opened it just to use it. I realized that I’m still the type of guy that uses the minimal ISO install anyway, so I’m not like some people who depend on Ubuntu like they’re on life support, and in that respect, I do build my computers the way I want, so its not like I haven’t made it my own.

However, I do love Gentoo for what it is. It’s just a lot of work though, and it almost killed my SSD drive on the compiling alone since it went into read-only mode until I re-installed Devuan on it.

The only thing left I’m doing is debating what window manager to try going forward with the setup.

My current progression in the alternative OS cycle has been:

I’m considering any one of the following, but am tied between ‘spectrwm’, ‘xmonad’, or ‘Qtile’, so whatever has as an easy and minimal config will win since LuaScript (aka via AwesomeWM’s config) sucks:

Also, I’m debating what VPS provider to use next year to deploy my own personal email as well as what the name of the domain name should be.

Choices Are Always Good! ~ Sam