As usual we went Trick or Treating in Ellicott City’s Main Street area. Just a few photos from that evening:

Scarlett graduates from lettuce washer to lettuce cutter:

I remember doing this and getting guff from my parents for claiming that I could read. In reality I had simply memorized one of my favorite books.

In September I once again covered Baltimore Comic-Con for Comic POW! Not only did I get to meet Greg Pak, awesome creator of Code Monkey Save World and The Princess Who Saved Herself (in collaboration with Jonathan Coultan and the artists), but I got to see that I made the blurb on the back of the second volume of Altar Girl!  (see my Comic POW! coverage of Altar Girl)

I wanted to play a bit with Fedora Rawhide so I installed Fedora 23 to a VM. I named it Blargg after the Fire Dragon in Super Mario World. (See video below) I used the following commands from the Fedora wiki:

# dnf upgrade dnf
# dnf install dnf-plugins-core fedora-repos-rawhide
# dnf config-manager --set-disabled fedora updates updates-testing
# dnf config-manager --set-enabled rawhide
# dnf clean -q dbcache plugins metadata
# dnf --releasever=rawhide --setopt=deltarpm=false distro-sync --nogpgcheck

## Optional: it is generally advised to do a selinux autorelabel and reboot
# touch /.autorelabel

https://youtu.be/K7H6f_wGJZQ?t=12m10s

I was able to get Kurio, my netbook, to upgrade to Fedora 23 without issue. BlueYoshi, the living computer, is still unable to upgrade. So far it’s tripping up on dolphin-emu, OBS-MP, and some Gnome package. I’m not sure if that’s something that’ll be fixed as RPMFusion continues to update their Fedora 23 packages or if I’ll have to do the old uninstall/reinstall dance that I sometimes have to do with these non-free packages that don’t get QA’d for a Fedora release. Not going to be doing my main computer any time soon.

Tried to upgrade the living room computer to Fedora 23. As of the time when I tried, because the RPMFusion repo wasn’t ready for Fedora 23, it couldn’t upgrade. I’ll try again in a day or two if the repo is up.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Everything Ms Rowling’s been setting up since at least book two came to a head in this book. Death Eaters, Dementors, the return of Lord Voldemort, why Snape is trusted by Dumbledore, and more. She had me on the look out for red herrings and I STILL got surprised by the villain (outside of Voldemort). The level of tragedy she allows to befall the characters continues to grow as her presumed audience continued to grow in age. This raises the stakes on Harry Potter and his allies as they are even more likely to run into trouble.

Team Fortress 2 (33 hours):

https://youtu.be/uF9N-mD_3UY?list=PLEJrELYLxNgWsp76cFb5sqedFrKP9qQLw

I’m a seasonal Team Fortress 2 player. Although I play it here and there at any time of year, I tend to really play a lot during October for the special Halloween missions. This year Valve was busy working on a new mode that was released earlier this week so they released a community-made Halloween mode: Invasion. It’s the first time I’ve spent any money since I spent $2.50 to get a bigger backpack a few years ago. Overall, the new modes were a lot of fun and I’m glad that Valve has gone from what should be the basic level of video game company support- supporting community mods- to allowing the best of the best to make money by sharing in the profits made during community events.

I recently had to reinstall an OS on the wife’s Dell Inspiron 17. I was unable to complete an install for Fedora 22, but Fedora 21 and Fedora 23 beta were able to install. It would always freeze mid-install - usually around 70 or 80%. From what I could gleam on the net, it has to do with a kernel issue. But I’m not 100% sure. Anyway, just putting this out there for anyone trying to get Fedora 22 on a Dell Inspiron 17.