Civilization 5 (14 hours):

Dan and Dave finally started playing their multiplayer turns again. YAY!

The Witcher (14 hour):

Finally was able to find some uninterrupted gaming time. Here’s the video!

https://youtu.be/iw8LjKofqU0?list=PLEJrELYLxNgUtl5L7oM52YnJj9Jt4c5yp

If you’re interested in watching, it goes from session 25 through 40 (or more if I forget to update this section before I publish)

Super Mario 64 (3 hours):

Scarlett kept asking me to play until I found the princess.

This year happened to contain one of the driest summers the Pacific Northwest had seen. There were lots of fire raging, some intentionally set and some caused by nature. On the way to the Bachelor Party caving trip, I saw this immense plume of smoke from a fire.

I’d been to lots of caverns before, so that’s what I expected from this bachelor party trip. I first suspected I was wrong when I couldn’t find a sign for the place. My suspicions grew when Dave arrived (along with other attendees) and we just started walking into the woods. As we arrived at the entrance Dave told us that one can be sure he’s arriving at the entrance to a cave by spotting mosquitoes. Turns out we were going into a lava tube. I thought that meant we’d be walking in a cave that was fine as glass. Instead it was as if someone had chosen a cave to dump a bunch of rocks. We did see some baby stalagtites, though.

A while ago I went to the Pacific Northwest for Dave’s wedding. I finally am getting caught up with my photos from back then. It was a fun trip because we’d lived in Oregon for a few years when I was a kid so I was able to revisit some fun areas.

First up was Multnomah Falls. It is the second tallest falls in the US and it’s a really neat hike. Because of timing and Scarlett being 3 (and unlikely to be able to hike back and forth) we only went up to the lower level. But it was still neat to be reminded of the great outdoors areas in Oregon.

1. I “lost” my optical drives. I had to mess with a registry key to get them back.
2. Here’s one I didn’t realize until I went to play Civ 5 and my saves were all gone. Because I have my main OS on a small SSD (and originally had my games on a regular hard drive - now they’re on their own bigger SSD), I had My Docs and My Pictures pointing to another drive. The Windows 10 upgrade lost those settings. I had to open up Windows Explorer and right click on each of those and change the location on the location tab.

Some people still treat TV as if it’s the boob tube (that’s boob as in dummy, not breast). But Scarlett’s kid’s cartoons led her to learn some stuff that led to the following exchange:

Danielle (rhetorically): Why does this monkey have a frog on its head?

Eric: It’s Swedish. (The toy is from Ikea)

Danielle: What?

Scarlett: No, it’s symbiosis!

Eric: Symbiosis? (I wonder if she knows what it means) What does that mean?

I’ve been dreaming (no foolin’) about this for two or more years now - having one computer running Linux with a Windows VM for gaming when there aren’t Linux ports. Less hardware overhead for me. But until now VMs haven’t been able to gain native use of the graphics card. This guy figured out how to do it and it’s great. I’m likely going to do this next time I do a CPU/Motherboard refresh.

I was having trouble printing and couldn’t figure out what was going on. I tried everything, including reinstalling the printer and reinstalling the driver. I was getting a misleading “you are using the wrong driver” message. Turns out SELinux was to blame! I happened to check dmesg and see some audit messages. Then I did a

setenforce 0

to turn it off and printing worked. I tried some restorecons on some directories, but I don’t think that fixed it. What I think fixed it was going into the policycoreutils gui and checking as active the cups module “Allow cups execmem/execstack.” Obviously, I turned setenforce back on after checking the box.

Today I was banging my head against the desk trying to figure out why I couldn’t ssh to one of my Fedora machines. I knew that while Fedora wasn’t the most secure Linux distro out there, it was more secure than many by default. That includes having a strict firewall set up. But I had already enabled ssh. What was going wrong? Well, it turns out that the ssh daemon is disabled by default! Just typing the following:

After waiting for a bit, turned out that the only real issue with Windows 10 is that you shouldn’t do Express Install unless you want Microsoft spying on everything. Also, now that I’m doing photography on Linux (another post about that at some point), the only thing I had to lose was the ability to play games for a while. The updater was pretty self explanatory and the process was more or less similar to a Fedora upgrade.