Home server is offline… for now

April 4, 2017January 30, 2024

My home PC has been re-installed, dual booting with Linux and Windows 7. My plan is to keep the web server running whether I boot up in either OS.

I’m working on it.

Err, a prototype website project…

Oh yeah, forget that stuff about me using windows again, blown to the wind that is…

So here is what I’ve always wanted to try out.

… (some cruddy sound being played) …

Just pausing for effect. Sorry.

… (could add some html to fancy this post up a bit) …

Nah…

A website project. But the server is built from scratch, ie, c/c++. I’m sure I’ll figure that bit out.

I’m looking forward to utilising intermittent socket connections and the gpu for drawing some coloured lines and rounded corners. I could fill some in too. I still remember the fill techniques from the zx spectrum.

Any ways, once this does start moving I will eventually put it on github or whatever is left of it in the future.

ttfn

It does matter when I use “C/C++” programmer…

There has always been this thing going around about people calling themselves a C programmer, C++ programmer and the one that bothers most people is calling themselves a C/C++ programmer.

For me, I am a C/C++ programmer and here is why…

I am a programmer and I am a lazy one at that. In fact, if I want to write a quick program that adds a lot of strings together just for example. Me personally would go down the C++ standard libraries route because I want to cut out all the silly extras you keep having to tag on in your code. And it still reads good, if not better.

It comes down to optimisation. I know the speed of what I want to achieve, and the code I am writing will not matter if it doesn’t work.

I’m being lazy and just getting it done. All up and running, no matter the efficiency. Only when it comes to be needed I will then remove parts of the cheating as I call it and then work on optimisation. Or as I call it, C’ifying it.

So I am a C/C++ programmer.

Windows 11 in the New Year?

After the recent success of which I was truly expecting not to work, I just thought I would settle back down into programming because now I need to work on lights and shadow rendering in 3D.

From within Linux, I installed Lutris and installed the Epic Games Launcher to install the Unreal Engine. Running the Unreal Engine in Linux is not a straightforward install. You still have to Linuxify it.

… And a few hours later Unreal Engine finally loads up. Few nearly there. Takes a lot of space on the drive. So there I am looking through the various projects I could load up and ready to play with, ready to click one and try it.

So I choose an empty template with a simple scene. Good place to get started. Plus, I want C++ because I would definitely be in need of that instead of Blueprints.

Then it happened. It tells me I need Visual Studio for a C++ project. Okay, so I click that very in your face button that will download and install it.

Well, as it happened, Visual Studio doesn’t want to install. Not on this Linux anyway.

At that point, which was yesterday, I decided to completely remove Epic from Linux. Which by the way is much better than removing applications from Windows. After that, I will edit the 1Tb NVME drive with Windows on it so that all the space is given to Windows. From then, which now I believe will work this time, I hope, I will install Unreal Engine on Windows 11 and it will have a lot of empty space to work with.

Here goes it… (I might be using Windows 11 soon because of Unreal)

Windows 11 is back!

Well, here I am still quite surprised. It worked.

It took another while to boot but it did it and I got the desktop. And after just a few minutes of me setting off on my “let’s explore a bit hey”, a notification popped up about a restart to update. Okay, I thought, this is what I remember well.

So, reboot, and played around a bit. I even played Unreal Tournament 2004. Then I remembered about all those little precious NVME’s and SSD’s.

So I quickly shut down and rebooted back into the fresh install of EndeavourOS.

First thing I did was to make my little changes to the desktop (KDE), which I thought, “Windows doesn’t do this.” Which was kind of funny, and I can’t remember why.

A deep breath. I opened up Dolphin to find that all the drives were all still working.

So I played a little bit. No games this time. Just browsing and watching youtube.

I am now typing this up from within Windows 11 while in the background I am moving a couple of Terry Bytes of data to my external 3Tb HDD.

I’ll play Unreal Tournament 2004 shortly.

C Y’all

Carl

Windows 11 Update (not good)

December 28, 2024
by csnorwood

Well, straight up. It didn’t work. Windows 11 attempted to boot 3 times and kept giving me the old BSOD. I had only just noted the error message on its last boot with something about a boot device. Even though it went through the motions of trying to boot with the swirling circle near the bottom of the screen.

The last time I tried to boot externally it failed to boot at all with just a black screen and the PC’s fans going crazy.

At this point I was ready to give up. And then I remembered that the 512Gb with windows had been replaced with the 2Tb NVME, which left the 1Tb NVME (which I was using for Linux, EndeavourOS) and the 2Tb SATA SSD which still had a load of stuff on it.

So… With the 1Tb spare inside this PC I am now taking a direct image copy from the 51Gb NVME of Windows 11 to the 1Tb NVME. It’s still got some time to go before the copy is finished, so I will try that out then.

I am already assuming that this is pointless because booting externally with Windows 11 and this TPM thingy, that transferring over to another storage device will just make matters worse, and wouldn’t have worked anyway.

But, you never know. So later on I will try it.

If it doesn’t work then I haven’t lost a lot, only Windows 11, and gained 1.5Tb of space to use.

If it does work, then Windows 11 will stay on this PC and the other half of the 1Tb NVME will get a Debian Linux installed on it alongside Windows 11. And now and then I will boot into Windows 11 from time to time just to see what it looks like.

Booting Windows 11 from external device(1)

(1) – So here I am after spending the morning upgrading my mini PC with a new 2Tb NVME. The PC initially came with a 512Gb NVME (installed with Windows 11), and space for another NVME, and, another SATA SSD 2.5″. I had ready to put in it a 1Tb NVME and 2 2Tb SATA SSD. Linux was installed and I forgot about Windows. Seriously, I would boot into it just to look at it and then just reboot. So after using Linux off my 1Tb NVME and having for spare space on the 2Tb which would often get reformatted, and still only get a few hundred Gb stored on it. So I have taken that 512 Gb NVME out with Windows 11 on and replaced it with a fresh install of Linux (EndeavourOS). With which I am currently using to write this out now. And I am about to test Windows 11 by seeing if it will boot off this PC, which it was installed on in anyway.

Specs:

AMD Ryzen 5900HX
Two touch screen monitors (USB powered from PC)
USB-C hub extending one monitor and has the 512Gb original NVME inside. (Windows 11)

And…

I’ll be back shortly because I need another coffee. All this speaking to myself has made my mouth dry…

I’ll post an update…

And out goes 2024… (almost there…)

December 19, 2024
by csnorwood

Hello everyone,

For a long time I've been bouncing between projects and not sticking with one. Probably all down to what life throws at you.

So lately, I've moved from Godot to using Raylib. Godot as an engine is amazing for not only beginners, but for advanced users too with its native development cycle. Raylib however, being a very cut down framework opens up a lot of options. You can find my latest project here.

My development platform:

OS: EndeavourOS + Wayland + KDE
PC: Higole F9B 512Gb model with 16Gb RAM. Intel N100.
Software: VSCode, OpenMPT(Audio), Blender(3D), Inkscape(Vector), Krita(Artwork)

The main reason for choosing Raylib over Godot is simply that I have raw access to what is being rendered. Raylib is a C framework and I am building my own framework in C++ over the top of it.

An example of the simplification can be seen in the source code.

These last 2 weeks have mainly been getting used to the API itself and its data structures. And now I am moving over to using shaders for the first time manually.

Although saying that Raylib is cut down. It still has everything I need right now without all the extra bloat. And once I've gone through the API and C++'ified it, building applications should be much easier.

2025 should be a creative year for me... See you there...

Godot 4 Terrain Generator – progress

July 27, 2024
by csnorwood

I’ve just uploading another video to youtube about the current progress of my work on 3d terrain generation.

Here I am mixing two noise values, a main noise for the actual terrain and the other which is only added at 10% strength adds extra terrain detail patches.

There’s still a lot of ideas yet I want to add to this and I am getting through them bit by bit.

Audio issues are still ongoing and hopefully will be resolved in future videos.

Until next time… Carl out…

Godot 3D terrain testing

July 8, 2024
by csnorwood

Just using GDScripts SurfaceTool, here’s a quick glimpse of what I’ve been fiddling around with.

For some strange reason Godot keeps calling me back, and each time I play with something else. This is the latest.

Think of now using a threaded solution to generate meshes using 3D noise and maybe even stretch it a little and animate it with 4D noise as a constant time dimension added.

I dunno…

July 8, 2024
by csnorwood

I was thinking just then, “hey, you do know that adding 6Tb storage to your PC is a big deal?” Well, that’s when it struck me, actually, yes it is!

They’ve been sat in the NAS case for almost a year now since I cut Windows on all my PC’s at home. And I never got round to setting it up for Linux. It kinda got that way, I had a 2Tb SSD to shove all my stuff on.

So a week later and Aliexpress delivers my HD caddies. Straight away, unboxed, 2 x 3Tb drives straight into them, and all setup. And voila! They all work and now I’m sat here with a tiny Mini PC, with about 10.5Tb of storage in total connected to it.

So, yeah… It’s a big deal.

… Now on to organising it all. (That’s the bummer…)

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