I dunno…

July 8, 2024

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…)

Windows 11 is back!

December 29, 2024
by csnorwood

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.

Z80 Spectrum 48K assembler

June 15, 2024
by csnorwood

So I finally got around to making my very first recording with my voice over to quickly demonstrate how easy it is to edit and run assembler code on a ZX Spectrum emulator.

Click here to view the video on Youtube.

ZX Spectrum 48k (adventure)

I’m hoping to record a video showing where I’m up to with my trip down memory lane.

Portable monitors are awesome! … ?

Straight up, yes they are. I have two, an 11 inch standard HD and a 15 inch 4K. Both power over USB, both have extra USB C ports on them and both have USB C video input and HDMI.

They are also thin, very light and come with a magnetic cover which acts as a stand. The brightness and colours are perfect to me.

But, …

When it comes to the resolution and the size of the monitor itself, especially the 4K monitor, ‘size matters’.

I do a lot of programming and screen real estate is essential for displaying code. The more code you can see on the screen, the better. And here’s were the 4K monitor falters.

At that resolution, you know 4 times the space of a HD screen. Well, in resolution anyway. You’d think, or at least I did, silly me. You’d think that opening 4 browser windows in each corner or the monitor. Oh yeah, that is cool.

Nope. It’s a 15 inch screen. Splitting it up into 4, 7 inch screens doesn’t work. Simple as. You strain your eyes reading tiny, tiny text.

For programming they are superb. But to split the screen up smaller, nope.

Oh, I’ve also got a 28 inch 4k monitor and I can confirm it doesn’t look too bad splitting 4 browser windows.

Microsoft and Chrome

I’ve not long got a new PC and my first Windows 11. As usual, I set it up the way I like it.

Then, I boot up to find Edge has opened all my Chrome tabs.

The weeks go by and I see reports of the same thing on YouTube.

And now today, I’m getting emails from Microsoft asking me to recover my Google account through them.

Hmm

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