Do you feel that? That feeling of victory, success, even (dare I say it) joy? That is the feeling of Friday, the gateway to the weekend fun and excitement. Now to kick through that gateway with a little humor.
Friday Funnies 2026.3
Friday Funnies 2026.2
Do you feel that? That feeling of victory, success, even (dare I say it) joy? That is the feeling of Friday, the gateway to the weekend fun and excitement. Now to kick through that gateway with a little humor.
Friday Funnies – 2026.1
Do you feel that? That feeling of victory, success, even (dare I say it) joy? That is the feeling of Friday, the gateway to the weekend fun and excitement. Now to kick through that gateway with a little humor.
Happy New 2026
Happy 2026, Internet.
Here’s to hoping that your 2026 is the best year it can be … I’ll be hoping for the new year to be damn sight better than the old. Its off to a rocky start here with the fog or allergies and some over eating – but having nothing to do was the plan of the day, so Mission Accomplished.
Lazy day today … Creative things tomorrow.
-FS
Greetings!
Welcome, or if you’ve been here before, Welcome back.
This is my little bubble of the internet, it has changed more than a few times since I started back in college, but I always tried to keep on some kind of specific path … until a few years ago. See, the last few years were .. uh .. rough – both for my physical and mental health. I mean I’m not the only one that can say that … but since this is my bubble and my story … And if you’re reading this and thinking that you know the whole story .. you don’t, and won’t. Events over this span caused me to lose interest in a lot of things and in an attempt to spark my interest again I came back to my website and made some changes … and then more changes to undo those changes … and then more changes .. and then, well you see where this is going. I some how manged to break more than one of the embedded images in my posts, and subjectively worse a lot of what I wrote was just … angry and bitter, directed at both myself and people / situations from the past .. Making things worse, I discovered my social media accounts, that were left by the side of the road due to … read up, were also filled with broken links and references to long deleted posts.
I originally made this site as a portfolio to show off my work, and I have always wanted to get back to that purpose – I want to make cool stuff and show it off. Maybe I can help someone understand a technical thing or entertain someone else. I spent too long of a while (again, see above) feeling not good about making, until my NAS crashed and I lost data earlier this year. After a few debates with myself, I replaced, rebuilt, and recovered what I could of my data and decided, it was time for a fix, a clean up, and a reboot.
I have, so far, fixed several posts that ended up broke from one change or another, deleting the broken links, the anger, and fixing broken images. I am working on the backlog of other stuff, both website and personal health related, that I have been wanting to do. In the future expect a quantity of gaming reviews, tech repairs, and computer security / privacy topics … really whatever is interesting at the time in no particular order or schedule.
A new year is right around the corner … Stay tuned..
-FS
Acer Aspire 7741
A while back I saw a listing for batches of laptops being sold from a computer recycler. These machines were being sold as “we don’t know if they work, they’re not what we usually sell, but you’re welcome to try to fix them”. So I thought to keep up my repair skill and to have a test laptop or two I would pick up a batch and give it a try. Couple odd days later I received the lot and most of them were just generic consumer ultra basic laptops and most of them, surprisingly, powered right up without an issue.
Most of the machines were low end consumer laptops with not much noteworthy; under-powered CPU’s, barely enough memory, mechanical hard drives, all wrapped up in a “budget friendly” package. Having the wind knocked out of sails of my epic test lab dreams (not sure what I was expecting out of the lot anyway) I decided to pivot my plans slightly. In October of 2025 Microsoft will be cutting off Windows 10, meaning that whole lot of machines just like these that I bought will be effectively eWaste and thrown in the trash. So I decided to amend my testing plans just slightly to find out if these machine would still be usable for most things … just without Windows.
I pulled out the first laptop an Acer Aspire 7741, it was not spectacular with an Intel Pentium P6000 processor (2 core 1.87ghz) and 6 gigs of RAM. To establish some kind of number that I could use to give others an IDEA of what the machine performed like (that is they could run the same tool on their own computer to get a number that could be compared to get a feel of better or worse) I would use GeekBench. (Note: this is not an endorsement for one tool or another, just the tool that I thought would be usable on the most platforms and be reasonably priced.)
To get started, I had installed a 120GB SSD to the machine and install Linux Mint and then ran a performance scan.
The results were not the most remarkable numbers ever, but the machine was definitely usable. I thought that numbers alone really did not mean a whole lot, so I would throw some things at it and see how the machine did.
I could search on the web, watch Youtube, and play a simple clicker game … But could I do anything useful?
So, it would not win any awards, but this Acer Aspire 7741 was not eWaste and was very usable based on the tests I threw at it. I enjoyed this first test and think I will write more of these, help in my small way to show that someone does not need the latest and greatest machine just to get on the internet and do basic things. Ultimately I will toss this machine on eBay, and I need a better testing process moving forward …
Bulletstorm
Bulletstorm, a wild and unique, first person shooter from the now very defunct People Can Fly studios is a game I cannot say enough good things about it. I have replayed this game many times already and it is as satisfying each time as it was the first time. Why is this game so much fun time and time again … well let me break it down.
The game puts you in the boots of Grayson Hunt, Elite Special Forces soldier Space Pirate, who in a single stroke of brilliant revenge manages to get his crew killed and ship destroyed. Grayson ends up on this supposedly abandoned planet with the last surviving member of his crew and working together they attempt to get rescued off the planet by way of their former Commanding Officer. A General who used Grayson and his former Special Forces team to cover up heinous crimes the General had committed and framed Grayson’s team for.
Honestly, on the surface, not that complex of a story … and then you start to find out the story of this “abandoned” planet – a former pleasure retreat built and staffed by convicts … that have been mutated by hazardous waste and radiation from ion storms on the planet. The player, as Grayson, now has to fight through these waves of mutated enemies for a chance to get off the planet and help your last crew mate, and friend, who was seriously injured in the crash landing. `To fight through all the mutations on the planet you are given a fairly standard compliment of weapons – pistol, shotgun, automatic rifle, etc all with a primary and secondary fire mode.
However, there is one weapon that made Bulletstorm truly unique at the time – an energy tether called a “leash”. This weapon allows the player to grab items like ammo from a distance and pull it closer or pull environmental blockers out of the way, a very useful trick. The “leash” also allows the player to grab enemies and pull them closer to be shot or kicked into other enemies … or grab explosive cylinders and throw them into enemies … or grab enemies and kick them into spikes … or any combination of these grab and kick combinations for interesting kill combinations that reward the player with points that can be used for weapon upgrades or ammunition for the other weapons.
The whole game is a profanity laced, ‘turn off brain and play’, action movie disguised as a video game. The original PC version was released with Live for Windows integration and has been removed from Steam, but was re-released as “Bulletstorm : Full Clip Edition” which appears to have toned down some of the profanity from the original but kept the original story intact.
It required a relatively decent machine for the time (requirements by Can you Run It) –
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo, AMD Athlon X2, or equivalent, running at 1.6 GHz or greater
- CPU SPEED: Intel Core 2 Duo, AMD Athlon X2, or equivalent, running at 1.6 GHz or greater
- RAM: 1.5 GB
- VIDEO CARD: DirectX 9.0c compatible, 256 MB of VRAM; NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS, ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro 256 MB, or greater
- TOTAL VIDEO RAM: 256 MB
- PIXEL SHADER: 3.0
- VERTEX SHADER: 3.0
- HARDWARE T&L: Yes
- OS: Windows XP (SP3), Windows Vista (SP2), or Windows 7
- FREE DISK SPACE: 9 GB
- SOUND CARD: Yes
And for the Full Clip edition (requirements by Steam store page) –
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS *: Windows 7/8/8.1/10 x64
- Processor: AMD A8-3850
- Memory: 6 GB RAM
- Graphics: Radeon HD 6850
- DirectX: Version 11
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 15 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
Stardew Valley
When I originally heard about Stardew Valley I kept hearing the game being played by kids so I got the impression that it was very much a kids game. That was until I decided to kick the tires one day and loaded the game and started to play it. Now at the time of writing this I have almost 100 hours in, and while I do not have a lot to say about the game, I do have a way different view after playing.
The game starts off with your grandfather giving you a gift, but with the rule that you cannot open that gift until you are so tired of your city life and get back in touch with nature and people.
Sometime later, while at your desk job, you snap and open the letter to find that Grandpa left you the deed to his old farm… That you decided to move to.
It is a very simple story concept, and one that I think most adults can get behind, while being kid friendly. The game gives you a brief how to play and then sets you loose to build your farm, it is in need of a bit of work to clean up the rocks and weeds...
The game loop is simple, you grow crops and raise animals …
Craft things for your farm …
Including machines to make products (like cheese and jams) to sell …
The game has a sort of 8-bit cartoony art style with a day / night cycle – you do not want to stay out too late though, or you might just sleep wherever you drop when your fatigue hits zero. Farming and tending animals is the majority of the game, but there are other things to do like fishing, cave exploration, and the yearly seasonal system means there are holiday celebrations in town to attend and participate in. The game also supports adding mods too, on my game I have added a weekly market day for more options to sell things that I make. `
The requirements to run Stardew Valley are not so high either (as noted by the Stardew Valley Steam page) –
- OS *: Windows Vista or greater
- Processor: 2 Ghz
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: 256 mb video memory, shader model 3.0+
- DirectX: Version 10
- Storage: 500 MB available space
All in all this all makes for a very chill game and I highly recommend it, especially if you are into sandbox style games and it supports multiplayer if you want to bring along friends for the fun.`
Stale Chips
Like a lot of people, one of my goals for this year is to reorganize and clean up, my backlog keeps getting derailed every time I go looking for parts in my current storage… During my cleaning I stumbled across these two CHIP single board computers. They both powered up, but one never displayed anything on the screen … So, time for an update…?
I jumped on the original Kickstarter back in 2016 when these were first released for only $9 each. I do not remember where I originally heard about it, but I remember being excited to jump on such a neat concept and all the tinkering that would be had. Doing a quick search back at the news of the time, the CHIP was being really well received with a good amount of chatter around it – USA Today and NPR ran excited stories on the CHIP.
Seeing as how I can post pictures of these CHIPs I definitely received the Kickstarter reward, but in researching I see that a lot of people did not, it was disappointing to see that a lot of people did not. The reason for this lack of delivery was apparently that the company, Next Thing Co., was not entirely able to continue product and went bankrupt. With the company going bankrupt that unfortunately means support is, well almost non-existent, aside from dedicated folks keeping these little things alive and mostly supported …
Originally, the CHIP was flashed by a Chrome plugin, support for which Google has LONG since killed off in the Chrome browser so the first challenge was to get these chips back in working order. Thankfully with some quick googling I was able to put together enough steps to flash both CHIPS between the Flash-Chip Git hub and the JFPossibilites archives of CHIP materials. Even with the instructions from these sites I still ran into issues with the process, needing an older version of Linux and an even older version of software to finish the flash (this was just my experience though), but after a couple hours of tinkering …
Ta-Da! Success, a CHIP desktop! Turns out these little guys still work after all these years and being moved from place to place in storage, I am a little excited.
This image even had the original software that came on the CHIP from the factory …
Including the original 4.4.13 kernel from 2016 .. ouch (as of this writing, the current Linux kernel is 6.7.1). At this point attempting an Apt update returns a lot of 404’s and site not found since CHIP OS was based of Debian Jessie and long term support ended in 2020 and the repositories for Next Thing Co are also no longer a thing. At this point, these CHIPs are looking very stale and much like eWaste. These are a cool idea, but methods to support them make life difficult.
So, what now? Well, for the moment this is where the CHIPs get put back into storage. There are sites to work around the dead repositories and get some updates onto these mini computers (I would be lying if I said I did not try already), but to what level of update? Updating them to that degree was out of scope for this post – I was just out to write about a neat Single Board Computer – also, I do not have any good projects for them at the moment. They are capable little SBCs, so I think I will be revisiting them sometime in the future, until then, they are just a little stale.
DAK Organization
Several odd years ago I saw this really cool calendar / to-do monitor in a YouTube video that the person in the video said was from a company called DAKboard. When I found out one of these boards could be built with a Raspberry Pi, I started building. I have had the board hanging up on the wall for several years now, trying to keep up the need to do things.
DAKboard itself is, at the core, an online service thing, it has different levels of features based on subscription levels – the higher the level the more customizations and displays one can run from the same account. DAKboard also sells custom hardware in both a full display or just the brains to connect to any sort of TV or monitor that one has gathering dust in a corner (or a webpage … or a tablet…) . However they offer a DIY guide to setting up a board using a Raspberry Pi, which is what I set up some time ago.
I am going to skip the technical details of setting the display up, as it is largely personal preference on how one wants their board to display (plus there is that whole subscription thing…). I have mine set up with Google and Outlook calendars and tasks from Todoist, along with my local weather. I occasionally run into something I cannot do (say limited number of calendars) here and there but for the most part, I am not feeling too limited with a free account. Definitely worth a look if one is looking for a tool to help wrangle in tasks.