FallingStuff – Page 4 – Words from fallingstuff

Buyer Beware

Every now and then I pop onto eBay or into a thrift store and see what kind of things I can find – electronic usually. I am a believer in the fact that old electronics (computers especially) often times times still have life left in them when someone throws them out. So I thought that it might be fun to explore what kinds of old electronics I run across, what repairs I might need to do to them, and what kind of life can I squeeze out of these things I find.

Kicking off this dive we have two tales of when sometimes eBay is a good and bad … First, a good listing, this Asus gaming laptop – up for sale because it “did not boot”.The picture that the seller was showing was that of a blue BIOS screen saying the laptop would just boot loop back to that screen. Knowing that a laptop setup to boot UEFI that did not have an OS installed would do just that, so I scooped it up. My hunch was 100% correct, the OS was missing or damaged. A quick reinstall of Windows and I had a working gaming laptop.

Working Windows AND it has 2 hard drives!

Now, sometimes eBay is not so good… Thinking I would get lucky twice, the listing said that the keyboard had water on it for an hour – just some water on the keyboard should be no big deal to repair. I went ahead and took the plunge…

The Lenovo laptop arrived looking fantastic and did not burst into flames when I plugged in the charger but it would not power up. So I opened the shell…

Well that corrosion in the middle of the main board tells the whole story. The “hour of water” had caused corrosion that ate through the main board damaged the battery connectors, various flexible connectors, and basically destroyed the board. The M.2 and hard drive had been removed so the seller would have likely known the board had sustained this much damage – and was not mentioned.

The point of these eBay stories is that not all listings are good and not all are bad. Obviously “Buyer Beware”, be sure to read the fine print and when the offer looks too good to believe, it probably is and you should not waste your money.

Wasteland 3

Rolling the clock back, I got into the post apocalyptic survival games after playing Fallout 3 (I sort of missed the rest of the Fallouts to that point) and kept playing through Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 4 and so on (we do not speak of 76). I have had a lot of fun with the Fallout series, so image my surprise when I find out there is similar post apocalyptic game coming out in Wasteland 3 … and that this game was the next entry into THAT series.

At first I was under the thought that Wasteland was a rip off of Fallout – all be it a good rip off. Then as I started to look into the game and play it, I found out it was quite the opposite – Fallout took elements from the Wasteland series. The plot of Wasteland 3 feels a little more believable, true to real world events (that is taking on the role of a soldier type trying to secure supplies to save people from your home); and I have to admit, I think I am enjoying Wasteland 3 just a little more (I say enjoying because as of writing this, I still have not finished the game).

The game is played from a 2.5D isometric perspective with turn based combat and a sort of morality system where decisions you make have effects on later game play. The more you do for a particular faction the more you are appreciated and rewarded by said faction and vice versa of course. However there are special interactions, say bringing in certain characters into dialogs that will effect the choices in that interaction. Nothing exactly new, but the way the events are played out in this game makes them feel different and interesting.

The weapons in the game are a variety mostly close (or copies) to real world weapons of the 80’s and behave just like those weapons. There are interesting gadgets that make combat a bit easier to survive and, along with some dialog choices add replay ability if you want to twist the story in a certain direction. Of course during your travels you run into so many moments of “What did I just see??”

There is a lot of subplot to the game that I cannot do justice in anything less than a few dozen pages, probably ruining the game. Suffice it to say though, the Deluge of Fire did nothing to help the stability of Colorado and Wasteland 3 is definitely a game to pick up if you were on the fence about it.

Civilization VI

I had some down time recently and decided to go through the backlog and find pulled up an entry from an old favorite series. Well I say old favorite, it is more like a game who’s entries have annoyed and amused me both in equal amount. That series is Sid Meier’s Civilization and the game, Civilization VI… and looking back I wish I would have taken more screenshots.

Originally I did not think about writing this post so I am wishing I had more pictures, but oh well. Normally Civilization games frustrate me to no end as they always seem to end up where I get stomped by a random victory condition I was not even paying attention to like .. culture or diplomacy. Civilization VI though was an exciting twist, I actually won the second game that I played. As usual the graphics were much improved over previous entries in the series and the gameplay feels more smooth, still turn based but very smooth to play.

This entry in the series threw in some very interesting features that I ran into during my first play throughs. First was the fact that for the most part, the other factions were not that busy threating or declaring war on me. Barbarians now form city-states, instead of those states just being in on the map from the word go and manufacture and field military units. Military units now stack so that there are fewer left lying around the field and making turns confusing while creating stronger units on the battlefield. The use of Nuclear weapons does not immediately earn the condemnation of every other faction on the map!

While the game is an improvement over other entries in the series, both visually and functionally, there is one thing that frustrating thing that I did not enjoy, workers cannot be automated … you cannot just tell a worker to just build just whatever is needed. For now, this worker automation is really my only major complaint about the game – otherwise I suggest picking it up when it goes on sale and give it a go.

Your Phone is Telling on You

This might be old news to some, in fact I have known about it for a few years now, but the recent series I wrote on left over drive data got me to thinking about it again. The short version is, your phone is telling … where your pictures were taken from… Ok, ok, so it is not as big a deal as that sounds, but it could be a privacy concern if you happen to be taking pictures somewhere you should not be.

So let me explain … When you take a picture on a digital camera, the camera bakes in some information, metadata, or more technically the EXIF tag. It is not much information, mostly the data on the camera, shutter speed, that sort of information.

Clearly this information is viewable in Windows without any sort of special tools too, making it really convenient to know what camera was used, how big the picture is, and that sort of detail. Sounds good so far, but mobile phone cameras can take it a step farther and add your GPS location information …

Like this picture here, only has the altitude attached (I disabled the location data on this phone) … but this picture …

This picture had GPS coordinates attached, and by plugging in those coordinates into Google Maps, someone would be able to pinpoint on a map exactly where the picture was taken. All this done with just Windows, no need of any special software.

While Facebook and Twitter both appear to strip the information off the pictures, if you are the paranoid sort, you may choose to consult the manual for your phone and turn off any geolocation options. Or maybe think twice about uploading that photo, seeing as there might be other data attached to the photo …