Category: Windows

Everything About Windows

The Last of Us Is Coming to Steam Deck

Paul
Last of Us on Steam

Steam and Steam Deck

This is one of those games that has been out for years. I won’t say it hasn’t been something that I look forward to play.  It has some graphical scenes but that goes along with the zombie apocolypses that you see every time in movies and shows.   This popped up on my radar last week when I saw this over the weekend on some social media.  I thought they were kidding so I went did some searching and it is comign to the Steam.  I can imagine it will also be coming to the Steam Deck because of how old the game is.   It’s is almost a 10 year old game but has been remastered to work with the Playstation 4 and Playstation 5.   With all this in the air, I am fairly certain it wil work on the Steam Deck out of the gate as it is released.  Even the newer versions of the game doesn’t require as much as Spiderman game.  Which I love to play on my PC or Steam Deck when I am on long car rides.  I can’t see this not being released to the Steam Deck.

Pre-orders 

It is currently on preorder for the game.  It will cost people $59.99 and it looks to be very interested when they finally release it.  I have heard this game has some great story lines and will be like Laura Croft to a point so that much will always keep me going with puzzles and being able to explore the worlds.   I’ve watch people play through the game from time to time on Youtube and it looks to be insteresting.  I have already put my money down for Pre-order since I don’t have a playstation.   My Steam Deck is ready to recieve the game once it is released.  I suspect the first week or two there may be problems with the Steam Deck but I am hopeful that they will fix them quickly enough.

March 3, 2023

That the time it is set to be released on Steam, I am hopeful they don’t delay it because this will be so helpful on my next trip in April that I am all set to go. I will have several hours to waste while traveling and this game will be my game to play to keep my busy while traveling.  I suspect this will be a 30 or 50 Gb download and install on any system.  So i will be keeping that much ready to be downloaded to my Steam deck.   I also have found a really small portable dock that I can take with me.   I’ve found it around town.  It’s Call the Gizmovine USB-C hub and it is currently not available on Amazon.  I guess you can go to Newegg and buy it if you want to pay more for it.  I do wonder if I can find more of these these hubs to use for later.   Small Post about this upcoming game.

Are you planning to buy this game or do you think it is worth the 60$ price range?  Let me know what you think and tell me if you have played this before.  Thanks.

Getting my Movies my way is the best way.

Paul

film, video, streaming, button, watch, home, show, entertainment, electronics, control, games, room, animation, furniture, recreation, screenshot, Free Images In PxHere

Photo by mohamed_hassan from PxHere

Time to use my DVD collection

I’ve got a really big DVD collection that I want to be able to use when I want to use them.   I’ll tell you when we were at home for those two months, I should of done that then in 2020 but I didn’t think about it until now.   However that doesn’t mean it is to late to do it.  I have a plan for the my Steam Deck and this will allow me to do that.  Although gaming streaming and video streaming are two different beasts it still has some of the princples that you might not think of.   You will still need to stream through wifi or wired if you are trying to get the best quality.    My plan is to have my DVD’s available anywhere I go, so I even can play on my phone if I wanted to.   I’ve found this awesome streaming service that will do just that on the Steam Deck and any other device.   I’ve installed Plex.tv and created a server for myself.   I’ve got this old NAS (Network attached storage) that hasn’t been used very much.   I’ve been upgrading it lately for just this occasion.   I want to put all my DVD’s and Music on their to listen to or use as I wish.  You can buy a NAS for really small amount of money and add storage as you see fit.

What’s the Purpose

The Truth of the matter is, because I can and it can help with not paying for streamin services as much.  I can be more selective of which services I want to subscribe to and save money in the long run.   I can also buy cheap DVD’s and copy them onto my NAS with realtivity easy process.   The really hard part is the CopyProtection that the big names do to prevent you from do just this.   The problem is that we own these DVD’s and we have the right do what we want with them.  Also there a movies that I want to watch that aren’t either on the streaming service or would need to buy another subscription to another service.  There’s to many services and with the prices going up and I have this NAS hardly being used it should be used more.

Understanding the Basics

We’ll not going to talk about the ethics as much as you want but if you are curious how to do it, you can watch this video and learn something.   I’ll talk a little bit about the copy protection that can be hard to circumvent but can be if you really want to own your media.   The problem is that not all this works with but can be useful to understand.   The copy protection of DVD’s has been something that has plagued mankind since the dawn of the DVD.   They deserve their money for the making the movies and films.  Even TV shows should get what is owed to them but that doesn’t mean people haven’t pirated them around the world through other means.

Copy Protection Software

Here’s where it gets a little bit more interesting to some because if you are like me and have some movies in either DVD or Bluray.  You’re going to need these software to do what is necessary to get to the information you might need. I’ll say this much, use as your own risk or own use.  I will not be responsible for anything that might happen.

I’ll say this I’ve only used DVD Decrypter right now because it works with all that I needed but the others look promising and I will try them out later.  It’s up to you on which one you will want to use to decrypt those DRM heavy DVD’s or Blurays.   I think it all depends on which one will work for you and how you like to use them .  Each one has their own unique way of getting the files needed to copy the main movie file.   So it just depends on what you are looking to do.

Are you planning to do this?  What do you think it will be like when you watch movies on the Steam Deck? I plan to try it out on the steam deck and see how well Plex.tv does the only thing that is problem right now is that you need to buy the server software either monthly or lifetime to do it.  I am going to look into buying the Lifetime because I am really curious as to how well this will work outside of my house.   I also might buy a little Pi board and use that as my server because I can use less energy that way instead of using my tower to do the serving of the movies.  What’s your plans for yoru steam deck?  I’d love to hear your plans on what you want to do with yours.

PolyMC no longer working on any Platform

Paul
“The account has expried and needs to be logged in manually again.”

No More PolyMC for Steam!

According to sources Lenny, the owner of the polymc program, decided to remove all contributators for the GitHub depository due to a political Mess. Everyone thought he got hacked and I am going to guess it was something he didn’t think to entirely about when he decided to all this. He’s has his reasons, and I will not debate those reasons or even try to comprehend them. I’ve tried PolyMC on my desktop Windows 10 Computer and I get this same error. You can’t even link your account back to polymc, this seems like Microsoft is serious about keeping some of their younger users safe. They blocked the app from being used and now no one can use it anymore. I don’t know how long Microsoft will ban or if there is even a chance to get this game unbanned by Microsoft. Due to that issue we will need to find another game launcher to play on Steam and others platforms. Many people are urging players to go to other launchers and I really can’t blame bloggers from saying this. You just don’t know what is in the code and why the author did what he did.  Now my tutorial will not work and we should focus on a new Minecraft launcher.

Other Minecraft launchers on Steam Deck

There are several good launchers on steam deck, if you are using JAVA.   You can always get them either through the Discovery App or through Pacman in Console.   Here are a few that I have seen that might work just fine with a few tweaks:

  • The Official Minecraft Launcher— You Will need to install gnome-keyring with a few strings to keep yoru minecraft creditials from having to be entered everytime it launches.
  • ATLauncher — Is best know for me as least with Sky Factory and other mods for a serious good time in Minecraft.  It however may not work as well as we hope.  I’ve seen comments where this doesn’t work, so only time will tell.
  • Minecraft Bedrock Launcher — If you like play the bedrock version this is the luancher for you on Steam or even Arch.   I haven’t tested this one out either.  It however looks to not be working on arch.

There are several other launchers on Arch but they seemed dubious and I don’t want to recommend them until we get more comments and more people trying them out.

Minecraft Launcher

I will be using the Minecraft official, until I can find a better one and hope I can figure out how to get it to save my profile for offline and online use.  I’d hate to have to keep putting in my when I want to use it and have to be online all the time to do it.  Other than that, I am not sure what else to try to play Minecraft on Steam.   I know I’ll be looking for ways to play Minecraft on Steam again without have to do much hacking or doing anything that might be too difficult.  I’ll probably even post a tutorial on how to install a good Minecraft launcher once I find one that will work with my Steam Deck.

What’s your Plans on playing minecraft on steam?  Do you know any good ways to do it now?  or are you like me just searching for another way to play on the Steam Deck?   Let me know your thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

It might be time to change your ethernet cords!

Paul1 Reply

Ethernet cords 101

Why would you need to change your ethernet cords?  You’re probably asking that because you’ve been using the ones in your hose for years without a problem.  This can seem quite different if you really consider the process of the network cords you have now.   Older houses are probably only using Cat5 or Cat5e cables.  The newer ones probably cat 6 but did you know there are more than that.  We’ve got Cat 1 ,2, 3 ,4, 5, 5e, 6, 6a,7,7a,8.  Each one of these is a much faster and more productive than the next.  Here’s a graphic to show you what I mean:

Those ethernet cables

Most of the time, those old ethernet cables are slowing you down.   If you are going to install ethernet cables into your house infrastructure you really should install the highest possible cat cable you can into your house.  This isn’t going to be  cheap but it will at least help with speed and it will also make it more useable in the future.  You might only have speeds of 10000mps down or up.  If you decide later on you want more speed you could easily upgrade your fiber speeds and be able to use the speeds without having to redo your ethernet cables in your house.  Gaming on ethernet cables would make it so much faster and less lag on the network than if you didn’t have those faster cables.

Network speeds to your Modem

If you don’t upgrade the cables from your modem to router if you have one of those then you will not be increasing the speeds of the network.  You’ll be bottlenecking all the speeds because of the cables you are using to the router to the modem.  You should consider buying a small cat8 cable and installing that into your router and connecting it to the modem.  This way the speeds will not be bottlenecked.  Also if you choice to use the highest speeds possible then will will allow you to get the most bandwidth from your ISP provider.  If you really do want the fast speeds possible, consider buying your modem and stop renting  your modem from the ISP.  This will help you in the future because the speed of the modem can be increased as the speed from the ISP.  ISP might be using some kind of throttling software in their modems to make it much slower for you for bandwidth.  This might be used or might not be used it just depends on the ISP.

Finally as you can see if you are like me, I use network cables in my house due to the saturation of the WIFI networks in my area.  This way I can get the most out of my ISP and not depend so much on my WIFI.  It can help with me to not have network interference from other WIFI broadcasting equipment.  I recently bought Cat 7 cables to help with my speeds on my modem since I can get 10gbps down and 5gbps down.  Which makes me having faster downloads and faster network speeds.   Don’t forget to check your cables from time to time for wear and tear and replace them from time to time.

It’s not a Bug but a feature : The Print Nightmare and Microsoft

Paul

It's Not a Bug but a Feature Comic

The Benefits of a central print server

It can be challenging to have a CPS(Central Print Server Infrastructure) due to a lot of demanding things.  This is the nature of allowing users to print to one location can bring on so many problems with how the IT people deal with it can seem almost impossible to some and down right chaos to others. After all, we have to deal with printing issues from time to time and even the unexpected problems that might arise.  For instance just in September, Microsoft released an update to the Print spooler and point to print features to cut off access to a zero day vulnerability called “Print Nightmare”.  Microsoft has stated in the past this was always a feature and not a bug, but I am sure that people may think this shouldn’t of been a feature to begin with.  Even then, you still have issues with having to fix the issues that Microsoft broke in the updates that are supposed to fix those other issues.   The Cost alone of productive might be hindered by the fact that workers can’t print what they need to print or have access to scan the papers they might need to scan to email or to use in production.

IT support

It will cause challenges to the IT support because it might not be as easily seen as you might expect with the current climate of people working from home or remote support.   After all, you don’t have any way to physically touch the printer or to examine the printer in details to know if it is a software or hardware issue.   This can be an issue on itself because some printing issues are both hardware and software in the same light.   One might look like a software issue but later find out it is a hardware issue because the manufacturer has determine the EOL(End of Life support) for that hardware.   In the end the printing to a centralized printer can have some good and bad benefits to all.

Acceptance of Printing

Even the accepting that you can not print can even be a challenge for the office staff.  There will be days you can’t print and there will be days you can print.   The office team will have to have ways to get around those challenges day by day.   They may eve have to come up with backup plans in case they may need to print something that day and we have issues just like this.  Although those are probably few and far between due to the how we are more dependent on email now a day.  It however isn’t something we should over look because of just how much people may need to use a printer.   There will always be a need for paper backups and there will always be a need to snail mail a form.  These are the challenges they will always face and we must accept that we will be there to fix their issues when the need arises.   Do you agree or Disagree?