Guy Speak Beaver

Skipping Startup Company Roll In Elder Scrolls Online

2018-08-25T12:23:00.000-07:00

If you've ever played Elder Scrolls Online on PC, you know it comes with a few different companies credits playing before you can even log in. But did you know that you can prevent those from playing and skip straight to logging in?

These instructions are for default install locations for Elder Scrolls Online: Summerset on Windows 10 Pro.

The default install location for your Elder Scrolls Online settings is at
C:\Users\<your user name>\Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live\UserSettings.txt

Open this file with Notepad or your basic text editor of choice.

Search for the string "SET SkipPregameVideos"

You can press CTRL+F to quickly go to it.

This number after that string is a Boolean value. 0 is false, 1 is true. It should currently be 0, so change that to 1.

Make sure and save the document before you close, then voilà.

Cleaning A Google Nexus 7 Rubber Case

2018-01-31T19:41:00.000-08:00

The image above shows a dirty Google Nexus 7 rubber case I received. Should be simple enough to clean right? Grabbed some 409 and a paper towel and went to town on it. But afterwards it didn't look any different.

Disappointing but marching on I tried 91% isopropyl alcohol and an old toothbrush. At first looked like it cleared it right up. Once the alcohol evaporated though I was left with a case still largely unchanged and dirty.

Next attempt was a toothbrush a small container of a healthy amount of Dawn dishwashing soap and water. Some vigorous scrubbing later and finally it's clean. Moving up and down and doing circles to make sure the dirt is attacked on all fronts it left a lot of bubble. Wiping them off and letting the case fully dry shows a much improved state. So If you have any rubber cases with stubborn stains and streaks, give this a shot.

Stopping Windows From Killing GRUB

2018-01-26T22:12:00.000-08:00

On my PC I have a few hard drives. A Samsung SSD with Windows 10 Fall Creators Update on it, a couple of a 500GB-1TB drives for storage, and a 150GB hard drive for playing around with Linux distros. Over the years I've played around with quite a few and I tended to stick with Fedora 24+ and Antergos the most. Installing and using them wasn't a problem at all. (Minus an Antergos bug on install that would get into a loop if it saw multiple hard drives. Had to disconnect all my other drives on install to get it to move. Reported the bug and had it confirmed, never found out if it was fixed.) Each one created a separate EFI entry and booting was only ever impeded by me messing around with video drivers or Arch's wonderful ability to bork itself.

Enter Ubuntu 16.04 . I'm not a huge fan of APT and preferred the simple output of DNF. Unfortunately a lot of software on Linux from larger companies and hobbyist's target Debian or have PPA's. So I went back to it to give it a go. Install went great, was finally starting to enjoy Unity, (funny considering it's getting tossed), and I've been trying to migrate to it fully. I had to jump back to Windows the next day and selected it in the GRUB menu and went about my business. Upon a restart the Ubuntu entry in EFI was gone and replaced with just Windows Boot Manager. Weird, but I should still able to select the hard drive with Ubuntu on it and get GRUB. I did get GRUB, but it was GRUB Rescue terminal. Frustrated I tried booting to the SSD to see if it put GRUB there, same GRUB Rescue menu.

Thinking something had just gone sideways once I reinstalled Ubuntu. Repeated the steps and got the same result. So I started looking up ways to fix it. You can fix a Windows bootloader break, why not Linux? After a little bit of research I found the manual and tried a few different commands to set the pointer to where it should be. I just kept getting "filesystem is unknown" or "could not find boot". After some more research I found a package for Ubuntu called Boot-Repair. You can download it inside a live USB and run it to fix your GRUB install. Afterwards it's advised to run GRUB install again from the actual installation. It's dead simple to run, just follow the instructions and once it finishes GRUB should be back.

Upon reboot I did see the Ubuntu entry in EFI again. GRUB had found my Ubuntu install and Windows bootloader, but had also populated the list with entries for MacOS and other Ubuntu versions. Not the cleanest thing, but it allowed me to boot again. Got into Ubuntu and ran the GRUB install again and specified the drive where it had been installed. Everything is great. No worries right? Wrong! After rebooting into Windows and restarting it had unsurprisingly killed GRUB and put it own bootloader back. At this point I'm annoyed and mad. Why does Windows keep going out of it's way to kill GRUB, but not other EFI bootloaders for Fedora and Arch?

Doing some more research yielded a find that possibly Windows 10 Fast Boot setting was doing the dirty job of killing GRUB. The setting is easy to change in the registry as well as a Control Panel GUI. After changing the setting and running Boot-Repair again, I tested it to see if it stopped the overwrite. The results were disappointing and the problem persisted. I was surprised their wasn't more information on this issue. Windows and Ubuntu are suppose to be friends now. Tons of people new and old to Linux run Ubuntu or dual-boot with Windows. Has no one else experienced this? I eventually did find a few and a guide on Ubuntu's support pages telling users to install Ubuntu first, then Windows to prevent the issue. Windows 10 is a pain to setup again so forget that. Looking at the information some more the suggestion was made by a user to use REFInd. I had used REFIt years ago on Mac to dual-boot, and apparently they had gone through a name change. Knowing it wasn't some fly by night piece of software that I was installing to manage my bootloaders was nice.

After doing Boot-Repair again and logging into Ubuntu I added the PPA, installed the software, and tested it out. Works like a charm. It prevents Windows and Ubuntu from getting aggressive in sanitizing the boot area. It can still fail and they have pages on how to mitigate it when it happens for any OS.

I'm still not sure why I only had this issue with Ubuntu, and why even when I installed it directly to my hard drive with Ubuntu on it, it got borked as well by Windows. I've been messing with it enough so I haven't had to will to audit what's going on and where exactly things are located at. Secure Boot has been off since I built this computer because who needs that garbage, since I know some people were suggesting and finding that to the culprit. I've also seen posts citing this same behavior of Windows going back to Vista, so it's not something new.

Just wanted to share my experience and maybe save someone else a few days of installs, and testing.

Managing Dark Souls 3 Tracking

2017-08-06T16:08:00.000-07:00

In the course of playing Dark Souls 3 I decided I wanted to complete all the achievements. Call it a compulsion or an addiction, but I enjoyed the game a lot and wanted to challenge myself. In the course of researching how to accomplish this I noticed that certain achievements existed like obtain all sorceries, obtain all miracles, etc. So I make a little checklist in Notes on my iPad. It would serve as a quick way to see what I had and what I still needed to get.

While it was A solution, it still had some quirks. Namely that Notes didn't like long lists with each item having a checkmark. I imagine that reading the status of a variable then rendering wasn't exactly what Apple intended the use for it. But I'm just guessing. So I started putting together a spreadsheet in Apple's Numbers.

Spreadsheet Solution

This solution covers multiple vectors. Spells, covenants, ashes, coals, and any other trackable items linked to achievements. So each achievement gets it's own sheet. Each sheet (minus covenants) contains the following.

- Item Name
(Obviously)

- Have It?
(Uses boolean yes or no answers with highlighting cells green for yes and red for anything else. Makes for easier cursory visual search)

- Location
(Where to find the item or who you need to talk to)

- Effect
(The effect when used, turned in, or any other effect that is relevant, this is mostly just to clarify sometimes unknown results)

Each sheet has two extra rows at the bottom. One is a total count of needed items (was done manually) and automated count of fields with yes. These two field are then used to get the percentage complete number at the very top of the sheet. Again this is just for ease of visually checking how far you are and if you need to check out the sheet more.

Covenants are a bit unique and focuses just on tracking rank. Rank rewards are the relevant parts and listing of what item is needed to rank up.

Where Did The Info Come From?

All the info for the sheets came from the Dark Souls 3 Wiki at Fexalife. For larger bits I just started scrapping the text. This brought along the hyperlinks for items, and unfortunately to remove those is a bit pain staking. The data also has some spelling and grammar errors, which I didn't feel like correcting to the use case.

Why Apple's Numbers and not MSOffice, LibreOffice, Google Sheets, etc

I choose Apple's Numbers for a couple reasons.

1. It's built into my devices. While I play on my PC I would be using a MacBook Air and iPad to track items. Why two? Because since I chose Numbers I would be unable to use ALL the features on my iPad. It's annoying, but an easy work around.

2. Cloud storage and sync is a cornerstone of this. Since LibreOffice doesn't offer that unless I host on one of the many cloud storage platforms, it's out.

3. I want to do this project without paying a service fee. So MSOffice is out.

4. So it comes down to Google Sheets and Numbers. While both can accomplish the same task, Numbers just runs better. Since my main devices would be MacBook Air and iPad, the native application by the hardware maker is always going to run better.

5. Could I have used any number of no-name software solutions? Sure, but working with what I'm already familiar with speeds up build time.

Wishlist Features

I did have a few features I wanted to incorporate but wasn't able to do. One was a self-updating list of unobtained items that were sorted by location. When I was looking into this I could see the edges of what I could do with Numbers. To add this would require a platform change and it's something I'm just not interested in doing with my journey to 100% over.

Terminus

I believe that covers everything. I'll attach the link at the bottom of this post. It's only in Numbers format and I really have no need to convert and recreate the sheet. So if you want to see it, use it, whatever it, feel free to. Any constructive feedback is also appreciated.

Link to Download Numbers: Here

A Dissection "American 'Christianity' Has Failed"

2017-01-28T20:23:00.001-08:00

It isn't everyday that I feel compelled to engage in a religious discussion, but who am I to pass up an opportunity to challenge my own theological chops. On the twenty-fifth of January in the year two-thousand and seventeen a post titled "American 'Christianity' Has Failed" was posted to Sojo.net. A provocative title, and one I couldn't forego reading. To summarize, the article is essentially what you'd expect from the title. A detailed account of how American Christians and American Christianity has failed to follow the message of Christ. What made this piece particularly interesting to me was the assertion that Jesus is speaking not only to the individual, but also the state. I found this and other claims to be just preposterous. Looking further into the site I see they prescribe to a blend of Christianity and social justice with a particular negative view of President Trump. So let's dive in and disassemble this mess of a message.

"For the last few years Christians have been singing worship songs that include lyrics like “ keep my eyes above the waves, when oceans rise …” and yet have rejected refugees who’ve seen loved ones die beneath waves, who themselves have literally struggled to keep from drowning in oceans. Those American Christians — particularly white evangelicals — continue to sing the words: “Spirit lead me where my trust is without borders …” but fail to realize the shameful irony that they’re largely responsible for refusing shelter and opportunity to some of the world’s most helpless and oppressed people."

My first question is who are these refugees that American Christians have turned away? Who are these people supposedly literally drowning because white evangelicals reject them? I imagine the strong imagery and vague accusations are an intentional combination to set the tone and appeal to emotion.

"This represents a predominant theme of Westernized Christendom: proclaiming Christian rhetoric while actively — or passively — practicing the opposite in reality.

Because while the gospels instruct followers of Christ to help the poor, oppressed, maligned, mistreated, sick, and those most in need of help, Christians in America have largely supported measures that have rejected refugees, refused aid to immigrants, cut social services to the poor, diminished help for the sick, fueled xenophobia, reinforced misogyny, ignored racism, stoked hatred, reinforced corruption, and largely increased inequality, prejudice, and fear."

Proclaiming Christian rhetoric while actively or passively practicing the opposite is not unique to Westernized Christendom. It is perhaps unique to humanity as a whole. Followers of any religion can proclaim their rhetoric while breaking it at the same time. That is simply humans being deceptive for their own gain.

While they are correct that Christ did advocate to help the poor, the sick, and those in peril; the paragraph quickly starts to twist the gospel with governance. Jesus did not instruct his apostles to other-throw the roman empire. Nor did he call for the establishment of a purely Christian or Jewish state. While the bible does cover different laws, ethics, and morals, it is not an instruction on governance. The overall direction of the bible is to show the reader who god is, what he can do, what he wants for you. It's an intensely personal message with the goal of leading the reader to gods grace and to live your life following him. So what of government? Should government conform to Christianity?

Not necessarily. The Jewish people have had times of a independent Jewish nation and times ruled by others, enslaved by others, and even captured by others. The Torah does not command them to rule always, nor does it command to conform. It is a personal journey, and one that can live in the freest of societies or under the threat of death. So of government, it is out of the control of Christians. This isn't an excuse for past wrongs, but an explanation. Christianity can not be held to account for the actions of the state. Nor should Christianity hold the state to follow Christ in all ways. It should pick its battles and fight for it's message, but following Christ and running a nation-state are two very different things. Just to put a cap on this specifically tangled section, the exaggeration of -ism's and all things unbecoming of Christians seems slightly overboard.

"If Christians refuse to help and actually use their political advocacy and opinions to further hurt refugees, immigrants, women, foreigners, minorities, the poor, the oppressed, the persecuted, the sick, the LGBTQ community — and aren’t abiding by the golden rule of loving their neighbors as themselves, then who exactly are Christians supposedly loving?

What benefit are Christians providing their communities, and what good are they contributing to the world around them? Because in America, it appears that the sole purpose of Christianity is to selfishly protect people’s own self-interests instead of sacrificially serving others."

An example of Christians using political advocacy to hurt this arms length list of categories would be helpful. The inclusion of LGBTQ is a particularly contentious item. While many denominations still morally oppose LGBTQ, society has pushed the normalization to a point where many Christians accept LGBTQ people as sinners, but not lepers. I think it's also worth noting that for hundreds of years the catholic church has been giving gay men sanctuary and jobs in the priesthood in times where being gay was illegal.

The golden rule is in fact not the golden rule of Christianity. The golden rule is simply a statement that is echo'd in many different cultures, religions, and moralities. Not to imply it's meaningless, it is important but by no means the peak of Christendom.

As far as benefits to the communities, many churches have after school sports programs, arts activities, food drives for the needy, charity drives, mission trips to foreign countries to help build infrastructure or churches, etc. I have seen this occur with mega churches all the way down to a small community church. The term sacrificially serving others bothers me more on a personal level because it comes off as a contest for who can sacrifice more, or who is the better Christian. Something Jesus criticized the pharisees for.

"The election of President Donald Trump has proven that numerous Christians are more worried about power, influence, and control than the gospel messages of humility, generosity, ministering to others, and love."

This passage seems highly presumptuous and conflates Christian voters with Trump. While I would agree that their are likely more Christians who vote republican, I think it's playing identity politics to ascribe the entire religion to one candidate or party.

"Of course there are exceptions, but it should be sobering for Christians to realize that that many who claim to follow the Prince of Peace, the Healer, the Light of the World, supported policies that are bringing darkness and pain to so many people."

They at least pause to give exceptions, which is appreciated. However the allusion to Christians bringing darkness and pain to so many people is pure hyperbole. The article has yet to articulate who these suffering masses are at the hands of Christians. It also lights Jesus and god as pacifists. While the holy trinity does bring love, it can also bring wrath, anger, and regret.

"These presidential orders, which will refuse help to many of the world’s most vulnerable individuals, are what many Christians voted for. This is the fruit of their political labor, but it’s not the Fruit of the Spirit. In fact, love, joy, peace, happiness, and self-control are notably absent from the current administration.

The gospel of Jesus has been traded in for a narrative of fear. But the Bible keeps reminding us to right the course: 'quotes Isaiah 1:17, Matt. 25:35, Lev. 19: 33-34, Prov. 14:31, Prov. 31: 8-9, 1 John 3:17, Jer. 22:3, Zech. 7:9-10'"

Their have been many different presidential orders signed in the days before, so specifying which orders and how they will refuse help to vulnerable individuals would be at the very least helpful. And again we see the conflation of Christians and Trump, and the claim that the administration lacks love, joy, peace, happiness, and self-control is egregious.

"By these standards — and by the ultimate example that Jesus himself set for us by example — mainstream Christianity in America has failed. It looks nothing like Jesus.

But the reality is that following Jesus is extremely hard. It demands giving away your most prized possessions and abandoning your biggest fears. So while there might be political, economic, financial, and safety reasons for implementing policies that harm people and refuse them help, there are certainly no gospel reasons.

Nobody understood this better than the early church. Those first Christ followers who refused to bow to the emperor and go along with the policies of the Roman government. For them, they gave everything — to the point of being persecuted, arrested, tortured, and eventually martyred — for the purpose of serving Christ and serving others, the result of choosing to dedicate their lives to the truths of Jesus rather than the ideals of the ruling empire.

The question is, will American Christians ever learn to do the same?"

The final paragraph wraps up with many repeats of earlier contradictions, illogical conclusions, assumptions, and accusations. I find the inclusion of the disciples interesting. It paints with a very broad brush that all the disciples were more or less the same defiant followers of Christ. This does a disservice to the different struggles each disciple faced going out into the world as the first Christians. The journeys included bouts of doubt, fear, shame, and struggle to survive, but their mission was never to fight the Romans. It was to spread the good news. To be a witness to all of what Jesus had done for everyone.

After the conclusion of the oversimplification is the question, "will American Christians ever learn to do the same?" That question following that story almost seems to imply that the writer thinks American Christians should martyr themselves.

Now the first time I read this article I couldn't help but feel and see a strong sentiment of judgement. A Christian judging other Christians and telling them they aren't Christian enough or denying they are even Christians in the first place. That's the core issue I have with the piece. Instead of encouraging others in their faith, it is condemnation for not doing enough. Jesus was not born to throw traders out of the temple or call the pharisees perverts of the word of god. He also wasn't born to only help the poor and sick. Jesus was born to free everyone. Rich, poor, roman, hebrew, arab, indian, whore, trader, etc. God is not one dimensional, nor is he easily conveyed. While it's easy to simplify and package up Jesus and sit in judgement of others it is much harder to convey complexity beyond our comprehension and encourage others in faith. I don't think the writer of this piece is wrong. I disagree with him, but if that is the path his faith takes him so be it. This is the path my faith takes me. To cross-examine and contemplate his work today.

Virtually Possible!

2016-07-21T08:34:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: I am not a virtualization expert. I am merely documenting my knowledge and sharing.

Virtualization, as I see it, is the next big or existing big thing in enterprise. Which is slightly ironic. That was IBM and others vision of the future in the 80's and 90's. That a mainframe would exist and everyone would just have terminal's that connected to the mainframe. But instead the mainframe idea was scrapped and everyone got their own computer. Not surprisingly this came with the problems of people screwing up their machines, breaking them, or having to perform maintenance on hundreds of machines. That's a lot of watch batteries for CMOS. And a lot of IT staff to cover your network and your machines.

Over recent years though, living on the cloud and running a terminal has become normalized and acceptable. The initial thought to just carve up the mainframe like a birthday cake doesn't work out too well. You just continually split all your resources until everyone is provisioned. If someone downloads a virus it just hops over to every other provisioned piece of cake. So virtualization solves that problem by only running what's necessary and isolating each piece from others. If you have a server it's a completely different ball game, but here's my journey running virtualization on a single consumer grade PC tower under Linux.

By a show of hands how many of you have heard of VMware? What about Virtual Box? Ok, so how about bare metal virtualization? That's what I thought. You can all put your hands down now. So recently I've been tinkering with Linux more and more. And overall it's been fun. What isn't fun is dual booting. I can mess around with Linux all day, but when I want to play a game I have to restart and jump into Windows. A minor inconvenience, but their MUST be a better way. Now the first work around most older folk think of is WINE. It's meant to run Windows software in Linux, BSD, and Mac.

Now this works, depending on what you're trying to do. When it comes to high end games, it becomes a case by case scenario. Overall it's still slower and is the software equivalent of a redneck speed boat. Pieced together and works right away, but at any moment can blow itself apart. My impression is the bottleneck is in the software itself. Translating between the two systems will never be as fast as direct access to hardware.

So what other options do we have? We can use Virtual Box or VMware. These are software virtualization technologies and while they do work as well, they are still plagued by slow performance unless you go absolutely overkill in your machine. You're not only powering your desktop, but you're powering a second desktop as well. Just taking your CPU and RAM and cutting them in half slows everything down. Unless you're running on a server of course. So are we SOL? Nope! We have something called bare metal virtualization.

I've heard the term before, but never looked too deep into it. But this problem actually creates the perfect time to try it out. So the way it works is that instead of loading an operating system and running software that creates a virtualized environment, it loads the kernel of the operating system and creates a virtualized environment from that. It's still a virtual desktop, so it's not the exact same as running just the OS, but it's as close as possible since the majority of resources are free for you to allocate. When it comes to games though, the virtualized environment still has the same drawback as software virtualization. You still can't access the full power of your GPU. BUT, with this method called KVM (kernel-based virtual machine), we can use PCI passthrough to access the full potential of the GPU.

That does have some requirements though. You need a CPU that supports VT-x (Intel's virtualization tech) or AMD-v (AMD's virtualization tech). This is the easy part. Even Ivy Bridge generation consumer grade Intel CPU's support VT-x usually. What most tutorials will NOT tell you, and I learned this the hard way, is that your motherboard must support VT-d as well. Even if you turn on VT-x in your BIOS, if your motherboard doesn't support it you won't be able to access the features of VT-x from your distro. Now from what I can see my board does not support it. It lists it as a feature, but says it's not supported. Looking at available motherboards that support VT-d and VT-x it seems like a premium feature. If it's a high end gaming/work station motherboard, including all the bells and whistles and dozens of USB ports, or if it's a server grade motherboard it seems it is supported.

Unfortunately the price of both of these types of motherboards seems to be fairly equal. Consumer market ranging around $150-$200 starting out and the server grade cheap-o boards from SuperMicro starting at $150-$200. And with a new motherboard equals different socket type, so I'll need a new CPU as well. But wait, there's more. With a new motherboard also equals new RAM since my current type and speed is not compatible with newer models.

And the last requirement is having two graphics cards. One card is just used for booting up Linux and the second GPU can be assigned to your KVM. This is called PCI passthrough because you forwards the specific PCI hardware address to your KVM so it's like it's running natively since it has the full power at it's disposal. That is the purpose of VT-d and why it needs to be supported on the motherboard.

All in all, I'm at a stand still. Since I don't have the hardware to support KVM or as it's known in certain circles "bare metal virtualization". When I do go through the upgrades I'll be sure to post about it. Unfortunately I'm not super rich...yet. Until then I can still prototype OS's and server software in Boxes, the built in software virtualization in Gnome. It works well enough to tinker with, but I would never suggest anyone use it for anything outside that.

TV Turns Into a Radio?

2016-07-08T19:45:00.000-07:00

Quite a few year ago, (so far back I can't remember), I received a Westinghouse TV. At the time it worked fine for a few weeks, but not long after it started having a problem. While having it on and playing something, after a few minutes it would turn the display off by itself. The light on the bottom would still be on indicating that it didn't just outright fail or die. And the sound would continue to play as if nothing was wrong. Turning it off and on again yielded no change. But if I left it off for about 15 minutes and turn it on, the display would come back up. After a few minutes the problem would come back. It was annoying and I stopped using it, but kept it around.

I didn't use the TV for years. It collected dust and traveled with me, but always with that problem. Some days were worse than others, but I could find no common environmental factor. So a year or so ago I decided to open it up and see what I could find. After taking the back plastic cover off and unscrewing the cover plate for the power supply I noticed something. Some of the copper on one of the coils on the power supply looked burnt. "A-ha!" I exclaimed. I thought I had found the issue. I searched around the Internet to find that this model from Westinghouse was no stranger to issues, and one of the posts did mention an issue with power supplies burning up. So I went over to eBay, ordered the part, and eagerly awaited it's arrival.

Once it arrived I installed it immediately. All the board numbers and plugs matched, looking to be the correct part. After installing it I turned it on to test it. Bingo, the TV stayed on for quite some time. I hooked it up to my PC and started using it as a monitor. After two months I'd grown accustomed to my new larger display. But that's when it happened. The display turned off by itself, while the light and sound kept working. I thought it was fixed?! But it was back to the drawing board.

I let it go for quite some time again. Only recently have I started poking at it again. With my new microscope, and micro soldering skills I thought it would be a nice project to practice on. So I started taking it apart and decided to remove all the boards and check them for damage. In total their are three PCB's. One is the main board housing the input and output, render chip, and tv tuner. Second is the LCD power board, that divides out the power to the whole display. Assuming it's a simple array of buck converters. Third is a invertor board for the video. Their is also three smaller PCB's that function as tactile button registers for TV control, small board with extra outputs, and IR blaster with an LED for user recognition that the set is on. I noticed the IR blaster PCB was ripped in half; replaced it wondering if it could mal-register signals but no luck. Looking back now I realize that wasn't a logical deduction.

After taking a close look at all three boards, I don't see any obvious burn mark, blown capacitor caps, or any other basic idiot-proof problems. I do however find two problem areas. One is a poorly soldering test bridge. It looks almost as if the solder has been super heated since the one side seems to be asymmetrical in it's through hole soldering. The second is an exposed resistor. It's entire corner is gone and leaving a large chunk of the internal ceramic exposed to the air. Now I haven't really done any reverse engineering, I started with guess work to give me a starting point.

At this juncture though, a schematic would help immensely! So I decided to email Westinghouse and see if I had a schematic they were willing to fork over. Unfortunately the support email informed me that their archives don't go back that far. That's how you know when you have an ancient TV. Luckily I did find the company issued service manual on one of those websites that provides copies of electronics manuals. Unfortunately the only schematic is one showing how all the boards connect together or basically what the pins on the cables are.

So here we are. Now I'm wondering what the contacts labeled "TEST2" are and if they should look like that, and if replacing the broken resistor could help. To my knowledge it would. Ceramic exposed to air lowers the temperature tolerance range. Causing it to over heat and under power, shorting the display power. Somehow. That part I can't logic out yet. But that also begs the question if something upstream caused the damage in the first place and if it could happen again.

So to eBay I go, and I'll update once I've replaced it and tested it out.

Device: Westinghouse
Model: LTV-32w1
Type: SLT32A

What The Hex?!

2016-06-12T16:35:00.000-07:00

Note: I am not a professor of hexology, so if I'm wrong let me know. This is a working method and description as far as I know it. I will also skip any basics that just slow this down so I can focus on the harder stuff. That's what she said, enjoy.

So a few weeks ago Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster came out on Steam. Being the obsessive fan I am for that game I bought it day 1 and plunged into the grind to get all the achievements. (This is the third time doing that. Yes, I have a problem.) One of the features I noticed, as did many others, was that full Japanese audio was listed on the store page. Neat, finally get to replace the grating English voice cast. Well guess what, no option to use Japanese audio anywhere. Not in game, not in the launcher. Now the launcher does have a language setting, but that affects text, audio, and subtitles. I'd like to be able to just change the audio and use English text and subtitles.

It only took about a day for a user to find reference to audio settings in the hex of the games executable. He changed the values needed and posted about it here. What he offered wasn't a tutorial on how to do it yourself, he merely offered to corrected executable as a download from a few different Google drives. This was of course met with needed cynicism. Being the adventurous type, I downloaded the file and ran the mandatory virus scan and it came up clean. After trying it, it worked like a charm. But still others had their doubts and cried for a legit mod.

So here's where it all begins. I wanted to know what values were changed and offer a solution so others could do it themselves. First up, wtf is hex? Hex is kinda like binary. It's not meant for humans to read and understand. It's a way conveying information using more than one's and zero's. Hex uses one's and zero's and two's and three's and all the integers between zero through nine. It also makes use of the English alphabet to extend the range of values it can express.

So how do you edit the hex values in an executable; and why? Well the why is pretty simple. Executable files can't be edited on a code basis, as in you can't open it up and see what all the code is and change it. You can however see the hex values. While the majority of the hex data is non-sense to anyone that's not a computer, it sometimes can be deduced down to readable text. You can edit these hex values. The result isn't always the same though. So be careful diving into parts unknown.

For the purpose of this post everything will take place on a Windows 10 machine. Mostly for the fact that Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster is only available as a Windows game. If you're running this in a VM on Mac or using WINE on Linux, you've got much bigger issues than what language is spoken. Windows does not have a hex editor built in, so we have to go download one. I use HxD and so should you. Because reasons. It's completely free and doesn't come with any bloatware or any of that BS.

Once you have installed it, you can open the executable for the game. What do you get? Long list of garbage. But with this program you open the executable, make the necessary edits, and save the file. So how do we know which characters to edit? If you have a before and after it makes it very easy to find the differences. What I do next you don't have to, but it might come in handy for future reference.

What we need is a program to compare the original file and edited one and show us the differences. I used VbinDiff for this. It's a nice little program that runs in the command line. After you download the ZIP file, make sure and view the ReadMe on how to install it so you can use the commands. After installation we can begin comparing values. So open up your trusty Command Prompt and type "vbindiff [location of first file] [location of second file]" Space are necessary, and Command Prompt does support drag and drop file location. So after locating both the original and modified file you can drag the file to the Command Prompt window and it will propagate the full file location. The order of the files doesn't matter too much since we are just comparing them to see the changed values.

You can check out my screenshots of all differences here for reference.

Once you hit enter the VbinDiff windows will load with nice 4 bit graphics. By default, pressing return takes you to the next difference in the files and it is sequential till it reaches the end. You'll notice on the right side of the window it shows what the values translate to, and unsurprisingly they are all changing the location of sound files. Changing ".../US/..." to ".../JP/..." Now that we know their is no funny business, go back to the top and go to each change again. Writing down the full offset value. The offset value is the line location of each value and is the two groups of four characters on the left side of the window. You can also write down what the values are before and after you change them or reference my screenshots. So now that we've OK'd the changes as valid, you can open up your English .exe in HxD and make the necessary edits or just use to modified files.

You can also just use the modified executable, but doing it yourself is always more fun. If you do use the modified executable, make copies of your originals to your desktop or other safe place first. That way in case something you do goes wrong you don't have to redownload the entire game. Once you move the modified files to your game directory and change the names to FFX.exe and FFX-2.exe, go ahead and launch the game and make sure the voices are now in Japanese. If they are, you are all set. If not, try redownloading the files or retracing your steps to make sure you followed all the instructions.

If you're going to modify your own executable, make copies first to avoid mistakes meaning you have to start from zero. Once the copies are made, fire up HxD. Open your English executable and hit "CTRL + G" or select "Goto..." under the Search menu. Type in the offset of one of the changes. Now match up the values that need changed. You might be tempted to just click, hit deleted a few times and type away. But the way text is edited in HxD is not the same as a word processor. So the easiest way is to highlight the two two digit values that need changed, right-click and select "Fill Selection".

A new window will pop up and all you have to do is enter in the new values. Make sure it's the same format, so "55 53". You don't have to mess with anything else, so click OK. If you look to the right and the text looks correct, you can move on to the next one and repeat the same process.

Once that's done you're almost half way done! I'm kidding, that's it. Just click save, load up the game and make sure audio is changed. This will change the audio in game as well as during FMV sequences. This process can be repeated for FFX-2 and FFX Eternal Calm. Changing the language setting in the launcher can be unpredictable. It should be able to be changed to any other language besides English and Japanese and not change the audio language. Be aware as well that if Square Enix does update the game it could very overwrite your modified executable. So keep backups. Finally, for anyone worried about bans or Steam frowning on this, their is no need to worry. It's an offline RPG, and no one has been banned for doing this modification.

I'll try and work on a shorter version of this tutorial, since this is pretty lengthy. No promises though. Happy hacking!

FFXIV Checklist v0.1

2016-03-16T21:01:00.001-07:00

So what happens when you play one game a lot and you want to optimize your play style? You guessed it! You..optimize your play style. In my case the game is Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV) and right now I'm trying to level all the classes concurrently.

"That's crazy!", say some. And to them I say, "yeah". Regardless the journey has begun. Now FFXIV is a game that has lots of carrots on lots of sticks. Just about every activity has a bonus of some sort to experience points (EXP) the first time you do it for the day. So many of those bonuses exist that it's tiresome to do them all. Typically players stick to what they are interested in and don't shoot for that level of completionism. But I'm not typical and I want all the bars full. So the best way to accomplish this is to distribute activities and classes out so I can take advantage of the daily bonuses.

Their are several things to check off daily.

1. Beast Tribe daily quests, 12 in all

2. Mini-Cactpot Drawing, it's free currency for special mounts, cards, and toys

3. Leveling Dungeon Bonus EXP, available at 15 and usually guarantees at least one level

4. Guildhest Bonus EXP, available at 10 and ignored by most but it's easy and quick EXP

5. Disciples of the Hand Grand Company Turn-in, easy and relevant EXP for DoH jobs

6. Disciples of the Land Grand Company Turn-in, easy and relevant EXP for DoL jobs

7. Retainer Marketplace Audit, useful to keep your passive cash flow running

Initially I just mentally checked these off and it's a small list. But I knew their had to be a better way. A way I could record that information and if I became not lazy, to analyze that information. Hence we have this lovely spreadsheet.

Still figuring out the best way to show this, sorry for low res.

So far this is the base. Nothing fancy, but it records that information by manually putting it in. Towards the bottom I have Mode calculations of each column. Doing the text based marks takes an array, but it does the same job.

So now that the base is done, do I want to manually put all that information in and modify my arrays that are fairly fragile every single day? Hell no! So on to phase two.

Phase two is building a way to input information into a window and have it drop it all in automatically to this spreadsheet. I'm not exactly sure what I'll use yet. I've been meaning to take a look at Access, since I have it anyway. I initially pictured this whole thing coded out, but since I only know how to make a language say "Hello World", and since I'm impatient, I decided to build backwards and see where it goes.

Could this be something big? Maybe, but right now I'm looking to solve a problem. That is to better organize my play time to maximize return. I feel like the Donald Trump of Eorzea! I'll keep this blog updated though with my little projects and statuses. Just as a way to share and a way to document what I can do.

To download and see for yourself go to:

bit.ly/22m8J25

Note 1: File is a 15 KB .xlsx (created in Excel 2016) (some functions only work in newer versions)
Note 2: The words "fancy" and "hot" refer to my two retainers. "Fancy'pants" and "Hot''pants"

bit.ly/22m8