The Linux Journey So Far…

If you’ve seen my twitter from time to time or been lurking in my Discord or Twitch streams you’ll know that I am a big enthusiast of using Linux KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) magic to run a Windows virtual machine on top of my distro of choice, Arch Linux. In doing so, this allows me…

Windows wants an upgrade? Not on my watch.

Just an update to say yes, I’m still here and that I’m currently working on a tool that helps defend your Windows 10-based device against the horrid mess that is Windows 11. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that eventually Windows 10 will be obsoleted as with any other operating system over time but from…

Dialup Internet? In 2022? Coburn, are you nuts?

Telephone companies hate him! Find out how one Aussie makes his own ISP with some weird shit and magic! Thanks to a Cisco SPA112 being the real MVP in creating your own home-grown dial-up ISP, I have successfully managed to get a Pentium II with MMX machine online in 2022 using a 24Kbps connection via…

Repurposing Telstra Gen 2 Smart Modems

From time to time when I’ve completed client call-outs I end up with old equipment that I’ll either send to eWaste (which is a electronics recycling service) or I may refurbish the device in question and later use it for my own purposes or sell on eBay, Facebook Marketplace, et al. So it just so…

De-Taitoifying a Taito TypeX4 Arcade Base Unit

In a little experiment involving a potentially dangerous BIOS flashing operation, I grabbed a copy of the latest version of the Supermicro X10SLQ-L Motherboard BIOS and flashed it to my unlocked Taito TypeX4 unit. Things happened. Flash goes the BIOS… After creating a BIOS update USB by using the wonderful Rufus formatting utility and then…

Motherboard Recovery: Recovering BIOS Passwords

The first revisions of this post actually was about a specific arcade units’ motherboard, but I decided to simplify it down to something easier to digest with some arcade stuff sprinkled within. BIOS Passwords. They’re a pain in the ass and sometimes you’ll buy a desktop, laptop or some other device that has a BIOS…

FixedUpdate, Networking Cycles and Mirror Networking

Alright, it’s time for a blog update and this one might be a bit of a doozy but here goes nothing. Originally, I wanted to do a post of a rant about some “micro optimizations” being rejected from Mirror, but that’ll be another day. For those who aren’t familiar with Mirror Networking, it’s a network…

Google Cloud Servers: Unity says “Magic number is wrong: 542”

This apparently is a mono bug, and seems to happen if you try to invoke a Linux headless build on a Google Cloud VPS instance. From what I understand it’s something to do with the terminal emulator that the Google Cloud Console uses. If you used SSH to log into the server and started that…

Mirror Networking: List Server “Missing chunk error” (Outdated installed erlang version)

Time for a change of pace and this time it’s a Mirror Networking post. The Problem Sometimes when you have purchased the Mirror List Server, which is written in Erlang and is a very robust old-school list server (think Quake/Call of Duty/Battlefield 1942) interface following the KISS principle, you’ll face an error regarding Erlang on…