Returning | October 2, 2020
Main Section
Hello everyone. I know this happened again but I am back again from being inactive. This happened mostly due to the fact that I just had almost zero drive to do anything. Almost none to be honest with you all reading this and I needed sometime to just reflect. I honestly never thought or think about leaving it just happens especially when I get stressed out. Anyways I feel I need to apologize to everyone I said I would try to post blogs every week and failed to do so. Sorry but after sometime I wasn't doing anything interesting and then by the time I thought about it months had already passed! Yikes! I really need to have a better schedule if I'm being honest. Which I will gover over in the next section. But yeah sorry everyone for disappering on all of you. I don't want to continue doing things like this so I do my best in the future which the next part will go over. If you are interested in what I have been doing the past couple of months I will explain that in the section "What I Have Done" below.
The Plan
So my plan is simple, doing more content here on the website first and foremost. I really love having my own website, I know sometimes it might seem otherwise but I really do enjoy writing the code for this site and everything about it, especially Urth Rage and the amount of time and effort I put into the information there. So for starters I want to flesh out Grunt's Corner to add more stuff into it and of course making Urth Rage even better with information from the ports that I will be writing up soon. Stay tuned, I promise! Also blogs will be shifting to atleast one a month schedule I feel weekly I don't have much to talk about and thats probably what killed it last time. As for YouTube I will be posting a community post soon just explaining what is happening and even linking to this blog post as well for anyone curious to read it. I want to get back into YouTube but I would really like to know what it is you want me to do? Such as more hacking videos, more Primal Rage 1 and 2 content (gameplay, hacking, deep dives into PR1, etc.), or is there something else you want to see such as gameplays, livestreams, and more. I want to make great content but I really want to know what it is everyone is after. So if you have any information on this please let me know in the YouTube community section I will be posting in.
What I Have Done
For anyone curious on what I have done well here is what I have done over the last couple of months. First I started working on my own encryption system for files! Very interesting on how it works it takes a file as a key and then uses this key file to encrypt your file of choice! Pretty neet huh? I wrote the algorithm myself and will be using it for personal use but I might go over creating a very basic streaming cipher encryption system sometime (possible tutorial for Grunt's Corner?). I also worked on writing my own instruction set for fun, its really difficult getting it all together but I think it can be a great learning experience for my programming going forwards. The biggest thing I did was switching my main operating system or OS. I switched from Windows to Linux (technically GNU/Linux, but I will just refer to it as Linux) for the long term and its all thanks to Windows 10. I will discuss more in the next section for anyone curious about my computing history and why I decided to choose Linux for those curious.
From Windows to Linux
So, after first using Windows 10 back in 2015 through the free upgrade from Windows 8.1 I thought it was fine. I ran Windows personally ever since I ran Windows 95 back in elementary school and then getting a Windows XP family computer back around 2001. Around that time my elementary school also replaced all of there Windows 95 PCs with MAC OS 9 computers and raffled the old PCs out and I ended up getting one of these Windows 95 machines for myself for personal use. So I have been using Windows personally for a while. But in school I also ran MAC OS 9 and X throughout the rest of my school year until 2013 (Which this helped me get so familiar with OSs, since I worked on MAC at school and Windows at home, that I can learn OSs pretty easily now) when I started university and I went full on into Windows for school. I knew about Linux around 2006 when I started seeing people talk about Linux and I started to follow it around 2010 closely keeping my eyes on it. Since it was just intriguing to me and still is. I tried using it but many times my hardware would not get detected and I would be unable to use the PC like I would on Windows so I never really bothered until recently. The reason? Well Windows 10 started to make my laptop not only super slow but it was causing all sorts of RAM problems (Why does Windows 10 use around 3.8GB of 8GB of RAM in a clean install on idle?) This made me decide to install Linux and I to be honest I am incredibly happy with mt descision. I feel for the first time since Windows XP that I am in control of my PC and that I can use my PC the way I want to. That is very important to me since I don't like the feeling of being trapped in what you are using, which after a while Windows 10 started to feel like that and it was getting on my nerves, but I never went fully through with it since software and laptop hardware detection where so iffy the last time I tried using it but at this time it was either unusable PC due to Windows 10 being trash or somewhat unusable PC due to hardware drivers not being found and I decided to go with the later and installed Linux. The thing that surprised me was when I was actually able to install the proper drivers and also configure the system the way I wanted it to be and its running better then Windows 10 ever did (Maybe when I first bought this laptoop it ran amazingly but right now it defenitly is running faster on Linux) and I also had a ton of fun installing and then just using the OS. With that I did create a version of MAME4Rage2 V0.4R1 for Linux and will write down some information on how to compile on Linux as well as a generic tarball containing a generic Linux version for people to use. My switch to Linux is one of my favorite parts of what I did these months since it went so well and I am just enjoying using my PC to it's fullest without Windows dragging it down and installing stuff without my permission (WTF Microsoft stop installing Teams whenever I want to play a game exclusively on Windows 10). I am still keeping Windows 10 dual booted but only because of certain games not running well on Linux like Killer Instinct 2013 but whenever these games become playable on Linux then I will drop Windows for good. Now while I am talking about Linux I know that you don't just install Linux, since it is just the kernel after all, so you might want to know what distro I went with? While I did use Ubuntu to start my Linux journey years ago and also looked at Linux Mint and Lubuntu as well. I ended up going with Arch Linux as my main distro of choice. You might be wondering why did you choose Arch? I chose Arch because it actually is a simple distro without any programs installed and that allows me to instll everything that I wanted to install to get the best out of my PC without having to deal with certain preinstalled software. Having that level of customization is really why I decided to use Arch in the first place, however the Arch User Repository (AUR) also helped me choose Arch since there are so many pieces of software in it that catches my eye and I really do enjoy the fact that I can just go and download certain software easily thanks to it.
Conclusion
In conclusion I am coming back to making content on the site after a long hiatus, I worked on some software and am working on other projects, and I switched to Linux. Hopefully you enjoyed reading this blog post see you in the next one!