Marcus

A photo of my television with a gaming PC underneath. On the screen is a running instance of memtest with the giant word "PASS".

Since we've had it a couple weeks and had no issues even during extended #gaming sessions, I decided to do a thorough RAM test on the new gaming PC with memtest while parts are still in warranty just to make certain everything is working properly.

#PCGaming

Two frogs sitting in a puddle of water in my gravel driveway.

My driveway a few minutes ago.

#Nature #Photography

So the next #XBox playing PC games is probably the whole reason #Sony just announced that they're going to stop bringing their first party single player #Playstation games to PC. God of War on an XBox is probably straight up blasphemy to them.

#Gaming #PCGaming

A partial screenshot of my Steam wishlist. The visible items are: - Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition - Resident Evil Requiem - Final Fantasy VII Rebirth - Death Stranding 2: On the Beach - Final Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles - Little Nightmares III

Come on #Steam spring sale, I got things I want to play without paying full price, 😛

#Gaming #PCGaming

FBI investigating hack on its wiretap and surveillance systems: Report | TechCrunch Hackers allegedly broke into the FBI’s networks, according to a report by CNN.

Headline: #FBI investigating hack on its wiretap and #surveillance systems: Report | TechCrunch

Source: techcrunch.com/2026/03/05/f...

It's back up.

An error page on gitlab.com that has an image of "502", where the 0 is a clock. Below that is the message: HTTP 502: Waiting for GitLab to boot It can take up to a few minutes for GitLab to boot completely. This page will automatically reload every 5 seconds.

The Gitlab logo with the following text below it: 502 Bad gateway.

The GitLab status page with the text: All Systems Operational

Hmmm, it appears #Gitlab is down. Have tried it with a VPN and Tor too to make sure it wasn't something specific to me.

But their status page is up and says everything is working.

Who the hell works out in jeans?

YouTube video by Marcus Adams (Gerowen) SteamOS/ChimeraOS Color Banding Fix (Short)

The portrait mode/shorts version of the video can be seen at:

youtube.com/shorts/M1h66...

That looks like Epstein's "temple" in the background, which has since been repainted and boarded up.

YouTube video by Marcus Adams (Gerowen) SteamOS/ChimeraOS Color Banding Fix

Figured out a fix for a minor issue I was having with #ChimeraOS on the new #gaming PC.

Link: youtu.be/Ycz6K-RwFVY

I'll have a shorts version up in a bit and will post it in a comment in case you're on a phone or tablet.

#PCGaming

If you are considering an AMD 9000 series GPU because you have been influenced by Reddit, Twitter or a wealthy tech YouTuber, it’s worth understanding AMD’s track record. While their GPUs are often great at beating cherry-picked benchmarks, they normally fall short in real-world gaming performance. Every year, an army of influencers target first-time buyers declaring AMD a godsend for PC gamers. Every year a small percentage of users get duped. Since almost all PC gamers use Steam, the February 2025 Steam statistics are relevant: AMD’s combined market share for discrete 5000/6000/7000 series GPUs is 3%. Meanwhile, Nvidia’s 4060 alone has 9% market share. This reality starkly contrasts with influencer hype. The reason is simple: influencers rarely play games and gamers rarely buy AMD GPUs. Experienced gamers know all too well that high average fps are worthless when they are accompanied with stutters, random crashes, black screens, excessive noise and a limited feature set. It’s notable that AMD’s GPUs have not historically had these problems in consoles because, unlike PCs, consoles operate in a closed environment which is less dependent on robust drivers. Using influencers for hardware performance data is less effective than using foxes to babysit chickens.

I was researching GPU comparisons just out of curiosity on userbenchmark/.com and at the bottom of a results page is a whole anti #AMD diatribe. Any time you research an AMD card this rant appears in the conclusion block at the bottom of the page. Just seems weirdly inappropriate.

#Gaming #PCGaming

Marcus Adams (@gerowen@mastodon.social) Attached: 1 image It's still orders of magnitude slower than #ZST . I haven't done testing in terms of best use cases for XZ, but a real quick test of the Debian 13 Gnome Live CD had the following r...

It's still orders of magnitude slower than #ZST. I did a real quick test just out of curiosity but I can't explain it all here, so you can find the results on my Mastodon at:

mastodon.social/@gerowen/116...

I use mobile #Firefox for web apps on my phone because it supports extensions like uBlock Origin. Just noticed #Mozilla has redesigned the menu on mobile and ya know what? I like it. More visually pleasing and no more scrolling to find the "Quit" button.

A screenshot of two terminals. The one on the right shows me using the xz command to compress a large ISO file. The one on the left shows htop running with all 16 CPU threads being fully utilized.

Observation. Although it wasn't the case with older versions of #Debian, or perhaps older versions of #XZ, creating archives with xz on Debian now uses all CPU cores instead of just one like before. Just noticed this after doing a fresh install of Debian 13 a while back on my desktop PC.

#Linux

Trump: “It was July 4th of last year, when flood waters tore through a girl’s summer camp in Central Texas. One of the worse things I’ve ever seen. I was there.”

Fact check: Trump was not there. He was throwing a party on the White House South Lawn while children were missing in Texas.

Got a little too close to the edge and this pig tried to murder me.

#EldenRing #Gaming

This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media's coverage of how people are using Meta's Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent. “I consider it to ...

Headline: This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby

Source: www.404media.co/this-app-war...

#Privacy

A+ State of the Union counterprogramming by TCM.

So even though it won't wake via Bluetooth, if you use a USB dongle you can still wake from sleep with a wireless controller. This is via the official Xbox 2.4 Ghz wireless dongle.

So now every time it starts, even in big picture mode, we get a user select screen to make sure we don't accidentally play on somebody else's profile.

One thing I've wanted in SteamOS and the alikes that boot straight into big picture mode is a user select screen on startup. This machine will get shared between myself, my wife and two kids. Turns out if you launch Steam in desktop mode there's a toggle for exactly that under "interface".

And I have dubbed its hostname:

GabeCubeXL

The inside of the PC.

Miscellaneous extra parts and tools strewn about a table.

The Steam downloads page is downloading some games. The PC is in the bottom of our entertainment center.

Built my own #SteamMachine with #ChimeraOS today. Expensive, but #Microcenter had bundles with the 7800X3D, motherboard and 32GB of RAM for like $500.

I may have to move it or do some modifications to our entertainment center, depends on how thermals act under a gaming load.

#PCGaming #Gaming

Microsoft Copilot Chat error sees confidential emails exposed to AI tool The company says it has addressed the issue and it "did not provide anyone access to information they weren't already authorised to see".

Headline: #Microsoft error sees confidential emails exposed to #AI tool #Copilot

Source: www.bbc.com/news/article...

#Privacy #Security

I noticed, the first time I opened a folder full of images on mobile, that Nextcloud stopped responding and MariaDB's process list got filled with the nextcloud user deleting file cache checksums. It took a while, but eventually finished and has been fine since. Maybe it was upgrading checksums?

Nextcloud Hub 26 Winter: Reclaim your digital autonomy - Nextcloud Introducing Nextcloud Hub 26 Winter, a powerful open source collaboration platform that puts you in control. Discover all the updates today!

#Nextcloud 33 has been made generally available and my upgrade on my manual archive install seems to have gone off without any issues.

Link: nextcloud.com/blog/nextclo...

#HomeLab #SelfHosting

A screenshot of the email I got. It reads: Add magic to your Shorts with new gen AI tools You now have access to a bundle of new generative AI tools that make creating Shorts easier and more fun. These features will be available in English to start, and we’re adding more languages soon! Welcome to your creative tools corner Explore AI playground in Shorts for the newest gen AI tools. Get inspired in AI playground ✨ AI playground is your home for gen AI creation. Inside, you’ll find our latest creation tools, a gallery of inspirational examples, and pre-filled prompts to help you instantly generate videos, images, and more. Simply open the Shorts camera and tap the sparkle icon in the top right corner. A GIF shows how to use text prompts in Shorts to create video clips, thanks to Veo. Dream it, prompt it, create it (now with photos!) 💭 We’ve partnered with Google DeepMind to bring a custom version of their latest video generation model Veo on Shorts. This model will work seamlessly in YouTube Shorts, at no cost. Now you can easily personalize video clips by adding up to 3 reference images alongside a text prompt.

Just got this email from #YouTube promoting their new #AI tools for generating shorts. They made a video about it here:

www.youtube.com/shorts/ZNf6u...

There's a Sucker Born Every Minute... And some of them call themselves audiophiles.

I got a free USB cable and it motivated me to write a blog post on #audiophile gear, 😛

Link: open.substack.com/pub/gerowen/...

#Music #Audio

Palantir, Which Is Powering ICE, Says Immigration Crackdown May Hurt Hiring Regulation of immigration or work visas means "it could be more difficult to staff our personnel on customer engagements and could increase our costs," Palantir wrote.

No really!? You mean if you kick out immigrants you won't be able to hire them!? I'm shocked!

Headline: #Palantir, Which Is Powering #ICE, Says #Immigration Crackdown May Hurt Hiring

Source: www.404media.co/palantir-whi...