It rained this week. It may have rained earlier, but this was the first meaningful rain of the season, not only because it had a bit of hail in it, but we got the first snow on the mountains this year on 11/16. This is always a big milestone for me, since while the harbingers of winter comes in fits and starts, snow on the mountains officially inaugurates the winter (re: the rainy) season for me. It might get warmer on occasion, but I’m not going to be running the AC for another 5 or 6 months.

This is also a great time of year, because we’re in that in-between period where we don’t have to run the AC but we don’t have to run the heat either. No HVAC = Big savings on the power bill. I’ll hold out on starting the heat for as long as possible. Hopefully I can make it to Christmas or after, but we’ll see. As soon as that unit starts, all I see are dollar bills shooting out of the place at a rate  like they have at the bank.

I also hit upon a decorating idea for my garage. I hung flags in the hobby area that mean something to me — USAF flag, California state flag, and a Jolly Roger to add some color and visual interest on the walls. I liked it so much, I’m expanding the idea out to the rest of the garage. I’m going to decorate the bare walls with flags from everywhere we’ve lived so far. I just hope there’s enough space to fit everything. Most flags are either 3′ x 5′ or 12″ x 18″ so figuring out how to get everything to fit is going to be a bit of a challenge.

I also say the first green shoot of life from one of the onions I planted in my raised bed. I previously planted some radishes, but none of them turned out. I think I planted them too late and the heat likely killed them off, but I bought some onion bulbs that are season appropriate and I’m hoping for good things.

Finally, in a bit of sad news, I went to Barnes & Noble recently because they had a 50% off sale on Criterion Collection movies and when I went in I found out why — they’re getting rid of their physical media. They’re keeping their CDs and LPs, but they’ve moved out nearly all of their Blu-Rays and DVDs and filled the area with board games, puzzles, and Funco Pops.

The funny thing is that I was all in at abandoning physical media and going full digital, but as the rights holders to many of these movies and TV shows have proclaimed their allegiance to onerous practices to increase shareholder value, I swang back hard to buying physical CDs and Blue-Rays again (and ripping them myself) just as brick-and-mortar stores chose to get out of the game.

I have no one but myself to blame, but it’s still sad to see the end of this era. I grew up with VHS tapes, then (very briefly) LaserDisc, DVD, and finally Blu-Ray in all its various varieties. That’s 40 years and it’s kind of sad to see an era ending. It’s not just the physical media itself, it’s the end of an era where you felt like you owned the thing you possessed and could do whatever you wanted with it. I could sell or give it to someone else. Or I could just keep it and it would always be there. Warner Brothers couldn’t break into my house and take my Batman tape away so I couldn’t watch it anymore.

But those days have slipped away into the remembered past and will soon be gone for good.

https://paulie.cool/wir-20241118-some-people-walk-in-the-rain-others-just-get-wet/

#barnesNoble #decorating #flags #Gardening #mountains #physcialMedia #rain #snow

I got the head and backpack asssembled for my RG Unicorn Gundam, so other than the weapons and shield, we've pretty much got a gundam
#gundam #gunpla #plamo #bandai

https://aluminumovercast.com/rg%20unicorn%20gundam%20(gundam%20base%20gold%20plated)/2024/11/18/A-Good-Head-on-Those-Shoulders.html

I've given my RG Unicorn Gundam his beefy, gilded arms. The head yet remains

#gundam #gunpla #model #bandai

https://aluminumovercast.com/rg%20unicorn%20gundam%20(gundam%20base%20gold%20plated)/2024/11/10/Two-Arms!-Two-Arms!.html

Gonna have those Kelly Brim vibes

https://paulie.cool/heading-into-2025-like/

#2025 #Celebrimbor #LordOfTheRings #MorningTea #RingsOfPower #Vibes #videoEdit

The RG Unicorn Gundam was going smooth until it finally revealed that yes, it was indeed a Real Grade
#gundam #gunpla #plamo #blog

https://aluminumovercast.com/rg%20unicorn%20gundam%20(gundam%20base%20gold%20plated)/2024/11/02/The-Real-Grade-Flaws-Finally-Manifest.html

And so ends another season of baseball. 162 games scheduled and 162 games played. Collectively, 2,430 games were played this season. I mentioned in a previous post that baseball was the game of my youth. I collected cards, memorized stats, went to games, and even played some myself. But in 1994, I fell out of love with the whole enterprise with the Strike and the cancellation of the World Series that year. My return to the game has been in fits and starts, but 2024 was the season when I really began to feel some of that old yearning for the game rekindling in my old heart. The excitement to see records made and broken, and following the rhythms of the season, from streaks and slumps, to blowouts and blowups.

I didn’t plan it or set out to say, “This is the year I get back into baseball.”

It just happened.

I went to my first ballgame when I was 7 years old. I watched the Cubs play the Braves at Wrigley Field. This was before the lights. The Braves won 7-5. I still have the program for the game where my Dad kept score. It’s not the fancy multi-page programs with full color photos on glossy stock that you may see these days. It’s just a simple bi-fold on heavy stock with the rosters of each team on one side and a scoring table on the other. The only color is on the cover, which is a stylized rendering of a man sliding into second base.

After that game, I decided my favorite player was Bill Buckner, a first baseman who got a hit that day. Don’t ask me for any reasoning behind that decision. The workings of my 7 year old brain are a mystery, even to me. Maybe I liked the direct, alliterative name. I’ve always been partial to those, so maybe it was that. Whatever the case, Bill Buckner was it. My baseball card from my T-Ball days bears witness to this fact.

Then 1986 happened. By this time, we’d moved again to the expansive confines of Norfolk, Virginia within Hampton Roads metroplex of Southeastern Virginia. They had a AAA team affiliated with the New York Mets at the time called the Tidewater Tides. They played at Met Park, whose dimensions were the same as those at Shea Stadium where the Mets played. This is where I became a Mets fan and my allegiance shifted to Dwight Gooden.

It was in the 1986 World Series where Mookie Wilson hit a ball right-up the first base line to the awaiting glove of Bill Buckner, who through the vagary of chance failed to put his glove down completely on the ground, allowing the ball to roll past him to give Mookie the hit. This started a chain reaction of events that ultimately led to the Mets winning the game and the World Series itself.

With my minor league team linked to these Mets, they had my allegiance for the rest of the 1980s. But then the Atlanta Braves came along in the ’90s to steal my attention.

I’d seen most of the Braves pitching staff and many of their players come up through the Richmond Braves, who were the cross-state rivals of the Tides that came through town all the time. I saw the most dominant pitchers of that age just humble the hometown team, but became a fan of them at the same time and rooted for the Braves up until ’94 and the Strike.

One of the effects of traveling around so much as a kid (and later as an adult), is a kind of rootlessness and the feeling that you don’t really belong anywhere. I was from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, leading to an eclectic mishmash of accents, idioms, and sports team affiliations. I consider myself from Norfolk, mostly because it’s where I lived the longest as a kid, and it’s where most of the important milestones of childhood and my teen years happened. But we didn’t have a major league team of any kind around us, and it was a Navy town, so everyone from around the country (and the world to an extent) all lived in the same place, denying it any real depth of cultural identity or team loyalties.

So most of the sports teams I followed were based more on key personal events than anything else. I liked the Cubs because that was my first baseball game. I liked the Mets because my hometown team was affiliated with them and they came through every year to play an exhibition game. I liked the Braves because I’d seen many of their players and I was impressed by their ability.

But I never had any strong feelings towards them. I was happy when they did well, but I had no real emotional investment in any of them. I held a much more ecumenical view of things, as my true heart belonged to the sport itself more than any individual team. I tended to be a fan of players, rather than the livery they were wearing at the time.

Now in the warm September of my years, I felt the old pull of my youth tugging at me again. Nostalgia for me is painful; a bittersweet longing for places I can never revisit and people I can never see again. I do my best to resist the siren song of sentimentality beckoning me to come and wallow in its inviting, shallow waters that feel like a warm embrace, but provide no comfort or relief, only a deepened sense of emptiness and loss.

But I’ve hit the time of my life where the long years of striving is ended. I did what I set out to do and I’ve accomplished everything I wanted. I’ve traveled and lived around the world, met Presidents and Kings, and participated in history. The family is grown and while my labors have far from ended, their only purpose is to provide for the necessities of life. Any sense of personal investment is gone and many of the things that I set aside have risen again in my mind, beckoning a return to the simple pleasures of my youth. Not out of any sense of nostalgia or vain attempts at recapturing moments that can never return, but to just do the things that made me happy.

Among these is baseball. Of all the loves of my youth, this is the one that caused the deepest hurt in my heart, but time, experience, and plenty of therapy have granted me a measure of equanimity and the ability to just let things go. I live in Southern California now, which interestingly is the first place I actually chose to live. Every other place I’ve lived in was a decision made by the government or through forced circumstance.

The great thing about the region is it has an embarrassment of sports teams. While I don’t think I’ll ever feel like I’ll really belong, I’ve definitely insinuated myself here and its dovetailed with my renewed interest in baseball. We’ve got the Angels and Dodgers here, and while I’ve been to a few Angels games and I don’t have anything bad to say about them, I threw my lot in with the Dodgers.

I take that back, there’s one thing that really bugs me about the Angels — they’re in Anaheim. In Orange County. Yet they call themselves the “Los Angeles Angels” (of Anaheim?). I can’t abide such blatant falsehoods and I wonder just who on earth this bit of chicanery is meant for. Everyone who lives here knows they’re not in LA or LA County, so the name can only be for people who don’t live here and why would they care either way? They ought to just go back to being the California Angels. Everyone was happy with that back then. They made movies about them and everything. Now they’re just kinda there and known more for wasting a generational talent and getting me free medium fries from McDonald’s when they win a game.

But the Dodgers? To a kid growing up on the East Coast, they were synonymous with LA and California. Fernando. Tommy Lasorda. Vin Scully. There was always a romantic notion of California born of TV and movies, and the Dodgers got wrapped up in all of that as well. And while the real world is obviously far from that concocted illusion, it had completely captured my imagination as a kid and it’s hold is so strong that I can never shake it.

I don’t think it’s just me, either. I think a lot of people here live in two Californias — the one we deal with every day and the romantic ideal of our imagination. Every time you get beat down by the traffic or the receipt at the grocery store, all it really takes is that one perfect sunset and the California of the mind re-asserts itself again for a while longer. There is magic here; fleeting, near insubstantial, and elusive. But every once in awhile you have it in your grasp for just a moment and gifted a glimpse of Paradise before it flits away.

At any rate, when I moved out here, everyone was a Dodger fan unless they lived in Orange County (which I don’t), so I figured why not. They’re a team with a storied history with an equally historic ballpark, and if I was to be a true southern Californian, I was gonna be a Dodger fan.

I didn’t jump in whole hog, but mostly in fits and starts. I thought it was odd the Houston Astros seemed to have the Dodger batters dialed in and then it came out that they were cheating, which not only offended whatever sense of justice was left in me, it revealed something else to me — I was mad on behalf of a baseball team. I was in it.

I still didn’t really get into the weeds until the pandemic season of 2020, when I was stuck at home and didn’t have much to do except hang out with my family and listen to baseball games on the radio. Most of the games were being played during the day, so I ended up listening to almost every game that season while assembling puzzles, cooking, or re-arranging the house. With the shortened season and day games, I was able to really dial into the rhythms of the players and begin to understand the game management philosophy of Dave Roberts, the Dodgers manager.

By the time the post-season came around, I knew these players. I had a feel for how their at-bats would go in various situations (the types of pitches they bit on, what they tended to do when down in the count, etc) and also a good picture for when Roberts would yank a pitcher and why. It was the first time I’d watched a World Series in maybe 25 years where I was completely dialed in and invested in at least one of the teams.

And then they won. And I was finally, completely, a Dodger fan. I bought a hat and got a T-shirt.

Over the following years, I attended games, bought merch and got excited when they signed Ohtani in the off season. After that, I followed this team more closely than previous years, and after attending probably the greatest baseball game I’ve ever seen in person, I knew this team was something special.

They even had a Mookie.

And so the season ended and the Dodgers once again won their Division, heading into the post-season amidst a mix of hope and hesitation — they’ve been one of the best teams in baseball for the last ten years, but they were never quite able to get over that hump and win the whole fucking thing outside the pandemic season, which a lot of people dismiss.

After getting into a 0-2 hole against the Padres, there was a feeling of here we go again. The Padres have been the Nemesis these last few years, bouncing the Dodgers out in the first series of the post-season, but then something new happened.

The Dodgers bats woke up. Freddie Freeman, playing on a bum ankle and gutting his way through the post-season, became Mr. October and delivered clutch hits again and again, including the sweetest grand slam I’ve ever seen in Game 1 of the World Series. The Dodgers rolled the Yankees 4 games to 1 and finally won in a full season, fulfilling all the expectations of the last decade and cementing Dave Roberts as one of the most exceptional managers of our times.

Amid the exultation and celebration, the season is now ended and we are bereft until Opening Day next Spring. The days will be shorter, football will assume its preeminence in the calendar, and the world will continue to turn about its axis.

I’m extremely happy I returned to baseball and fortunate to follow one of the best teams in recent memory, who delivered real magic this year and enriched my life in many ways this season, providing a soundtrack to my summer and delivering fantastic experiences for me and my family. I would’ve been poorer for having missed it.

https://paulie.cool/when-the-days-are-all-twilight-when-you-need-it-most-it-stops/

#Baseball #Diary #Dodgers #PersonalHistory #Tides

Worked on the Gundam Base Unicorn Gundam (Gold Plated) this weekend

https://aluminumovercast.com/rg%20unicorn%20gundam%20(gundam%20base%20gold%20plated)/2024/10/28/Time-to-Waist.html

First Part is Here: Dual Scoot Boogie Part One

With Linux Mint selected as the distro, now came the interesting part – the logistics of getting it done. The first and most obvious thing was that I needed to upgrade my C: drive, which was a 500GB M.2 SSD installed on my motherboard.

This PC began life as a quick and dirty streaming PC that I built from the most economical (and available) parts during the pandemic, so it only had what it needed to stream to Twitch from my gaming PC. I stopped streaming when the pandemic subsided and then decided to make my streaming PC the main desktop, so I cannibalized the power supply and graphics card from the other computer. It now sits alone in the dark; once a proud gaming champion, now just a shell bereft of purpose, save for potential spare parts.

I’ve been upgrading memory, HDD storage, and other components over the last couple of years, but the painfully small SSD remained the original sin that needed to be purged. Problem was, it served as my boot drive and the one I wanted to install Linux on as well.

So I needed a new SSD and figure out a way to clone it with the least possible disruption. The SSD was easy enough — I went with a 2TB M.2 replacement, but the actual process of cloning it had me scratching my head for a minute or two. What I settled on was plugging the new SSD into a USB adapter, ensuring Windows recognized it as a drive, and using a cloning program to quickly clone the old SSD stick to this one.

Since it had literally been 15 years since I did anything like this, I searched to see what the current recommended software and processes were, but there didn’t seem to be a consensus around the software, so I just used the first one I could find with a free tier — Macrium Reflect.

The actual process itself was quick and painless. I cloned the drive, turned off the PC, removed the old SSD stick (after removing the GeForce card blocking access to it), installed the new one, and booted up the PC.

It was like nothing had changed. It worked perfectly. The old SSD was wiped and permanently entombed within the confines of the USB adapter to serve as a 500GB USB drive.

Now came the fun part: installing Linux Mint from the bootable USB drive I created. The process was relatively straightforward. I found a guide online and followed it to create the necessary partitions (root, swap, and home) and then let the installer do its thing. The PC rebooted and I was met with a screen offering the choice to boot into Linux Mint or Windows.

I chose the former. I was in.

The stock Linux Mint desktop is familiar to anyone who’s used Windows, using the same design elements for everything. It came with Firefox as part of the package, along with a firewall that I immediately turned on. It was ready to use out of the box. I made some modifications to the look and feel (I installed the KDE Plasma desktop instead of the stock Mint offering), but the more important thing is figuring out which programs worked natively and how would it affect my normal workflow for various tasks.

The first thing that jumped out at me was how different things are from the 2000s. Obviously, progress in hardware and software are a thing, but until now it never really hit me just how differently I use a computer. The last time I seriously worked with Linux (not counting Raspberry Pi or things like Android), I went online — I wasn’t always connected.

Going online was something that you consciously did. I had dial-up until 2004 because of where I lived and how little money I had. Most of my computer usage was devoted for tasks that were mostly local to the machine and offline — gaming, writing, etc. So all of the software was specific, or at least written to, the OS that I would be using (Windows). And using Linux with janky substitutions just wasn’t very satisfying.

But so many things are native to the internet now and designed to be largely OS-agnostic. It doesn’t really matter what OS I have for the majority of programs I would use. Discord, Spotify, Steam, Audacity, MakeMKV, Handbrake, Proton Mail — all available on Linux with the same look and feel (and sometimes better operation or features). I’ve got Firefox to access web apps, but Librewolf is also available, as well as browsers only available on Linux if I want to go down those rabbit holes.

I’ve been using LibreOffice, which has an Office feel from before the Ribbon was introduced and Microsoft started junking it up in earnest. It definitely works smoother & faster here on Linux than it does on Windows, and it’s a perfectly acceptable replacement for what I’d need it for. Also note: I don’t use Google Docs or any of that. I limit my use of Google products as much as practicable.

I’ve found that I can easily use Linux Mint for 90% of everything I did in Windows with little to no issue. In many ways, it’s a better experience than contemporary Windows. I don’t know if it’s a good analogy, but the thought in my head is that this it would be like if Windows XP/Windows 7 had been continued to be polished and refined with useful features, but you could still jump into a DOS command line to bypass the GUI if you needed to.

It’s a genuinely pleasant experience.

The only drawbacks I’ve encountered are on the video & photo editing side of things. Da Vinci Resolve seems to offer a Linux solution, but it’s for a specific distro and there’s a lot from reading the documentation to get it to work on my machine that immediately sets off my potential jank alarms. For photo editing, my Windows programs don’t have Linux equivalents and as much as I like Gimp, it’s not what I need for what I want to do.

I could use WINE, but I’m not sure how much I want to potentially dick around with using GPU-intensive programs through an emulator, so I think I’ll keep ducking back into Windows for those tasks until I find a suitable replacements.

Other than that, I want to emphasize that I’ve been using Linux Mint exclusively for the last 2-3 weeks and gone through all my task workflows without any issues or hiccups. With few exceptions, it’s a great replacement for Windows and it’s become my primary interface.

It turns out that 2024 is the year of Linux on my desktop.

https://paulie.cool/dual-boot-scoot-boogie-part-two/

#Cloning #DualBoot #KDEPlasma #Linux #Mint #SSD #Windows

When Microsoft first announced their upcoming Recall feature, I was like yeah, nah. My immediate gut reaction was that this was a security nightmare, and it didn’t help that it came wrapped with the AI nonsense that shareholders are pushing to get greater returns from a moribund industry. Microsoft quickly paused the rollout to make it more appealing, but there was no question that they were going to release some version of this thing along with their bullshit AI, so I began thinking it was time to look at alternatives.

Granted, Microsoft and every other member of the tech oligopoly has collected information for at least the last 30 years, but there’s something about what’s happening now that crossed my own personal Rubicon. Maybe it’s the obnoxiousness inherent with the AI push. But it’s more than that, I think. It’s the culmination of turning everything into a subscription, putting ads everywhere, and increasing the cost of services without providing much in return. Topping off this shit sundae with an inherent security risk in a world where leaks are so common that I’ve probably banked a lifetime of credit monitoring, while the companies responsible for them face zero accountability, is a bridge too far.

I suppose the biggest difference is that it’s in my face now. All this stuff used to be in the background where I could barely see or even be aware of it. But now they’re rubbing my nose in it, asking whaddya gonna do about it while rifling through my wallet.

And I’m like, Okay Linux, where you at?

I did briefly consider buying a new Macbook. I had one awhile ago and I generally like the Apple ecosystem, but spending that kind of money for what’s essentially the same experience as 10 years ago isn’t all that appealing at this point.

It was Linux. It was always going to be Linux.

I haven’t messed with Linux in the desktop space in years. Back in the 2000s, I dicked around with Red Hat and Debian, and even rolled my own distro at one point. But the main problem was that it was janky and felt like it wasn’t quite ready for prime time. It was great if you wanted complete control over your operating system, but at a certain point you have to stop dicking around and start doing things, and that’s where it fell apart. It always felt like I was fighting the limitations of the available software and eventually, after hours of figuring out how to do something that was effortless in Windows for the umpteenth time, I threw in the towel.

But I’ve heard good things about where Linux is at these days and I looked at various distros to configure a dual-boot set-up. It also helps that contemporary Windows is pretty janky itself, so I guessed that it’d be an equivalent experience.

I quickly discovered that there are major differences in the distros that’ve developed over the last 20 years. After doing some Facebook Mom research, everything seems to have split into three major distro families: Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch, with each using different software repositories, display managers, and varying levels of centralized control over the OS.

I was left thinking, Can I at least just do apt-get and still be good?

I settled on Linux Mint, which is by all accounts a stable and respected distro that people seem to like. One of my major requirements was that I didn’t want something that I was gonna have to dick around with. I’m not in my 20s anymore. I’m very aware of time and how I want to spend it, and my computer is a tool for accomplishing things, rather than an experimental machine. Mint looked like the one that would allow me to get up and running with the minimum amount of fuss, while still allowing me the ability to customize things if I felt like it.

In the next part, I’ll cover the process of configuring the PC to dual boot and my thoughts on using Linux Mint as a desktop alternative to Windows.

https://paulie.cool/dual-boot-scoot-boogie-part-one/

#DualBoot #Linux #Mint #Windows