I had seen a video recently on “Explaining Computers” and I noticed that the Raspberry Pi 4 now supports booting from a USB drive. Considering that it also has USB 3.0 support, and you can readily find SATA/USB 3.0 adapters, I think this makes for a pretty promising Pi 4 build. I’m considering snagging another along with the necessary cabling and a SATA drive to create a reasonably decent headless server with some beefy storage and better access times than SD flash. I think I’m going to keep the existing Pi 4 that I have running as is, as a general purpose and print server, because it just works. But I really feel like I need a Pi 4 with 4 TB of storage, because why not? I’m pretty sure I can put it together relatively inexpensively and I might dabble in some NextCloud or OwnCloud crap to boot. We’ll see. I always have too damn much stuff going on, but this is the goal at least.

I think I’m a little in shock about how much work I have coming my way. It’s pretty intense. It looks like I’m going to have at least two, possibly three concurrent high profile projects as well as a number of smaller projects interspersed. I can’t really say how things are going to go, but I’m going to do my damnedest to get it done and do it right. I’m also writing this post on my phone using JuiceSSH, which is pretty cool. I’m glad I bought it. It works really well. It has this badass feature that allows you to use the virtual keyboard as either a “hunt and peck” for commands or an “autocorrect” for long strings of English words. I’m also tunneled into a raspberry pi over WireGuard. I need to buy at least one more of those, maybe two, and a large external drive to tether to it. Well, back to the grind, I guess.

I started “The Boys”, and it’s damned good. Highly recommend. It’s even grimier than Watchmen, a good sight more believable as well. Check it out some time. Besides, Amazon knows how to spend ad dollars effectively.

Also, the fucking money quote: “So… You’ll teach me to outrun cancer?” Holy fucking balls. 😂

How did we get here? I find myself asking that question over and over. It’s almost a daily reflection for me. How did Harvey Weinstein vicitimize women for thirty years? How did Jeffrey Epstein turn sex trafficking into a cottage industry? How did Trump maintain his personality cult across thirty allegations of sexual impropriety? The truth nearly seems stranger than fiction. At least, to me.

I’ve always been an incredibly defiant person. I buy heavily into the “No gods, no masters” mantra, and I feel as though we’re the masters of our own destiny. But that isn’t true for my peers. If they were to see a famous person in person, all bets would be off the table, and many of them would cease to be the same individual. The truth is that the “rockstar effect” is killing society.

Super Mario 64 Windows Edition

Some crazy cats decided to reverse engineer and port Super Mario 64 to Windows and DirectX. So here it is. Download it.

sha256sum: 6aca0bf380e62ec7ebe7c2b44597d9a5b0f29507ea59474acbdda285f7ada7b6 SMB64PCdx12.rar

VirusTotal Result

See the VirusTotal result to guarantee the download above is clean. It’s pretty awesome, but you’ll need to install Steam and run it through Steam in order to configure a controller. Personally I think the Switch Pro controller is the best bet for playing, but that’s all a matter of opinion. Also, I’ll be sure and let you know if Nintendo tries to sue me to take it down. Fuckers. 😂

It appears as though the nihilists are winning as we delve deeper into quantum mechanics. Local realism is under attack from every front, it would seem. I honestly despise the fact that quantum mechanics are easy and cheap to dip your toes into. It’s a short segue from polarized light to breaking existence as we know it. Who wants a universe that both exists and doesn’t exist until you observe that it either exists or doesn’t exist? Yet you can perform simple experiments at home that lead you down this absolutely insane path. I don’t know about you, but this shit bothers me. The underpinnings of everything in existence feel more solid than what we’re teasing out from photons.

So this is “in the works”, I haven’t succeeded yet. The ultimate goal is to be able to upscale a shitty 70kb jpeg to a megapixel jpeg using trained neural networks. Badass, rite? Well, the disclaimer here is that I’ve been chipping away at this project and haven’t yet got a functioning setup. So without further ado, here’s my fucking trainwreck.

I started off following the guide at alexjc/neural-enhance. My first attempt involved me thinking I was slick and I could just grab the docker container since it’s already installed, configured, and the neural networks trained with more than a few already very usable targets.