Category: Tech Talk

Quick Warning about Feed Informer

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last August I shared my latest blogroll solution using Feed Informer. I’m still using it, but I had noticed fewer posts popping up. I figured it was a natural post-Blaugust tapering off of new posts.

Then today I wanted to re-visit a post I’d read (via my RSS reader) from Chasing Dings and noticed that the post wasn’t in my blog roll. Long story short, I logged into Feed Informer and a BUNCH of feeds had been disabled due to failed retrieval attempts. It was a simple enough thing to re-enable them but until I took the time to look I didn’t realize they’d been disabled. It’d be nice if Feed Informer would send a notification when it disables a feed but I guess for a free service one can’t be too picky.

Anyway that’s it. If you happen to use Feed Informer maybe log in and check your sources every so often to be sure they’re still enabled.

Conflict Between Jetpack Boost and Javascripts in WordPress Sidebar

Posted on by Nimgimli

Just a quick PSA in case anyone else runs into this issue.

Was trying to squeeze a bit more speed out of Dragonchasers today and I installed a plugin called Jetpack Boost. This plugin has a few options including one called “Defer Non-Essential Javascript.” When this option is turned on, scripts, or at least some scripts, in the ‘sidebar’ wind up displaying below the page instead of in the sidebar. Which makes sense since, y’know, the script is being deferred.

The correct solution is an option to specify certain scripts as essential so the plugin doesn’t mess with them. There is no way to do this ‘out of the box’ yet, but it is a known issue.

You can track the issue here.

This issue was created on August 5th; hopefully we’ll see a new option soon.

[Header image is from Final Fantasy XIV and has nothing to do with WordPress plugins 🙂 ]

My Brain is Rotting

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m a web developer. I know that because it is my job title.

I don’t really develop anything anymore though.

Back when I got into this business I did all kinds of things. I had the keys to our Solaris servers. My palm print was registered at the data center so I could access the cage, which I did frequently. Sometimes I’d have to drive over there at 2 AM to address an issue, and it was just me. I knew what to do.

At the time we were running Vignette Storyserver which used Tcl as a scripting language. Tcl! I dunno that I could still write a script in Tcl. Or Perl for that matter, which is a lot less weird than Tcl.

I wasn’t part of the IT department but I worked very closely with them. I was kind of honorary IT.

I was removed from that gig when they hired a new exec who wanted a clean slate. I mean that wasn’t the reason they gave but it was what happened. The exec hired people they had worked with at their last company. The powers that be decided to move to a Java Server Pages platform. While everyone was being trained in that, I was assigned to maintain the old site and its Tcl scripts. Then once the switch over was made I was laid off because I didn’t know the JSP platform (the name of it escapes me… Documentum maybe?) that they’d prevented me from being trained on. Yeah, that’s fair.

My next gig, we were using Expression Engine, which is written in PHP with a proprietary templating language that was very PHP-esque. We didn’t have a data center, we had an ISP who did most of the maintenance on the servers. I still took care of a VPS server we had for odds and ends, and I did some stuff on Amazon EC2 instances. I spent a lot of time writing scripts to talk to API endpoints and stuff. It was a step down from the first gig in terms of tech but it still was a job I was constantly learning stuff at.

Enter a new exec who determined that we should ditch Expression Engine and put all the sites on WordPress because, y’know, he had a nephew that used wordpress or something. (Everyone knows WordPress so I won’t explain it.) Through my whole career I’ve been at the mercy of executives who come in, make decisions based on bad or no data, then usually leave when they fail at their job. But their decisions stick around.

Anyway so I started making custom WordPress themes. Every brand got exactly what they wanted because we weren’t using an off-the-shelf theme. We were secure because we weren’t using dozens of plugins that are constantly being probed for defects. (Security through obscurity!) It was definitely a less rewarding job but I guess learning WordPress had some value.

Then that company got purchased by a much larger company. The new company ran everything on WordPress, which was good as far as it being an easy transition. But this company has an IT Department that is completely divorced from the web team. They’ve erected a major wall between anything that can be called a server and the rest of the company, and that includes me. Now I do none of the server work I used to do. I no longer have access to manage DNS, which I used to do. They seem to have a fear of APIs, so that work is gone.

As for WordPress, they are replacing our custom themes with a standard theme across all their sites. A consultant is building it. I won’t go too far down this rabbit hole, but the point being now I’m not even going to be building WordPress themes. Lately most of my days are spent doing help desk level tasks like resetting passwords, unblocking access, setting up redirects. Stuff, honestly, an intern could do.

It’s clear I need to find a new job, but I also feel like I’ve waited too long. I think about updating my resume and what I do now does not justify my salary, frankly. And I haven’t USED my high-value skills for so long that they’ve atrophied while at the same time going out of date. So I don’t REMEMBER how to do all the things I used to do, but if I could remember then those skills would be kind of dated, anyway.

I feel stuck. I feel like my brain is rotting away. When I get laid off (and it is pretty clear the current company is making a concerted effort to no longer need developers on its payroll…they already have a 3rd party on contract with ‘resources’ in India and the Philippines who I’m sure are MUCH cheaper than me) I don’t think I’ll be very marketable, between my age and my atrophied skill set.

The only hope I can think of is to find A Project. Something I’m excited to build and that I could build in a technology I don’t know. Something like the project Scopique is working on to learn React, or like Tipa’s Python project to import an old blog into Github.

I just can’t think of anything. And really I don’t WANT to do anything, but I feel like I HAVE to do something. I really wish I wanted to. I remember being super excited about web development and learning new things. I put in so much overtime on that old Tcl site not because it was asked of me but because I was pumped about it.

But now I kind of just want to sit around and play video games once the work day is done. And I’m not really sure how to fix that. Like how do you make yourself get excited for something?

Maybe I can be a greeter at Walmart for my next job.

The one thing that has occurred to me is to find some non-profit that is a) working for a cause I believe in and b) looking for volunteers to help them with some technology project. But I’m not really sure how to do that.

Google Fiber Installed!

Posted on by Nimgimli

When we moved into our current apartment about 9 years go Google Fiber was “coming soon.” We signed up to get notified and got a free t-shirt. While we waited we signed up for Time Warner Cable, which was the only viable option.

Yesterday, at long last, Google Fiber finally arrived. I wanted to quickly recap the process.

First there was a lot of prep. We live in an apartment complex so they had to run the underground conduits and fiber (the image at the top of the posts is one of the sunken Google Fiber boxes; it’s maybe 2’x3′ and there seems to be one for ever 2-3 buildings), then they placed small-ish boxes on each building and ran a thin cable to the front door of each apartment. Two long cables, one per floor. Above each front door they place a narrow box. They did this for all apartments before they ‘turned on’ fiber. It took a couple of months to do all this, then a month or two before the service was ‘lit up.’

I drew a box (on the pic, not on the actual wall!) around the fiber cable since it blends in so well.

Once we signed up, they came and drilled a hole through the wall, again over the door. They threaded a cable through and installed a box above the door on the inside. From there they ran a very thin gauge cable across the ceiling to where they’d install the box that the router connects to. This cable was small enough that they just used some kind of caulking to ‘glue’ it down. Once they got to where they wanted this box, they punched a hole in the wall, cut out some drywall near the floor, and dropped the cable down. Fished it out and installed the box down near the floor.

Pardon the grime. This is the box mounted on the wall, down near the floor and that’s an A/C vent right next to it. Hope that won’t be an issue

This box in turn connects to a Google Wifi router. You can also use your own router for their 1GB service. The 2GB service requires that you use their hardware (there are I guess work-arounds but officially only their hardware is supported). At this point fiber becomes no different than broadband from your cable provider. I decided to use the Google router since my own router is getting a little old at this point. I just plugged into my existing spiderweb of Ethernet cables I have snaking around the apartment and I was done.

And really that’s the story. It was pretty simple. The last time I had fiber it was Verizon Fios when that system was quite new and THAT installation was major compared to how things are now (I’m sure Fios installs are much simpler now, too. It’s been 15+ years or so since I first got Fios).

Time will tell how reliable it is. You can do a speed test on the router itself and it is reporting high 900s for both up and download. At my PC I’m getting less, but still way faster than I was getting with Spectrum (formerly Time Warner Cable):

Speedtest from this morning on Spectrum
Speedtest on Google Fiber this afternoon

I’m guessing I’m losing some speed from having crappy old Ethernet cables or due to the crowded hub. I’ll debug it eventually but for now I’m happy with what I have. I opted for the 1 GB service which lists for $70. Their 2 GB service is $100 but with just the two of us living here I doubt we can saturate that 1 GB plan.

For comparison, we’re paying $90 for the Spectrum service, but that is after taxes and fees and what not. We’ll see how much Google Fiber actually is once I get our first bill.

So why’d we switch? Money and speed. When we first moved in (before Time Warner Cable became Spectrum) it was crap, but honestly for the past few years Spectrum has been pretty reliable for us, and when there IS an outage they do a good job of sending out text messages with estimated repair time.

That said, this is the cable junction box on our building:

Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it? Also the installer who had been working when I took that picture had left it like that; he hadn’t even replaced the cover. I had to do that. I’ve tried to get this situation addressed but Spectrum says it is the responsibility of the apartment complex, and the complex says it is Spectrum’s responsibility. Any time an installer is out there working in that box I start streaming YouTube so I know as soon as I get knocked offline. Often while connecting apt A, they disconnect Apt B by mistake!

The Google Fiber installer, by the way, was friendly, courteous and the last thing he did was ask to borrow a broom so he could sweep up the dust from the drywall where he had drilled/cut. The site was immaculate when he left.

The one concern I have with Google Fiber is the physical security of the fiber. Like I said there’s 1 line that runs the length of the building for each floor with a drop point over each door. And it’s a very thin line. I think could could probably snip it with a pair of scissors and knock the entire building off line with 2 quick snips, one per floor. I can totally see some kids in the complex doing this as a prank. @partpurple says I’m being paranoid, which may be true. But I always expect the worst of people.

My Latest Blogroll Solution

Posted on by Nimgimli

Problem: My Blaugust blogroll was a boring list of static links that I doubted anyone would ever notice, let alone use. I wanted a blogroll that showed activity and a preview of recent posts. Something to catch the readers interest and entice them to go visit other blogs.

Years ago I did this via some long forgotten plugin but it was glitchy and several times I got a nastygram from my ISP about how many resources my blog was taking up because of it. So I retreated to a static list of links.

But with Blaugust getting me pumped about blogging I wanted to give it another go. I read about how others did it. For Bhagpuss it just comes with being hosted on Blogger, I believe. Wilhelm cobbled together a system using a few services and wrote a great post about it. Naithin uses a currently maintained plugin (I found several WordPress plugins that offer this service but most hadn’t been updated in years.)

Inspired by these other bloggers, I got to work.

Ideally I didn’t want to spend a ton of money on this since, prior to Blaugust, I hadn’t even written a blog post in like 8 months. I didn’t want to pay for a service if I was going to basically abandon the blog come September.

Trial #1 used Zapier to monitor a Feedly category and create an RSS feed based on posts as they hit Feedly. This worked OK, but it turns out the free version of Zapier is very limited in the amount of resources it offers. I would’ve been out of “tasks” by the end of the week, and the cheapest Zapier tier is $15/month which is more than I spend hosting the whole blog!

Then I looked at some plugins (Feedzy and WP RSS Aggregator, which is what Naithin uses) and they both are pretty nice but I was wary of how much of a load they’d put on “my” shared server. Ideally I wanted to offload the fetching and sorting to somewhere else.

OK at this point I’m even boring myself so let’s cut to the current solution.

Feed Informer is an RSS aggregator that for some reason is free to use and really flexible. You add the feeds of the blogs you want to include (sadly there is no mass import, you have to add them one by one and the service validates them as it goes) and then you choose a “widget” to display the feed. I used a javascript embed, which I just added to a Custom HTML widget in WordPress. The display of the feed is determined by a template. Feed Informer offers a bunch of these and lets you preview your feed on the fly. I got something close to what I wanted, and then used the ability to edit the template to make some changes to get it to where I was happy with it. The available tags are well documented, and you can tweak CSS and such too. It was super simple to set up.

Since it’s a javacscript embed pulling from Feed Informer it should put no load on the local server.

Of course that was 10 minutes ago so we’ll see how reliable it is over time. The only gripe I had is that it didn’t like certain feeds, giving me a warning about them being formatted incorrectly. I could choose “add it anyway” and I did, and I can see posts from some of those blogs in the feed now so they seem to be working.

I am also not 100% sure how long it caches the feed for, so I’ll be watching that over time.

The worst flaw for me personally is it won’t read Naithin’s Time to Loot feed. I can open his feed in a browser, but Feed Informer says “nothing was returned from the server” with no real opportunity for me to debug. This is a huge bummer because I really enjoy Time To Loot and I bet you would too. I’ll try to add him again tomorrow in the hopes it is a temporary glitch.

By the way if you see your blog over in the side bar and you want it removed, let me know. And if you’re part of Blaugust and don’t see your posts there (or, y’know, it says Blaugust & Friends so even if you aren’t part of Blaugust but we know/read each other), let me know that too and I’ll add you.

Playing around with a new theme

Posted on by Nimgimli

Recently I had the urge to start blogging again, but I knew my theme here was severely out of date. Specifically it didn’t work for beans on a mobile device.

I decided to start fresh, and what you’re seeing is an early iteration of a new theme. There are still a fair number of issues with it. I over-estimated the amount of space I had on a phone for a top nav menu, and I have a lot of images that need resizing.

Problem is I don’t have a proper staging server for this site so I have to experiment ‘live’ but since I haven’t posted here in like 5 months I figure traffic must be near zero so I’m not going to worry about it too much.

Just figured I’d better make a post about it on the off chance someone stumbles onto the site before I get it finished.

My Frankensteinian PC gaming setup is complete (for now)

Posted on by Nimgimli

First a recap, very briefly. I needed a new laptop at the same time I was suffering from FOMO around my friends playing PC games together. So after a few sidetracks that didn’t pan out, I decided to blow the budget and bought a gaming laptop.

Zowie XL2411P

My last update was when I ran a wired Ethernet connection (since it is in a corner of the apartment with poor WiFi reception) to the laptop and confirmed that Parsec worked great. Since then I decided that a 1080P 15″ screen is just a little too small for me for gaming (keep in mind I’m nearly 60 and my eyes are getting worse all the time) so I added a 24″ 144hz 1080P monitor. I capped at 1080P because the GPU in the laptop (a GTX 1070 Max-Q) can only do so much. I’d rather higher settings at 1080P than mid-settings at 1440. I think 4K is out of the question for this GPU.

As I started using it more, it became a bit of an issue having to use headphones all the time. It’s hard to chat with Angela wearing headphones. So I bought a little USB-powered soundbar to go with the monitor since the monitor has no speakers

GoGroove Mini SoundBar

Of course with no headphones I started to really notice the sound of the fans, so I bought a USB-powered cooling pad to see if I could quiet it a little (it worked, somewhat).

Then I bought a powerstrip with USB charging ports so I could power soundbar and cooling pad without drawing more power from the laptop. And a non-powered USB hub just to try to neaten things up.

It was about this point that I realized I should’ve bought a desktop gaming PC AND a modest laptop because right now this laptop sits in a nest of cables and cords that just seems kind of silly. I mean, it works great but to take it somewhere I have to disconnect the external drive, the USB hub, the displayport cable, the Ethernet cable and the power cable.

Just a few cables to detach before I go mobile.
Also how does the camera always pick up so much dust that my old eyes can’t see?
I can sure see it in the photo!

When I have some ‘play money’ built up again I’m going to look at one of those Thunderbolt docking stations, but they’re like $300 so that might be awhile. In theory with one of those I’d just have the power cable and the docking station attached to the laptop. Much easier to grab and go that way.

And then danged Nvidia put the Nvidia Shield TV on sale and I made an impulse buy. And y’know what? That has pulled everything together perfectly. The Shield TV is mostly a media streaming box like the Fire TV or Apple TV, but it has a few gaming features. One of them is GameStream which offers in-home streaming. Alternatively you can run the Parsec Android client on it.

Nvidia Shield Gaming Edition

So far GameStream has been working well. I can now stream from the laptop to the 60″ TV in the living room. So far I’m only using it for games I play with a controller since if I have to drag out keyboard and mouse I may as well go sit at the desk.

This weekend I was playing Anthem like this. It was running on the laptop in a corner of the kitchen but I was in the living room on the couch with a warm puppy laying beside me and it ran perfectly. GameStream has a virtual mouse feature if you need to just click one or two buttons. In fact it has a virtual keyboard too but I wouldn’t want to do much typing with it. The only thing I haven’t sorted is a way to voice chat while doing GameStream but if I’m going to be doing MP I’d probably sit at the laptop in order to be at my best anyway. Streaming is for more casual gaming. I’ve been playing a lot of My Time At Portia by streaming this way.

Nvidia Shield also supports GeForce Now, which is a cloud-streaming game service. I tested it a bit and it seems to work fine, but for right now I have enough ‘local’ stuff to play.

I’m really content with how I have things set up now. It’s a good thing I do since I’ve really blown through my ‘mad money’ for the time being. Thankfully tax refund season is upon us so can build the piggy bank back up!

PC gaming post #46 (or somewhere around there)

Posted on by Nimgimli

So after my semi-failed experiment in streaming games from my old machine upstairs to the entertainment center downstairs I thought I was done with PC gaming once again.

Then I had to buy a laptop. See, “my” laptop was actually provided by the company I worked for. They got bought and I thought I’d sort-of inherited the laptop but nope, last week I was told I needed to return it. I really wanted a laptop for ‘downstairs use’ so I started shopping. And then I got a crazy idea, and expanded my shopping horizons to include gaming laptops. Thanks to advice from Stargrace I wound up with an MSI, specifically the GS65 Stealth Thin.

This was the dumbest possible time to buy a new laptop since CES just happened and Nvidia announced the RTX chipset and all that but I’ve never been known to have a shred of patience.

After getting over some sticker-shock induced buyer’s remorse, I’m pretty happy with the machine except for the puny SSD drive inside (512 GB). I’d read that there is a 2nd SSD slot so figured I’d just install an additional TB drive, but didn’t research things thoroughly enough. To get to that slot you have to basically take the entire laptop apart, voiding the warranty, AND a TB SSD drive is $200-$250 and honestly I’ve spent enough for now. But I have a plan.

I skipped the whole ‘hook it to the TV’ idea and set up a desk in the corner of the kitchen devoted to PC gaming. Then I connected a 3 TB external drive and installed Steam on the external drive. I figure I’ll put most of my games on the external drive since I’ll be playing them seated at the desk with external mouse (and eventually bigger monitor) anyway, and I can just disconnect that drive when I just want a laptop to sit on the couch and do Internet stuff. Thanks to the machine having USB 3.1 ports, and the external drive also supporting USB 3, the access speed doesn’t seem to be a huge problem. ~knock on wood~ Eventually I might upgrade to an SSD Thunderbolt external but again, the cost of the laptop has definitely used up my “fun money” for the time being.

But then an even BETTER idea hit me. My machine upstairs can play older games and indie-type games, perfectly well, and it has plenty of drive space. I can still put Parsec streaming to use. I can stream older games from the upstairs PC and just install the latest or least input-lag sensitive games on the laptop itself. I haven’t tried this yet since I’m waiting for a 50′ ribbon Ethernet cable to run a hard line to the kitchen (Wi-Fi is a little dodgy in there) and then I’ll put it to the test.

My hope is that by the time this gaming laptop gets long in the tooth one or more of the various cloud-streaming services will have things working well enough that this can be my last GPU purchase, but we’ll see. The laptop has the GTX 1070 MAX-Q or something like that. QMAX? Anyway, not as fast as a proper 1070 but the display is 1080P and it seems fast enough to run today’s games at High or Ultra settings and still get 60 FPS. I wouldn’t try to drive a 4K display with this machine, though. Basically it was the best mobile GPU I could afford, and it’s why the hard drive is so small. For a similar price I could’ve got a 1060 MAX-Q and a 1 TB drive but I figured the GPU was more important.

One last obstacle. Whenever I’m sitting at the desk playing games, Lola is on the couch looking very confused and upset that I’m not over there with her. So next step is to get a doggie bed to put next to the desk. 🙂

My latest attempt at living room PC gaming

Posted on by Nimgimli

For most of my gaming life I was a computer gamer as opposed to a console gamer. The first system I owned that could play games was an Atari 400 which I got in 1980 or so, and the first console I bought was a Turbografx-16 in 1989. For a long time consoles were the ‘side project’ and PC gaming was my focus. In addition to playing games I loved building and tinkering with PCs.

As I got older the appeal of PC tinkering faded while at the same time consoles got more powerful and started to get more and more attention from developers. I went longer and longer between PC upgrades and spent more time on consoles. Then I started working from home full time, and that was the final nail in my PC gaming coffin. See, we live in a 2 bedroom apartment. One bedroom is our office and I sit there all day every day working. It is (obviously) where the PC is. When the work day is done, I HAVE to get out of there for my mental health. When you work from home full-time you need routines to help your brain flip over to work mode in the morning and turn off work mode in the evening.

So for the last 5 or so years, at least, I’ve played almost no PC games. Problem is, almost all of my online friends are still over there in the PC world. I’ve tried to find a ‘tribe’ of older console gamers but haven’t had much luck. Every so often I try to combine the best of both worlds and bring PC gaming out of the office and into the living room. So far I’ve always failed.

My most recent attempt began when Belghast mentioned ParsecGaming. You’re probably aware of Steam in-home streaming and the Steam Link system, right? It’s a way to stream games from the PC in your office to the TV in your living room. I’d tried Steam in-home streaming a few times but always found it was more fiddly than it was worth. It turns out Parsec does the same thing, except it works. Parsec actually does a lot more than that; you can stream games from a friend’s house or enable virtual-couch-co-op with far away friends. I can’t speak to those features since I was only interested in office->living room.

Setting it up was dead simple. You install Parsec on both systems and enable sharing on your ‘host’ PC then connect from your remote PC. In my case my remote was a laptop. Even on 5 Ghz wireless it worked pretty well and it gives you full access to the host machine, so if a game needed something tweaked I could do it from the remote client rather than running upstairs to click a UAC “accept” button or something. After playing through a Warframe mission without any serious issues I thought my problem was solved!

Of course laptop on the coffee table isn’t the living room experience I was looking for; I wanted the games on the 60″ 4K TV. This simple idea led me down a rat hole as it seems my Samsung Smart TV is pretty persnickety about having a PC hooked up to it. First I tried connecting through a 3-way HDMI splitter and it was no-go. I bought a higher-end HDMI switch rated for 60Hz and UHD. Still no good. Bought some certified high-speed HDMI cables. Still no good. If I connected direct to the TV it (apparently) worked, so finally I just decided to devote an HDMI port to the PC and it worked…for a few moments. Then the signal started dropping out.

At first I thought it was playing games through Parsec which was causing the dropouts. Or maybe just games in general for some reason (but with this laptop I couldn’t test that since it won’t run games on its own). But long story cut a slight bit, it was a timing thing. It ran fine for a while but even if I didn’t connect to Parsec eventually it started glitching. After trying a bunch of stuff I finally got a system that worked. Turn off UHD Color for that HDMI port. Turn off the TV and the laptop. Turn on the TV, then the laptop. Then I had a steady signal, but I had to do that start up sequence every time, which wasn’t ideal (waking the laptop from sleep wasn’t enough, I had to power it off and on again).

Still it worked! Now I had a wired ethernet connection to the laptop in the entertainment center and a wireless keyboard and mouse over at the couch. I bought the $25 Windows Wireless Adapter for an Xbox Controller (which I later found out I might not have needed; newer Xbox controllers can apparently connect to Windows 10 via Bluetooth). I sat back on the couch and… no, wait I couldn’t sit back, I had to perch on the edge of the couch to use the peripherals on the coffee table.

But it worked! I did another test Warframe mission. Success! Played some of Tom Clancy’s The Division. Success! Except…I have those games on console and frankly my Xbox One X is more powerful than my aging PC up in the office, AND there is some input lag using Parsec. Or maybe it is the PC itself. It’s small and I might not have even noticed if I hadn’t been playing these games on the consoles, but they just felt a tad sluggish while streaming them from the PC.

But what about other kinds of games, like MMOs and strategy games? In a fit of nostalgia I d/led World of Warcraft and tried to play that. It worked fine except a lot of the text I couldn’t read from across the room. Ditto strategy games; most of them just haven’t been crafted with the intention of being usable from 10′ away. It isn’t that I absolutely can’t read stuff, but that I have to really concentrate to read them, which isn’t ideal in a gaming environment when you want to be able to glance at a UI component and understand what it is telling you.

So, that was kind of the end of this attempt. In order to play “action games” I’d need to upgrade my PC significantly which I don’t really have the money or the patience for right now. Text-heavy games don’t work great on the TV so they’re out. It isn’t all bad news though. I can still stream MMOs and strategy games to the laptop with it sitting on the coffee table.

I have a desk in the corner of the kitchen that I’m not doing much with, but WiFi reception there is pretty crummy. So now I’m thinking of getting a 50′ Ethernet cable (cheaper than a Wifi extender and more reliable once it is in place) and running it from the entertainment center into the kitchen so I have a wired connection there. I think using the laptop would be more comfortable on a desk than on our low coffee table. And then I was thinking…maybe I just buy a new gaming PC and install it at that desk in the kitchen and give up on the streaming idea.

Or, crazier idea, subscribe to Shadow.tech and get a virtual gaming PC for about $30/month, at least to start with, just to see if the PC gaming itch ‘sticks’. $30/month is high but better to do that for 2-3 months and then get bored, rather than spending $1500 and getting bored after 2-3 months.

Decisions, decisions….