Unbotched(?)

Ah... okay, let's start with the good news: Ma's machine is finally working. The updated bill of parts:

Description	Price
Gigabyte B760M DS3H AX DDR4 + Core i5-14400 (μATX) bundle	SGD 492
Seasonic PRIME GX-650, 650W 80+ Gold	SGD 250
Samsung 990 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 SSD 1TB	SGD 159
Total	SGD 901

In short, I hardly saved any money compared to what I previously spent to build the previous version. What I didn't save in money, I saved in some time with data migration. And the amount stated here didn't take into account the taxi fare, and the additional thumb drive that I had to get for Xubuntu installation because my old ones were broken.

So, what went wrong?

I think that m.2 slot with the ``thermal guard'' is borked. In a previous post, I talked about how I broke the NVMe drive that held the operating system of the previous machine. This time, I was smart enough to remove the stickers and what not before slotting it in. It all worked, that is, until I assembled it back together and put it into its stand.

In which case it did not work.

That was back in 2025-01-24, the same day I bought the new SSD.

Due to Chinese New Year nonsense, the machine had to be put away during the visitation season, and it is only today that I could bring myself to do something about it. I tried turning it on as is, hoping that it settled long enough to self-fix---no luck. I reopened everything up, and switched out the SSD to the other m.2 slot without the ``thermal guard'', and what do you know, the fucking thing worked.

Hallelujah!

There's one other oddity left though---the machine can handle cold boots. But throw in a reboot, and it gets stuck in POST.

Why is it so, I haven't the foggiest clue, and am honestly tired af to deal with that shit. I'm just happy that Ma's got a machine back where she can use to watch her streaming video, where the whole privacy situation is more controlled than the household ``smart TV''.

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Grim Dawn has had quite a big mechanics update---there is a new innate ability to dash in the direction of facing via a key press (defaults to the spacebar with the keyboard+mouse control scheme), and the mana/health potions have been replaced with spells that have time-out instead.

Oh, and they have a new expansion planned too.

I just want to point out that Grim Dawn has been around since 2016, and they are probably rivalling Terraria (2011), and Minecraft (2011) for ``labour of love'' status.

The funny thing about Grim Dawn is that each time after the first playthrough that I look at Path of Exile or more recently at the early access of Path of Exile 2 and wonder if I want to get onto that bandwagon, I just turn back to Grim Dawn instead.

Now, prior to this, my guilty pleasure was Torchlight II. According to Steam, the last time I played it was back in 2018. I suppose I did play the crap out of the game, even buying it for folks too. No idea why I stopped---am going to load it up again to give it a go.

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Well, apart from that, I must add that I have been having fun with Eirian-VI. Some important points that I learnt:

1. Colour mode works only for native e-book formats (the one I used was .mobi);
2. Comics purchased from Amazon that refused to be installable on the grayscale Kindles could be downloaded to the Colorsoft;
3. PDFs, when converted by Calibre directly to .mobi, look like shit unless each page is rasterised;
4. Use pdfcrop, then use -sDevice=pdfimage24 in Ghostscript before converting to .mobi via Calibre yields the best viewing result (metadata is still shit).

So with all these in mind, do I recommend the Kindle Colorsoft?

Sure, why not? The fast refresh rate, and generally improved responses are always a plus, as is the high resolution that is available. Colour availability is a bonus, and for the most part, shouldn't really be an issue. Most people do not follow my predilection of using PDFs for readables---they tend to use EPUB, and rely heavily on the Kindle ecosystem (i.e. using ``Send to Kindle'' to do the necessary conversions as opposed to man-handling stuff with Calibre). So for them, they are less likely to face the kind of issues that I am.

And that's about it for now. Till the next update.

Edit: So I found out why I stopped playing Torchlight II---I literally ran out of things to do. The gameplay was fun for its time, but eventually the strategic depth was just insufficient to sustain more than the 315+hrs that I had put in across the 4 different classes. Grim Dawn will have nearly 45 different classes that come from pairwise combinations of soon-to-be 10 masteries, and then there's the whole sub-field of Devotion.