The Crow2025-08-05T20:04:02+01:00David Rutlandhttps://thecrow.ukThe precinct: a cop game where you do the right thingDavid Rutlandhttps://thecrow.uk/the-precinct-game-review-pc-linux/2025-08-05T13:36:14+01:00
Recruit Nick Cordell Jr died while writing out parking tickets next to an expired meter. He never knew why he died, and barely had time to draw his weapon before bullets from a machine gun tore through him. As he clung to life, a red…
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Recruit Nick Cordell Jr died while writing out parking tickets next to an expired meter. He never knew why he died, and barely had time to draw his weapon before bullets from a machine gun tore through him. As he clung to life, a red sedan - traveling well in excess of the speed limit - slammed into and carried him hundreds of yards down the street, as the driver and passenger continued to fire automatic weapons from the window.
It was his second week on the job. The screen fades to red, then white.
Welcome to Averno - circa 1992.
There are many ways to die in The Precinct, released in May 2025 by Amazing Storytelling. Most of them involve being either shot or run down by speeding vehicles, but it's the details that matter. In addition to senseless acts of street violence, there are criminals staring at the possibility of a life sentence who are desperate not to searched; rooftop gang fights; and what may be gas canisters - left carelessly by the side of the road - that explode when you crash into them
You can't drown, though. Fall into the water and you'll have to swim to shore.
Averno is a city of violence and vice, and almost everyone is guilty of something.
As the son of the former police chief (killed in the line of duty, naturally), you're a rookie cop on the beat: taking names, handing out fines, and using your stop-and-search powers to root out the guilty and bring them to justice.
Things never go as planned though, and a peaceful afternoon looking for spraycan-touting vandals can see you leaping into your patrol car and speeding through the city in order to stop a burglary.
Averno doesn't exist in the real world - although a maps provider tells us there's a microbrewery of that name a few streets south of the US border in Mexicali (dogs allowed).
Drive like it's Liberty City
Legend has it that the Grand Theft Auto series started life with the player on the other side of the thin blue line - controlling a cop car pursuing villains around the city - and the precinct is a look into how the series could have evolved.
There's the reckless disregard for damage, destructible scenery including fences, gates, and lampposts - and that driving on pavements, driving the wrong way, and slamming into vehicles will earn you no penalties at all. It's fun, and learning the shortcuts as you scream through Averno with flashing lights and wailing siren is a joyful experience.
We've parked back at the precinct with our car on fire more than once, and have randomly exploded a few times, too.
Despite being a 3D game - unlike the early GTA entries, which had a semi-fixed overhead viewpoint - The Precinct doesn't allow the player to adjust the vertical viewing angle. You can rotate 360 degrees on the X-Y axes, but you'll always be looking down from around 45 degrees overhead. If you're coming from games where the camera has full freedom of movement, this can be a little irritating for a while as you try to adjust the view to a preferred position.
Paperwork: Life on the street
When you're not speeding around the city, causing pedestrians to dive out of the way, the life of a beat cop is a humdrum affair. You can choose one of several types of patrol, including the aforementioned parking violations: you can do speed checks on passing traffic, general foot patrol, fly a helicopter, or take part in one of the initiatives against graffiti or gang violence.
As in the real world, there are rules and procedures involved in policework. While you don't need an excuse to stop people, there are specific things you need to do, and an order in which they need to happen. You get points for doing things by the book, and negative points for doing the wrong things, missing checks, or doing them in the wrong order. Search the suspect before checking their ID? That's a negative 50 points right there.
Kill someone when you're not authorised to use deadly force, and you'll have to restart the patrol.
Points mean promotion, and promotion means prizes in the form of weaponry, improved policing abilities, better (actually worse) vehicles, and other skill tree perks.
Crimes are divided into on-foot crimes, vehicle crimes, and possession crimes. And stopping someone for one misdemeanor can quickly spiral as more wrongdoing is uncovered. You might pull a car over for speeding - a ticketing offence - for example, but on searching, you find that the driver is wearing counterfeit sunglasses and has a pistol in his back pocket. These are both possession offenses. You add the charges and go to arrest the suspect; he runs. That's "evading arrest" - another charge you have to add. He shoots, that's "assault." Adding offences gets tired after a while, and you'll find yourself hitting the "Delegate paperwork" button again and again.
Likewise, you don't have to book every suspect yourself, and can instead call an escort car to return your prisoner to the station and book them on your behalf.
Not just a cop simulator
While we suppose that technically, you can play through The Precinct as an ordinary police officer, going in every day, pounding the beat, getting promotions, and drinking in the obligatory cop bar after hours, there's more to the game than that.
There's a gang arc, too, which sees the player character collecting enough evidence to arrest and prosecute the leadership structure of two comically stereotypical gangs. And then, there's the mystery of what really happened to your dear old dad.
If you're bored with the depressing day-to-day of a cop's life, there are unique stunts, jumps, races (marked by a pink flare), and side quests such as finding missing museum artefacts. If your own quest is for completeness, you'll want to find all the pieces.
The ending of the game isn't really a surprise, and if you're paying attention, you'll have seen it coming a mile off.
We'd have liked the option of corruption, beside The Precinct's single ethical dilemma, but no, you're an upstanding member of society.
How does The Precinct run on Linux?
The Precinct is a Windows-only game, and is available on Steam for £24.99, or you can save a few pence by purchasing through the Epic Games store for the oddly specific £23.79 price point. It's not a long game by any means, and you could probably finish it in a day if you had a big enough supply of coffee and doughnuts.
We found it ran perfectly on our 3060M gaming laptop, using Proton Glorious Eggroll with settings maxed out.
Gaming on Linux is constantly improving, and even in the absence of dedicated Linux ports, it's rare that we find a PC game that won't run on our system. Some of our recent(ish) favourites include the enormous, fan-made Fallout London expansion, and Gameloft's Oregon Trail remake.
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Generate RSS feeds for (almost) any website with mkfdDavid Rutlandhttps://thecrow.uk/generate-create-rss-feeds-any-website-with-mkfd-free-easy-tool/2025-07-26T22:15:00+01:00
Some people don't like visiting websites. Yes, that's hard to believe in an age where you're never more than three shallow breaths away from a web browser at any moment, but it's easy to understand. Websites generally exist to make money for their owners, and…
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Some people don't like visiting websites. Yes, that's hard to believe in an age where you're never more than three shallow breaths away from a web browser at any moment, but it's easy to understand. Websites generally exist to make money for their owners, and while this can be as benign as sponsored links offering great value domain registration services, static banner ads or exhortations to buy the owner a coffee, it can also include tracking that follows your every move across the internet and in the real world.
The same kind of people don't usually like signing up for proprietary services or apps that are designed to capture your data with even more granularity.
In a world where every click is monitored, RSS offers an easy and private way to keep up with your preferred news sources, blogs, property prices, and semi-professional online magazines.
RSS feeds deliver content without tracking
RSS (which may or may not stand for Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed format that allows you to automatically receive updates from websites, such as news articles or blog posts, in a structured XML format.
If you subscribe to a website's RSS feed, every time it pushes a new article, the feed is updated, and when your RSS client next checks, it will pull down the details of the new article. At a minimum, this will include the title, URL, and maybe a brief preview of the story so you can decide whether to click through, or simply digest the headlines. Some websites - such as this one - provide the full article text and images in their RSS feed.
Our H2 isn't quite accurate in saying that RSS is tracking-free. There's no actual reason why analytics code can't be injected into an RSS feed, but it's something The Crow only sees rarely. Additionally, if the site owner has access to logs, they can see which RSS readers have been picking up feeds - along with associated IP addresses. These are small concerns though, and generally speaking, you're pretty safe.
The RSS landscape is a flaming mess
Once upon a time - possibly in the early 2000s - RSS ruled the web. Sites would display RSS-powered tickers at the top of every page, boldly flashing their latest headlines to casual visitors, and the only option to keep up with the latest news was to subscribe to a carefully curated and categorised RSS feed.
Those days are long long gone, and although every WordPress-powered website (about 65 per cent of all content) will generate an RSS feed automatically, almost every news organisation has its own aggressively marketed app, and readable articles are served up to users via Google's "Discover" page built into every Android device. We imagine there's an equivalent for Apple. You can express interest in topics, but you can't choose what you get.
And while in days of yore, a news organisation might split its feeds into categories such as News, Opinion, Sport, UK, and World, that's a rarity these days, and instead, RSS users are forced to swallow the entire firehose output in one gulp.
This will generally include SEO articles that are designed to answer specific user queries and won't appear on any "normal" site pages. Stuff you don't want to read, in short.
mkfd is the answer to all your RSS woes
We don't think we're overstating the case with this subheading. mkfd - a self-hosted service developed by Tim Barani - addresses all of the concerns listed above, and more besides, by helping you to create your own feeds for any publicly facing page on the internet.
It achieves this by scraping, then extracting specified elements from items on the page and combining them in a way that can be interpreted by your reader of choice.
We deployed mkfd back in March 2025, and so far, we've tried it on sites without feeds, sites whose own feeds are stuffed with SEO spam, and we've even used it create feeds of properties for sale within a certain area and price range. It's versatile, is what we're saying.
Installing mkfd is easy-peasy with Docker Compose
If you're using Linux - or even Windows Subsystem for Linux -mkfd offers a variety of installation methods, from piping a bash script via curl:
Here at The Crow, we're heavily invested in a Docker plus Docker Compose stack, as it makes containers easy to orchestrate and manage. The mkfd repository doesn't yet have a docker-compose.yml file, so you'll have to create your own. We ran the Docker command once, and then used Docker Autocompose to create a fully functional Docker Compose file, then tinkered with it until it suited our needs. You can do this yourself, or simply copy ours.
You should probably change the values for COOKIE_SECRET, ENCRYPTION_KEY, and PASSKEY. Or don't - it's up to you. Also, make sure to set the paths correctly for working_dir. If you're running another sevice on port 5000, you'll want to change this, too.
When you're done, save and exit nano with Ctrl + O, then Ctrl + X.
Start the containers with:
docker-compose up -d
...then go and walk the dogs while Docker Compose pulls images, and sets up mkfd for you.
When it's done and your animals are suitably exercised, open the browser of your choice and visit localhost:5000.
If you've installed mkfd on a local or remote server, go to your.server.ip.address:5000 instead.
How to create RSS feeds from any website
While mkfd offers a whole bunch of features, we're only going to show you the basics - enough to get you up and running.
Once mkfd is loaded in your browser, you'll be presented with cryptically titled text fields the purpose of some of these is obvious. Others, less so.
The first thing you'll want to pay attention to is the Preview button at the bottom of the page. As the name suggests, hitting this will generate a preview of the feed in its current state. You should check this after every change to make sure it's being generated as you expect.
Next, give a name to your feed by filling in the Feed Name field.
For the Target URL field, copy and paste the address of the page you want to scrape from your browser's URL bar.
As a demonstration, we've decided to go for the History and Culture section of National Geographic, so in this case, the Target URL is https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history .
Hit preview at this point, and your generated feed will be as follows:
That's great and all, but it doesn't contain any stories. You'll need to identify the Item Selector that each individual article has in common, then features unique to each one.
A good place to start is to expand the Link section, then add a as the Link Selector, and href as the Link Attribute. These are the same across most sites and will allow you to quickly validate your Item Selector.
mkfd has a Selector Playground that allows you to click on any any component of the page you're scraping and quickly see the relevant selector.
Click on the Selector Playground and click around. You're looking for something that all the stories have in common. For Nat Geo, this is ".PromoTile", so paste this into mkfd' Item Selector field.
You don't have to use the Selector Playground, and we find it a little clunky. Instead, you can open the page in FireFox, right-click on the area you're interested in, then click Inspect. You'll be able to see the tree and easily home in on what you're looking for. Right-click the relevant place in the inspection panel then Copy > CSS selector.
Once you've found the item selector, hit Preview again, and inspect the document tree. There should be a section for every article that has the ".Promotile" selector. If you pre-filled the link attributes, there should be a valid link in the following format:
So far so good. Next you need a Title Selector or a Title Attribute. The attribute can be something like an H2, but it's better to go for the selector itself. You don't really need both.
For the page we're looking at, the selector is ".PromoTile__Title--mobile", so plug it in and hit the preview button again. There should be a new line for each iterator along these lines:
<title>
20 years after Katrina, New Orleanians are redefining 'home'
</title>
That's great! We have the right title and URL, and basically that's all we need. More to the point, it's all that the iterators on National Geographic are providing - it's enough to let you know whether you want to read the full article, anyway.
If the scraping target does have additional attributes such as description, image, video, author, and date for each article, you can add them in the relevant field in mkfd, or even misuse one of the existing fields.
Use mkfd to create shopping or Right Move alerts
mkfd isn't limited, and you can use it in unconventional ways, such as updating your feeds when items that match a premade search are added to a site.
Say, for instance, you're looking to buy a four-bedroom house in Liverpool. You don't want to pay more than £110,000 and you don't want a flat.
You want to be notified pretty quickly if one comes up, and you don't want to be visiting the website dozens of times per day.
If you visit Right Move and fill in the relevant fields, your address bar will look something like:
... while the rest of the page is populated with pictures and descriptions.
Copy that URL to your clipboard and head back over to your mkfd instance.
Give the feed whatever title you want, and paste the URL into the Target URL field.
The Item selector is obfuscated, but will work with little wildcard magic :
div[class^="PropertyCard_propertyCard"]
For the Title Selector and Link selector, go with ".propertyCard-link" and for the link attribute "href".
Right Move uses relative links, so check the relevant box, and put "https://www.rightmove.co.uk" as the base URL.
You'll want a description of the property as well:
[data-testid="property-description"]
...works as a selector.
[data-testid="property-price"]
... is obviously the price. mkfd doesn't have a field for this, so feel free to stick it in any unoccupied field, such as Author Selector.
Generating your mkfd feed
When you have all the information you want in your XML preview, it's almost time to generate the feed itself.
Before you do, consider how often you want to scrape the site in question. Too often and you'll likely be blocked.
By default, mkfd will refresh the feed every five minutes. To our mind this is a bit too frequent, but you can change the value in the Additional Options section.
Once you're happy, scroll down to Submit, and generate the feed.
Ideally, you're running mkfd on a machine on your local network, in which case the result will be something along the lines of "http://192.168.1.xxx:5000/public/feeds/0xxxc8-9xxx-4443-xxx-45431xxxxxxx.xml
As mentioned, we're running a FreshRSS instance on the same machine, and can simply add that URL manually and it will work. We can access it or Fresh feeds withan RSS client wherever we are in the world.
If you're running on a remote server, bear in mind that mkfd doesn't currently have any kind of authentication built in - meaning that internet randos may be able to access your instance and add unsavory feeds. Make sure that that you're behind a proxy, have ufw properly configured, and use htpasswd to restrict access.
RSS isn't for everyone
We get that some people prefer not to have to deal with RSS - especially when you have to create your own feeds to get the results you want. If you do go down the route of installing apps and signing up for services and newsletters, make sure you take necessary steps to protect your email inbox from spam.
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After effectively banning porn, Idaho state government shows visitors... porn.David Rutlandhttps://thecrow.uk/after-effectively-banning-porn-idaho-state-government-shows-visitors-porn/2025-07-20T21:51:57+01:00
Most of what we know about Idaho comes from Neal Stephenson's Fall, where various inhabitants and characters are described as "extreme libertarians with a religious bent." They live in isolated compounds, and practice, "a fringy kind of Christianity." We don't know how true that is,…
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Most of what we know about Idaho comes from Neal Stephenson's Fall, where various inhabitants and characters are described as "extreme libertarians with a religious bent." They live in isolated compounds, and practice, "a fringy kind of Christianity." We don't know how true that is, as the state barely registers on The Crow's radar on a normal day.
We do know that state lawmakers do not like porn at all. In a world where getting politicians to agree on anything is next to impossible, the Idaho House of Representatives unanimously passed House Bill 498 in February 2024 - requiring adult websites (read porn providers) to make robust checks to ensure their visitors are actually adults.
The bill was passed by the state senate a month later, and was signed into law by the governor on March 20, 2024 - coming into effect on on July 1st, 2024.
No, it doesn't actually ban naughty pictures and movies, but we'd be surprised if anyone had handed over their government-issued ID in return for access.
Idaho allows parents to sue porn providers
That the bill passed was not, in itself, a surprise. Sure, people like porn, but they also like bumper payouts, and one of the core functions of legislation is to ensure that underage Idahoans(?) who view material "harmful to minors" (or their parents) are able to sue the entity that provides it. There's even a statutory minimum award of a modest, yet potentially life-changing $10,000.
In case you're wondering what this nebulous term actually means, the bill provides a description:
(a) Material that the average person applying contemporary community standards would find, taking the material as a whole and with respect to minors, is designed to appeal to, or is designed to pander to, the prurient interest. (b) Material that is devoted to or principally consists of descriptions of actual, simulated, or animated displays or depictions of any of the following, in a manner patently offensive with respect to minors: (i) Pubic hair, anus, vulva, genitals, or nipple of the female breast; (ii) Touching, caressing, or fondling of nipples, breasts, buttocks, anuses, or genitals; or (iii) Sexual intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, bestiality, oral copulation, flagellation, excretory functions, exhibitions, or any other sexual act; and (c) Material that, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
So far as we're aware, PornHub has yet to be sued, and literotica looks as healthy as ever. This could be because the ID checks are genuinely robust, or perhaps the young inhabitants of the state aren't inclined to look at pictures and images of people doing the dirty.
Maybe it's just that no-one has got around to it yet.
Idaho is astonishingly bad at managing website migrations
Idaho is a great place to start a business, and according to a random 2016 grab of www.trade.idaho.gov, offers "tax reimbursement incentives," "access to markets," and "a skilled workforce." Whether or not that skilled workforce is employed in the state's IT department is up for debate.
Later in 2016, perhaps feeling that the word "trade" wasn't lofty or aspirational enough for the potato state, and in gross defiance of the state motto (Let it be perpetual), the Department of Trade was rebranded as the more dignified "Idaho Department of Commerce."
Naturally, the trade subdomain was scrapped, with 301 redirects pushing visitors towards the new domain at https://commerce.idaho.gov, which offers almost exactly the same incentives and services as the old department.
So far, so good. But at some point prior to 2021, the server configuration was changed, leading to a 502 error, with "No route known for www.trade.idaho.gov." A year later, the 301 was back in place, and visitors to the subdomain homepage were redirected to the International Trade page of the Commerce Department.
Redirects can be tricky - especially if you're migrating an entire website. You want the redirects to be as clean as possible, and for people visiting an existing page to land on the equivalent page on the new site.
The simplest way of doing this is to make sure that aside from the domain name, every part of the URL is identical. In most cases, a single line in Apache will do the rest of the job for you.
From what we've been able to see, the URL slugs and paths are identical, so why they didn't do this is utterly beyond us.
In fact, we're not even sure how they did it. You might expect trade.idaho.gov/idaho-business/international-trade to land you on commerce.idaho.gov/idaho-business/international-trade/, but no, it'll take you to commerce.idaho.gov/idaho-business/international-trade/idaho-business/international-trade/, essentially duplicating a section of the URL and resulting in a commerce 404.
Were the redirects added individually and by hand? Did they use a find and replace tool?
It is possibly the worst website migration we have seen in, like, ever.
With the Department of Trade now mothballed, and some redirects in place, the old subdomain was left to rot like an unloved and abandoned building.
And as with any abandoned building, you don't have to wait long until squatters move in.
The state of Idaho even demands age verification for its own "adult material."
Not all pages on the old Department of Trade site will redirect visitors to the shiny new Department of Commerce. Some will redirect visitors of whatever age straight to adult material.
Take www.trade.idaho.gov/video/ahp/video-blue-film-blue-viral-hot-hd-sex-videos-05.html for instance. This is clearly the URL of a porn video, and it's also a legitimate idaho.gov address.
Visit the page without JavaScript enabled, and you'll see a WordPress site with the Twenty Twenty-Five theme. There are are broken images and blocks of text stolen from all over the internet.
Re-enable JavaScript, and a properly working redirect will whisk you away to a membership porn site. We can't say how good the porn is as, in accordance with Idaho law, a credit card is needed to watch it.
We found dozens of Idaho trade URLs - mostly leaning towards Indian tastes, and offering Desi Aunties, Bangla Blue films, Hindi, and more. Most of these will land you on a site with content from a site supposedly called "okporns." Some lead elsewhere.
So... Idaho state government shows you porn. So what?
Imagine for a moment that someone is considering moving their business to Idaho. You'll also have to imagine that whoever hijacked the subdomain has ambitions beyond directing visitors to smut.
With control of an actual factual, genuine, idaho.gov subdomain and some slight degree of competence, it would be the work of five or so minutes to build a website that would fool our hypothetical business owner into creating an account and handing over their details. It wouldn't take an afternoon to create one that could take payment for permits and fees. Hell, you could gather taxes through it and funnel them into your offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands.
You could do a great deal of damage - and it wouldn't even be hard.
Why, exactly, is Idaho pushing porn to visitors?
Take a look at the DNS records for trade.idaho.gov, and you'll see three IP addresses. All of them are owned by Microsoft and are part of its Azure platform.
We're taking a stab in the dark here, but in our inexpert opinion, at some point, Idaho stopped paying the bills for its trade subdomain, and in a shocking display of oversight, didn't update their DNS records.
Microsoft recycles the IP and now another customer is using it to serve their own crappy content.
Shocked, we were. Shocked.
Do the pornsters even know that they are now in possession of some prime Idaho virtual real estate? Have they, perhaps, considered moving their enterprise to Idaho with its low taxes, high quality of life, and access to market? They have an "Entrepreneurial Culture" - although it may not be entirely suitable for this kind of venture.
Want to sue Idaho for serving porn to minors?
With the promise of a minimum of $10,000 in compensation, we're sure that many Idaho residents are rubbing their hands at the prospect of finding porn (there are definitely prohibited human parts, but they're kind of low quality) without robust age checks.
Sadly, you can't. It's a long tradition for lawmakers to protect themselves, and at the bottom of the first page, you'll see that the state awards itself "Sovereign immunity."
It's a long paragraph, but essentially means that the state cannot be sued in court unless very specific conditions are met (they are not).
The bill also makes clear that the law only apples to commercial entities, and that they must "knowingly and intentionally publish material that is harmful to minors."
Even we would have a hard time arguing that Idaho is intentionally pushing smut, but we're alarmed that there isn't a proviso for peddling filth through gross incompetence.
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Infinite featured-post scroll with Publii static site generatorDavid Rutlandhttps://thecrow.uk/infinite-featured-post-scroll-with-publii-static-site-generator/2025-07-18T12:19:22+01:00
The majority of people who use the internet (or just people - everyone uses the internet) can be divided into two camp: people who plug a search query into Google, then either visit a page or digest the AI summary, and doomscrollers. Doomscrolling is the…
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The majority of people who use the internet (or just people - everyone uses the internet) can be divided into two camp: people who plug a search query into Google, then either visit a page or digest the AI summary, and doomscrollers.
Doomscrolling is the modern curse of mankind, and can lead to teenagers wasting their lives flicking from video to video on TikTok, YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels, and SnapChat.
This is especially galling during what promises to be a record breaking summer in the UK, and from the garden, The Crow can hear the occasional snicker through the teen's bedroom window, as yet another perfectly timed 60-second prank fails successfully.
The other type of visitor isn't ideal either. While we delight in each and every visit to The Crow, it's slightly irritating that people just smash and grab. It would be nice if guests hung around a bit longer, Maybe they'd click through a sponsored link to purchase a very reasonably priced domain name or perhaps buy us a coffee. It's feasible that they could discover an article they weren't looking for, and share it with a friend.
The URL in the browser URL bar changes to reflect the new article.
The page title changes to reflect the new article title.
The view is logged by our self-hosted Matomo analytics server with the correct URL and article title
There are a couple of things to note about this spec list:
The articles should be of interest generally. Not everything published on The Crow is solid gold, and posts detailing how to install Golang are really helper pieces for different articles.
We want Matomo to track visits because we want to see how well this is working. We're not stalking you across the interwebs and selling your data to the highest bidder. This is purely internal.
Publii has a "Featured" feature which allows us to flag articles we want to appear in the side bar to be clicked. They're pieces we're particularly pleased with and provide a great source for our infinite scroll feature.
Infinite scroll isn't a new feature on static sites
From what we were able to glean during a quick search of Publii's own GitHub Discussion forum, Infinite Scroll is definitely a thing on Publii, and the Premium (paid) version of the Persona theme already has it. But we're pretty invested in our customised TechNews theme right now, and besides, there's a ready-made solution out there in the form of the venerable and much-loved Infinite-scroll.
The script has plenty of options, but none of them quite did what we needed. New requirements appeared in our spec list which resulting in us hacking on the code until it did what we damned well wanted.
Essentially, our modded script grabs the URLs from the featured column and creates a new array - starting with the current article - whether featured or not - and progresses through the featured posts in date order from the top.
When the reader approaches the bottom of the post, the next post is loaded from the array. The page title and URL bar update, and Matomo grabs the new page view.
A modified Infinite Scroll script for Publii
After some heavy (and probably largely unnecessary) butchery this is what we came up with. We admit it's unlikely to be the most elegant solution.
It works - or at least it seems too, although we're forced to admit that it took far longer than it should have.
To improve the experience for readers, we decided to remove the author bio, post navigation, and related posts from the bottom of all posts. If you're that interested in this writer, you can click my name next to the date, and honestly, the "related posts" feature never worked that well for us anyway. One other thing to note is that lazy loading images borked things for us. YMMV.
Are we happy with how The Crow looks and feels now?
Well, we're not unhappy with it. Publii gets the job done with less fuss and tinkering than does Jekyll, and GitHub integration make it a neat publishing solution. On the other hand, the site is fairly hefty. We'll work on that in the future.
There are a few features we integrated into our Jekyll / Raspberry Pi workflow which we'd like to bring back, such as our janky log-based commenting system.
For now though, scrolling through featured posts is pretty natty. And yes, we know it's not actually infinite.
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Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky - a tar-black comedy of civilisation's endDavid Rutlandhttps://thecrow.uk/service-model-by-adrian-tchaikovsky-a-darkly-tragic-comedy-of-civilisations-end/2025-07-12T16:12:20+01:00
While it's not explicitly stated when Adrian Tchaikovsky's 2025 novel, Service Model, takes place, the use of the word "yeet" as a verb in the context of energetically throwing something, indicates that the events are not too far in the future. Spoilers ahead When we…
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While it's not explicitly stated when Adrian Tchaikovsky's 2025 novel, Service Model, takes place, the use of the word "yeet" as a verb in the context of energetically throwing something, indicates that the events are not too far in the future.
This isn't unusual in the industry, and it isn't unusual for Microsoft. It's particularly unsurprising as part of the gradual deflation that followed the pandemic boom.
Take into account the unfortunate and unsurprising, yet entirely plausible, 2023 Goldman Sachs prediction that AI could replace 300 million jobs and two thirds of all roles over the next decade (the actual article title is "Generative AI could raise global GDP by 7%"), and you've made it somewhere towards the starting conditions of Tchaikovsky's vision of the future.
The extreme wealth inequality that is currently accelerating in 2025, has been dragged past its limit in Tchaikovsky's world, and in turn, the world has come tumbling down.
AIs and robots perform most tasks for the extremely wealthy. None of them appear to be particularly good at their allotted jobs, but they're good enough, and sometimes that's all that matters.
Never mind the gross inefficiencies, makework, and self-defeating ends that stem from a situation where fancy statistical engines make up 100 percent of the workforce - someone, somewhere becomes fractionally wealthier (perhaps even by seven percent) with each turn of the screw that forces the rest of humanity into the dirt.
The main plot is secondary and the lessons of Service Model are not subtle.
While the opening pages don't make it immediately obvious that we, the readers, are riding secondary waves behind the tsunami of the apocalypse, along with our protagonist, it soon becomes obvious.
Our hero - or at least the valet robot we're following - has killed its master. The master isn't given a name, but the robot is called Charles. Charles doesn't know why he sliced his master's throat from ear to ear before leaving him on the bed and continuing with his task list. This forms Charles's central mystery. Not his motivation, though - or even an item on his task list.
After being stripped of his name, Charles is sent to be diagnosed and decommissioned.
From the police units conducting the investigation, through to the diagnostics facility, we are provided with instance after instance of the shortcomings of robots, and the shortsightedness of not only their human designers, but also the people and corporate entities that brought this situation about.
The AIs and robots aren't really able to generate or create anything new, and they aren't generally able to alter either their task lists or programming, so are unable to adapt or adopt sane solutions to changed circumstances in a way that makes sense or is in any way effective.
As we traverse the world - across what seems to be mainland Britain, but may not be -Tchaikovsky gives us case studies of why this or that great endeavour fails: librarians that digitally store the contents of work by binary digit in alphabetical order before destroying the originals; self-replicating armies that scavenge spare parts from other units, and continually fight - even though there does not ever seem to ever have been a war; a robotic judge - the most advanced and capable model we see - that delivers the kind of justice derived from the sensibilities of its mansion-dwelling ruling class creators.
These tableaux are what we're meant to be looking at - not UnCharles's journey towards an impossible self awareness.
Humans still exist after the collapse, of course, and where they appear, they too serve as lessons. Beyond the spark of hope, curiosity, and heart-breaking roguish desperation provided by a teenage girl known as 'The Wonk' - who acts as UnCharles's initial saviour and companion for most of the book - we see examples of Mad Max style, desperately poor, hardscrabble settlements, inhabited by the descendants of stockbrokers and accountants. There's a supposedly historically accurate farm, where thousands of 'volunteers' work 8 to 6 in offices, performing pointless tasks bookended with a doubly pointless commute designed to make them as miserable as possible, and administered by a selfish autocrat who delights in inflicting the most mundane suffering. Does this seem like a dig at return-to-office mandates? It did to me.
The world belongs to robots, but the characters are people. Our protagonist is no protagonist at all, and how can character development occur when the main character has none. It is UnCharles's part-time human companion that is on a quest for meaning.
A comedy, you say?
Despite the prophetic but not-quite-serious death-of-civilisation-for-mundane reasons vibe, Service Model is a funny book. The use of "yeet," as noted above, made me chuckle, and there's a fantastic courthouse scene that put me in mind of Ghostbusters II, but most of the comedy is of a slapstick nature, and speaks of unintended consequences of ill-considered actions.
Sure, it isn't objectively funny to think that the setting of this book is the result of people being replaced by automation without a safety net, but it also kind of is, in a sort of facepalm "that sounds about right" way.
The robots own efforts to continue with their tasks in the absence of human guidance is where the comedy really is. They conform to the letter of their programming, with solutions completely at odds with their original purpose. Again, it's facepalm humour, but it fits, elicits laughs where appropriate, and as our protagonists leave each situation behind, we're already looking forwards to the next darkly humorous sketch..
Adrian Tchaikovsky loves his novels to close out with a thread of hope and interspecies cooperation, and if you've read any of his work before, you'll have a pretty good idea as to how the novel will end.
Should you read Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky?
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The Gamebox 300 is a Game Boy Color - with extrasDavid Rutlandhttps://thecrow.uk/gamebox-300-barrels-of-emulated-fun-with-some-significant-drawbacks/2025-06-12T12:23:00+01:00
Walk past a GB300 lying on a table, and you'll be immediately overcome by the urge to pick it up and start playing Pokemon. The similarities to a Game Boy Color are apparent straight away. There's the brightly coloured case (or there would be if…
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Walk past a GB300 lying on a table, and you'll be immediately overcome by the urge to pick it up and start playing Pokemon.
The similarities to a Game Boy Color are apparent straight away. There's the brightly coloured case (or there would be if we hadn't bought a black one), the small screen, the D-pad, and the familiar selection of buttons in the right places. If do you notice a difference, it's that the speaker grille is more reminiscent of the OG Game Boy than its successors.
And in the age of rechargeables and fast power delivery, you'll eventually find that you still have to change the batteries.
Gamebox 300 is a retro pirate's dream machine
Inspect the box of this pseudo-Game Boy comes in, and you'll notice that it actually says "Gamebox 300 Seven Simulator 6000+," and this latter number refers to the number of games that come preloaded on the bundled micro SD card. And unlike the models that you might find in your local Home Bargains or B & M, most of these are titles you'll recognise, and that you may have already played.
A quick perusal shows us all of the Pokemon titles through to third gen, various fighting games including the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat series, Civilization, the Road Rash saga, and even Sim City.
This is because - if you haven't already guessed - the Gamebox 300 is an emulation platform, with support for the NES, SNES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, MAME, and PCEngine.
First up is the convenience of those 6000+ pre-loaded titles. Sure, antique console ROMs are easy enough to get hold of, but having them tested and ready to go is valuable in itself. Just turn the thing on and get going.
The Game Boy-esque form-factor is also an improvement over the Leapster. It's easy to fit into your back pocket, and whip out for a few moments of fun while waiting in the queue at Aldi.
Menu systems are uncomplicated and easy to navigate, and you can browse your stored ROMs by platform, use the handy search function, or even browse your recent history to pick up where you left off.
Potentially best of all, the console has composite video out, meaning you can hook it up to your TV and play on the big screen.
With the supplied rechargeable battery, we managed to play for around eight hours. Not in a single sitting, you understand - we do have other things to do.
Great execution, but some pain points
You'll note that while we have mentioned rechargeable batteries, we haven't yet mentioned the means by which you charge them.
The Game Box 300 is equipped with a USB-C port on the right-hand-side of its top edge - it's a standard feature of most gadgets in 2025 - and a step up from the four AAs you need to power the Leapster.
It also comes with a (very) short USB-C cable.
Use the supplied cable, or a high-end dedicated PD cable, and the Gamebox will charge resonably quick and without problems. If you use an intermediate grade cable, the charging circuit will die. It will never work again.
When this inevitably happens, you have the option of unscrewing and opening the back to remove and charge the 800 mAH 18650 that you'll find within.
For an old-school vape fiend like the Crow, this isn't a problem as we have a load of compatible charging equipment. In fact, it's a great opportunity to swap out the the low-capacity unit for a higher-rated 3000 mAH battery. People without an array of spare 18650 chargers to hand, though, will be out of luck.
Saving from within the games themselves also seems to be impossible. so if you're merrily progressing through your RPG of choice (Final Fantasy III, natch), and saving using the inbuilt mechanism, you'll find that after rebooting the system, your progress is gone. This isn't the end of the world, as its possible to save the entire system state using the console menu, and you'll have four save slots for each game.
Our final gripe - and this relates solely to using the Gamebox as a Game Boy substitute - is the lack of a link option. You can't connect to another Gamebox owner to trade Pokemon, meaning that some evolutions are out of reach.
It's hard to get hold of a Gamebox 300
While the console was briefly available on Amazon, virtually every trace of it has disappeared - either due to its obvious shortcomings leading to an unacceptable return rate, or because of the obvious and egregious copyright violation that go into marketing it.
Either way, there are only a few references to the Gamebox 300 online (It's apparently made by Damacoola), although they do occasionally crop up on eBay. We paid £4.80 for ours in an in-person transaction and consider it money well spent. If we'd paid the supposed original price of £23.99, we would probably feel a little disappointed.
You don't need dedicated hardware to emulate old games
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Gameloft's The Oregon Trail is a fun time-suckDavid Rutlandhttps://thecrow.uk/gamelofts-the-oregon-trail-is-a-fun-time-suck/2025-05-05T14:11:00+01:00
We were sad when Nora died. We'd enjoyed spending time with her for over a month, across a journey of several hundred miles, she'd proven herself to be the best of people. A missionary by trade, Nora was kind and competent. She could negotiate a…
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We were sad when Nora died. We'd enjoyed spending time with her for over a month, across a journey of several hundred miles, she'd proven herself to be the best of people.
A missionary by trade, Nora was kind and competent. She could negotiate a bargain, tend wounds, and find her way through the wilderness.
Essentially, Nora was the glue that held the group together. She was its lynchpin, and once she was gone - buried beneath a randomly generated epitaph after succumbing to afever after an infected wound - the party disintegrated.
Elias died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound; Daisy was washed away downstream while fording a river; John was run over by his own wagon.
The Oregon trail traces a path through US history
If you're over the age of 40, you've probably played The Oregon Trail before. It was created in the early 1970s as a way of engaging pre-adolescent schoolchildren with the harsh realities of life on the pioneer route from the misery of Missouri to the promised land on what would later become the US east coast.
The game mechanics are simple. It's essentially a mix of lightweight management sim, and a series of minigames you play to keep your party alive through random and fixed events as you travel between objectives on a map.
Starting in the town of Independence, you pick your party members, buy a wagon and supplies, then set off on your journey westward.
You'll choose what route to take, and need to make decisions on how to survive. Clean shirts, medicine, and harmonicas will keep the party hygienic, healthy, and happy but take up space in the wagon. They'll also disappear as they're used, and become damaged as your wagon cover decays. Wagon repair kits are in short supply once you hit the trail, but can be bartered for at major landmarks and forts.
While you start off with some basic foodstuffs, you'll need to kill to survive once you're away from civilization: hunting requires bullets (and a knife if you want to keep the pelts); fishing requires bait. The result is a bunch of fun minigames that serve to keep you alive, while providing tradeable resources. There are other random encounters and minigames, too, but we'll leave them as a surprise.
Pixels and parallax on the Oregon trail
Being created to run on HP 2100 minicomputermore than half a century ago, Oregon Trail graphics were rudimentary to the point of non-existence, and later versions weren't much better - even as they leaned towards colour, and figures that could be recognised as human. Or a Wagon. Or a bird.
The most recent iteration of the game acknowledges this heritage with a distinctly pixel-art style, and sprite animation that you think you remember from the 1990s, but which is actually much, much, better.
The trail moves beneath your feet, with the characters and their wagon staying more-or-less centre screen, but you can really get a sense of distance travelled thanks to parallax scrolling - meaning that the background, middle, and foreground move at a different rate.
For a pixel art style retro gaming experience, this is perfect, and harks back the late 1990s and the days of the Amiga 1200 (for which The Oregon Trail was never released).
Minigames are simple and fun, and with the kind of no-clip action you'd expect from pre-millenium platforms.
Landmarks, forts, and campsites, are all beautifully drawn, coloured, and animated, and the game is overflowing with factual tidbits, historical information, and fun anecdotes. You can "collect" animals by clicking on them as they appear on your route, and you'll actual learn stuff as you progress through the game.
The 2022 version of the Oregon Trail is produced by Gameloft in Collaboration with the publisher Harper Collins, using the Unreal Engine.
Different American perspectives
The Oregon Trail is a history of the great American expansion, and through most of its history of has been an interactive storytelling experience of white men and women heading west.
This version is different. In addition to a variety of trails and seasons you can traverse as the ever-marching face of expansion, you'll also get to play as the people who were originally there. On Winter Migration trail, for instance, you'll take the role of a Native American mother and son, who must reach the hunting grounds before winter sets in. Unlike the main game, you won't have a wagon, and consequentially, very little room for provisions.
This isn't the only nod to the diversity of people populating the old west. While your party may be composed of racially diverse characters, Conversations with NPCs will tell you that Black people won't be permitted to settle in Oregon. May as well stay at home. Right?
The Linux Trail
Similar to the Oregon Trail itself, getting to Oregon on Linux isn't quite as simple as hopping on a train or plane to your destination.
Despite the many platforms for which the game has been published over the past half-century, it has never been officially made available for Linux.
This doesn't mean it's difficult to install or run, though. Gameloft's The Oregon Trail is available on Steam or DRM-free on Gog for £24.99.
In the former case, you'll be able to use Steam's Proton to play the game, and in the latter case, we installed and launched with the Heroic Games launcher for flawless performance.
£25 is a high price for a game that's changed little over the past 50 years, but there's a huge amount of additional content, and even the main trail will keep you occupied for more than a day.
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Print your way through the zombie apocalypseDavid Rutlandhttps://thecrow.uk/print-your-way-through-the-zombie-apocalypse/2025-04-22T13:39:00+01:00
Zombies aren't something we usually worry about at the crow's nest. But they're an ever-present possibility, and the upcoming release of 28 Years Later - another no-doubt disappointing sequel to the classic 28 Days later - has us wondering how we'd fare if the zombie…
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Zombies aren't something we usually worry about at the crow's nest. But they're an ever-present possibility, and the upcoming release of 28 Years Later - another no-doubt disappointing sequel to the classic 28 Days later - has us wondering how we'd fare if the zombie apocalypse came to pass.
Yes, zombies would definitely be a danger, but there's the complete collapse of society, infrastructure, and civilisation to think of, too. No power, no running water, no food.
It's always worth preparing for the worst, and as we have a large-format 3D printer squirreled away in our lair, printing the gear we would need to survive events triggered by a horde of brain-eating former humans should be both simple and cheap.
This is what we decided we'd need:
A bicycle
Cities are a dangerous place to be when there are zombies about. If there's a single zombie in your neighbourhood, you can be sure that more people will become infected, then suddenly there are dozens, hundreds, thousands even - all looking for fresh brains to eat and people to infect.
Getting out of town is the best option, and with the roads doubtless jammed with traffic, a bicycle is a great way to get you there.
There are hundreds of bicycle designs you can print, but most of them are miniatures, and scaling up won't leave you with a working two-wheeled conveyance.
Rather than printing an entire, full-sized bicycle, it's a better idea to print the parts that will allow you to build a frame from scavenged materials.
ColorFabb's 3D Printed bike aims to do just that - providing joints into which you can slot frame tubes, gears, and the rest of what makes a bicycle. As we already have a stable of bikes out back, we're all ready to go. Make sure you are, too.
Fishing rod
After an exhausting ride to a secluded brook in the deep countryside, you're likely to be exhausted and in need of sustenance. Fish are easy to come by but difficult to catch without a rod.
On the other hand, a rod is bulky, difficult to carry, and will likely attract the attention of the roving hordes.
The Sharky fishing rod isn't actually a rod. It's fish-catching gear that's small enough to fit into your back pocket. It comprises a reel with a locking mechanism and a quick release. There's also a hole for a carabiner in case you want to clip it to your belt. We built the Sharky - which is currently on V5 - but have yet to catch any fish. We put this down to our own lack of skill, rather than any inherent fault in the design. It's quick, easy, and we see no reason why it shouldn't work.
A solar still
Clean water is a must, and who knows what's died just around the bend, upstream of your little camp.
Solar stills purify water using the sun’s energy to mimic the natural water cycle through evaporation and condensation.
Depending on where you are in the world, the amount of water you get out of it will vary.
Super Steve's survival distiller certainly looks the part, and requires mason jars, plastic piping, a computer fan, and either batteries or solar panels to run.
Bows and Crossbows
Regardless of how peace-loving you are, at some point you're going to need weaponry. Maybe you're retreating from the undead as they come for you, or maybe you're getting tired of eating fish every day.
Recent years have seen a plethora of new and innovative crossbow designs proliferating, and our favourites are the Slinghammer and its variants.
Originally designed to chuck ball bearings of up to 12 mm diameter using an 80-lb off-the-shelf pistol crossbow limb, the Slinghammer is a repeating crossbow, meaning you can cock and reload it quickly, using a lever to slide the magazine forward, catch the string, and return it.
If you're using ball bearings, you have a 40-ish shot magazine, which you can empty in under a minute. It's fast, and you really wouldn't want to be hit by one of these.
If you want to up your lethality, you can try the Slinghammer conversion kit, which fires either 7.5-inch or 6.5-inch bolts. Would it kill a zombie? Maybe. Would it absolutely ruin its day? 100%.
Using the 7.5" bolts from the Powerstroke model, we've gone clean through a roasting joint. We doubt it would go through bone, though. The Powerstroke package will give you an eight-bolt mag - which you can empty in about 10 seconds. We've not timed it, but that feels about right.
The standard bolt chucker is less powerful, as it has a shorter stroke, but comes with the option of a 20-shot doublestack magazine.
So far we've printed both the Powerstroke and standard models, equipped them with laser pointers, and dialled them in at 150 fps. If you want any oncoming zombies to resemble a porcupine, these will do the job.
We also printed the ball-bearing chucker for the daughter and equipped it with Theraband Gold elastic resistance fitness bands. It can rapid-fire 12mm steel balls at 130 fps. Again, it's unlikely to kill a zombie, but it'll give it a hell of a headache.
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The giant in the attic - a large format 3D printer is just what you need at homeDavid Rutlandhttps://thecrow.uk/elegoo-neptune-4-max-large-format-3d-printer-review-at-homeneed-at-home/2025-01-11T11:11:00+00:00
Along with high-speed internet access, 3D-printing is one of the surest signs that we're living in the future. Think of something, anything, and within a few hours it can be yours - without you leaving your home, or even having it delivered by a guy…
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Along with high-speed internet access, 3D-printing is one of the surest signs that we're living in the future. Think of something, anything, and within a few hours it can be yours - without you leaving your home, or even having it delivered by a guy on a bike.
Of course, this only applies if the things you want are made out of plastic - and kind of small.
That first point isn't quite true - metal 3D-printers exist at an eye-watering price point, and there are even some home-made, jury-rigged metal printers that have been fashioned out of TIG welders, and managed to yield fairly respectable Benchies.
And the second point isn't true either. There are some truly enormous 3D-printers out there. People have printed full-sized boat hulls, and The Crow could comfortably sit inside an Elegoo Orangestorm Giga.
When we first dipped our toes into the world of 3D printing a few years ago, it was to seize the means of production and make own own cool stuff. We went with an AnyCubic Photon Mono resin printer, and it was great for making highly detailed models, fittings, fixtures, odds, and sods.
But a resin printer comes with its own set of problems that emerge over time: it stinks, it's messy, it is limited to small objects. Slowly, print runs dropped off from daily to weekly, to zero. Years passed until we decided we wanted to make cool things again - but without the limitations of smelly resin.
The Elegoo Neptune 4 Max is not small
The first thing you'll hear about the Neptune 4 Max from most reviews is that it's huge, that it's a behemoth, that you'll never fit it through your front door, that it will break your dining table.
This isn't true. It's big, yes, but it's not as big as an armchair or a washing machine. It's probably not even as big as your TV.
After hauling the box upstairs and unpacking, we had no problem carrying the gantry, build plate and base up a rickety stepladder and through the loft hatch into the space that would later become known as 'The Lair." There wasn't much clearance, and it had to go through on a diagonal, but we had no real problems with either the size or weight.
To us, the Neptune 4 Max feels about as big as a 3D printer should be in order to be of practical use. We can't see any real purpose for having a 100x100 printbed in our lives - or even 200x200. A 300x300 printing surface is acceptable, but the Max's 420x420 combined with a 480mm height feels about right, and gives us the confidence that we can print just about anything for the home.
Having said that, you'll need a pretty sturdy surface to place it on.
Assembling the Max is a breeze.
There isn't a whole lot to unpacking and assembling the Max, as Elegoo has pre-built as much of the machine as possible, while ensuring it will still fit in a flattish-pack box.
The gantry and its associated motors, pulleys and wiring is ready to go, and merely needs bolting on to the base unit, and some cables to be connected, along with the filament detector and sail fan (should you choose to use it). The built plate is magnetic, so you can just slap it in place.
There really isn't that much more to it than that.
Setup and first prints
As soon as we had assembled the Neptune 4 Max, we we eager to get started - no with some monster project, but just to see if it actually worked, printed a solid model correctly, and if there were any major problems.
Before we could get started we need to level the bed.
The process is semi-automatic, and for the most part, involves sliding a piece of paper under the nozzle, using the neato control panel to adjust the print head's position, and adjusting six screws (located around the underside of the bed) until the paper could barely be withdrawn. After that we used to printer's own auto-levelling software to heat the bed to print temperature and test against a grid of 64 points. This is time consuming, so it may be worth making a cup of tea while you wait.
Suitably refreshed, we inserted the USB stick to inspect the included files. There was a nut cracker, a textured plant pot, a cube, and a Buddha included - each with an estimated print time in the region of one to two hours. We went with the Buddha and the plant pot. The quality was fine - not as good as resin, and llayer lines made it obvious that they had been run off an FDM machine, but good enough.
We put a spider plant in the pot, and the Buddha sits under the plant on our bathroom windowsill. It's a nice tableau.
Fluidd is silky smooth
We've not used the supplied USB stick since completing our first Buddha and plant pot combo. Instead, we sit in the living room and send gcode up the the Max over WiFi. The Fluidd interface is slick and shows all the vital stats of the printer: time elapsed, time remaining (according to both the slicer and the printer), various thermals, print head location on all three axes, and more.
There's a list with all the files that have printed recently, making it super easy to prit again with the same settings, and you can even inspect the Gcode layer by layer. Sweet!
If you're of a mind to, and we were, you can connect a webcam to one of the USB ports to monitor what's going on.
Using a webcam with the Elegoo Neptune 4 Max
Monitoring your print is important. Accidents happen, and while you're happily in another room, your printer could be spitting filament all over the place. The print may come unstuck from the base or it may be on fire. You need to know.
The Max runs Linux under the hood - Armbian to be specific - which means that connecting via SSH with default credentials is a doddle, and starting the camera service barely less so.
With that out of the way, we hung the camera from the roof using a quickly designed and newly printed bracket and plugged the cable directly into the USB port. If you're likely to use the USB port to upload print files to the Max, you'll probably want a USB hub.
Back over in Fluidd, the video feed showed up straight away in top right corner - meaning we could watch our print in action so long as we're in the house.
But what about when we're out and about? The Crow doesn't solely reside in a comfy recliner in the living room, and when we're browsing bargains in the middle of Lidl, there's often a nagging fear that our print job has run out of control and is, as we peruse the cheese selection filling the interior of the loft with orange plastic.
While it's easy to expose Fluidd's interface to the web, it's probably not a great idea to do that. Sure, Fluidd has auth controls, and we've no reason to doubt they're effective, but unlike many web services, an attacker can use your 3D printer to cause fires and kill you. It isn't worth the risk.
Instead, we located the cam feed on port 8080, created a new subdomain, and proxied through Apache on our main server. Of course, the Max's Armbian system would serve perfectly well as a complete server in its own right, but use what you have, right?
Access is secured via htaccess and htpasswd, and even if an attacker manages to get through, what they have is a camera feed, not control.
How fast is too fast?
Elegoo shipped the Neptune 4 Max with customised Klipper firmware. This has a bunch of implications that we're not going to go into here, but the main one is that the Max is fast. Not two-minute Benchy fast, but 500 mm per second is pretty quick, and acceleration is in the region of 25,000 mm per second.
This is great, but we found that running it at any higher than 250 mm per second resulted in an unacceptably high print failure rate, and with standard acceleration settings, the noise coming from the bed slinger overhead was atrocious.
Slow and steady wins the race, and if you want prints to succeed and look decent, while still getting a good night's sleep, you'll want to keep the various speed settings down.
What? No Linux?
Elegoo ships with its own, customised version of Cura 5.6.0, designed to help users get the best from their printer, and with optimal settings already dialed in to ensure a silky-smooth, trouble-free printing experience.
At least we imagine that's what it does. We don't know, as while Elegoo has provided binaries for Windows and macOS, it hasn't seen fit to bundle a single AppImage, deb, or rpm. Sure, there's source code tar.gz, so we have the option of compiling ourselves, but it doesn't vibe well with the simplicity and ease-of-use of the rest of the system.
We can only guess at how the official software actually performs, but in the meantime, are quite happy with stock Cura, which has a perfectly adequate Neptune Max 4 profile.
Big prints are a joy to make
There's a certain quality and fittingness to bespoke objects that just isn't available from off-the-shelf purchases. but bespoke is expensive, and even if the object in question is constructed by master craftsmen, the result may not be exactly what you had in mind.
3D-printing means that you can tailor your possessions, and if they're not quite right, tweak them slightly and print a revised version. minor annoyances melt away in the face of 3D-printed fixes.
Out bedside cabinet is too far back to comfortably rest a cup of tea on in the morning, and The Crow's spouse takes exception to him resting it on the bed covers. The solution: a sliding mini table- that grips the side of the bed, is perfectly sized for a morning brew, and will slide back when not in use. Likewise, where does one place ones wine glass while in the bath? Propping it against the edge of the bath and the wall has resulted in multiple mishaps, but another mini table, attached to the side of the bath, keeps the Pinot Grigio secure among the bubbles.
We wouldn't have been able to make it with the Mono.
Kitchen drawers are a pertpetua battle in the Crows kitchen. What goes where? Drawer dividers can help, but they're never the right size or layout, and even adjustable dividers end up rattling around after a few months.
Kitchen drawers are big, but with the Max's respectable printbed, we were able to churn out perfect 400 mm x 400 mm units which slide in like a glove, and are solid, stable, and good-looking.
How about a wall-mounted wine rack in the dining nook - to save us the epic trek to the imaginary wine cellar? No Problem. A can crusher to save space in your recycling bin? done.
Moving outside, we now have an attractive and functional lion's head fountain, made using part of an unloved fish tank filter.
It can do small, too. Miniatures aren't up to the standard of a resin printer, but they're certainly not terrible, and once painted, are eminently suitable for tabletop games.
I see it, I want it, I print it, I got it.
Not entirely smooth sailing
Benchy jokes aside, life with the max hasn't been entirely trouble free. The noise from fast prints has caused plenty of marital strife. There's also the fact that printing large objects inevitably leads to some degree of warping as extremities pull themselves from the base plate.
Some of this can be put down to the fact that a frigid loft in northern England in winter is not the ideal environment for a 3D printer. The base remains hot and the air is cold. The plastic contracts and, well, issues develop.
This rarely results in complete disaster. Either the print completes but is a bit wonky on one or more corners, or we cut our losses and try again.
In the second week of ownership, however, warpage was so bad that the print head a large, partially printed model from the print bed. The object ended underneath the printer, locking the Y axis in place, and the printer continued to print. This was not ideal, and resulted in the purchase of a new extruder assembly.
Insanely good value
The Elegoo Neptune 4 Max has a list price of £472.99, but there are bargains and deals to be had. We went the eBay route, and bought from the official Elegoo eBay store, with a post Christmas voucher, meaning we paid a smidge under £350 for the unit and a tiny amount of filament. On the official website, the max is currently £377.99, s we didn't save a tonne of cash, and there's usually a bargain to be had if you buy the Max on Amazon (affiliate link).
It's not a cheap purchase, but it's not bank-burstingly expensive either.
You should buy one.
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Fallout London may be be the best entry in the series - and it's great on LinuxDavid Rutlandhttps://thecrow.uk/fallout-london-running-well-linux-review/2024-08-02T14:03:00+01:00
Fallout 4 - while fun to play - was disappointing. It offered a lightweight, Disneyfied version of the post-apocalyptic word, seemingly aimed squarely at console gamers and kids. Unlike previous entries in the series, it wasn't really possible to exist in the wasteland as a…
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Fallout 4 - while fun to play - was disappointing. It offered a lightweight, Disneyfied version of the post-apocalyptic word, seemingly aimed squarely at console gamers and kids.
Unlike previous entries in the series, it wasn't really possible to exist in the wasteland as a terrible human being, and the player character was given too much, too soon. It was surprisingly difficult to die in the early stages of the game, and the wasteland felt inappropriately hopeful.
Fallout London - the long-awaited, game-sized mod from Team Folon isn't like that at all, and after a gratifyingly brief character creation process, we died by fire several times in the opening few minutes. Stimpacks? Guns? NIghtsticks? They're not around. It's you and your fists for the first hour. Future London feels dark, grim, and desperate in a way that the base game is not, but that is entirely appropriate for a game set in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.
We're going to skip over the installation process - suffice it to say that we found installing Fallout London on Linux to be a complete ballache that took up an entire afternoon, and failed for seemingly random reasons. If you're used to gaming on Linux, you'll be used to the various workarounds and counterintuitive actions you need to take in order to get Windows software running well.
These are our impressions of Fallout London after a few days on play.
The London look
While America was stuck in the nuclear-powered 1950s, England seems to have progressed to the 1980s, or possibly the early 1990s. The computers are reminiscent of Amstrad units, and have trackballs, as well as speakers embedded in the monitors. Abandoned police cars look like something you'll have seen on The Bill back in the day, and there are even pink wafer biscuits to add to the aesthetic of this writer's youth.
Sarcastic and often cruel replies that made dialogue in 1, 2, and New Vegas so much fun to play was missing in the borderline-PG Fallout 4, in which everyone is earnest and decent - spelling them out to you every opportunity. Witty banter is back again in Fallout London - and even more sweary. In addition to the casual A-list curses, the British slang feels just about right. We recognise and use some terms, ourselves and we're fairly sure overseas players will be able to work most of it out without resorting to Urban Dictionary.
The buildings seem authentically London, and walk into the Ship and Mitre, and you'll immediately recognise it as an English pub. It's great. All the major landmarks are there, and often plot essential. Saint Paul's Cathedral, the Millennium Dome, Houses of Parliament, Nelson's Column. It's a lot.
That litter bin in the picture below? There's an identical one less than 100 yards from where we're sitting right now.
And there are traditional British corner shops with names like Morrisingh's, Singhsburys, and Singhsbury's Local. Inside every one of them, you'll find a skeleton in a turban. There are post boxes that are visually similar to the ones around the corner from The Crow's lofty eyrie. Do not go near them.
And what could be more British than a laundrette? Dot Cotton - eat your heart out.
Character-wise, you'll see exaggerated versions of the type of people London calls to mind when folk from outside the smoke think of the place. There are the Beefeaters - cannibalistic stand-ins for supermutants; the gents who are your typical London gents,
Two exceptions here are the Thamesfolk - a semi-aquatic object lesson in what happens when you live in and on a polluted waterway, and Hooligans - who go out wearing footie shirts and exist only to give you grief ad beat you up for no obvious reason. They seem about right, and you can probably spot a group if you venture to the capital today.
Get a haircut from Sweeney Todd, then a pie from Miss Miggins next door.
The Gameplay
Where Fallout 4 coddles you, London cripples you, and you start the main mission with a couple of serious debuffs due to your origins as a lab rat, and a subsequent railway accident - leaving you to take more damage and deal less.
Large areas of the city are flooded. Sure, you can swim, but you'll be sucking down 250 rads per second while you're doing it. Even dosing yourself with Rad-X and using a prophylactic Jimmy hat won't prevent your health bar from flooding red and killing you in a matter of seconds.
Once you're in the world, weapons are fairly easy to come by. You're given a sweet and lethal Balisong (butterfly knife in the UK) by one of the first named NPCs you meet, and local hooligans can be relieved of their Boxcutters, bats, and other weapons easily enough. The Butterfly knife has its own neat idling animation. How distracting you'll find it will vary.
Like to kill from a distance? There's no shortage of guns or ammo, and although the game tends to push you more towards knives (as in the real London), it will make sure you have a gun in your hand when you need one - such as a set-piece shootout on the river.
Missions are often your usual fetch quests as you work towards a goal, but they've not been too onerous in the ten or so hours I've put in so far. One exception to this was trying to find an NPC in the dark in a flooded area by torchlight. Instadeath Ragequit.
While in Fallout 4, we could run through the game on survival mode and complete the (a) main questline in a few hours, there's no chance of doing that in London. If we have paid for the mod, we'd have felt we were getting our moneys worth. We're ten hours in, and have only just managed to get back into the Angel lab.
The bugs
Bethesda games are notorious for buggy gameplay and glitches, and Fallout London is surprisingly bug free.
We've had only a couple of crashes to desktop across the few days we've been playing. Infinite loading times were taken care of by a mod.
Gameplay-wise, we've seen few areas which made us think that this was anything less than a perfectly honed and polished top tier title.
The first was after the aforementioned gunfight on the river. If we didn't leap from the boat at exactly the right moment, we'd end up in the water in a second, and dead in two. The second is when equipped with the gask mask, we'd get debugging messages in the top left of the screen stating "Im in first person" and "Im in 3rd person." Really no big deal. If you've followed the instructions and use Heroic games launcher, you shouldn't have many - if any - problems.It's awesome, it's awe-inspiring, and it's astonishing that this was made by volunteers up against obstacles seemingly put in their way by Bethesda.
