By Rian

Gray, a writer.

Surviving the Abyss, Early Access, and Abandonware

There are several games on my radar I am eagerly waiting to see the final copy of. Since Steam has started Early Access (i.e. preorder now and start playing beta, or pre-beta version), many developers have built their new business models around the idea that there is another source of revenue until the actual release…

PS5 Pro, 4K TV, and HDR

The new PS5 Pro is released at $699.99, and I’m here to ask a question: Is a gamer not entitled to sweat of —I meant— pixels of his consoles? Enough Andrew Ryan quotes, but it is a serious question nonetheless. At $700, PS5 Pro has a tough battle ahead of it to win the spotlight…

How To Prepare VPN VLAN for Switch

In my previous post on how to setup VPN VLAN, I discussed the methodology of setting one for the first time. Now that it’s near Black Friday of 2024, some of the VPN providers have already started pre Black Friday sale in October. No doubt consumers are shopping for which service is right for their…

Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred Spiel

Diablo IV has a tall order to meet as a fourth installment in the franchise. Blizzard has added, removed, or changed some bits and that since 1996, but as a sequel to a 28 years old franchise, the game cannot offer new ideas without radical departure. Vessel of Hatred has even taller order, as an…

How to Setup Expanded Storage for Steam

Recently I moved the m.2 SSD from a NAS to a Mac. A NAS running on Linux was better served with expanded memory, so I thought to use the SSD to expand the internal storage of my workstation. Upgrading process was straightforward, but there was a problem moving games from Steam Library to the newly…

Diablo IV, Console Support, and DualSense

Part 2 on the most recent title from Diablo franchise, and frankly found more often on the indie games, the dubious controller support and lack of documentations thereof. As strange as it sounds, there are aspects of a video game where a spec is necessary. Not just “minimum requirements” and “recommended” specs of your hardwares,…

Diablo, Controller Support, and Lock-on

With Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred just released, —and yes, “emergency maintenance” requires me to publish this story before I could give my fair share to the game— I though to ask where do games stand on supporting controllers. Or, more specifically, supporting features that are not bound by keyboard and mouse. Before we dive…

Mis-Recipes, Dis-Recipes, and AI Recipes

When ChatGPT-craze was still booming, there was a YouTuber who put the AI recipes to the test. It doesn’t take professional baker to immediately catch what is off with the recipe GPT-3 has written for her. Her video mostly focuses on the experimentation and information on where AI technology stands on food. Recipes on the…

How to Fix Error 173 on Intel Mac Pro dGPU

Of many things Apple Silicon brought, I am still curious whether or not Apple is willing to bring dGPUs into Mac Pro lines of their products. Despite how useful other PCI-based cards may be, most users, at least the ones that are most vocal, express their desire to use more powerful graphics card on Mac…

How to Troubleshoot WordPress Scheduled Post Not Publishing

No doubt different writers have different post publishing schedules, but we all do have a schedule —or at least try— to follow. What used to be simple ‘schedule to publish’ on WordPress is quite no more, however, with many hosting services now require WordPress hosted websites to take advantage of caching. Personally I find it…

PCalc Spiel

Have you read any iOS, iPadOS, or watchOS rumors for this year? Behind all the ‘throw the pasta on the wall’ schtick, there was one I couldn’t laugh about. It’s the calculator app. Calculator apps on any Apple devices were either too old it was a place holder item for announcement of App Store, or…

Native Support, Bootcamp, and GPTK

As much as I appreciate native Mac supports in PC gaming, there is something to be said about the overall quality of the support. Some games are simply not optimized. Its performance is either subpar or some advanced settings are simply unavailable for native versions. Some games run into glitches that are unique only to…

App to Connect to Network Drive on Boot

This one belongs in the “there is an app for that” department. If you are an avid NAS user, chances are most of your drives are already connected via network. And that means, on every boot up, you will need to manually login to the NAS on Finder to mount the drives. One might call…

Frostpunk 2 Spiel

For a game set in the ice age, Frostpunk 2 surely is released at a weird time. I would imagine September isn’t particularly hot or cold in either hemisphere. Last installment for the franchise was released during the pandemic, and even for a DLC, the last scenario didn’t sit well with the world it has…

How to Disable Windows Web Search on Start Menu

For unknown reason, Microsoft can’t stop shipping its OS without more bloatware. Both Mac and Linux can be guilty of the same crime, but I am more surprised that Windows doesn’t have a dedicated ‘lite’ version available for .iso on the website. To reiterate, Windows is shipped with Bing search embedded on the start menu.…