spook-rambles

[spook-rambles]

Got to go camping this weekend for the new moon at a nearby dark sky site. I learned that planets are really small and also really bright! These were all shot at 600mm f6.3 but the planets are cropped a LOT, plus took shutter speed down to 1/60 to get color on Jupiter and definition on Saturn's rings. Compare that to 30 seconds on a (slightly) higher ISO for the shot of Andromeda. Also got a few clear images of the planets' moons, a super blurry Orion nebula, and some other fun stuff that isn't quite post-quality :)

[spook-rambles]

Finally did a bunch of network shit I've been putting off and got all my shit reverse proxied! I'm trying to securely open up public access to services & websites on VMs I host on my local network so I gotta be careful about my security.

It pleases me immediately to see that

from local subnet everything works - lots of network critical stuff runs (like pi-hole DNS/DHCP) on the reverse proxy server, plus a few services (like torrent client interfaces) that shouldn't be accessible from the internet

from the internet - you can access my client's website! And none of my private stuff!

and everything is https with fully qualified domain names and letsencrypt.

bugs - local access to client's website resolves differently, but I'm going to work around that with a proxy endpoint but I haven't configured it right yet

future - gotta separate my VMs from the rest of the network a little more fully. The real solution is likely to move the network infrastructure components to a different physical machine, but I only have the one for now!

I feel like I'm starting to get the hang of this!

[spook-rambles]

when I say I wanna be the best there ever was. I meant it. Long post warning... tl;dr local man takes "perfect Pokemon" idea too far and spends several weeks learning to RNG manipulate his DS and plays the same DS game start to finish a few times in a single month

after my fateful full odds encounter with Rufus, the shiny wooper, I decided that I must have a shiny of every single Pokemon I love. Which I think is a well adjusted response. But the more time I spent breeding oddishes with the foreign ditto I realized that it would honestly be a true shame if I finally got a shiny and it had imperfect IVs! Or nature!

Turns out that the caliber of pokemon that would satisfy my need for perfection only show up for a few dozen moments in a given decade, and so I learned about RNG manipulation! Thanks to the in depth guide on Smogon I found a whole new way to waste hours for tiny incremental improvements!!

So. The perfect Pokemon. I start at the Smogon competitive guide and find which stats to match so I can find the seed in RNG reporter. For a Pokemon to be shiny it must satisfy a condition including the original trainer ID/secret ID (SID), so with a given save you only have access to a tiny subset of all possible IVs that are shiny.

Usually you can get around this by breeding, when IVs are assigned separately. You can hit one seed for the shiny PID with the correct nature, generate an egg, save, hit another seed, and then collect the perfect Pokemon!

This only doesn't work if:

1. Your pokemon is legendary/event only/gift only or

2. You have a preference on what ball it's captured in, or the original location, or for some reason the trainer ID (which can grant renaming rights pokemon with OTs that match) or maybe other things I haven't thought of?

Since perfect means perfect, I'm obviously in the both of those groups. The perfect oddish deserves a luxury ball, and would only be right to encounter in Ilex Forest. So! I need a new TID. I create a new ss save (may as well to complement my hg main save) with perfect timing at the very beginning to get the right TID. Several hours later I'd bred a shiny Absol and trained it to know mean look, false swipe, and thunder wave. Its IVs were random but still had good IVs from the perfect ditto. Only the best to capture the perfect Pokemon.

So then I was SO ready to go get the oddish, who I had already mentally named KIWI, only to find out I need a Synchronize lead (fortunately I had a ralts in my main save that was modest), two chatots to advance frames, and fittingly another oddish to attract it with sweet scent. After getting THOSE, I went to Ilex Forest in front of the shrine, sang like a hundred times with my chatots, and summoned. The motherfuckin kiwi.

And here he is!!!! 31/31/31/31/31/31!

Inspired and motivated by my victory, I finally beat the game (still hadn't best Kanto), bred and trained a perfect Garchomp (PUFF, M.D., which stands for magic dragon), and the perfect Dragonite to give an egg move to the perfect Garchomp. THEN it being the Christmas season and all I decided to do the same for @spookclimber who got me back into Pokemon in the first place. Their unsuccessful (😥) Rayquaza grind inspired my initial shiny hunting, though they eventually made the hard decision the progress in their emerald save.

I had my TID/SID for the Modest KIWI, but the perfect Rayquaza is Adamant. So! New save! New TID! A spreadsheet!!!

Green squares reach represent a possible save where you could encounter a perfect legendary of either nature it intersects. Blue is perfect special attacker; below 31 ATK in order to get the correct nature. I didn't check my work, but I think it's the same for below 31 Sp. Atk, like the Adamant Rayquaza. I guess 31/31/31/31/31/31 pokemon can only be Timid, Modest, Docile or Calm?

Yellow is useless because why not get two potential natures, and the black/white areas are mirrors of each other.

That informed the next bit. I compiled all the legendaries in plat/hgss and got what natures Smogon recommended, then consolidated them into 3 games with two natures each that only misses 3 pokemon for perfect (potentially, I only am trying to perfect things I want on my team).

So it was settled. The perfect Rayquaza was to be found in soulsilver so that it could have a twin perfect Groudon (who will set up for KIWI). So no problem right? Just reset, time the beginning, beat the game, beat the e4 again, beat red, talk to mr. pokemon, go catch (and time) Groudon, boot up hg, go catch Kyogre (perfect kyogre is later in the plan), trade that to ss, go show Kyogre and Groudon to professor oak, go BACK to the embedded tower, and time Rayquaza!

And so it came to pass that my longest and most satisfying hunt was completed.

Presenting the spook's well timed all natural perfect Pokemon certificate of authenticity for the god of all Rayquazas:

Game time is 19 hours in. Can't wait to trade him!

[spook-rambles]

turns out my HeartGold Pokemon is like. Am anti-speedrun. I'm mostly just shiny hunting and breeding oddishs with near perfect IVs (I'll get that perfect one soon 👀👀)

I said I'd go full legit except that I pirated the game at least until I got my first shiny, which I did! Meet rufus the shiny wooper!!

he was a total accidental encounter, which was so exciting!! But after I got him I wanted to do the Masuda breeding method, for which the ideal is a foreign language Ditto with perfect IVs. Turns out you can buy those on eBay for like $2 and my finger was on the button when I said "that's dumb as hell, I can hack one in just as easily as this guy" so I did! and now own a perfect IV shiny ditto named ne0 who will likely spend their whole life in daycare. Unless I decide otherwise ne0 will be my only hacked poke, and I did do all the stuff to make sure they're legal and everything. btw to anyone reading this I will send you a copy of ne0 for free

So until then we bike up and down and up and down with sleepy (my slugma, for ½ egg hatch time) and 5 oddishs eggs

and when I finally get the shiny oddish? time for shiny slugma 👀👀👀👀

no I have not beat all 8 gyms. not to mention the 8 kanto ones.

[spook-rambles]

finally got my web dev setup happy (mostly)!!

I have the src set up on a samba share so I can develop from Windows, then I just use a putty window to run the gulp -> scp to virtual host. If I was smart enough to set up gulp watching I think I could set it up to recompile/deploy every time I make a change which would be awesome but I'm running on a deadline so I can live with running one command I _guess_. Also why I'm gonna settle for http(non-s) and a suboptimal permission layout..... gotta make things for my client to see before I perfect my system

I did save my blank reactstrap though which I'll try to keep updated, so new projects should be really quick. Sure hope I can mock up a dashboard though before tomorrow morning!

[spook-rambles]

my boi oddish helping me sort out calibration with the 3D printer. I’m on the very last bits of this awesome spool of transparent green PLA and just turned down the temperature like 5 degrees and it’s running so wellllll

so there he is in the slicer software and then again lookin like bigfoot because I’ve decided that the monochrome on my camera looks better (to be fair it’s like 10 feet away from the print and also like older than I am. it’s a decomissioned big brother ass camera i love it)

he’s also the perfect color because I’m grinding hard for the shiny oddish in Pokemon Heartgold rn so he will bring me luck

[spook-rambles]

my boi oddish helping me sort out calibration with the 3D printer. I’m on the very last bits of this awesome spool of transparent green PLA and just turned down the temperature like 5 degrees and it’s running so wellllll

so there he is in the slicer software and then again lookin like bigfoot because I’ve decided that the monochrome on my camera looks better (to be fair it’s like 10 feet away from the print and also like older than I am. it’s a decomissioned big brother ass camera i love it)

he’s also the perfect color because I’m grinding hard for the shiny oddish in Pokemon Heartgold rn so he will bring me luck

[spook-rambles]

uhhhhh wasn't Bill Cipher reincarnated as King

List of things I’m worried about : 

1. the Emperor Coven’s followers have a golden triangle as an insignia

2. a portal is being build around that ominous half spherical golden eye

3. might be trauma but it reminds me too much of Bill

[spook-rambles]

LED pretty....

[spook-rambles]

PRINCE ZUKO + BENDING TECHNIQUES

[spook-rambles]

ayyy guess who impulse bought a jewelry polishing kit to polish my 3D prints 😎 gonna start looking gooooood

[spook-rambles]

see yes I _would_ like to go out and do yard work but what if instead I design and print a phone case. think about it. I could put in microSD storage for the arduinoHID attack thing... can't do that with yard work...

[spook-rambles]

HEY WHAT THE FUCK??? WHAT THE FUCK?!! NOBODY TOLD ME THAT MB/s AND Mbps ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!!! apparently ~100MB/s ≈ 800Mbps??? So my disk usage of 100+MB/s is actually saturating my gigabit network?? My stuff works?!!

[spook-rambles]

so. I’m a self employed web developer. or whatever. so I’ve been keeping that in mind while I’m re-setting up my regular server for plex and all of its totally legal buddy programs. One of the big changes this time is I added samba to my RAID’d drives, so I can have easy data access to all the good stuff on the whole network and do backups and stuff easily and ALSO to get back to the topic, provide a great place to keep data for my new business, and to do like data transfers from development machine to deployment machine

but the end result of this is I go to deploy a website build and I’m like. okay time to go the the virtualized linux that lives in Windows now so I can scp this shit over to the Samba drive, but really samba’s just a Unix emulation of a Windows protocol, and if we’re really being honest this runs in a vm so that’s an extra layer, and it goes onto a partition on and EMULATED RAID mount (thanks mdadm), but it’s okay because then it just goes to the disk right? Wrong! The DISKS are fuckin emulated too because ESXi doesn’t support individual SATA passthrough so I had to manually create virtual disk files to get decent disk support!

and all of this to just have a backup and a stopping point before I grab it on yet another VM that does the actual web service....

[spook-rambles]

today is the everyonceinawhillenial Super Smashed Bros tournament, where everyone I know that's good at ssbu (and some that aren't) comes to get their ass kicked by me, your friendly local Zelda main

unfortunately since we introduced trophies (one time so far) I have been beaten out for it. but today is a new day! and I have expanded our selection of trophies. I have preserved the grand prize, the Kirby Butt, from last time and I have added the Waluigi Tits Of Shame for second place

time depending I'm working on some special awards but...

(text reads "super smashed bwos touwnyament champion!!! >:3c)

the designs aren't my original work, some of the first results for "smash bros trophy" on thingiverse because they're AWESOME

been working some kinks out of the printer and I think the method of the future is probably just taping the model to the build plate if things go wonky

sorry I don't know how to format pictures! but this is an in progress special award 👀

[spook-rambles]

folks exciting news about my Pokemon go buddy (love u lampent) and my favorite alcohol! they're the same!!

if u look close there's a tiiiiny agavero label under his hat. anyway guess who has an idea for a novelty light fixture

[spook-rambles]

iiiiiiiit's backup day! other than one notable natural disaster and one notable hard drive crash, I've kept a (relatively) scrupulous horde of data that accumulated since the first time I had a "My Documents" folder. it's getting to the point where my tech horde consists of the big Windows machine, a pretty decent ESXi (virtual hosting OS, mostly a fancy way for me to run my Ubuntu server) server, and like three laptops that were too broke for my mom but not for me. Add into this mess several multi-terabyte movie and show libraries floating around at different levels of backing up and improving on one another.

enter backup day. ya boi is tired of this shit. I've been slowly merging my monolithic amounts of data together so I can start The Great Reinstall (upgrading software on everything I own and reformatting a lot of drives) but. I've just left my one working large external hard drive in Minnesota. and I don't have a power adapter for the other one. It's fine! I just shoved some specially bent paddle connectors in there

should be fine!

but anyway by like sometime tomorrow I can actually start reinstalling stuff, but I'm excited to have a central repository for all my data, and it should then be really easy to create a formal backup schedule

why do you have to do this spook? You ask. Well you see. I'd like to start mass wiping and formatting drives and computers because well. my minecraft server got hacked and I got a bunch of other weird stuff so I said fuck it! new everything! but also I don't want to list a solid 6 to 8 terabytes of legally acquired media I've been hording for e v e r plus my hundreds of gigabytes of photos!