Yes, I bought a Steam Controller.
No, I do not regret it.

Followup: Steam Controller: 2 years later

I am a diehard linux user.

No substitute, my OS must be open source, but when big name brands and companies conflict with my ideals, I generally don’t want anything to do with them.

I began shopping for a new keyboard late last year (Nov- 2015) and had narrowed down my choices fairly well, with a G710+ on that list.

Doing my research, I found that many people had been complaining about this keyboard’s compatibility with Linux systems, otherwise I would have immediately bought the keyboard on the spot.

There were a few problems I found that the online communities has been talking about:

1. The keyboard’s audio/multimedia controls would cause ‘6’ to be spammed during bootup, which would be a problem for me since I use FDE.
2. The keyboard’s lighting would be hardware controllable only.
3. The M and G keys would not function in their proper ways.

After working with this keyboard for 2 months, I can proudly say none of these are an issue at all, and I would gladly recommend a G710+ to Linux users.

The only problem I directly had to solve was fixed thanks to help from Wattos’ Linux Driver. This driver enabled the G and M keys properly and gave me script control over the lighting in all keys.

Even without the custom driver, the G710+ worked just fine the first time I plugged it in. The issue with the audio and ‘6’ spam seems to have been completely resolved (tested on Ubuntu) and the audio controls work without extra configuration.

The passthrough USB port has been extremely handy in conjunction with my G930 headset, which also works perfectly out-of-the-box with Ubuntu.

Now in my opinion:

The lighting is excellent with 4 levels of brightness, and the layout feels perfectly spaced for casual and extremely fast typing.

The palm rest was a must for me, since I always type with my hands resting on a surface, the included attaching rest integrated very well and is great for my needs.

The cord is a bit thick, although understandable containing two separate USB connections. The cord was very stiff coming out of the box, so I had to flex it around a bit before I could wire it through my desk setup. The cord is really intended to be used in a stationary setting, and does not do well if you want to have the keyboard in your lap.

The keyboard is heavy, but understandable considering the number of cats it can support walking over it. I’ve had absolutely no problems with construction or design, in any parts.

Finally, it would be nice if the 3 indicator LEDs (Numlock etc) also changed brightness, but instead they simply remain glaringly bright during midnight gaming sessions.

UGC Highlander Season 17 has finally come to a stop.

For the first time, I had a team I was proud of.

Having Robosane host a team was actually a great success. We had a good number of players and subs, so that we weren’t scrambling every match to find a ringer. As you probably know, I played medic, and while doing so, I found a number of tips I think all competitive players should have.

1. Null-cancelling movement script. This made dodging and strafing much more responsive and easier to pull off, highly recommend using one.
2. A HUD with medic in mind. I use Flathud, which has a customization option to put the ubercharge low-center screen, making it more easily noticeable.
3. Scrims. No, I really mean it. I’ve found that the most important thing about medic is communication, and the best way to get better at it is to spend a lot of time playing with your team friends. It is much easier to get your point across the better you know your team, and will help make you less afraid to interrupt when you need to.

That’s what I felt was most important; don’t agree?, tweet me: @robobenklein

Other than UGC, I found that configs really are overrated. You might think that getting new configs could have X benefit and help me with Y. The fact is, they take a lot of fine tuning, and the truth is that there is not that much that configs are really good for.

I found that configs should not be used if you are trying to get better performance, TF2 itself is already good at managing that for you, let it do it’s work, use the built in video settings.

The best use of configs I found, was weapon management or interface customization. I admit I have done some of this myself, because I found that I enjoyed being able to show/hide my weapon based on what I’m using. It gave me a huge deal of control over how my interface worked, but not without a good sum of time spent configuring it to my tastes.

As of writing this, I am doubtful Robosane will be participating in season 18 (thanks for nothing highschool), however I am aiming to be back in the game for Season 19.

UGC Highlander Season 17 is upon us!

This time we’re ready!

This season Robosane is sponsoring a UGC Team, and we’re ready to roll with 12 players currently on our roster. I’m playing medic as I usually am, with Solsane unexpectedly as demoman. You can see our full roster at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZFYt-eXi0nGt4s-VMGwXApW9UBxf-BWwuIW0eVfyxec/ which is always the first up to date.

We performed our first scrim last night against PAL, and we did well after our first round, making a two win comeback before we called a time-based mercy. The round logs are at http://logs.tf/1024498?highlight=76561198058317490

Hopefully this year we’ll have a team that actually shows up for more than half the matches.

It’s a pretty cool place if you didn’t already realize.

I was one of lucky few who were offered a paid internship at the ORNL Computing Facility, where I worked alongside the Computing and Facilities Director, Jim Rogers.

Although I was sitting only 20 meters from the once fastest supercomputer in the world, I didn’t do much with it. Most of my work was put into web design, CMS (Drupal) administration, and only nearing the end did I begin to do work using data from Titan.

The website in question was Drupal, something I had heard of when looking for a CMS, but I decided in favor of Joomla. I now realize I made the right decision.

Drupal, firstly, had a completely different naming scheme than Joomla, which made things very confusing in my head.

For Example:
“Modules”:
Joomla: The Items which compose non-primary content spaces (like sidebars)
Drupal: Plugins which extend the functionality of Drupal (eCommerce, security, extensions)
Honestly they should just be called ‘Plugins’ in Drupal, I mean that’s what they are.

Elsewhere it was nightmares trying to get things to work like they should, although admittedly it was almost all the modules, not Drupal’s fault.

The default template had no excuses though. It was a fixed-width non-mobile-friendly page with images where they could have used a single line of CSS to get a better or same result. After a hundred line changes or so of manual editing, I was able to correct a majority of the issues and make it usable for mobile. I’m sure there’s some free template out there that fixes this, but of hours searching my team member and I were unable to find anything suitable for our type of content. With about the same time I spent on Robosane’s template, it should have been fairly simple as Drupal’s templating system is much less complex.

:non bis in idem

On Summit:
Summer 2018 Followup