Let me explain.

If you’re here and reading this you likely know what a ROG Ally, Steam Deck, and SteamOS are but just in case you wandered off of the streets of Blusky and are now looking around like a lost Travolta here’s the breakdown. All of these things are planets around the sun that is “gaming handhelds,” or, if you’re really new here, taking an entire gaming PC, stuffing it into a unit roughly the size of a Nintendo Switch, and then filling any remaining space with battery because boy are you gonna need it.

They are sick and awesome and sex and if you’ve never gotten one… well, that’s fair, they’re very expensive and I don’t want to assume anything about your financial situation. That said if you’re able, and interested, and like the idea of playing your favorite steam games on the go? They are all pretty fantastic options. Go to a retailer, and hold one. They have different hand feels and that’s honestly the more important aspect of how they’re gonna be for you to play on.

But today we’re talking about one of these in particular, the ASUS ROG Ally, the line of gaming handhelds, and the instructions here can apply to any of these units: Covering the Ally, the Ally X, and the Ally XBox. X-XBox? Whatever they put on the box.

And I envisioned this as more of a technical write up, describing the tweaks, and challenges, and addons, and hacks you would need to go through to get this done. However, I’m frankly astonished to say: that’s really not an issue, like, at all? There is one perma-broken feature of my Ally X now, at least at time of writing, and that’s those spiffy joystick LEDs. Yes, that’s it. At time of comment, you need the Armoury Crate application, which only runs on Windows, and ASUS is hiding the keys from Valve as to how to talk to it. But… I dunno. Pretty lights aren’t a reason, IMO, to not do this, YMMV.

But the upsides? Oh goodness, my friends, this thing runs so amazing now. I really can’t oversell this. I can run RoadCraft at full resolution, 1080p, and get about 45-60 FPS. It was unplayable under Windows! Halo Infinite still has to run at the bottom of every setting, but I can get solid 60-70 FPS now. And my other games? New Vegas literally just works, it’s astonishing (and kind of pathetic) how much better the Proton framework jives with the old girl. Snowrunner is an absolute rock steady 120FPS. Sleep and wake just works. No more fighting with Windows’ bizarre glitches, no more having to force-off the unit when Windows sleep breaks, no fighting with the controls… it’s brilliant. It’s simply brilliant.

Now the Technical Part

This is so short and I wanted to highlight that fact.

What do you need?

• Your ROG Ally (X/XBox)
• A Flash Drive (and likely a USB-C to USB-A adapter)
• A PC (you can do it with the Ally but it’s a little slow and kind of a pain)

And how do you do it?

• Get SteamOS Downloading, as it’ll take awhile. Mosey on over here and grab it from the men themselves.
• Download the Rufus Utility here
• Use Rufus to write the recovery image to the USB. It’s all very self explanatory, pick the image and pick the flash drive.
• Once you’re ready, grab your Ally, plug in the drive, and restart it. As the logo appears, hold volume-down until the BIOS screen opens up. In there:
  • Disable Secure Boot (this is part of Windows’ DRM, SteamOS does not need it)
  • Select the flash drive as the boot device. (If it doesn’t appear and you’re using an adapter, flip it over. Some adapters only have data lines in one direction)
• Apply the BIOS settings, reboot, and let it boot into SteamOS.
• You’ll eventually get a Kubuntu desktop with several icons. Incredibly awesomely, the touch screen does work here, so double-tap to restore SteamOS.
• Make a cocktail of your choice. Reflect on your excellent decision to do this.
• The device will restart. You’ll provide your wifi, use your phone to sign in to Steam. Now put it back down.
• Reflect further. Second cocktail is optional.
• The device will restart a couple more times to apply updates, then you’ll be ready to go.
• Download games. Play them. Further cocktails advised.

That’s it.

That’s it?

Yeah that’s it, works great. I scaled down the UI some for the desktop.

“But Madison, like you I have put an unhealthy amount of time into Fallout 4, and how will I get my huge breasts Chinese Assault Rifle mod back in?”

Relax. Vortex gets in this club.

If you want the Vortex mod manager on here, use Pikdum’s script (and star his repo dude did awesome work!) to get it. It handles the entire process save for one step: you’ll have to make a staging folder on your game SSD, which will appear as drive J: when Vortex asks for one. I just make it J:/vortexstaging.

Anti-climactic? Download and play a game on it, that’s the climax. :D

Before I start talking about this, I want to lay out my bonafides. I’m part of the sick and twisted portion of the gamer^TM audience who actually fucking loves open world games. Yes, It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.

Having said that for what it’s worth, I don’t particularly enjoy that every goddamn AAA game is now an open world. While I enjoy an Ubisoft sandbox, seemingly everyone wants to make yet another Ubi-open-world map-covered-in-icons repetative-grindy-same-damn-mission-over-and-over mess. As fun as I find those, they are big commitments and as such, I only play a handful of them. I mean good grief I just bought S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, and I’ve already sunk nearly a hundred hours into the thing. But I digress.

When my friends somewhat depressed ask me, like you might ask a family member who’s life choices you think are legitimately bad, “Why do you play these things” I actually have a pretty solid answer. Do I want to navigate this world for the couple hundred hours to complete all the icons and fill/empty the map and go through probably dozens, perhaps hundreds of missions built on the same foundation. Or, to put it short: Do I want to be here?

If I do, I’ll buy it and play it and probably crush the life out of it by the time I’m done.

If not, I won’t.

So… you wanted to be on Halo?

I mean yeah, who wouldn’t? For all the complaining I’m about to do, this game does an incredible number of correct things:

• The art style is, frankly, iconic. It pulls quite a lot from Halo CE, the most iconic IMHO with perhaps Halo 3 as a close second in terms of art style. To be clear, we’re drawing a distinction here between art direction and graphical fidelity. Halo Infinite is not the most graphically insane game I have (which would have to be the aforementioned S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2) but the graphics are excellent, sharp as a razor, and clearly communicate information. Halo CE is almost cartoony, using bright colors to distinguish enemies from terrain, and Infinite walks in those well-trod footsteps, a notable departure from many entries, perhaps best exemplified by Halo 5, where enemies can blend in to the surrounding scenery and be difficult to spot.

• The combat is frenetic, insane, and gives me the most genuine experience of being an improvising spartan I’ve yet experienced in any Halo game. Getting into a flow-state in Infinite’s combat scratches my brain in the same way Titanfall 2 does. The multiplayer reflects this; since firefight was added, I’ve played a TON of this. (I’m too old for PvP)

• The story is lovely and was deeply meaningful for me, and me alone. I loved it, no notes, my sole critique is it has absolutely nothing to do with Halo 5, which itself had nothing to do with Halo 4, which is arguably the topic for another post someday.

Alright, so how did it screw it up?

As a last component of the setup: when it was announced that the newest installment in the Halo series was an open world, I was skeptical, but tentatively excited. The first teaser trailer’s last shot, Cortana’s dialogue, and the music legitimately brought me to actual, physical tears, and can prompt hot eyes even today years later on.

Also, from an industry perspective, as I said: everyone and their mother makes these things. This is a pretty set formula, and that sucks in certain ways, like it’s tough to get an open world game that breaks out of the standard mechanics, and most of them tend to look and feel the same. That said, it also means, generally, you can go in with fairly high expectations and have a great time. You will get some combination of:

• Incredible vistas to find and later explore, massive, beautiful landscapes that stretch out in front of you, and oftentimes can themselves be traversed in search of further vistas;

• A crafting system that idles at obligatory, and sometimes either becomes super fun and engaging (Horizon Zero Dawn) or becomes the main obstacle preventing you from furthering your quest and slowly driving you insane (Avatar);

• A map system wherein the map is covered in a fog of war, of whatever sort, that will slowly clear as you explore, replaced with map icons denoting your activities;

• Be populated by an array of activities, repeated ad-nauseum, oftentimes some combo itself of bandit camps, radio towers, and if the developer is fancy, some other stuff for flavor.

And one more that I’ll discuss later.

So there we go, there’s the blueprint. Simple right? Halo Infinite does all of these pretty damn well. For modern standards the Halo Infinite world isn’t… huge? But it feels plenty large enough moment-to-moment. It would take a notable amount of time to cross the entire world in even something quite fast like a Banshee, and the times you’re whisked from area to area, as a result of story events feel far apart enough to sell the illusion.

In the case of Infinite we have several things: Our bandit camps are played by the Banished, who have established bases all over the place for all manner of things, from simple patrols, to specific things like ammo printers and digsites. There aren’t really radio towers per se, instead we have USNC forward operating bases we capture, gaining fast travel points, places to get upgraded weapons and recruit marines, with the notion that we’re helping the UNSC remnants regain control of the world. And, we have a few other misc. activities: we have to hunt down Banished forces that have Extra Health, i.e. enemy heroes, we have occasional squads of marines to rescue, who then gleefully travel with us likely to a rapid demise. And… the bosses.

Each area has a mini-boss one must kill to advance to the next plot point. Truly a visionary decision here, taking the most hated game mechanic in the Halo series, and make it the central planetary gear the rest of the game turns on. This has been a meme in the community since the first awful one dropped; The Prophet of Regret, in Halo 2. No balance at all, you run around trying to punch this jackass while elites come in and murder you with swords, chased in rapid succession by Tartarus. It’s awful, it’s glitchy, the puzzle to the fight is both extremely obtuse and also really simple once you understand it. You know, I’ll say, the one with the Blademaster is actually thematically interesting and fucks with the formula enough that it’s pretty cool. The rest are fine, at best, and drop to the level of being hot ass; they are basically just bullet sponges with gimmicks. But again I digress.

All of this, is fine. The world is going to be your pull point, as we’ve established, either you’re here because you care, or you’re not because you don’t, and I don’t grudge you either decision. But throughout this journey, you develop a vibe of what’s going on: you help the UNSC gain territory and control, and in exchange, you get ammo and guns. Your FOBs become locuses of control, as they should be. You capture one after a grueling story mission and you immediately celebrate by emptying the armory of the upgraded pistol which fucks harder than the SOCOM from ODST, and finally get some bullets for your Battle Rifle. You repeat this numerous times, your FOBs becoming your familiar homes, your stops between missions out, and where you get proper guns before you burn off the ammo and start grabbing Banished weapons.

Now, this is actually a solid hook. But. There’s one way that you can make it absolutely fucking suck. How?

You take it away at the very end.

They did what!?

After an emotional cutscene where you get in a fight with the Weapon, and she resolves to be left behind, your pilot buddy is kidnapped by the Blademaster, so you’ll come to the end base that you were definitely going to anyway cuz it’s the only red part of the map left, but whatever, this works. You get the location, you go there… but you can’t use your weapons. And you get UNSC backup… in the form of the soldiers that were imprisoned there. That’s it.

Like, I’m not a child, right? I understand these games are pointless, merely software cleverly designed to punch dopamine from my mind. You know the only way this can be made worse? Make me acutely, visibly aware of how pointless in what should be the emotional and achievement chatharsis of the experience.

And the worst part? When you move on to the actual last level, after you send Escharum to be with the rest of his people in the Brute afterlife, they do it again. You take a pelican ride, keep your weapons, and land on the last base without even an opportunity to re-arm!

No marines, no special guns. Whether you completed every damn map icon in the game, or absolutely none, it matters not one damn bit. You will pass through this last level exactly the same.

You know what bothers the shit out of me!? Even Outer Worlds got this right. The end of the game plays wildly different depending which factions you have worked with, which you’ve made friends with, which choices you’ve made, and yeah the combat makes it utterly boring but still, you get a payoff. A minor, dull payoff, but a payoff.

Halo Infinite changes nothing. Halo Infinite’s open world doesn’t work, because it is, at the end of the day, the most elaborate and complex level selector. You use it to navigate a predefined set of, at times, quite good Halo missions, but you do it with a massive 3D map instead of buttons. And, even worse, you can’t even select the level you WANT. You can ONLY pick the one that’s next.

I just. How. How 343. I will die wondering who on earth thought it was a good idea to include all the content of an open-world game, with absolutely none of the point whatsoever.

End rant.

What’s turned into my unofficial “thesis” of my blog if you will is that technology, despite the current awful state of it, is good. Or at least, it has the potential to be, if it’s built and maintained by people who not only care but who are instiutionally empowered to turn that care into excellent products.

However, despite that core optimism, I would contend (and I don’t think it’s a controversial opinion) that tech is in an utterly horrendous place right now. And that impression is crystalized daily by a number of little incidents. As Ed Zitron put it so well:

In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.

From “Never Forgive Them”

Here are two examples from merely the last 24 hours centered on “signing in”, an utterly benign task that, depending what you’re signing into, can quickly devolve into a farcical Kafka-esque nightmare.

YouSuffer

I turn on the TV last night, Apple TV, nothing fancy. The YouTube app appears as it often does, but there are no accounts listed; instead, only an “add account” and “kids” button. So my sessions expired, were lost, whatever. This isn’t a problem right? I restart the app in the odd event that the app just broke (about 40% of the time it launches as the TV turns on to a gray screen with no interacables, this is not Good Software) but alas, no accounts. Fine. I click Sign In.

I am given a screen with a QR code, and the text on a button says “Sign in with your phone” and beside it is said QR code, with a URL to a YouTube page to connect a TV, and a code to type in. I dutifully pull out my phone, I scan the QR code. It… takes me to the URL on the screen. Okay… oh, perhaps I need to click the button that says Sign In with Phone! I do. It does nothing. Pressing a different one and then pressing the phone one again reveals it’s just changing the content on the right side of the screen from QR code and instructions to different instructions for other methods to sign in.

Okaaaay. I pull out my phone, and scan the code once more. It opens the URL in Safari. Not YouTube, which I have installed and signed in. I am instructed to sign in to my Google account, here. Easy enough, my credentials load from iCloud, and I am subject to TFA: Which, hilariously, is to open the YouTube app on my devices.

I dismiss Safari, and open YouTube. YouTube asks me if I am trying to sign in in the exact same place my phone is located. I confirm that I am. I watch the TV. Nothing happens.

I swap back to the Safari window. The authentication window redirects (apparently I am now logged in) to show… a confirmation that I want This TV to have access to my YouTube account, and watch history, yadda yadda. I confirm. The TV (about 20 seconds later) completes sign in. This entire process took about 4 minutes.

And like… let’s unpack this. I’m a developer in this space, I know how to build this shit. Let us count the things that make me go “what the fuck” in no particular order:

• Why does the YouTube app have the ability to confirm sign ins, but not handle them?
• Why does the YouTube app not simply open from the QR code on the TV screen, and prompt for the TV to have access to my account?
• Why do I need to sign in to my Google account, in Safari, to then open a Google App, YouTube, to confirm my sign in to the browser, to complete an authorization for another app on another device?
• Why did the YouTube app even lose my sign-in in the first place? This is an often used device, there’s no way in the world it timed out. And it lost my wife’s too.

Insurance

Let’s move on. I needed to tweak my auto coverage. I logged into an insurance company I won’t share for obvious reasons. Or should I say: I TRIED to.

I browse to insurancecompany.com. There is a Log In link in the upper right, and I click it. It opens a drawer from the top bar within which rests a login form… which then immediately redirects the whole page to a bespoke login page. Okay. Odd. I open the password manager, I insert the credentials. I click login, and…

We’re sorry, but we were unable to process your request. Please try again later.

What does THAT mean!?

Sidebar to this, I have so many goddamn nits to pick about error handling being like a Warhammer-esque completely lost technology. I get that it’s a pain in the ass, believe me, I have written the code to do it, and testing it sucks to do, and it’s generally pretty thankless work. But I am so, utterly, at-a-loss for words SICK AND TIRED of software breaking and having nothing to show me but an “Oopsie doopies, something did a fucky wucky!” with a goddamn sad face emoji.

At least this one skipped the sad face emoji.

I do not need an overly personal apology, you loonies. I need a REASON. What happened!? Were you unable to reach the server? Is the server down? Is my password wrong? Is my account named something different? Did you change how I have to sign in and I missed the email because it’s buried with 600 other emails you’ve sent me that aren’t my bill and aren’t important and are the reason my spam filter blocks your domain now?! GUESS if you have to.

An aside rant…

Message to my fellow web developers: Please stop fucking with my password manager. I have seen so many times lately websites that simply REFUSE to attempt a login until they read keystrokes in the fields, despite the fields being full of text! This is not your job. I do not want to have to convince your fucking JavaScript that there is something in the fields when freaking field.val().length > 0 will manage that PERFECTLY.

Returning to our usual programming…

Relevant to the above, I look at my password, I delete the last letter of my email and retype it, and delete the last letter of my password and retype it. This works more often than you would think. Nothing. I realize my adblocker has killed about 110 connections at this point that this, I can’t stress enough, LOGIN PAGE apparently had on it. I disable my ad-blocker, I refresh, I re-insert credentials. Nothing but more “sowwy” error message.

I bitch at a buddy. He suggests using Incognito. I am skeptical but I need to get this shit done, so I try. And to my surprise, it works! Thankfully said friend is a veteran of garbage websites. Why does this work? I haven’t the slightest idea, but interestingly the incognito window didn’t redirect me from the home page, it simply let me insert my credentials into the form that loaded like 5 paragraphs ago before I was whisked away to an indentical and apparently non-functional one to bang my head on for 10 minutes.

Now it’s time for the MFA. A text message. Dear reader, would you be surprised that it didn’t arrive? If you are, I envy your optimism. It didn’t. Now, this kind of echoes what’s probably my chief complaint with BitWarden, which is the god awful login, session management, etc. but that is a rant for another day. And, frankly, they’re a open source project, they don’t get paid to work on their thing, and I have infinitely more patience for volunteers doing important work like that than I do for multi-billion dollar firms that can’t send TEXT MESSAGES. All of that to say: BitWarden likes to say it sent a code to you, when it didn’t, and asking for another will fix that issue 99% of the time. So I ask for another.

Still no text. I am textless. I am bereft of verification codes, even now, hours after this happened. No clue where they went!

I use email instead. Email arrives, copy code in, boom, we’re good. I make my policy change, which takes like 30 seconds, as opposed to the login which easily ate about 10 minutes.

I just. How.

I build this stuff. I know how hard it is, and the acronym “MSAL” is enough to send me into Vietnam-esque flashbacks because, Lord Omnissiah be praised, Microsoft cannot make a good framework to save their lives. But I also know it doesn’t have to be this bad. Signing in should be boring. Predictable. Invisible. If your login flow feels like a boss fight, you’ve already lost. For us password manager users, this should be an utterly brain-dead step: open page, insert credentials, click Login. Why so many websites feel the need to fuck with us is a mystery for the ages.

To the brave souls who just wanted to check their email, tweak their insurance, or watch a video without being spiritually dismantled by a login screen: I see you. May your sessions persist, your codes arrive, and your password managers never be thwarted by rogue JavaScript.

Till next.

So, I grabbed a set of these off Mercari. The seller helpfully (and quite honestly) let me know they had aged even further since he had listed them for sale, letting me know that the speaker units within the satelites had now fully deteriorated and they were effectively mute. That said, I had specifically known this was likely, and reassured him that I knew this and my plan was to fix them.

They arrived and taking apart the first (easier) satelite, the left one that has no controls in it; yes indeed, the speakers were gone. I do mean gone too, the paper backing had essentially vanished, leaving the driver just sort of hanging in mid-air. In fact when I opened the box and pulled them out, the magnetic backer of the driver just thudded out onto the bench. Woops!

But yeah with nothing holding that in place, this speakers got nothing more to offer, sadly. Some quick research revealed I needed 40mm 4ohm 5-watt speakers, which you can slam into your online store of choice and get probably a bunch of different results. That said, I am not a patient lady, so I went to the Prime gods and put down an order for these speakers here, which funnily enough are actually called out in the description as Satellite Creature replacements.

I’d give them more credit for this but they also indicated the connectivity tech as Bluetooth and… no.

So, slammed down an order for those and two short days later, fired up a soldering iron. For the left satelite I did a basic swap, including new wiring what with the old ones being wrapped in some kind of foam. Nothing overly complicated here, the speaker terminals should have + and - labeled, as does the PCB for the speaker on the bottom. Arrange accordingly and solder.

Then you reassemble the whole units. This is the fiddliest part by far as you kind of need three hands to do it properly, but once things are where they belong, it all snaps together really well. For my own peace of mind, I did glue the speakers to the plastic frame that fits inside against the outer one before installing, though since the original backers fit well against them, this was probably overkill. Once that’s done you can re-insert the frame in the speaker body, and click the chrome part on the front, which doubles as a retainer for the speaker and it’s frame within. Then you screw in that offset bit and you’re good.

The only issue I had was due to the placement of that capacitor there, reassembly was a bit stiff. I could’ve unglued the speaker and rotated the contacts away from it to address this, but it went together without damaging anything and works fine, so I didn’t bother.

Last step was to connect everything. This was clearly a well loved set of speakers, and by that I mean the cables were… pretty fuckin filthy. That said before I went to that trouble I wanted to make sure they would work, so we plug in everything (including the original power supply!) and I went with my Mac, since I know and trust Apple’s integrated headphone jacks and their associated drivers to be good, and fired it up.

And there we go! I’m not certain why it is these go bad so often… it’s sad to be honest, because I have a different set of speakers, a Creative i-Trigue, from the same era and they’ve aged incredibly gracefully compared to all three sets of Creature’s I’ve had apart now. Some light research suggests it’s mostly an issue of build material quality, which is unfortunate. The i-Trigues weren’t that much more expensive but JBL really cheaped out on them.

In any case, I’ve got them now, and I’m happy. Till next!

Along the way I’ll be explaining why what it does is so great, why the new version fails on it’s face to accomplish the same thing, and at the end I’ll go find out if you can actually buy the old (working) version or not. I hope for your sake you can.

Our Subject - Synergy

Synergy is an app I bought one eternity ago, genuinely I don’t remember when, I want to say when I was at my previous job and working a stint of needing my Windows laptop an unfortunate amount of the time, probably ballpark 2018. It does exactly what it says on the tin; it lets you use one mouse/keyboard combo to control multiple computers.

Protip: Always use the Mac peripherals. Windows seems to be better about letting accessibility features control the mouse more smoothly than Mac does, and I don’t think that’s anything Synergy’s devs are doing wrong, I think that’s just system architecture.</digression>

It works in the following way: You have a server machine which accepts connections and has the actual keyboard and mouse you’d like to use, and you have clients which connect to it. Your server then has a UI you can use to arrange machines much like one would in the Displays settings for Macs and PCs. You move your mouse to the edge of the screen and viola; your mouse moves to the other machine and your keyboard input now goes to that other machine instead of the server. Move it back, it moves back. Very intuitive, very good, and Synergy 1 accomplishes this quite handily.

It’s a bit old school relying on IP addresses in your local network, but for those of us who came from the halcyon days of the early Internet, where networking computers in your own home with name resolution was a fantasy at best, this is a pretty standard affair, and one easily addressed with DHCP reservations.

It even lists your IP address there, in the UI, which you can then type into the prospective client and get hooked up so easily.

So How Did They Ruin It?

So, like I said I used this for a good spell in 2018-2019, then ended up not really needing it for awhile and fell off. However eventually, I had a need for a similar application, did a similar search, then had one of those “Didn’t I buy this already?” kind of moments and a quick password reset later, I was back in. But now, it was Synergy 3! By virtue of having purchased Synergy 1 way back, I earned a free trial of Synergy 3. Or maybe it was just a free trial, I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. I downloaded, I used. It was largely the same, except now the interface was Modern™. Which is to say, big blocks of color and I’m 99% sure written in JavaScript.

Gone now are IP addresses too, replaced with “detection.” I haven’t cared enough to Wireshark this to figure out if it’s phoning home and looking for other computers that have phoned home from the same account and location, or just port-scanning your network, but in any case, it seemed to work. I installed the app on both my Mac and PC, they found each other, I picked which one would be the server, and all was well.

… for awhile.

However in short order I was having issues. Shock of shocks, the “auto detection” didn’t work terribly well. I struggle to think of an auto-detection that isn’t Apple-made that works well, but nevertheless, it didn’t. I found myself repeatedly restarting it on both machines trying to no avail to get them to see one another. Various online resources recommend restarting your WiFi to address this, but I’m not fucking doing that, because I shouldn’t have to. End of story.

Paradoxically, they have settings for picking your network device but not just connecting via IP address. It’s such an odd mix of technical and non-technical and I can’t parse why on Earth it was done this way.

Then I got this:

I put in my serial in the odd event that the old one would work, or perhaps get me a discount, but to no avail. However what it did tell me was that I could still download and use Synergy 1.

Aside: I have no clue what happened to Synergy 2. Maybe I only get links to download Synergy 1 because I bought it?

So I logged into my account on their website, navigated past the download page that advertises Synergy 3 to the “Other versions” page, found Synergy 1 and selected it, scrolled a second time past an advertisement for Synergy 3, downloaded it, and activated it. And friends, let me tell you: This is marvelous. Not only do we get dark mode on the Mac by default, because this app was presumably built with an older version of Cocoa which Apple reskins behind the scenes, but it’s SO. MUCH. FASTER. Not only is the software itself faster, but the experience of using it is too. Instead of massive buttons, bars and blocks that go nowhere, we get regular sized buttons, with input fields that immediately register as input fields. And, best of all, no fucking autodetection that breaks or requires troubleshooting. Sure, sometimes I have to update IP addresses, but that’s a nothing task. It takes seconds and then the service is off to the races.

So, thank you Synergy for locking my license to the old version of the software. You know, the one that works. I’m a happy Synergy 1 user and I will stay that way as long as is possible to do so.

Ending on a High Note

I did promise I’d check if you can buy Synergy 1, and the answer is no but yes. Your purchase of Synergy 3 includes access to Synergy 1, which while hella convenient given Synergy 3 doesn’t work, does also feel like a tacit admission that they know that it doesn’t work and therefore are still keeping the old version up and accessible. It also begs even more questions as to what happened to Synergy 2, which increasingly feels like that weird uncle nobody in the family talks about.

Anyway, you can buy it here for $30 if you’re so inclined. I do reccomend it, it has no issues at all on Windows 11 and the newest MacOS. And who knows, maybe someday they’ll come out with Synergy 4, and bring back just using bloody IP addresses to augment their not-auto-non-detection.

That’s all for now, till next!

Today my friend’s Steam Deck hits the Black Workmat of Doom™, which to be clear is legally distinct from the Workbench of Doom™. They’re both full of doom, but this one is smaller, and more suitable for smaller items.

And small this is, though large-ish by mobile gaming standards? This is the first generation Steam Deck from Valve. This thing kicked off a well documented surge of tiny computers stuffed into large gamepads that can actually run games pretty well, though IMO the Deck is still the best, mostly hands down to Steam OS and of course the amazing work Valve has done on the Proton tech under the hood that lets Steam OS, which if you didn’t know, is actually linux, to run games so well.

But anyway, this isn’t a history lesson. My buddy got some sticky mess on his face buttons, and that’s no good. Let’s go dig it out.

The Procedure

First and most obviously, shut this boy down. We don’t want this coming back up while we have it apart, and there’s two ways to do this: You have the option to use what Valve calls Battery Storage Mode which will prevent the unit from starting without being plugged into a charger. That said, I’m old school, so I just unplug the cells. To each their own.

Start with the eight screws on the back plate, 4 on top, 4 on bottom. Once that’s done, get a spudger or other blunt instrument like a butter knife, and lever gently on the triggers. The clips holding it together still are located on the grips, which makes good sense, and in my experience are pretty durable, but as always, go slow, and go easy.

Once it’s open you’ll see something like the above: this heat sheild sits between the case and the power distribution hardware, so get that off with a few more screws. It won’t lift free initially as there’s some thermal paste pads between some of those parts, so just give it a little juice and it’ll pop off.

Under there you’ll find this plug, this one’s quite stiff but there’s no clip or trick here: just gingerly tug towards the battery itself, and it’ll pop out. The deck is now without power. Groovy.

After that we’re in standard exploratory surgery mode: start taking screws out and see what comes out. The joystick module attaches with 3 screws and one of the ribbon cables you see there. All these ribbon cables come apart by lifting a small lever on the end of the cable, and then wiggling the ribbon free. Get in the habit of using tweezers to handle these, at all times, whenever possible because any oil from your hands can sit on the tiny contact surfaces in these, and cause strange glitches in your controls.

At the point taken above, I had removed the ribbons (most of them anyway) and the trigger still wouldn’t move, and I figured there had to be a screw underneath the trigger as well. This part kind of sucked: I managed to not break it but I had to pull it apart pretty hard to remove it. That said, there’s a hinge in there, obviously, and that’s all that’s holding the trigger on. Gently but firmly pry the hinge apart. Once you have one out of it’s little nub, the other will follow and you’ll get it off.

Once that last screw is loose, you can lift off the daughter board for this side. This will show you the bumper assembly and the one screw that holds it directly to the back. The black and white conductor there is the connector for the haptic motor on this side. The one in my buddy’s here was weirdly well connected, I never managed to remove it, but since it’s just regular wires and not a ribbon, it’s also much more pliable so I decided it was smarter to just let it be, and turn the daughter board to the side. Didn’t even make a difference but as always, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Finally, remove the bumper assembly which also includes, on it’s reverse, the face-button contact surfaces. Again, watch your ribbons here, there’s a lot around this area and you want to make sure you get em all out in-tact, and all back together before you’re done.

Now it’s more or less the standard script for anything electronic you’re gonna clean: IPA and Q-tips come out. The buttons are all keyed so they really don’t fit into one another’s openings unless you break something. Depending how sticky they are, you might need to give em some help out of the sockets, but in any case, pop em all out.

Dip a Q-tip in your IPA, and make little circles around the openings in the face case, especially above the little ridges, and don’t be afraid to be generous with the IPA. It won’t hurt the case and you don’t wanna do this twice. Then, hold the face buttons between a couple fingers, and repeat the procedure, running the Q-tip around the outside edge of the face button.

Now, take a break. You want these good and dry before you assemble. I personally re-did my nails, which took about 15 minutes, hehe.

Now, reverse all these steps. Go slow: make sure every cable gets back in, everything is reattached. You don’t want extra screws. And of course, once you have it back together, fire it up and use the built-in control pad test application to run through everything and make sure you got it all plugged back in.

There you go!

So a ways back we got one of these Chefman 6.3 qt air fryers from my aunt. We love the thing, it’s great to use and does a great job cooking food, apart from one massive, massive flaw: this thing’s buzzer is LOUD. Like genuinely the loudest buzzer I have ever heard in a kitchen countertop appliance, to such a degree where it would actually hurt our ears to use the thing.

Now I’ve resolved a problem like this before, with our electric fireplace, which had a remote to turn things on and off, and also the same exact kind of buzzer (though honestly even that one wasn’t this fucking loud) but the point is: I knew what to look for. And finally it irritated me enough that the thing ended up on the Workbench of Doom™.

The Procedure

Worth noting up top: I took the bottom of the unit, the door, the fan, and a whole bunch of things off in the pursuit of doing this and I just didn’t need to do any of that, in fact the top comes off basically by itself. Learn from my mistakes.

First thing is to remove the top. This is held in with tension clips, so take a spudger (or if you don’t have one and don’t mind potentially damaging the finish, a screwdriver will work fine) and lever the top of it up. The tabs are at roughly 1/4 in from each corner, as you can see in the photo. Also be aware that the top dial/button combo may fly off, which mine did but I found it so all was well.

Shockingly, none of these broke.

Once you have that little board unplugged and the top removed, turn the unit round to the back and gently lever up on the little air exhaust that’s back there. It too is just held in with a couple clips, and it pops out pretty easily.

You’ll then need to use your spudger and lever up on the piece of trim that goes around the top edge, and pop that loose too. I actually forgot to get a picture of it but you get the idea from here I suspect. Then, lastly, use the same procedure to gently pry out the front LED display. This is also the brain-box for the unit, and nothing will work without it, so keep it handy for testing later on.

Now, this part is terrible and shut me down for about 20 minutes, until I had disassembled the entire bottom half of the case (don’t do this, you don’t need to at all) looking for screws on the underside that were holding the top on. There are none. In fact, there are four screws holding the top of the case on, one in each of those incredibly deep holes. I had to find my tiny phillips with a notably long shank that could reach the things to get these out, and honestly, don’t even try and get the screws out when you’re done. Just lift off and continue.

At last we arrive at the power distributon board. You don’t need to be too gentle here, as these are large through-hole components, most of which are relays switching mains current to make the fan, heating element, etc. work. There aren’t any massive capacitors here like you might get in a larger piece of equipment, but as always, short them out with a screwdriver before you go digging around. I gingerly unscrewed the two screws that held it to the case, then tapped each cap with a screwdriver. Didn’t even get a spark but you know, no such thing as too careful, a sizable capacitor can give you a nice zing.

Ask me how I know.

Anyway within that red circle is the little screamy bastard. Bit of desoldering wick to take up the solder holding it on and you have it out, and in your little hand. Now, my previous projects with these were strictly removals: I desoldered it and threw it in the trash. However given that this is an appliance, I did want some audio feedback to actions, I just didn’t want it to deafen me, so I had to figure out how to calm it down.

Now, I assumed that a resistor would be the way to go here, but obviously to figure what size, I needed to know what voltage this was running at. I used my bench power supply to hit it with a variety of voltages, starting at 5 volts and ending at 24. However, all it would do is crackle… at which point I realized, oh alright, so this isn’t being turned on and off, this is being pulsed, probably with a triac or similar device. That might be trickier.

However, I realized through testing it afterwards (thinking I’d grilled it to death already) that in fact, applying 24 volts DC had… well, probably damaged it, hopefully not completely? So I re-attached and… it was much, much quieter. Again I fully acknowledge this is likely due to damage, but look, a fix is a fix.

The wife wanted it a little quieter though, so I desoldered it once more, and again gave it 24 volts DC. This is more an art than a science at this point, but I think I gave it another 7 seconds or so before soldering it back to the power supply board. It was now not only not grating, but quite pleasant, in fact. The beep was clearer, even, and no longer so shrill.

So, great sucksess. Would do again, wish I would’ve done it sooner to be honest. Got the entire unit back together with only 3 leftover screws, and it works perfectly.

Here I’d like to go more into detail about what this is, what my plans for it are, and why I’m undertaking a new “online identity” of sorts.

Without getting too into my previous life, internet and otherwise, the short version is I had my egg crack moment as the kids like to say not too awfully long ago, and for the uninitated, that’s when a trans-person realizes they are trans. I’m writing to you now still very much in man-mode, as they say, and I’m laying out the plans for the route forward to becoming the woman I now realize I very much want to be.

I’m also building this website on a fresh installation of Kubuntu linux, which to be honest, the last time I used this was… good grief, probably college? Which at this point is a solid decade in the rear view mirror. Christ.

Anyway…

So yes, all in all nothing to special over here, just you’re standard edgy edge-boy of the early 2000’s who after years of heavy work on himself as discovered that himself is actually a herself, and now sets about sorting that out far too late, and just in time for an incoming administration that will almost certainly be putting in the overtime to make sure I regret it. And alongside that, let’s set about transition with a side of content creation, because that’s gone so well for everyone else who’s done it.

Well, if my friends will tell you anything about me quite reliably, it’s that I don’t do anything the fucking easy way so why should this be any different.

But along with coming out of the closet with regard to being queer, I’ve also decided to bring my creative sides out of it as well, and start giving those a more prominent place in my online life. To that end, that statement you read on the way in here (Maybe, if not, it’s on the home page). To wit:

Tech projects, notes, random screwing around with a side of gender discovery journey.

And what does that expand into? Well, I’ve been told I do interesting things (blatant lies I assure you) and I plan to share them here, and probably elsewhere too. I’ve been told video is the go-to thing but to be honest, I find this somewhat doubtful. I don’t think I’ve ever googled for a technical problem I’m experiencing and been excited by the notion that the answer lies in a video and not in a written word. So, while making videos either for YouTube or even TikTok isn’t necessarily not on my radar, at the very least, it isn’t yet what with… well. Not being myself just yet. But that’s a situation that has a built in expiration date and I plan to make it expire post-haste, and then I don’t have the excuse anymore. So look forward to that.

And with that, I guess that’s day one of the new site? Cool. See y’all around.

I’ll be posting to BlueSky most regularly, and also I’ll be getting an email list going soon. Check back as I get all that up and running. <3