Death of an Xbox

Sounds dramatic and what I really mean is I am cancelling my Game Pass subscription.

I bought the Xbox Series X 1TB a couple of years ago and when kids came to visit it worked perfectly especially the Game Pass subscription to get a multitude of games.

The kids have now grown up and I realised that Microsoft was happily taking that monthly fee and I wasn't using the service. Of course I only noticed because they did it again, so cancelling still gives me access for another month.

I immediately downloaded a load of Game Pass games as part of its swan song.

• Dome Keeper
• Death Stranding
• Stardew Valley
• Final Fantasy I, II, III, IV, V, VI

I am currently addicted to Dome Keeper (not an exaggeration, sadly).

I died in 5 seconds of starting Death Stranding! Not hyperbole, the character you control does not stop walking and I walked straight off a cliff while trying to look around. To be fair your character is immortal, but still... Continued playing for about an hour and got very bored.

Final Fantasy... Having never owning a Playstation and everyone I knew being Sega/Nintendo and Microsofties I thought I was missing out. No, FF is not for me. Tried each one in turn and got too bored too quickly.

Now Stardew Valley. Booted it up and it had a cute spider to the right of the Title. Then as the screens progressed the spider slowly descended in time with the game. At the start screen it was perfectly positioned to not block the text and was just moving a little. Then the game started and the spider left my TV and dropped to the FLOOR!!!!

FYI there is NO spider in the loading screens of Stardew Valley, except in my living room!!

Then I got very very bored trying to get anything done in the game.

Maybe I am old or I have a short attention span, cos I then downloaded Doom Eternal and Doom Darkages. Both were unplayable and I used to love Doom 1, 2, 3 and Quake I, II

But at least I found CEX will more pay cash for the Xbox (boxed) than I paid for it second hand! Not a huge amount, 60 quid, but if I take store credit then it is over 100 squids!

Still have a Playstation 5 (not sure how that happened)

3D Printing storm

I have been printing like crazy recently.

1. Giant number for my gate, to avoid delivery persons from failing to find the house. They had complained. I just used Blender's text and extruded it with a couple of counter sunk screw holes.
2. Downloaded a cable clip specifically for the Ender2 V3. It holds the boden tube to the cable array and keeps everything neat. It was flopping and getting dangerously close to catching on something. You are supposed to use cable ties and cut them each time you need access.
3. A toothpaste holder to track if I have done my teeth in the morning and evening. Also has a toothbrush head holder as I cannot charge my toothbrush in the bathroom and separating the head was always a worry. Why do I need to track brushing my teeth? The medications I am on are confusingly at different times. So, I might do everything other than brush my teeth and then come back unsure if I had or not :D

I like the way all three are me-problems :D

HR cracked

HR sent me an email with a password protected PDF attached with the instructions to use my DOB DDMMYYYY as the password...

and it didn't work :(

I could have just emailed back ... but ... it was more fun to use AI to craft a bash script that used pdfinfo to brute force the password!!

Did it work !!?

NO!

Well, it might have but it was insanely slow, so I switched to John-The-Ripper, which feels like one of oldest bits of software out there.

I did have a lot of faffing about getting the right libraries installed to run the pdf2john.py script. But once that had extracted the hash from my PDF john was off and running.

Eventually it got 96% after 3 hours and found the password!

It was my DOB with some wonky values. Something I had anticipated and I had tried each digit in the password string off by one. The actual value had multiple values wrong and not off by one.