I get very little time to game these days, which has the benefit that I have saves usually spaced no more than about an hour apart. Sometimes a couple of hours on the weekends. There were a couple of points in HL1 where I had to go back to a previous save because I was in a bad situation, I'm playing on PC so there was no real limit on the number of saves I can keep.

I've not started HL2 yet (this time around, and it's been 20 something years since I last played it) so I can't remember what that was like.

I'm going to finish Blueshift, then go on to HL2, but I'd really like some texture and quality updates; HL2 is a real downgrade from Black Mesa. I tried it in VR but was feeling nauseous within a few minutes.

All of this is to lead up to Alyx on my Steam Frame which is just sitting there waiting until I replay these so I can remember what happened.

> Half Life 2 felt like it almost made fun of me at times for building that hoarding mentality, always dumping health and ammo on me when I had already been preserving it as much as possible right before. Meanwhile the few things I would run out of it would never give any more of for entire sections

I'll bear this in mind. I think HL1 was a little too obvious; you suddenly get a cache of rocket ammo, you know what's coming.

The plastic is purely for protection and rigidity, the "label" is the actual functional part of the disc.

For some odd reason, the specific game that comes to mind for this was Horizon:Zero Dawn PS4/5.

Conversely, I'm playing Half-Life:Blueshift right now, and I didn't try to save anything, now I've hit a couple of points where I'm out of ammo or health and can't progress without loading an older save.

I had one fun experience in Black Mesa (HL fan-remake) where I was knocked off of the edge of a "cliff" by a large enemy (no spoilers) and it auto-saved mid-air, so it reloaded me falling forever >_<.

I was blocking the telemetry in DNS previously, and my TVs were already rooted but weren't doing much with it. Now I've got a nice clean home replacement and all of the telemetry gone.

It was recently fully clogged (Epson EcoTank) and I managed to get it back to fully printing after about 10 rounds of head cleaning, so it's not a huge deal, but how many home printers are really printing regularly these days.

Ours gets used maybe once per quarter, and I actively encourage the kids to just photocopy, in colour, random stuff whenever they want to be sure it doesn't just clog up.

shrug

I think they're just absolutely inept and should never be trusted with anything security related as an organisation if this is a mistake they could make.

Thankfully, they clarified they're in Europe, so GDPR prevents them from ignoring known leaked credentials, lest they have that to deal with, on top of the revenue loss they'll make when all of their customers eventually find out: "they ran leaked credentials knowing our data was at risk, but decided to suck it and see".

I was also running Projectivy [sic] Launcher, but it launched a minute after the stick started which wasn't a great UX so I ended up disabling it because it annoyed the family.

Either way, I'm not worried about recovering it now; it would have been nice to use it for a few thing, but when it stopped working I just went out and bought a new TV.

It's much harder to switch out the launcher on a FireStick, but I did manage it briefly before it started boot looping right around 1yr of ownership, so it's e-waste now.

I've been looking at upgrading to 10Gb myself, currently my top contenders are Mikrotik and Ubiquiti.

Mikrotik is much more reasonably priced, but I already have mostly Ubiquiti equipment so I'd probably spend the extra to keep the single-pane-of-glass for maintenance, something simple like the Flex XG / Flex 10 GbE so long as it can run my VLANs.

I should caveat all of my opinion with the fact that I stopped buying this stuff the best part of a decade ago when I decided to go open source, so things may very well have changed in that time.

My experience with a particular manufacturer I won't name, which provides solar panel monitoring and optimisation equipment that I have installed at home suggests otherwise though, it's bad to the point of being unsure if I should laugh or cry.

Anyway, my experience back then was that Netgear and ASUS stuff was generally overpriced, performed reasonably though not amazingly well but had support dropped within 2-3 years and were left with severe vulnerabilities.

D-Link I found lacked features, performed generally weaker than the others, and were lucky to get any updates.

I can't recommend anything these days because I haven't used any in a long while, so my old-timer advice is moot. If I had to pick a branch of off-the-shelf to buy today because I was forced to it'd probably be Ubiquiti.

That said, I'm a dev in the communications-security space, my requirements are a little different to my family and friends, I have static IPs, lots of hosted stuff, and a low risk-appetite for vulns on my network, while a typical household will have a dynamic IP, unlikely to be hosting much if anything and so their attack surface is lower.

What's likely to be my next move personally? I currently run a Protectli box with about 90% more power than I need for my 1Gb network and 1Gb/1Gb WAN, but the NICs (5 Intel NICs) are the limiting factor, I'll likely buy something similar with 10Gb when the time comes and carry on running OPNSense and hopefully Coreboot.

I also have a bunch of EdgeMAX because I use the L3 features, they were more expensive, and that range is sadly now discontinued, but the Unifi equipment have all been workhorses, and the only think I've ever had fail in the past decade was an EdgeRouter Lite, the power circuitry failed after some dodgy mains voltage issues in my previous home.

Uniquiti APs are fine, they've been reliable for me; I have one AP that's nearly a decade old and still going strong, and I just swap them out or extend coverage when a new generation comes along, and move the older ones to where stronger/newer wifi isn't needed. If I wasn't in the Unifi ecosystem which keeps my life simple, I'd probably look at Ruckus or maybe see whether Mikrotik have anything compelling yet.

As it stands; the Unifi Server I'm self-hosting keeps them up-to-date and optimised, so I just plug in an AP, adopt it and forget about it, it gets configured automatically and away we go; that's about the amount of involvement I want these days.

Coincidentally, I need an extra AP for my Steam Frame to use it away from the dongle in an area where I currently don't have good WiFi coverage, so I'm going to pick one (probably a 7-Pro or 7-Pro-XG) up and just plug it in to an ethernet port in the room in question, wait a couple of minutes and be ready to roll.

I wouldn't buy Netgear, Asus, D-Link again. My ISP gave me Eero and I've never connected it, far too much Amazon crap going on there (but I have to keep it if I want the ISP to provide support).

Gl.iNet has been OK for the price but re-flash it with vanilla OpenWRT because their OS has some dubious phone home stuff (or did last time I looked at it).

Honestly, in terms of routers, I'm never likely to use something off-the-shelf again a decent box with Intel NICs that can run OPNSense and preferably run Coreboot (or similar). If I did go with something COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf), I'd look at Mikrotik.

I'm not a massive fan of Ubiquiti but I have their APs and I've had a bunch of their EdgeMAX switches (sadly discontinued when some of their best devs left), and their APs have been solid for me for the best part of a decade.

The advantage of using dedicated components is that each can be chosen according to your requirements.

I know people have limited budgets, but having seen the code that sits on these devices and how poor quality and easily exploited it is, time and time again, I'll never buy TP-Link (amongst others) again.

For a while I collected a graveyard of routers that had been abandoned by the manufacturers (and contained serious vulnerabilities), with the intention of writing them all up one day; next thing you know I have two children rapidly reaching double-digit ages, and much better things to do with my life than write about how shitty the code is on actual products we buy every day.

I switched, about 7-8 years ago to a Protectli box running Coreboot and OPNSense and haven't looked back; I use Ubiquiti APs and switches. I'm not saying they're the best, but anything used in corporate/enterprise is going to have better support (if not better code quality).

The great thing about Ubiquiti APs for me is that each new WiFi generation (or two) I can just buy a few more, snap the existing APs off of the various ceilings they're attached to, snap on the new ones, adopt them, and away we go.

My home is 1930s, it's fuse, in the black Bakelite housing typical of the era was insufficient and we were missing a incoming breaker to/from grid, those were updated. Our meter is much more recent, though still dated; allegedly it would have worked but it wasn't a smart meter, which we wanted so we had that updated.

I've also heard through my many hours of watching Solar videos on YT before our install that some breakers, RCDs(?), RCBOs(?), whichever it is, aren't always suitable for bidirectional current flow, so that's a possible issue too.

All of that is aside the "suicide cord" danger of the old generator method, but that's gone now with modern tech, the output is cut before you can get your hands on the contacts on the end of a plug.

It's just been legalised here in the UK, and I think it will help people with their bills, but the key is to keep installation costs down; if it's DIY you can look at a decent ROI time, but with the cost of trades-people these days, if you have to call out a sparky to inspect before you plug it in, you've added potentially years to your payback period.

At ~800W, I think on the whole we'll be fine; the equipment in our homes has got much more efficient over the years, and our homes were mostly built for times where we were using higher powered devices. If you can draw over a kW to power an electric heater or kettle, I don't see why feeding a mere 800W back in would be a huge risk.

Disclaimer: I'm not an Electrician, but I do have a degree in Electronic Engineering.