And we’ve kept it up! It’s been really amazing.. There are four of us that manage to meet daily (DAILY) for this exercise, and one other individual that will join in but as he’s a commercial driver, doesn’t join in on the conversation, and instead uses it as a sort of live podcast to listen. Plus a few other people have popped in periodically, most of whom attend Rez.Church, my church. We started by meeting in a WhatsApp call every morning, which was rough at first, but quickly smoothed out into a nice routine.
Around the end of May we were inspired to try capturing and uploading our daily conversations to YouTube. Again, this was a bit of a rough start just because me getting the tech worked out on my end (I was as far as I know the only one in the group who knew how to live-stream at that point). But we got that worked out and like the morning meeting itself, I found a nice rhythm and routine.
Then, just recently Damian got the inspiration to try and expand, to reach more people. This involves a lot more than just our morning Bible Study. So he came up with the Remain Community, built out of a social media engine he found called Mighty Networks. So far we’ve been meeting there for about a week, and have transitioned our video calls from WhatsApp to Zoom. Not my first pick, but Mighty Networks DOES have options for offering other video conferencing platforms as well. We were excited to find that a WhatsApp call could be linked to ahead of time. However we decided that a few weeks to burn-in Zoom would be prudent, just so we wouldn’t jerk our 5-6 regulars around too much too fast.
I guess what’s been a little confusing to me and something I need to codify in my own space is – Remain.Community encapsulates a group of small groups. The idea being any large number of people could join this community and subsequently join their own space which would serve to facilitate online meetings with others of similar bents. Essentially, it would do what Rez’s Church Center subscription does, but also offer everything that something like Facebook would have – walls, chatrooms, event calendars.. And it is FAIRLY clean and customizable.
Granted, I find it a little redundant at this point, but since we’ve shifted away from WhatsApp to Mighty Networks, it’s not been too big of a leap in my thinking. Yeah, it requires its members sign up with a site they know nothing about, but since we can gate keep who comes in and what they can access, it is reminiscent of something like Discord. I initially would have preferred a platform like Discord, but I also know Discord has a directory of ‘other popular groups you can join’ and most of those do not foster a clean, Godlike community and would be completely available and advertised without restriction to our membership. NOT something I want to ignore.
Additionally, yesterday and today we live-streamed to YouTube rather than just recording and posting later as we’ve been doing since May! Saves on the processing time and lets us work on the nicer details. Plus Damian, being a complete API programming nerd, decided to start writing automated scripts on Heroku to set up future livestreams combined with his current, favorite obsession, ChatGPT, to generate summaries and things for said livestreams. Combining all these resources has the potential of being (and is proving itself to be) a giant time-saver overall. I just have to learn to let go a little, since I’m a bit resistant to offloading work that would give me a sense of worth.
Anyway, writing all this out has been nice. Kinda just had to get it down into text form.
]]>I have a lifetime subscription to Plex. I’ve had it for at least eight years. It’s cool! It lets me watch IPTV (built-in) and even has the option to connect to digital tuner+antenna combos on my network. I mean, I saw this “HDHomeRun” device I could buy on Amazon a couple of years ago and got curious, but not enough to buy one. Especially since there were the usual statements of, “Oh and you’ll need a separate subscription to some electronic TV guide for $5-$25 a year or something, blah blah blah.”
HOWEVER, the tax return paid out well this year, so I decided to spring for one last week. A HDHomeRun DUO and a $25 antenna to go with it. It arrived last night, and I got to start playing around. TURNS OUT, it has its caveats, but it isn’t so locked down that I can’t use it for free (ignoring 1) the cost of buying it in the first place and 2) my Plex Pass, which I would say has all but paid for itself by now).
Now, first off, I don’t have cable TV. I have cable internet, but I don’t want to opt into Comcast’s lineup of 1000-9000 channels that I’ll never watch because I have Plex and all the stuff I like already physically and digitally owned. The only thing I have as far as live, over-the-air TV are 18 local channels, 12 of which are accounted for on any sort of TV Guide, electronic or otherwise.
The setup of the HDHomeRun was pretty straightforward. Ethernet to connect it to my network, RG6 and USB to connect and power the antenna. Powered it on and after a minute or so I was able to connect Plex via their pretty decent instructions. At first glance, though, the HDHomeRun website was threatening to charge me directly for recording shows. I wasn’t happy to see it, but I also wanted to just play, so I moved forward with the setup.
Turns out, if you’re running on Plex, and have the Plex Pass subscription, recording is handled directly within Plex. No need for the HDHomeRun subscription or whatever.
However, a few problems arose during setup:
Problem #1: The initial channel scan only found 3 channels, 1 with 3 sub-bands, so 5 total. I didn’t initially understand this, selected what I THOUGHT were channel selections to this list of checkboxes (EPG channels isn’t the same as Tuner Channels. No. EPG (Electronic Programming Guide) is a required directory of TV programming, like the good ol’ TV Guide magazine, that must be matched to those channels in Plex. Thankfully Plex provides one built-in, and it’s good enough, but it wasn’t THAT straightforward until I did some research.
On initial matching, I’m trying to watch what I think is PBS Kids and I’m seeing FOX. Very confusing. And only 3 channels? Also confusing.
Then I thought, “maybe this EPG thing isn’t what I think it is. Oh! I bet I know. I’m MATCHING the channels on the left to the ones on the right. Not picking the ones I want to BE in the listing at all.” So FOX became FOX, PBS Kids became PBS Kids, and all was well.
Except 3-5 channels? Then I found the high gain switch on my new antenna. It was tuned to “long-range.” If I switch that to “short-range” what happens? My detected channels jumped to 18. NOW I was able to see the stuff I had hoped to find.
And Plex said, “Click this button to record future episodes.” I did, and SURE ENOUGH!! In a half hour, I had a new MP4 in my library. A day later and I have a good dozen.
Problem #2: This morning I discovered Twitch2Tuner, a self-hosted Plex-discoverable emulator that uses a developer application on Twitch to read your artists, will pipeline the live streams into Plex AND generate a dynamic EPG (known as an XMLTV file) which Plex can read to enable them (remember, the EPG is required for a channel to function. Plex will disable a live TV channel if it isn’t matched with a programming guide).
Well, turns out Plex can’t use the built-in EPG listing based on ZIP code and an external, XMLTV programming guide generated by someone else simultaneously. And if you want to use an external one (like Schedules Direct, for example) for your actual broadcast TV, you usually have to pay for it.
While Schedules Direct might be the best one (or at least the most recommended) for XMLPG generation, I had to do some extensive searching, and found a script by Zap2it that can take its own TV listing or that of good, ol’ TV Guide and parse the channel listings pretty far into the future to generate that mystical XMLTV file directly!! Of course, being 2 years out of date, zap2xml, the script in question, was taken down, but some angel on Archive.org managed to capture it before then, and it still works!!
Yes, you must create an account on either Zap2it or on TV Guide to use it and set your location on either, but once that’s done, the simple execution of the script with your login info will parse all the returned javascript and translate that into a giant 16MB XML file that can be imported directly into Plex via the Tuner/DVR configuration.
(Though now that I look at it, zap2xml has an option to run based on mailing address rather than a login… I may not even need the free account!)
Once that was done and data was downloaded and all my channels were showing proper stuff, I added my second Twitch2Tuner emulator, also listed. It detected that the DVR setting was set to external XMLTV, and now prompted for the location of the Twitch2Tuner XML file. Which was at http://<ip>:22708
!
Aside from a few frustrating connection issues with live-watching remotely, I am very happy at this point!
]]>When I was a child, the snow would fall
all pure and deep and white.
We'd keep it just so, unblemished and bright,
only prints of deer and rabbits and animals so small.
Who knows how far down we would sink?
The knees? The ankles? Just the soles of our feet?
Later our dad would push it up deep
And we'd join in to slide and throw and shriek.
Now I live alone in a suburb of a small city.
The snow never falls so deep.
And before I get up, whether weekday or end
Some guy with his 4-wheeler that's fit with a shovel
will scrape up the sidewalk and put forth a struggle
and rid the street of that nasty, slick trouble
before I can see it like when we were kiddies.
And because I’m actually quite proud of this one, here’s a half-baked proof of authorship:
Text
PGP Signature (Public Key F044CAEF)
I had a thought – how about something a bit new to play with? Let’s see how far it’s come in 3 years since I updated to the twenty-twenty theme back in probably 2019?
Sure ’nuff. It’s not fantastic, but it’s interesting! I may fiddle around with it, too, and instead of a neon-green on black color scheme, tone it down to something a little more palatable.
Oh and those stupid ads (which I have had active for a while (I know, hypocrite that I am)) should be less intrusive and also align better with things if possible. We’ll see!
]]>Given that I like random name generators (even “analog” ones like this) a whole lot, including the stupid back-of-the-kids-menu story creators that ask you for a noun, verb, adjective, another adjective, a second noun, and so forth before spitting out a ridiculous short story about a panda and a pencil that ate cake and knives together under a pink and yellow sunset, I went on a fun search for name generators. Most that you find are pretty lousy, but a few stand out to me:
Thus, in the name of “giving our band a new name”, I present to you, previously known as “Powell Production Studios Studios” a NEW name known as….
Using Donjon’s Markov Generator with the following seed values Pristine Powell Pavel Parked Prince Pickle Pants Play Pleased Poop Phendravi Studios Starry Spicy Slick Snake Shrug Schtik Sigh Stamped Shoopdawoop
, I came up with some pretty nice results.
Someone just put me out of my misery.
]]>Time to play around with the Minecraft splash screen!!
I found this tutorial on PlanetMinecraft.com which is good at detailing the small, finicky nuances of creating a resource pack to change the Minecraft splash screen. HOWEVER, I found that a lot of the details written there were unclear and slightly overkill.
Also reverse-engineering any of the Menu Panoramas from Vanilla Tweaks revealed everything needed for the file structure of the final images.
Plus, as I run mainly on a self-hosted Spigot server, the actual commands to perform perfectly-aligned teleports did not work. So here I will create a simple step-by-step tutorial.
/execute as
commands.pack.png
and pack.mcmeta
properly configured for your version of Minecraft is already known.Minecraft Options
, adjust FOV to 90.Minecraft Options > Video Settings > Details
, set clouds to Off./gamerule doDaylightCycle false
/execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 0 0
/execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 90 0
/execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 180 0
/execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 270 0
/execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 0 -90
/execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 0 90
The rest is easy:
pack.mcmeta pack.png assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_0.png assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_1.png assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_2.png assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_3.png assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_4.png assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_5.png assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_overlay.png
Copy the new resource pack to .minecraft/resourcepacks/
and enable it within the game, then exit to the title screen to observe the new rotating imagery of awesomeness!
Now I live under the umbrella of Xfinity/Comcast where this thing is. I have had many issues, namely with connectivity and a flaky cable, an old Netgear N300 router/modem and a few other things.
I also have been a Plex customer/lifetime Plex Pass holder for over 11 years. But only with the purchase of this NAS have I been able to finally get a server that actually works reliably up and running.
Over the past week, and even sporadically since I’ve imported my media library in January, I’ve had weird connection issues, namely the remote kinds, or the kinds that only crop up when you use the Android app (which forces you to resolve through app.plex.tv). I did manage to get my custom domain’s certificate changed over (the one this very blog uses). Additionally, I managed to get remote access turned on with a bit of port forwarding, and it seemed to work okay for a while. However if I were to stay on Plex’s “Remote” settings tab, I would see the connection very sporadically drop out and then resolve itself a few seconds/minutes later.
All in all, I haven’t noticed enough problems to really start to complain. I’ve been able to watch and listen to my stuff on my phone and laptop, and that’s all I want. New media I can upload via Samba from the laptop, or over the network using the extraordinarily slow Synology file manager via the web interface.
However, today was the clincher.
I have the entire collection of Harry Potter audiobooks, and in lieu of my normal podcasts during the commute to and from work, I’ve wanted to listen to these instead. Additionally, it’s nice to pull them up from anywhere and listen when I’m working on stuff. All of this on the Android.
Yet this week, PlexAmp, the audio-only client for Plex was unable to access my server at all, even on the local network. Additionally, pulling up the audiobooks through the regular Plex app would work, but shortly after the screen blacked out due to lack of visual content, the audio would pause between tracks, forcing me to unlock the phone after which play would resume almost immediately.
I decided to try and “fix” it today. I figured a good first step was to delete all authorized devices from my Plex account. Except, even despite the warnings, I also deleted the Plex Media Server from my account. Mind you, the server itself was okay. Still running, no problems, but it was no longer tied to my account, and I had no way of recovering it because, well, it’s a NAS.
I found a way to reset the login token in Preferences.xml
and did so.
Then I couldn’t even access it via the custom domain connection. UGH..
So I found out how to simulate a connection to the media server as localhost via PuTTY’s SSH tunnels, since an unauthenticated Plex Media Server still lets you access it from localhost. From here, I was able to get to all of my media and, more importantly, the server settings. I was asked to log in, did so, and then received a big orange “Your server is unclaimed. Remote access is not available until you claim the media server.” I found this to mean that I was essentially still locked out, even though I was, in my browser, still logged into Plex.
A click of the claim button sat there for a few minutes, then timed out. At one point, I was able to see a barely distinguishable “Unable to claim server
” error which quickly disappeared.
Over and over I tried this, tweaking settings, removing my custom domain certificate, replacing it, completely uninstalling Plex from the NAS, reinstalling an old version, all to no avail.
All online resources said that there were essentially three things that could be wrong:
Well, the first two were easily tested and already verified. Just plain removing authentication strings from the Preferences.xml
file was what caused this issue in the first place, and I know that port forwarding was working fine on my router, so it had to be something with the DNS.
Besides, whenever I logged into localhost:32400 (via the tunneled SSH remotely), I never saw my profile pictures or anything show up, and all server logs seemed to indicate that during the “claim” process, Plex itself was unable to contact the authentication servers.
I know they were having upstream problems earlier this morning, but https://status.plex.tv indicated that this was working just fine when I checked it. Must be something on my end.
Unfortunately this “DNS Rebind Protection” is not a thing in my N300 router. There is no place I can enter rebind-domain-ok=/plex.direct/
. I have no internally running DNS server; I do everything through Cloudflare and my registrar, and Cloudflare doesn’t offer Rebind Protection as far as I know. At least, not for free.
My router does have a standard “manually configure DNS” settings section, though, and months ago I had configured it to 1.1.1.1/1.0.0.1 (Cloudflare).
Yet this was not working, and doing the same “Claim” process over and over with endless tweaks to Plex and the settings file was getting frustrating.
That’s when I decided to step out just one level and look into the Synology network settings and found… Network > General > Manually Configure DNS Server.
What could it hurt? I’ve been seeing warnings and errors all over Plex for the past 2 hours, and if, for some reason the NAS is contacting Comcast directly even though it’s SUPPOSED to resolve directly with the router and on to Cloudflare, that may still be the issue.
So I switched it to Manual, entered the Cloudflare nameservers there as well, clicked Save, and switched back over to localhost:32400. Back to the General settings tab and lo and behold….it was suddenly Just Working!
I must also note that I’ve been spending the past 3 days adding old DVD rips to my library, none of which had automatically grabbed correct metadata, and which could not be manually matched with an online title for grabbing proper metadata, but instead gave an immediate “nothing found”. All my old media was okay, but none of the new stuff had updated itself like I saw it doing the first few weeks of my running this thing.
Now with the NAS DNS settings properly pointing to Cloudflare, I had no issues matching the new titles.
So if your router doesn’t have access to this DNS Rebind Protection business, but you’re still seeing the “Unable to claim” error and you’ve tried everything, see about manually setting the DNS configuration of your actual server machine; not just hoping it will use the ones in your modem or router like it’s supposed to.
FORCE your stuff to contact Cloudflare or Google or something that won’t screw with you.
]]>However, care must be taken when upgrading to Minecraft 1.16. Lots of posts and videos have been made on how to upgrade a singleplayer world, but even more care must be taken for multiplayer, as you have a lot of other players depending on you, the sysop, to maintain their builds, their contraptions, their stuff.
I myself run a Spigot/Paper server for myself and my inlaws, and the question came up today, “So would you guys like to go explore the new nether biomes on Saturday?”
I had to remind them that, “Hey, Minecraft 1.16 may be out, but Spigot usually takes a few days and Paper is going to be behind THAT, so we may not be able to make this Saturday work. We’re relying on the punctuality of those developers. And even if we do get Spigot or Paper by Saturday, chances are very high that our favorite server plugin, EssentialsX, which gives us the /tpask
, /home
, and /spawn
commands will not have been updated on top of that. I will do everything I can to make sure we can have some fun with new, cool things on Saturday, but I can’t guarantee it.”
As a failsafe my plan is to temporarily run the vanilla Mojang server straight-up. We’ll lose performance, and we’ll definitely lose support for the few plugins I run, namely EssentialsX, Dynmap, and DiscordSRV, but we won’t be dead in the water without those.
But this is multiplayer. I can’t magically wave a hand or flip a switch and suddenly we’re playing on 1.16 and everything works still.
Rather, I will need to spend time taking the server down temporarily (which, with only four of us is not a big deal – sometimes we go days without anybody logging in).
Once the server is down, the plan is to make a full folder backup, archive it away as “Final 1.15.2 Save.zip” or something.
Optionally I can also take the world, world_the_end, and world_nether folders from the save, create a new 1.15.2 instance with my launcher and copy the save file in as its own world. There are some folder finagling steps that must be done, though.
world/
in as .minecraft/saves/worldName
world_nether/DIM-1/
in as .minecraft/saves/worldName/DIM-1
.minecraft/saves/worldName/DIM1
Through some testing, the playerdata/
and level.dat
files in the world_the_end/
and world_nether/
folders seem to be either unused or duplicates.
Loading up the server world in singleplayer 1.15.2 should prove that yes, the server save was backed up correctly.
Once this is confirmed, exit and copy the entire save directory to the 1.16 saves location (if using the Vanilla launcher, this may actually be the same folder and can be loaded with a different version. But if you’re like me and using something like MultiMC, this is an entirely different instance of Minecraft so as to avoid version clashing, and so the save must be copied in full to the v1_16/.minecraft/saves/
folder).
When loading, the warning that “This world was saved in an old version of Minecraft. Upgrading is irreversible. Are you sure!?” Well we’ve already created the backup, so like with every other Minecraft Backup tutorial out there, we just say, “I know what I’m doing! Proceed with upgrade.”
Now the world is loaded in 1.16.x. Open it to a LAN with cheats, fly around, check out key builds and contraptions and confirm that they’re working.
Next travel to the Nether. If you’re like me and have only explored out to, say, (500,500), (-500,-500) that entire area will be deemed nether_wastes, and no ancient debris will be generated down at lower bedrock because …there is nothing to generate. HOWEVER, as I tested and confirmed, generating new chunks by flying past these borders do generate new nether biomes properly.
So with the key builds listed out to re-verify, run the upgrade. For Spigot and Paper, this should be as simple as
wget -4 -O BuildTools.jar https://hub.spigotmc.org/jenkins/job/BuildTools/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/target/BuildTools.jar
java -jar BuildTools.jar --rev latest
or downloading paper-<version>.jar
and changing the startup script with the new version number, and then just starting up the server like normal.
HOWEVER, if you’re like me and don’t have any essential plugins that will break your entire world if you were to leave them out, consider, at least temporarily downloading server.jar
direct from minecraft.net and changing the startup script to load that directly rather than the Spigot or Paper variants.
Once this is done, it will definitely be prudent to log in, op the player or switch into creative and fly around to those various key builds and verify that they’re still functional and uncorrupted.
SpigotMC has not updated to 1.16 yet. Nobody knows how long it will be. It’s lead developer is like so many others – aloof and mysterious. However, it will be presumably updated quickly. It may be today, it may be tomorrow, it may be next month. It’s hard to gauge based on historical evidence.
And PaperMC, while known to be quick with updates, also has to wait for Spigot before it can move forward. However, Paper is also known as a drop-in replacement for Spigot that overlays on top of Spigot’s config files VERY well and only adds its own tweaks for performance. Therefore, reverting to Spigot can likely be done immediately and the re-migrating back to Paper, if there is any delay from their release after Spigot’s, will be extremely straightforward.
That said, Spigot plugins are ALSO subject to waiting for the SpigotMC core release. And plugins are even less predictable than Spigot itself! With no sarcasm, it may be months of waiting for something like Dynmap or EssentialsX to become available. A bit of hunting for some hidden beta ore pre-releases of these plugins may be available somewhere, but it will be prudent to re-add them carefully.
So as soon as Spigot updates, the plan is to carefully follow the previous backup plan. One cannot be too careful with these sorts of things. It would be wise to first revert to Spigot/Paper, making sure the server is up to date, and starting it plugin-free. Once everything is started, it will be a fairly straightforward, though possibly lengthy process to re-download new versions of plugins, load them in one at a time, restart the server, verify that they work, all of that.
This is gonna be nasty. With so many new blocks and new terrains I have very low hopes that Dynmap’s developers will be able to get something out very fast. From my sketchy knowledge of how Dynmap works, they will probably want to generate new shaders for the nether, and possibly new perspectives given that the nether is now more honeycombed than ever before, what with “vertical biomes” having been introduced.
The v0.3 branch is their default, and there seems to be no other one that has any recent developments or any telltale naming that would indicate one could self-compile it for 1.16. However, when it does finally become available, I’ve written a gist that explains my techniques of mapping the Nether Roof which also has a few steps on how to re-render an entire map from scratch, make changes in situ, cancel and re-start a render again.
Not much of a conclusion, as I’m only halfway through this process at the moment. I want to give SpigotMC a chance to become updated before I go whole hog and run this thing from Vanilla for the next week and a half. If they I don’t have a good, solid server version from Spigot or Paper, I will plan on switching temporarily to Vanilla.
]]>That last “I love you” was the last I heard. I waited all day to hear something, assuming Ivy would be able to get my number or contact me eventually, or that Vicci was just super quiet because she was undergoing emergency heart surgery or something.
I even had my volunteer team at church pray for her that evening around 6pm.
After I got home, I realized I had a message from someone in NV via Facebook telling me that she found me on Instagram via my sister who was more active and not so anonymous, and to please contact Ivy at such-and-such number, that they were trying to get ahold of me all day.
I called immediately and was asked, “Are you with anybody right now?” My heart refused to sink, and I said, “No… but please go on.”
And I heard the words, “We lost Vicci today.”
Her next words are a bit of a blur, though I understood that as soon as Ivy arrived, she went about taking care of cats for the day, gathering up a few things, continually checking with Vicci as she tried to figure out how to get her to the car and the ER.
Then she heard, “Oh God,” rushed in and found Vic gasping for breath, convulsing, and quickly asked, “Do I need to call an ambulance!?” She got a nod, and in 5 minutes paramedics were on the spot, performing CPR, trying to get her calmed down, wheeling in a gurney, and carting her out.
An hour and a half later, Ivy, still at the house, got the call that they made it to the hospital, but they were not able to stabilize her.
This conversation ended with me pacing frantically up and down my hallway, not able to think, not wanting to breathe myself… Ivy asked me if I had family I could be with. I said yes, but it was an hour’s drive. She said, “Please don’t let yourself be alone, but please be careful.”
I thanked her and kept pacing. Calling my mom, I tried to explain everything in tears. She said to get over there, that she could send Dad to get me. I told her I just needed a little bit to calm down, pack a bug-out bag, feed the fish.
On the drive there, before I could call Mom, my sister and her husband called.
They didn’t know what to say, but they offered to put me up as well, that they were heartbroken for me, that they didn’t know if it was too soon, but that they knew that I was so good for her. I told them my thoughts, my fears on her eternal soul, that …is there even any chance that I could pray for God to give her one more chance even NOW. Andy had the best words:
I think that these are the mysteries that God keeps from us. We always ask these questions, but we get no clear answers because He wants us to trust Him. If He is truly a loving Father, He has our best in mind, and NOTHING He does will be for our harm. With that trust, sometimes all we can do is say, “We won’t know until we’re there ourselves,” and at that moment, we will be given that understanding, and everything will make sense.
It was a sleepless night at my parents’. Sunday my sister invited me over. I took them up on it, talked with them, tried my best to calm down.
I was in frequent contact with Ivy, who told me that they had the family down from Cedar City, UT to look at things, that she had Vicci’s mom there, that they were really at a loss because nobody could find a will and everyone was trying to frantically figure out the legalese of probate and such. I told her I didn’t know if I could get off of work to come help, but I absolutely knew I had to make something happen.
I stayed with Andrea and Andy on Sunday night, a bit more restful, but not great.
Monday I went into work, having emailed the upper management with the details and that I may need to be taking some vacation to take care of things.
They were shocked, supportive, and said, “When you figure out what you need to do, just go. Go take care of it. We’ll be here when you get back.”
In the middle of they day, I got a call from Ivy saying, “We REALLY need your help here. The family is unable to function and we’re making very little progress with decisions.” I said I’d try to take care of it, and wracked my brain on how I could scrounge up some money when I realized I had a round-trip ticket for January 1st. Some research revealed that I could get a credit refund for almost the exact amount that a one-way trip would cost, and I would just worry about the return trip when I figured out what I was doing and how long I needed to stay in Vegas.
That night, I packed up from Andrea’s and had Dad take me to the airport. Monday night I was landing in Vegas and meeting with Ivy and Vicci’s mom, Julia. A quick trip left us at the house with the cats and a lot of memories, but no Vicci.
And this is the point at which I’ll stop for now. We’ll see if in six months I’ll be able to put in ANOTHER large portion of this story, though things are becoming easier to deal with emotionally.
]]>In the vanilla launcher create an “installation” of the Minecraft version for which you are running the shader. In my case this is 1.14.4.
Run the new installation to download that version of Minecraft from minecraft.net, then exit.
If it hasn’t already downloaded minecraft.jar for this version, it will do so, and then launch the game.
Quit this instance of Minecraft.
Having the Optifine jar downloaded (in this case, it would be named OptiFine_1.14.4_HD_U_F5.jar), run it directly by either double clicking it or invoking it from a command line.
If you were to continue using the vanilla launcher, you could click the Install button. However we’re using MultiMC, so we want to Extract, which will give us the actual drop-in mod jar that we can load into MultiMC.
At this point, we now have two files for Optifine: the original installer and the new “OptiFine_1.14.4_HD_U_F5_MOD.jar”.
Open MultiMC and create a new instance, picking the same Minecraft version as before.
Once created click the “Edit Instance” button and move to the Version tab from the left.
Click the “Install Fabric” button on the right and choose the latest version it will allow. Fabric Loader will be added to the list of versions for this instance.
At this point, move to the Loader Mods tab in the instance window. Click the Add button and locate your Optifabric jar as well as the OptiFine_*_MOD.jar extracted from the previous step. These two mods should now be visible in the Loader Mods list.
Click the Launch button at the bottom. At this point if you had your file explorer open to this MultiMC instance, you would notice as Optifine is being loaded for the first time a few folders are being created and the console giving you a nice, verbose output.
After a point, Minecraft will launch as expected, though it will now include Fabric with the version and display the OptiFine mod to indicate that it was loaded successfully.
At this point, all of the Optifine options are available in Options/Video Settings both from the start screen and from in-game.
Assuming you are running a version of Optifine that supports shaders (in preview versions this may be grayed out to indicate that support for Shaders has not yet been implemented and tested to a level that sp614x has re-enabled it), click the Shaders button.
Initially only two selections are available: OFF and (internal).
The internal shader does offer a few more options by ungreying all of the buttons on the right-hand side of the shader selection window, but leaving all of those options on default displays a fairly typical Minecraft render.
To load the new shader (in this case Sonic Ether), you do not need to exit Minecraft!! Download the shader pack from the website, saving the entire ZIP file into some location.
Restore the MultiMC launcher window. If the Instance editor is also open, switch to the Version tab and click the “Open .minecraft” button at the bottom right.
Navigate into the “shaderpacks” folder from .minecraft and copy-paste SEUS-Renewed-v1.0.1.zip in.
Switch back to Minecraft. SEUS-Renewed-v1.0.1.zip should have appeared in the Shaders selection window. Again, Minecraft does not need to be restarted manually. The entry in this window will simply appear as soon as Optifine has detected the presence of the file in the shaderpacks directory.
Click on it the new entry and watch as Minecraft performs a soft reload of the window. The Shader Options button will now be ungreyed, and a few different settings can be tweaked from here, but at this point, SEUS should be running from your MultiMC instance when the world is loaded!
For example, the Lighting & Shadows/Shadow Resolution=4096 improve the overall sharpness of the shadows cast.
Left clicking these options will increase their value, while right clicking will decrease them. Additionally, the hover tooltips display what they are, though many are advanced and should probably be researched and experimented with before tweaking dramatically in one direction or the other.
Anyway, this is my first time using this, and I’m definitely looking forward to playing around with it!!