Support me on Ko-Fi
23/09/2024
Hi, I just opened a new Ko-Fi page. You can check it out here. Alternatively you could just click on this button here:
As for why I did this, it is because I've just been recently placed into university right now and as of writing this blog post my income stream is little to non-existant, whilst I know that I could try to release my game, Operators Idler, immediately but it wouldnt really work out in the long-term.
Even though its called Ko-Fi to help people "get a coffee", the £5 to get this coffee could also give me the same things to make a sandwich
Additionally, supporting me shows that you really like my work and really motivates me.
Oracle Cloud still fucking sucks
20/09/2024
After having a few months to play around with Oracle Cloud, I can still say that they still fucking suck
As an update to my previous Oracle Cloud blog post, I still do not have the VM.Standard.A1.Flex, to try to increase my chances of potentially getting that shape I tried to convert my account from a free account to a paid account, however, whilst I was going through the process of having my debit card charged £1, I found that Oracle Cloud was attempting to charge me significantly more at around £71 so I just gave up on attempting to change my account to a paid one.
This leads to me only having access to the shitty micro VPS that was offered and just because theyre available for me to use doesnt mean that they were any good. To learn PHP, I tried to setup a website on it where its main focus was to be a petition to get one of my friends to shut the fuck up.
The biggest problem I had with it was just that the website as well as the server straight up refused to load sometimes where it could only be fixed by restarting the VPS.
All in all, I still would not ever reccomend Oracle Cloud VPS
Setting up my own DVD/CD ripper
19/09/2024
In the last few weeks I've been working on a DVD/CD ripper so that i can work on archiving my dad's collection of movies, tv shows and music. So far, I've managed to finish on the manual side of it and i will try to work on automating what ive done.
Initially I tried to get this working on Proxmox, it was relatively easy to set up a new VM, however the issue I encountered was trying to set up a passthrough for DVD drives into the VM but I wasn't really smart enough to figure that out.
Then I tried using VortexBox, I don't really know much about what it doesexcept for the fact that it is an OS that can rip Music and DVDs, I tried creating 5 instances of it on Proxmox but I then found that i wasnt exactly a fan of it.
So now I'm trying debian and got Docker loaded onto it with an image called Automatic Ripping Machine. It works really well. However, my problem with it this time around is that it didn't really give me enough control over its configs.
Instead I tried installing the programs onto the baremetal. But that leads to me losing out on my music ripper of choice, Exact Audio Copy. Leading to me attempting to use Wine which lead to a ton of bullshit where I couldnt seem to boot EAC at all. So I gave up on using Debian.
Next I tried using Windows 7 as that seems to be the only good Windows OS that is still relatively up to date enough to work with EAC and my other programs of choice. However, that came into the problem of not being able to find an ISO for windows 7 installer at all on Microsoft's website. Fortunately, one of my friends told me that Massgrave also served installs for Windows OSes. Unfortunately that lead to a problem where the fucking motherboard straight up didnt work with the keyboard and mouse... what the fuck??? So I tried different Motherboards, leading to none working for various reasons. On ASUS motherboards, all of them had the problem where mouse and keyboard were not working. Gigabyte had the issue of not recognising the boot USB at all. My laptop had the issue of refusing to boot at all, black screen no matter what.
With all of these issues I just had to give up
This leading me to use Windows 10... of all things. First thing I pretty much did was instll Firefox, get the alpenglow theme on it, download some goofy windows debloader tool, and then finally download my software of choice.
- MakeMKV for ripping the actual media.
- Handbrake for transcoding the media into a smaller file size
- Exact Audio Copy for ripping my music
As for configuring MakeMKV... You don't...
Onto actually configuring Handbrake for transcoding, I pretty much using a somewhat old archive of a guide on a torrent site called PassThePopcorn. Using this I pretty much configured Handbrake to transcode everything to a good quality whilst also massively reducing the file size.
As for configuring Exact Audio Copy, I pretty much also copied another guide on another torrent site called Orpheus
With this holy trinity of software, I've pretty much got the ripping suite setup on my ripping machine. After this I pretty much hooked it upto a samba share on my NAS so that I can pretty much just watch everything that my family owns
The only thing really left to do is to try to automate the whole thing using the CLI or AHK
How I used a bot to farm Microsoft rewards points
29/04/2024
Operators, a roblox game currently in a demo, is going to be a paid release, whilst I've got the money to buy the game, I'm still going to try to find out a way to get the game for free or get Robux to effectively buy the game for free.
Did you know! Microsoft has a rewards scheme to try to trick people into using their search engine more just so that they can collect our data. Using this rewards scheme you can get 100 robux for 1500 points. To try to get these points automatically, I got this Python script by charlesbel and followed its steps to just set it up on my laptop. However, since there can be issues with Microsoft banning you, I'm using a free VPS from Oracle as a HTTPS proxy as well as using multiple MS alt accounts just to keep myself safe.
How to:
- Download Google Chrome
- Create a microsoft account (Maybe multiple).
- Download this repository: https://github.com/charlesbel/Microsoft-Rewards-Farmer
- Download the requirements for the project with:
pip install -r requirements.txtin the terminal where the current directory is the folder where you installed the repository. - Create a file called
accounts.jsonand fill it with:[{"username": "[email protected]","password": "password"}] - Optionally if you want to run it with a HTTP proxy you can do:
[{"username": "[email protected]","password": "password", "proxy": "http://user:pass@host:port"}] - Run the script with
python main.py -v - When the bot gets stuck on the login screen, just open a new tab go to https://login.live.com and login with the account you want to use. (The reason why this has to be done is because bot is dumb).
- Close the browser and terminate the script.
- Run the script again with
python main.py - Wait...
- Profit
As of writing this, I am still alive and Microsoft and Roblox has yet to show any aggression. I'm sure I will be fi...
Oracle Cloud Free Tier is honestly the worst thing I've ever signed up for
26/04/2024
Trying to sign up for the Free Tier on Oracle is a nightmare in of itself, whilst it's iffy that you have to sign up with a credit or a debit card, it took me like 5 months just to create an account because every time I tried to create the account my request was denied due to apparently "invalid payment details". Even when I did eventually manage to create an account it was with the same banking details!?
On top of that, there is the issue of trying to get servers from them in the first place, the best selling point for their Free Tier is the VM.Standard.A1.Flex where you can have up to 4 OCPUs (Apparently 2 vCPUs each) and 32GB of RAM for free seems like its just perpetually "out of host capacity".
To hopefully try to fix this, I have a script on one of my physical servers that runs every 2 minutes that uses Oracle's API to try to create a VM. I have had that script running for the last 3 months and it still hasnt happened. I have this script logging everything too, it is now currently...
tldr; Oracle Cloud Free Tier fucking sucks and is a scam trying to get you to use their paid products.