Building Ticket Foundry - A no bullshit IT Ticket system

So here's the thing. My "team" is me. Just me. And even a team of one apparently needs a way to track what the hell they've actually done all week, because "trust me boss, I fixed stuff" doesn't hold up great in a status meeting. I looked at the existing options. Every single one costs too much mone…
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The relaunch of my silly websites

Over the past few days, I've been working on completely redoing my two silly websites, Flatiron Specials, and Endless Drunk Ron Swanson. The Flatiron Specials page went through a lot of changes, and has hundreds more ingredients added which means it can generate up to 2 billion combinations. Drunk Ron Swanson was just modernized so it works consistently across desktop and mobile browsers. 

Flatiron Specials

The addition of the Share button was a nice touch. It provides a link back to the website as well, so that others can play with it, and learn about The Flatiron. 

Far as Drunk Ron Swanson goes, well - the link is https://www.drunkronswanson.net. Someone swatted the .com address, so I'll never acquire the original. 

Oh yeah, this entire website has a new design too. I'm still playing with the CSS so there are probably things broken. 

Vibe coded an 808

I know that AI is definitely one of those things that people either embrace or absolutely loath. I've joined on team embrace, and use it for quite a lot of random projects. Anything from create stupid images, fixing the code on my websites, helping re-write an email to sound less passive aggressive,…
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Buy a house they said, it's wonderful

What a nightmare the past 2 months have been. We discovered an issue with our downstairs toilet, in the bathroom I renovated during the Covid lockdown, where the toilet was leaking water from the drain every time we flushed it. An issue that we knew about for awhile finally came back to haunt us. Th…
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How to disable web browser Efficiency Mode in Windows 11

If you’ve noticed your web browser slowing down or acting weird in the background on Windows 11, you’re not imagining it. Microsoft’s Efficiency Mode (part of Power Throttling / EcoQoS) can kick in for apps like Chrome, Edge, or Firefox, throttling CPU usage and lowering priority to save power, espe…
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XBCX Material Market searching

I've been playing an unhealthy amount of the Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition release on the Switch lately. I really hated the Wii U release back in the day, but I don't even remember why I had problems with it. I just struggled to get into the game.  With this new release, I am absolutely hooked. I'm trying to max out everything and 100% the game as much as I can. A lot of upgrades require finding materials to craft stuff, however the game does have a material market built in which means you can just buy stuff instead. Kind of handy, except for the layout is absolutely garbage.  There are almost 500 items you can buy for crafting. This doesn't sound bad except for the menu only displays so many at one time, and there is zero options for sorting. Which gave me the idea, I was going to type out everything on that list and what page it appears on, into Excel, so I can just search for items I need. That lead me down another path, and I just created a website for anyone to use instead. 

I am pretty happy with how it turned out. For full disclosure, I did use a lot of ChatGPT to generate the page for me, based on the data I was feeding it. It took a ton of trial and error to get it to work properly, but the end result functions perfectly.  If for whatever reason you find yourself here and want to check it out, click this link!

Every single meeting ever

Good morning everyone, how is everybody doing today? I can't hear you, I said. HOW IS EVERYBODY DOING TODAY?! 

Everyone in the room looks defeated. Slightly horrified to be forced into excitement that they were not expecting. 

. "I can't hear you, I said how are yall doing today?!" with fake excitement. His face melting into a bit of goo. Everyone around him is also melting into goo.

Unfortunately I can't draw very well. But I can graft together BS to feed into ChatGPT and get results. Because I am a go-getter.

Guess I'm ready for the PS5 Pro?

The real question here is if Sony is the fool for releasing an updated console for $599, or if I am the fool for buying it? Little bit of both perhaps? It's definitely some kind of weird obsession to chase after the latest shiny technology thing, but I went for it anyways. 

The biggest slap in the face with the price however is the fact that it's digital only, and then doesn't even include a friggin' stand. So I'm $110 into a device that hasn't shipped yet. Factor in the $699 price of the console, it's easy to see why the PC Master Race crowd laughs at game consoles. 

Chrome update blocking your favorite extensions?

So it finally happened, Chrome is starting to wage war on extensions that Google isn't a fan of. These are mostly ad blockers such as uBlock Origin, but also some other extensions such as FrankerFaceZ for Twitch, among others. 

Luckily there is a pretty simple fix that works with the latest version of Chrome. It does require using regedit, so that is something to consider if you're not sure what you're doing. 

Open RegEdit and navigate to - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome

Create DWORD and name it 'ExtensionManifestV2Availability' then set the value to 2.

That's it. There is another easier solution however, which is stop using Chrome. 
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