Elite Dangerous DW2 Mass Jump on XBOX

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As you might know, I am very in the space simulation Elite Dangerous. It is a remake of the 1984 game Elite, which actually was one of my very first games on Amiga. Todays Elite Dangerous is quite some grinding game. While you can drive on planets with some kind of buggy, you can grind for ship, trade and explore the vast numbers of star systems in our galaxy. There is an interesting background simulation with different factions trying to influence the state of star systems, the economics theirs and so on. While there is no crossplay functionality, all players do work on the same background simulation, which again forms communities over all supported platforms (PC, XBOX and PS4) playing virtually together.

While players have only discovered less than 1 percent of avaislable star systems, at the current rate, it will take the community more than 50 years (yes, fifty) to visit all star systems in this game.

From time to time there are community events. Right now, there is an eight-month event called Distant Worlds 2 where more than 10.000 players travel together to the most remote system known in the galaxy which is called Beagle Point.

While I joined one of the coordinated jumps along the trip, I was able to record a video of the jump, which again I want to use to try out the sharing capabilities of videos on this blog. Said that, enjoy the video.

Open Live Writer–Offline Blogging on Windows

windows, , 2 Comments

While I worked with Microsoft, Windows LiveWriter was my favourite offline writing tool for blog posts. At one point Microsoft stopped supporting Live Writer in 2017 while the tool itself was not developed anymore since 2012. About that time I moved on to Apple and MarsEdit on macOS.

Therefore, I was very pleased when I found Open Live Writer while looking for blogging alternatives on Windows. OPen Live writer is a fork of Windows Live Writer with source code available under a MIT License on GitHub. 

Open Live Writer Homepage

The installation file is just about 6 MB (indeed megabyte not gigabyte). It supports WordPress, SharePoint, Google Blogger and probably every other service with a proper blogging API.

Supported Blogging Services

Eventually, I set up my blog on Open Live Writer and this article became the very first article IO have written on a Windows machine for the past sever years.

tl;dr

Open Live Writer is a nice offline blogging tool for Windows, just in case you missed it like me.

Cannot connect to SMB shares on Windows 10

windows, , 1 Comment

I recently set up a new Windows 10 machine. After eight years with only Apple devices, I finally wanted to fetch up with the PC and Windows world again.

For a day or two, I tried to connect my laptop to my NAS at home. I checked firewalls, credentials, server settings, usernames, network. I checked it double, triple, quadrupplewise. I tried almost any permutation. Eventually, I gave up.

The actual problem was, Windows 10 gave no feedback at all when trying to connect to a SMB (aka Sever Message Block Protocol) share on my server. All connection attempts just ended with a silent fail. In terms of user experience this is a violation of Grice’s maxims. Windows 10 simply chooses to opt out of the conversation.

At a very last attempt, I tried the option to map a network drive. After entering user credentials again and again, finally Windows 10 came up the very first time with a useful error message.

Error while connecting SMB1 shares on Windows 10

“This shares requires the obsolete SMB1 protocol…” is quite some information one can work with.

Enabling SMB1 turns out to be quite easy. Head to Turn Windows Features on or of and scroll down to SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support. There check SMA 1.0/CIFS Client to enable SMB1 support.

SMB 1.0/CIFS Support on Windows 10

Once done, connection to servers providing (only) SMB1 will work again on Windows 10.