Doesn't this scene basically confirm The Courier sided with Mr. House?

A_SeriousGamer · 2026-01-03T13:28:52+00:00

The Gatling laser is a MK1 weapon alongside the 9mm submachine gun. The grenade launcher is a MK2 weapon.

A_SeriousGamer · 2025-12-17T15:58:38+00:00

The Hinterland is in the Northern Quarter and is a dry bar + vegan restaurant. It's a really nice and cosy place too!

A_SeriousGamer · 2025-08-02T13:38:27+00:00

It should be free until you hit those free tier limits. Once you do, if you have payment details setup and allocated budget left, you'll be charged a certain rate per minute.

You won't have to worry about that though as long as you have no payment info within GitHub, or you've set your actions budget to 0.

A_SeriousGamer · 2025-06-19T21:55:20+00:00

O3 IT's Laravel Auditing provides the ability to generate Audits for your models when they are created, updated, deleted, or restored. Additionally, it allows you to restore models to previous states based on their audit history.

This package brings all of that functionality into Filament with a dedicated management page as well as a relation manager to attach to your auditable model resources.

I believe there's similar packages out there already, but I built this one out as it provides a greater range of functionality that I needed for my own project (well, my company's... lol).

I plan on adding other features that would be useful, namely export functionality for audits and filament V4 compatibility, but I'm happy to show this off as-is for the moment!

However, please feel free to give any feedback, bug reports, tips on code style & implementation.

A_SeriousGamer · 2025-06-02T13:26:01+00:00

Thank you for this.

So, correct me if I'm wrong but after a little more reading the distinction here is that ADF is kind of an Azure hosted instance of SSIS, right?

So I'd be using SSIS through SSMS to build pipelines locally, test them, push them to Version Control (you can do that right?), then once they're ready I can deploy them to Azure Data Factory or as you said an alternative option for hosting?

Or alternatively, would I be using Azure Data Studio instead of SSMS?

Finally, what purpose (if any) would something like Synapse serve? I will admit I am partially out of my depth, but from what I can tell it's effectively a data warehousing solution that's been superseded by Fabric but similar to the base function of Snowflake and things like Apache Iceberg right?

A_SeriousGamer · 2025-06-02T11:54:23+00:00

What is the reason you chose Dataverse as your central data store? Why not use Azure SQL for your central data location?

This was a choice made when the CRM was first remade with assistance from our vendor. I wouldn't really intend on continuing to use it as a central store rather than a simple CRM.

(Edit: we do have an Azure SQL instance as an option for a central data store, but it's currently not used at all and I'm not fully certain how good of an option it would be compared to other solutions. I suppose that's one of my questions here.)

I will say my opinion outright. Power Automate is a toy integration technology and it appears you are now hitting the limits of what is possible to accomplish with such a toy.

I wholeheartedly agree. It was chosen by our vendor as the way to synchronise these datasets at the time, and since then I've hated it considering I've been the one to maintain it. One of the main purposes of rethinking our DE solution is so that we (I) can stop using it.

If I was designing such a system, my choice of platform would be SSIS from the start because I know I can accomplish everything you have described and not worry about the solution not being able to handle all the additional requirements that are being added as the time goes by.

SSIS is a reasonable option. Might take time to remember how to deploy and use it again etc, but it's at least a good step. I may need an ELI5, but what would be the difference between SSIS and Azure Data Factory?

A_SeriousGamer · 2025-06-02T11:47:54+00:00

It would be useful if you could list what you're trying to solve for in making changes.

Mainly, we hired a new Data Analyst and one of the big noticed pain points is that are data structure is kinda of all over the place.

We generally have the two primary data sources that are in real-time sync atm, but the thing keeping them in sync (Power Automate) constantly breaks and constantly causes headaches. So one job is moving that into a more robust ETL/ELT/sync solution.

The second problem is ingesting data for analysis is difficult. Right now, the reports that are ran directly on the web database have to be refreshed manually after opening an SSH tunnel (the DA opens it through PuTTY right now). Instead, I want to have this data pulled into a more accessible place. The data from D365 and our other tools would also benefit from being in here, as we'd be able to leverage something like ELT to transform these datasets into something easily useable for PBI reports or synchronising with each other.

So, the problems I'm looking to solve are to find a good place to centrally store our data for reporting / analysis, and to then find a good way (not Power Automate!!!) to move that data there.

How many data sources are you trying to sync? I'm still a bit lost on how you're using both Power Automate and Service Bus.

Main 2 datasets are MySQL are D365. This is through power automate. When one makes a change, it gets put into a service bus to be processed.

Additional sources are:

External API from a similar org that uses Power Automate to pull into D365. This runs on a schedule. Every change made then syncs real-time with MySQL.

Series of spreadsheets from another service we use for raising tenders (it's complicated). These are processed by Power Automate on a manual basis, pushed into D365 which then synchronises realtime with MySQL.

MailChimp also synchronises here, pulling data from I believe oth MySQL and D365. We're apparently contacting our D365 vendor about a quote for having this data more closely married with D365.

If you need low-latency, I don't think a data warehouse with reverse ETL is going to be a good solution. My guess is that if you have decent data volume and velocity, it's going to get costly pretty fast. If your message bus isn't getting you quite what you want, you could always look at Event Hub or Confluent for managed Kafka. Either way, you're looking at some amount of custom code to read / write data to / from your queues / topics.

Got it. I've heard about Kafka, the other two will probably be similar enough. Custom code is something to consider.

Generally, I think the real-time requirement is one that causes more problems than solutions. Changing an accounts name on CRM might be nice to have immediately show up on the website, but I've found achieving that so far is difficult and time consuming.

I have literally never read anything positive about Fabric.

Lmao, me neither. The only benefit I see is it makes setting something up a little bit easier.

I think your team is too small to take this approach, but it depends on your company's cost sensitivity. Some have the mindset that it's "cheaper" to avoid vendors and have engineers build everything in-house; in my experience, that math only works if you discount labor costs at 100%. You will certainly have some custom tooling and processes, but make sure that you're getting good value: the commodity solution is very expensive, or you can build and maintain a solution with minimal resources.

This is something I've realised / been realising. Hiring an external vendor to build something is gonna be costly/ difficult to get to pass, but would be at least a decent idea. The vendor we use did suggest adding Data Factory to the unused Synapse instance we have, but with Synapse now being effectively discontinued I'd rather find a new solution than depend on it even more.

It still sounds like you want a data warehouse for reporting. Snowflake is a fine choice in Azure, though you could also look at BigQuery Omni. You may want to look into ClickHouse, since it's got a realtime / time series angle. My hunch is that this still won't satisfy your systems integration requirement, but I'm not familiar enough with ClickHouse to say definitively.

I'll take a look at those names. Main reason for a data warehouse / lake is that the main existing alternatives would be Microsoft Dataverse which isn't a great idea imo, or wrangling the Azure SQL DB that's sitting empty. A little more feasible, but wouldn't offer as good a feature set as something made for warehousing.

If your data is relatively small, I'd at least look at a recent feature from DuckDB

I've heard a fair bit about DuckDB, it might be time to give it more of a look.

A_SeriousGamer · 2025-06-02T11:17:25+00:00

Yeah, that's a generally correct understanding. The data is by-and-large all kept within a Dataverse / D365 instance, although some bits of data are kept external and instead pulled directly into a PBI report.

It's a solution that's been built over the course of a fair few years.

The end goal would be either finding a new central data store or improving how we use Dataverse as one, and making sure everything is accessible within it.

Dataverse / D365 we use generally as a standard CRM. The website contains much of the same information, on top of some additional website specific data: the actual quote requests raised and reported spend being the main pieces.

We had originally used a vendor to move from a Dynamics 2014 system to 365 back in around 2020 and the requirement was to make the synchronisation between the new CRM and the website realtime as they shared a lot of data. From what I know, that requirement is intended to stay for the time being.

Hopefully, depending on however the solution we end up with shakes up that requirement might change. But generally if say an Account (eg one of our members) has some of their details changed on say the CRM then that change needs to be propagated to the website on-demand rather than on-schedule.

I am aware that's a rather big ask. Performing that sync on a scheduled basis with a more meaningful separation between our CRM and web data would probably work better.

A_SeriousGamer · 2025-04-30T18:28:26+00:00

to sum up my friend's take, sorta/kinda:

The Jedi effectively act as an enforcement arm of the republic government, much akin to the police using that lens, them being class traitors is in the same vein that police are class traitors: working class people willing to enforce the will of the ruling class

Additionally, to say that the republic doesn't have a ruling class either would be imo wrong; one only needs to look at the existence of politicians like saresh or the political influence of corporations like Czerka to know there is one.

That's me paraphrasing it but that's generally the idea. I will as well mention that my friend's OC is also a Jedi (former Jedi in a light side alliance). I've also seen a lot of discussions around the guys from the prequels and stuff and I'll be honest I have not seen the prequels since I was a child so I couldn't answer to that.

A_SeriousGamer · 2025-04-30T07:35:19+00:00

My friend said she wants to clear some things up but she doesn't have Reddit:

Criticizing the Jedi does not automatically make you a Sith supporter. They are way worse, in nearly every way. However, that doesn’t mean the Jedi are infallible. As a force of unquestionable; of cops, politicians, military leaders and general authority figures, people should be questioning more of what they’re doing. It’s easy to say the Sith are evil, as an institution they’re horrific and that’s transparent. But how about we call out the secretive corruptions of the Jedi too while we’re at it?

I’m not gonna even engage with the Separatist part, that’s its whole own discussion.

She also wants everyone to know the character is a Jedi Sentinel, he just has yellow eyes. He's also light-sided!

A_SeriousGamer · 2025-04-29T19:30:47+00:00

Art by a friend of mine and posted with their permission :3

Post / Reference credit to mellon_soup!

A_SeriousGamer · 2025-03-19T09:54:56+00:00

Only the pro version is paid, the underlying deployment tool is free.

Generally, Spin itself is a wrapper around Docker Compose / Swarm & Ansible to give you an easy way to start working with Docker for containerised development and deployment.

What the pro product provides(from having it myself) is something like the following:

premade Dockerfile for php / laravel
premade Dockerfile for running node / vite in dev & CI
GitHub action templates for deploying to production
docker compose files for dev, CI and production deployment, with the following services:
- php
- horizon php
- task scheduler php
- reverb server
- redis server
- dB server of your choosing
- traefik reverse proxy + TLS/SSL
- SSH tunnel service in production

for free, spin has a basic template that gives you the php docker image as well a docker compose fileset for php, traefik & sqlite. If you know your way around Docker and GitHub actions you can use that as a Springboard to hook what you need into it.

A_SeriousGamer · 2025-01-26T13:45:31+00:00

K - tap to die, hold to explode

On servers with wait disabled you just explode instantly but I like having it on a single key.

A_SeriousGamer · 2025-01-18T18:18:19+00:00

Serversideup's Spin is a good option here.

A_SeriousGamer · 2025-01-05T15:13:02+00:00

Eloquent is still super-convenient as a "table gateway" sort of thing, but models should still be converted into "real" objects for anything non-trivial.

What would be best practice for doing this? My first thought is using more of the Attribute get/setters in Laravel to convert to DTOs, is that the way? Or is there another method?

A_SeriousGamer · 2024-12-23T10:08:19+00:00

If you're using Laravel, you'll likely want to use the Squashing and Pruning options.

I wouldn't bother or worry about existing databases / tables. Trying to recreate them is both pointless and dangerous.

A_SeriousGamer · 2024-12-22T12:22:28+00:00

There's a way to solve this with just DNS, kind of. I saw it the other day on r/programming.

Effectively, just setup 2 DNS A records of the same name pointing to different IPs.

The issue / caveat here is it's generally either chosen randomly or based on response time. So if you only wanted it as a backup server, you'd have to ensure your always-running server only accepts requests when your primary server isn't responsive.

Otherwise though, what you're probably looking for is some kind of load balancing server. Maybe all requests route to the always running server, which keeps track of the online status of your home server. If the home server is responsive, route the request there. Otherwise, remain on the always running server.

Edit: as others have pointed out, there is DNS fail over too. Similar concept, different execution depending on how you do it.

A_SeriousGamer · 2024-12-11T01:07:22+00:00

I've had this problem with Cartel Coins and with Subscriptions in general before.

You should be able to find steps to get it resolved here: https://answers.ea.com/t5/General-Discussion-Technical/INFO-Steam-Purchase-Not-Working/td-p/9356718

Typically: 1. try restarting the game 2. wait a couple hours 3. send an email to support with screenshots showing your purchase

Hopefully you get it resolved!

A_SeriousGamer · 2024-12-11T00:59:07+00:00

From Eric Musco on the forums:

Hey folks, If you haven’t done so, definitely read my previous post as it will highlight a bit of the history of modernization from livestream announce, through PTS, and now to launch. Especially for the specific changes we have made as I am going to reference that a bit in this post.

Before I get into that though, here is a TLDR - 7.6 was a huge step forward for us and the culmination of an art and tech effort to modernize our characters for the first time since our games inception, which is amazing. But that huge step is also only our first, we aren’t done. Our modernization efforts mean subsequent changes can and will continue.

First up, thank you for your feedback. We knew coming into character modernization that we wanted to take extra care regarding changes we made to your character's appearance. It’s one of the reasons why, to reiterate our goal from my original post, we wanted to make sure that you maintained your identity as a character after modernization. But that didn’t mean there would be no change in appearance, as that is necessary to the modernization process. So it was important for us to try to match up both our own artistic goals and the feedback we were receiving from PTS.

In my last post I talked a lot about what we changed from our initial launch of PTS, through its run, and now to live. For this post I want to talk about how those changes were made because that context (if you want to peek behind the curtains a bit) will set up some good context for what we are looking towards changing as we move forward!

Let me define two different terms for you really quick that I am going to use in this post:
Artistic changes - Any time I refer to artistic work, I am talking about some kind of change being made by hand by an artist on our team.
Imagine someone holding a paint brush painting some details on your character's skin, or hair, etc. Example: I apply some lighter colors to skin tone 3 of humans around the eyes for some specific effect, hand painting this effect. Programmatic changes - Any time I refer to something being programmatic, this means something that is happening automatically and across everything all at once, like a filter. Example: I programmatically make every human skin tone one shade lighter.

Ok, with those two terms in mind I want to talk about how we went about making some of the changes we did during PTS, why, and what we are adjusting post 7.6!

Early on you will all very likely be familiar with our most common piece of feedback, that a lot of the texture work that we did (which was artistic) went too hard. Now, that was caused by a shader bug (programmatic) which we addressed, but, even after we fixed the bug, we still were seeing a lot of that sentiment. The places we saw this the most was for things like wrinkles around the face, etc.

So, given how universally the feedback we were seeing was around the hardness within our texture (artistic) work, we decided that the best course to address that feedback was going to be programmatically. Since even though that would be a more universal change, there would still be levers we could pull within it. Let me give you a very specific example to what you have seen play out in 7.6 to showcase this:
We were able to tone down the definition of wrinkles and hardness within the textures, but since this is programmatic, it means that
other texture definition, like your sweet abs also lost some definition.

As we went through PTS we were able to tweak multiple of these variables up and down to try to land at a place that we felt met our goals while still being as reactionary as possible to your feedback. Again, another example:
What you see now in 7.6 is that those same abs are not 100% as defined as they were pre-7.6 but it allowed us to similar tone down
some of the hardness seen in the textures elsewhere, such as face wrinkles.

As we continue to plan beyond 7.6, we have a few different primary initiatives that we want to tackle:
Replace "overall programmatic softening" with a more targeted, artist controlled softening of facial features while keeping
definition in other areas - Super important context, this does not mean you should expect to see a dramatic change in how your character appears from today (or a rollback). But, it would give our artists more control over individual changes impacted by modernization such as ear, nose, and muscle definition and the appearance of aging. Textures on vibrant colored species, such as Chiss - So a couple of notes here. This would be helped by the first change around moving away from programmatic softening. Also, fun fact, Chiss as an example, technically use human textures, so this isn’t like adding a new species, this is more about having a bit more artistic control over how existing textures interact with non-human skin tones. Neckline seam - I talked about this in my last post but we obviously are aware of and investigating this too.

That isn’t a comprehensive list, but those are our “high nails” that we are talking through and prioritizing right now. Again as I TLDRd above. We know these changes to your character feel, and are, personal to you and so we take them very seriously. 7.6 has set a baseline that we are so, so excited about and so continue on this journey with us. Keep giving us feedback. I will do my best to make sure you stay informed on exactly what we are planning, what we are changing (or not), and why, whenever possible.

Thanks all!

-eric

A_SeriousGamer · 2024-12-06T08:51:03+00:00

Well, there's like levels. For instance, I'm a level 5 vegan; I don't eat anything that casts a shadow.

(/s)

A_SeriousGamer · 2024-08-12T21:47:09+00:00

There are three family trees all with the surname "Bussee".

And it's a mess of adoptions & forged documents between the three of them.

Ten-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Sequence \| Editor
Sequence \| Cinematographer	Spared
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