This is all about tech and the technology we use every day.
This new distro has shot up to number one at distrowatch. It’s Arch based. They are sponsored by Cloudflare, claim to be blazingly fast and highly customizable. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, plan on checking it out soon. Do you have any experience with it? Please share your thoughts if you do. Check out cachy here: https://cachyos.org/.
The channel in the video below is good for keeping up with game discounts. He covers a lot of high quality resellers too. The video below from yesterday turned me on to a new reseller called Fanatical. Honestly surprised at how much more discounted the games are on the reseller sites than directly from Steam. If you haven’t checked out Fanatical, do so, they have mystery bundles and they are fun. From what I can tell, all the games so far, are compatible with Steam. Check out Fanatical here: https://www.fanatical.com .
Trepang two feels like a mashup of old school FPS games, mixed with some new game-play mechanisms, finished off with overall uniqueness. The games that come to mind for me with Trepang that provide influence are games like Wolfenstein, Left4Dead, DeusX, Control, and a few others.
I’ve only played the campaign mode in Trepang. Given that I can’t speak to multiplayer capability. The campaign mode starts off with the hero, breaking out of his/her prison cell in a high security facility, that on the surface appears to be a prison. From that fairly normal start of a game, things quickly evolve and unveil some truths as to who the hero is, why the hero was in prison and what supernatural elements are associated with the main hero that makes them special.
Without giving too much detail away, the game delves into scifi, zombie, cultist, hardcore military and other elements as the hero progresses through one mission to the next.
Being fairly new to this game, there is a little confusion for me on the campaign mode, as the missions are, from what I can tell nonlinear and are picked in the mission briefing room. New missions become available as missions are completed. This is a little weird because, from mission to mission, the story and elements can vary widely, which at times, leads to a disjointed nonlinear feeling of imbalance, is the best way I can put it.
Game-play is sooo smooth in this game. It’s important to note however, the slide kick and grab (F key) are huge factors tied to health and staying alive. It’s therefore imperative to key bind these in a comfortable way, and to practice, practice, practice. During missions, enemies will spawn in “waves”, depending on the difficulty level chose, a wave can be either super intense, or insane. There are very few missions where even easy difficulty, is easy. So, plan on being constantly challenged by this game, in a most unrelenting, intense, and sometimes insane way. Mind your guns and ammo at all times. While engaging with enemies, try to keep up with getting new ammo, and armor while engaged, otherwise you run out of either of those, you die. Find a gun that works for you and stick with it, too.
Character progression, from what I have been able to tell, is quite good. You start out with very little in the way of armament, and gain more as you finish more missions. Same goes for knowledge. There are a lot of files that you will run across in the game, pick them up, they help tell the story of how you got to where you are at that moment, and where you’re going. If you skip this stuff you will miss out on a big part of the overall game.
I still have quite a way to go before I finish the campaign. I will more than likely kill a few keyboards out of frustration along the way, but it’s all good. This game is intense in a lot of really good ways, and those few moments of frustration are a small price to pay for this little gem. Overall, playing this is very enjoyable, and I’m looking forward to what comes next from this developer!
Trepang2 is on sale in the Steam store right now, so what are you waiting for?
Here’s a link to my review on Steam:
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197995290532/recommended
After exploring Kagi yesterday I noticed they have more than search. If you’re a Mac user you will be pleased to hear the company has built a brand new browser called Orion. I tried it out and found it to be fast, and most of all, much easier on memory than Safari, Firefox, or Chrome. As a matter of fact, I noticed it uses almost half the memory of the competition. The browser is full of features and also blocks invasive ads by default. Check it out and share your thoughts. By the way, a Linux version is in the works according to the developers.
What a fascinating write up in Arstechnica about a new search engine that leaves the duplicitous business models behind. When you think about it, search really has morphed in weird ways over the last 20 years. It’s almost like it’s not about search anymore. If we truly do still have a vibrant internet or the desire to do so, this product makes a compelling argument. Reminds me a little of dogpile search from way back, anyone remember that? Looks like they are still around, surprisingly. We need stuff like this now more than ever. Check it out here, it’s a great analysis:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/enough-is-enough-i-dumped-googles-worsening-search-for-kagi
Yeah, I know, it stinks to have to worry about this, but over the last few years, if you work in an office environment, you’ve more than likely had this happen, and perhaps you didn’t know it? If you manage people, it can be even more detrimental to have employees generating content which is being used in email communications, perhaps to leadership or clients. Having the tools to help detect when AI is being used is a good first step towards paving paths forward to clear solutions around the use of AI. I’ve used a lot of tools to help detect content which is generated by AI, but a lot of the tools in the market want to charge for the service. When reviewing documents, emails, or resumes for AI content, to correct the behavior, perhaps paying for this service is warranted, but it really depends on how often you need to use it. If you’re occasionally in need of a detector, here are a few sites to help out. The first is really good, GPTzero, but they only allow for a limited number of free searches. The second site is free, and from what I’ve been able to tell is also really good. If you aren’t sure if a document or email was written by a human, these tools are going to help uncover the truth with amazing accuracy. I highly recommend adding these to your toolbox at the office!
Gptzero:
Scibbr AI Detector:
https://www.scribbr.com/ai-detector
Below, find some info on a handy little script I wrote to track SSL certificate expiration. I use this all the time and find it to be quite handy. Please feel free to fork and improve this, or let me know if you find it useful. Enjoy!
Download the program from github here: https://github.com/aagregory/certcheck
certcheck is a simple script that uses the tools already available on a system to generate a report that can be used to track the expiration date of critical website certificates. This will ensure a level of visibility required to maintain certificate renewals in a timely fashion.
certcheck requires Curl, Perl, and the DateTime module.
Recommended configuration
Run certcheck on a Linux host that has the required tools. Recommend running the report daily using cron and emailing to the webmaster, or using a log aggregator like elastic stack to monitor and send alerts if the expiration date is closing in.
Hi Everyone!
If you use Linux Mint as your daily driver, you have most likely enjoyed an overall bug free experience. However, some of you may have noticed recently, that the last update of Firefox has produced an annoying issue. The windowing mode changes from dark mode to light mode, even if you are using the dark mode theme.
Some people have brought this up as a bug in the Cinnamon github repo. Fortunately, there is a workaround, see here for more info: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/issues/12994 .