I finally found time to take it apart, iit was interesting and it worked.
I guess that is also one way to get around the AIpocolypse, find cheaper drive and a 3D printed extension. Yes, I struggled to take it apart gingerly.
I also for some reason, ran out of space at the very end on my flashcard.
I thought this was going to be a one part thing, not 2 parts! Ok, time to do some explaining.
(I broke it up into sections, so hopefully it is easy to read and its very technical on computing stuff).
Some ideas seem like good ones, I mentioned in this blog about the server I am still running in 2026 despite being 12 years old and still running. It crashes every so often as its got too many servers, its running Windows 11 and Hyper-V which is a resource hog and keeps getting hacked.
How it all started….
..is that I wanted a computer to be accessible from anywhere and with my Trainz work, my council work and development work all separated. The plan was 1 Windows virtual machine, 1 Linux virtual Machine and one Linux/Windows/Whatever for my council work virtual machine as we don’t get issued computers in my Parish Council due to budget constraints, so have a BYOD policy.
The system looked like this:
How the topography looked afterwards was….. quite frankly a mess! But it works.
Somehow!
The plan was to move my server partially in the cloud to allow me to access the computer anywhere, I mean anywhere, so I looked for a cheap enough server deal, came across IONOS who looked reasonable, asked if I could use it for remote desktop which was fine, was asked if I was OK with Linux, recommended a package and got going. That ended up being a disaster but I got it working with XRDP. I’ll explain more. Then I needed more power, so got an upgrade, but ended up with 2 vServers. Ok, I’ve now got 2 vServers, now what? Put both to good use I guess.
Then came the fun.
The idea was to complete the whole lot in less than a week. That was late April/Early May. Fast forward to early June and I am near completion, plus a lot less hair, plus a lot more going on. The first thing I did was investigate “Proxmox”. That itself took about 3 weeks to get to a semi working state, which resulted in me face planting the keyboard at the end. The idea was to use Proxmox to host 2 virtual machines, Apache Guacamole to access the virtual machines via RDP and then have a separate Debian environment. For your sanity, if you don’t like the route of being restricted to a particular distribution, don’t chose this one. Seriously, don’t! Its not a beginner friendly route.
The concept works, don’t get me wrong, its a good idea if you need a full fat OS to work with like me. But the problem is, I was restricted to one of 9 images, all Linux and I couldn’t add my own custom image to the vServer (I get why, its for security.)
So setting it up was easy, adding and converting a disk image was easy. Went from VHDX (Microsofts format for virtual disks) to RAW with little trouble. Import the virtual machine and no network. Do plenty of troubleshooting to no avail and restart from scratch.
Go through the same steps, the host now looses its internet connection (because you can’t use a network bridge – I knew that already) and almost every tutorial said to tie the network card to the bridge. No, I want a NAT (Network Address Translation) which required manual config editing which was easy right? Wrong.
Rinse a few more times, fix the issue, now trying to get the guests to talk, right, without a DHCP server (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), I eventually realised that each host needed to have its own IP address set. That worked, but then came a bigger problem, no DNS (Domain Name Server), so I could access anywhere with an IP address by pinging it, but I could not use web addresses to connect, nor was there any sort of basic web browsing.
The funny bit:
In between all of this, I helped clean a flat as this was largely done while working around other jobs and I’ll talk about that in another blog of “Unprofessional professional Cleaners” – I even thought of a title and one night I was travelling from Twickenham, London (where I worked for that day) to Chichester, UK which is roughly where I reside.
This was about 2 to 3 weeks in and I remember going into a public area of the train and during the journey, this just shows the mentality of some people. I was joined by a youth who I said nothing to – to begin with and the mentality of “anything is a threat” and going to Haslemere, guard knew where I was anyway and it was a Saturday. I had my headphones on listening to V2 Radio online (Great local radio station!) and being this was around 22:00 on a Saturday, there were loads of club tunes. I didn’t have my headphones on too loudly but I ignored them, kept typing command after command and said.
Me: “I got a DNS problem”.
Youth: “You what?”
Me: “I got a DNS problem”. Obviously, only heard of “I got a problem” and probably related to him.
Youth; “What is that?”
Me: (incorrectly thinking) “Directory Name Service” (No, I know, Domain Name Service, I was in a situation – shows if you feed BS, they believe it)
Youth: “What does that do?”
Me: “Translate web addresses into IP addresses”
Youth: “Are you a hacker?”
Me: “I’m a programmer and programmers are good hackers.” (I might have to explain my justification)
Youth: “Can you hack my phone?”
Me: “I’m not interested in your phone”
Then proceeds to turn the volume up on my headphones a bit louder, blocking him out. All I heard afterwards is a very faint “hello, hello… HELLO”.
To be frank, his phone is probably polluted with problems and I got better things to do than try and hack an iPhone, especially when I found out that he had been kicked out of first class in the middle and decided to join me instead. Some people think their phone is the most important thing in the world and they have to keep it charged, in fact, battery life and lack of features is why I went away from iPhones – strange to say, but no desktop mode, but my Android has it and you are locked in the Apple ecosystem which grabs you and you get trapped in it.
After that, I thought “I’m not getting anywhere with Proxmox” and it was a few days, then I thought “what about if I just KISS and go with QEMU? The other problem I had is that when I set up the Windows VM, because there was no DNS, I couldn’t therefore set up Windows and further more, because there was no DHCP, there was no internet and therefore no DNS to connect to on a fresh install, especially when you need to use an online account to even set up Windows 11. Painful? It was!
A new start.
So a few more erases then went for plain old QEMU, moved everything across and everything worked. Almost flawlessly, I started from scratch with the Windows VM again. But then installing Guacamole and getting everything working? That was a different matter. Found an online script and it worked, if it wasn’t the local computer, my remote desktop worked without issues, but locally? Forget it! Loads of searching, wiping again and then I went for a Docker Container. Nearly gave up with Guacamole after a few weeks even in a Docker container which I screwed up completely because I screwed up the SQL server on the hottest day of the year and head butted the keyboard in frustration. So I gave Guacamole in a Docker container one last go with a fresh install, it worked, it wouldn’t connect to the remote Linux machine anymore, I did a bit of searching and found 2 check boxes. It worked, it connected. Tried the local machine, with the same 2 checkboxes, it worked. I finally got somewhere on little sleep. At this time, I was also setting up an OpenVPN container as well, realising my dream may never come true. This was on the hottest May bank holiday we had in the south.
Now I overcome 2 problems, here came the third.
NAT.
NATS!
Network Address Translation (NAT) can be useful, however, they are a lot more complex to set up. Now here is an excellent tutorial (read me!) of how to deal with port forwarding on NATs in Linux. This bit was just as troublesome because, the moment you switch off the machine, goodbye to your rules. Have a text document with your rules that are tested as working saved with you!! You will need it. So, Debian in my case, comes with UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall), great, you can allow ports to be opened, type in a simple command and it works nicely with iptables (the other bit you need) until you kill the power and kill your rules. A fix? Simple, iptables-persistent which….
.. is incompatible with ufw! So needs to be uninstalled. ARRGHHH!!!!!!
Yes, really. So I ended up using firewalld and firewall-gui, manually adding the rules via command line first (the gui doesn’t save them either by the looks of it or did something wrong). And then nearly lost my last bit of brain cell with any sort of sanity.
Now I got everything working, on one server, I followed the tutorial, got 2 port forward rules working, able to access my machines from Remote Desktop Client on my “thin client” and was thinking, “yay, a step in the right direction, it works!”. Guacamole didn’t, I tried the web address, IP address (which then suddenly worked for the local session, so I got now 2 servers working with 2 check boxes I mentioned earlier), then typed the local address on the third Linux VM, I suddenly had a third machine that worked. Then the Windows one that went:
NOPE.
A few mods later, yay, it suddenly worked. Windows 11 works by default with Network Level Authentication, i.e. you need to input your username and password into a box before you are allowed to connect.
Then machine no.5 was on the other server with a version of Linux, but when I tried to add a rule, the machine suddenly lost its connection. Worse it was now exhibiting “I don’t like the DNS anymore”, so started afresh again. This is why backups are important but I didn’t get that far so I didn’t shed a tear in losing a handful of files and my new Curriculum Vitae (CV) which is in an email somewhere. This is after I got rejected for a job role and found many issues with my application which was fair.
So started from scratch, did a similar thing to the other server, used all my experience and then set up the port forwarding rules. It worked, finally. I had got somewhere. Now, I’m able to access all my desktops from a web browser. Until I was bored again. Well, not really, but I somehow had been targeted with MS Azure services with my last brain cell with any sanity attached to it, so I thought I’ll get a free tier Windows Server and see what it is like (then lost my sanity), added it to Guacamole and to be fair, its not a patch on my others, but it works, I wrote this document on it (Windows Server 2022 Standard Azure edition) which I had to start from scratch because I installed the core version with no desktop experience.
But that took less than half a day to setup and it was wet when I wrote this.
Final result, full screen site, works on any device (see below) almost and I can access any computer listed. One more joined but that’s a physical server – photo because its from the Thin Client.
So, that was everything, it took me 2 months to build, it robbed me of my sleep, it almost robbed me of my sanity. Okay, it did! But it works. I only got one apparently easy bit to do, ngnix reverse proxy and a HTTPS certificate. That is it. Can I go back to modeling?
Why do it? Is it worth it?
Actually, I’ve lost my sanity, I’m now typing in “ls” into a command prompt than “dir” and forgetting I’m in Windows, but why? As I mentioned, I wanted my computers to be accessible from anywhere and wanted to keep my council stuff, for Data Protection reasons, (GDPR you know!) and storing council stuff means I’m subjected to a FOI request. Because Freedom of Information (FOIA) includes storing anything on a personal device means that all documents relating to the organization means that my device is also subjected to a FOIA if it is related to the council. I found this out when I went for FOIA training with the company I am with. Coupled with SAR (Subject Access Request), I really do not want to take the risk.
Another point is to learn skills, I do intend to stay in Train Planning, but as I learned how to set up my own Linux system, I’m basically messing with stuff that organizations deal with, then there is a motion to get me into IT. I was asked by the Head of IT “why don’t you join IT?”, “Because I know nothing about ActiveDirectory” which is I guess easy to teach, I knew of Azure but never messed with it until now and I’ve done some seriously complex stuff. Who do you know for loads of computers created a bootable disk image using a virtual machine? Me! I deployed it to several physical machines, and it worked. It was basically a Windows 10 install with all my programs installed with a user account, ready to go, all I did was write the disk image to the disk and start. Anything else had a run once script in cmd and I did that easily. I also created scripts to automate installs for Windows, yeah, these are skills I don’t talk about, found a way to PXE boot (that was hard) with TFTP, so network installs. Etc.
Finally, my computer from everywhere. I’ve stopped using my desktop completely and for several years, I access that everywhere, OK, it was a security risk as I learned and wised up to security issues and always was worried about getting hacked as port 3389 was exposed to the internet. I previously used 3312 as well for other machines. But then I went and learned about virtual machines and putting them to different uses. I used Virtualbox which is a Type 2 Hypervisor and used that for nearly everything. It does the job, it’s great to learn from, but slow. I learned about Hyper-V and its differences (I’ve used Hyper-V before as a virtual machine, not in any complex layout but I found it consumed resources by the bucket load), it’s not until I started playing with it, I found out what it’s like and moved onto Linux KVM from there, despite my initial problems.
With multiple devices, having a server online, does help with accessibility. Also, I don’t actually carry a laptop most of the time in the strictest sense and it goes with a wider problem in the UK – policing.
Think about this, you got your laptop, OK, 90% of your data lives on it, its not backed up anywhere, you go outside, you use your laptop, it disappears on some machete wielding, Sur-Ron riding youth with no identification and wearing all black. As in no number plate, can’t be traced, etc. You shout “Hey, Hey!” and you get the middle finger as they don’t look where they are going. Hopefully they will end up in the railings, you hope.
But I’ve seen someone do exactly that in London with phones, losing a phone means you lost a lot of contacts. Losing a computer with your content on it would be devastating, so I’ve taken proactive steps to stop that, I’ve come close to losing it several times, not through theft thankfully, but hard drive failures.
Now, I carry what s pretty much a “mobile thin client”, or a laptop setup as one, that gets nicked, I lose nothing. That gets nicked, it’s very well locked down, even I forgotten the password to access the admin account (truly!). So, it gets nicked, what have I lost? A relatively inexpensive device to replace. What does the thief have?
Not entirely theft proof, but you don’t lose your data.
A VPN certificate (easy to revoke), a load of links and no passwords. Now you may go “but you are more likely to be hacked”. Yes, true, but I’ve thought about that, hence why I use Guacamole and with MFA enabled. Furthermore, the virtual machines are restricted to 2 IP addresses, so I cannot use remote access via RDP anywhere else apart from the web browser or at home. That works and works well. I’ve got more to do, but that will be for another blog another time.
(You know its bad when I’ve restricted SSH on port 22 to one IP address)
Its a Coolpi Genbook RK3588 and I did a video of it.
So if you watch the video, I really couldn’t find much or if anything at all on this hackable, programmable computer.
I didn’t get much time to spend with it, all 20 minutes worth, but I finally unpacked it.
I’ll edit this post when I’ve taken it apart so you can see the guts and how it performs, its got a few programs I don’t like and if you hadn’t noticed or hadn’t watched yet, it doesn’t like my dual monitor setup, it mirrors both, it’s suppose to support 3 monitors. Then again, I am using a Dell Ultrasharp U2520D and a Dell Ultrasharp U2518D. Oh and it’s very unprofessional, if you like to see more, please do tell me. I am looking at a RISCy purchase next, being a MUSE BOOK as in this day and age, components are getting quite expensive.
(Oh and the use case, I do plan to run Blender and some interesting programs, despite having 8GB ram and an ARM64 CPU – the battery life is more what I am interested in.)
For something not meant to professional, the preview that I can see, the Sony Cybershot HX20V doesn’t do a bad job, I thought it was going to be worse than that.
If you want to get one yourself, look here.
As an offshoot of my previous post and getting my VPS working (Virtual Private Server click me to see what I mean), I’ve been trying to play with my latest asset from Blender. The good news is that the 10T tank Wagon is in Trainz, with LODs, with now rotating axles, bad news is that it isn’t textured yet and I as I write this, I have to fetch the screenshot to show you which is on another computer that isn’t available. Also unusually for my stuff, it actually has LODs, be it 4 levels. I’ve always kept away from LODs because of the problems with A) reducing detail which makes development time much longer, B) as mentioned, makes development time much longer.
At least in this case, it was much easier to do and the performance isn’t too bad with 4 LOD levels. Level 4 was built from scratch but the other 3 were gradual reductions.
So as an offshoot of this, I had a go at the rectangular tank wagon. I thought it would be a case of a new body and same frame, but what I didn’t realis is how many detail differences there are! The frame is different. This is how it looks.
It was a good idea… I thought!
(Feature image downloaded from Pixabay (Edgar Oliver), not my own image, so credit to the author for providing a royalty free image for me to use as I don’t have any server images that are suitable!)
So I paused 3D modelling, well sort of, to work on a computer as I wanted to put my stuff in the cloud. First problem was finding a cloud provider cheap enough, I didn’t care what it was, it just had to be something. So, did a Google search and got in contact with a company called “IONOS” and a quick chat to say that I wanted something to mess around with online (basically to replace my home lab, I’ll talk about this in a bit) to run Blender mostly and for personal use.
Recommended a 6 vCore, 8GB vRAM server, ok, not bad for the price, but the question was “Do you have any experience in Linux?” and the answer was “Yes, Debian and Arch”. I prefer Arch as AUR is the most useful tool ever for Linux. The problem with Linux is a lot of programs you want don’t come “precompiled” to install. You have to build it yourself, which means, if you have any issues, you have to find all the dependencies yourself. AUR can help, but my god, can you end up going down that rabbit hole of finding all the dependencies. On a download page on this site, I came up with a script for that problem, Proton VPN (which has a free tier to use). So I can use Proton VPN on the train without worrying about my data. VPNs have become more important for me as I adapted my network for my uses. Before, I just connected to a desktop via RDP and that was it, exposed to the net, for about 15 years when I really got into it, on the default port, left on 24/7.
I knew about VPNs, but I felt they were way more complex to setup, so I generally tended to avoid them. Then I went into Train Planning, used a VPN solution, then thought “actually, I can use this at home, the benefits are fantastic!”, now learning also I can do far more with a VPN, then that allowed me to access my NAS from the outside. That allowed me to download files from the outside. Now I’m going all online with offline too, part of that plan was a long standing one, hence the vServer. Well, I am learning new skills for potentially my next job, its selling myself to my next employer- well, I already have a reputation at my workplace. Its a case of selling myself when I don’t have much experience in a corporate environment. I just been super interested in VDI, except my network isn’t large enough.
So, I started playing with Virtual Machines more recently – I always did using VirtualBox so I can run my windows software on Linux and Mac OSX, this came from Virtual PC when I had a proper Power PC mac – which wasn’t particularly good for Max, yes I tried it.
So, I decided to start playing with more and more VMs, I created a development environment for a program that never happened. Why? Because if I am to hand over the source code, I would want to use a VM with everything set up and avoid the problem of “well, it worked on my computer” scenario. So lets go onto more recent ideas.
I became a councillor and I thought initially “so, lets repurpose my VPN server which had Windows 10 on it that’s now out of support for something else”. (Yes, I ran a Debian VPN in a virtual machine for security reasons and backed it up). So I turned that into a Linux then windows server, then used KVM initially which I started having problems, then used Hyper-V. Loaded it up with VMs and let the problems begin.
Now my personal work is in a Windows VM and my council stuff is in a Linux VM which is behind a VPN. What was the point? Well, I am a lover of thin clients, as I write this, I am using one right now. A Dell Wyse 3470 Mobile thin client, the data stays in one location and with the power of remote desktop, you can go from location to location, room to room and you don’t have to shut your PC down. Great! Performance however? Is something else. In corporate environments, this sort of thing is used to the max! Think of a couple of big servers, running Windows Server, in a large chain containing several Hyper-V Virtual Machines for a number of employees, in some cases, just to run ONE program. Yes, one program, with a remote connection. I’ve used remote desktop but not remote app. That is something for future me to get interested in and gets a bit complicated to set up. Now that means you can have a laptop or a desktop, that goes from several hours to set up, to a matter of minutes, as long as you got a good internet connection!
So you hear me rambling on about my skills and thinking “well, whats the point?”, Trainz. That’s what, more specifically, one point to develop my work, to store my work, to use my work and it doesn’t matter what device I use. Thin Clients are useful for this as it means you can do all 3 in one go. 2 things I am worried about that I am trying to mitigate.
1) Data loss
2) Theft
This is where VMs come in, does both, but putting it online, also means that you swap one for another, likely to get hacked. That I am going through and finding a solution for.
And what would I say to someone thinking that they want to learn some new skills? JFDI! I mean, guess what my server that runs all my virtual machines? You’ll love it! (Its below the 3Com Switch)
A 2014 Lenovo small form factor desktop, M73 from memory. 4th gen Core i5 4570-T, 12GB ram, 256GB SATA SSD. Yes, really, that is it! Does it do the job? Yes! Is it slow at times? Yes! Can I run more virtual machines? Yes and I’ve run upto 5 at once. Will it die? Sure, but I got a back up of it online for when it does eventually kick the bucket. All I have to do is then get a new machine, install the OS and then restore the backup. Everything is saved.
I guess that gives you an insight of my environment I love to mess with and give some of you some ideas of how you can use your skills for a long drawn out project. Oh and I now use Linux more than ever before, I am looking at replacing Windows with Linux and I have tried to.
Oh yeah, does the vServer run Trainz? Yes! Not very well which I think is down to the Bochs graphics drivers, but it does it via Debian, it has an AMD EYPC CPU in it, along with other machines and it seems to be OK. I’ve not tried the Lenovo M73 which I should replace. (Anyone want to help me?)
Final thought, you do realise that what I am doing now is the future of computing? Microsoft is already trying with Windows 365, having your data in the cloud on a virtual machine with all your programs. Its a good thing as you have a high performance computer which is replaced when you migrate off that server onto another, so you don’t get much performance degradation as it is anyway. Its also more efficient, a thin client doesn’t have to do much, just repeat frames from another computer of some sort. So you go from a computer that is like 60W to one that is less than 5W. My desktop probably pulls 200W then the screen ontop. Which sucks a lot of juice – for something that basically idles most of the time anyway. Yeah, computers do idle a lot, the more you share the resource, the more efficient it is, bearing in mind, a lot of office applications actually don’t consume much processing power, in fact, if someone asked me what computer they should buy for their budget and shops won’t like me for this, but buy what you need, don’t buy unnecessary power because its a waste. Do you need a nVidia or AMD graphics card for Office documents? No way! Save your money, get something like an Intel Celeron N100 or Core i3, or a low end machine. Even an AMD Althorn 3000 is enough. Most of these sorts of CPUs may not last as long but long enough to consider replacement in 4 to 5 years when Microsoft changes the system requirements again. Although by this point, you can just go down the thin client route. (And a virtual machine is more than viable for that sort of thing).
EDIT:
If anyone wants me to, I’ll try and produce a detailed explanation of how everything worked. Including a previous server build that failed miserably and some tips I’ve learnt as the default server packages that IONOS provides have some features missing that would be useful as a general purpose system. Other things, online storage is a must and Windows Server which is what is often packaged with these virtual servers is far more expensive – bear that in mind. Nothing says you can’t slap Windows in a VM though, I did that.
That was a bit unexpected, I got some serious optimisation to do!
While trying to learn blender, I almost bar a few small things before it goes to the next stage, completed my tank wagon.
It was an interesting project and the modelling took a week longer than I wanted, most of it is because I am trying to undo the way Max works as this is now muscle memory (GMAX which got me into modelling works way differently than Blender) and the unique ways that blender works. For example, the way you start an object in Blender requires working from primitives, I work mostly with splines in *max these days which is massively different. When I completed a spline, I can add a surface modifier or an extrude modifier. Blender so far, from what I noticed unless someone wants to leave a comment, you have to convert the spline to a mesh (curve in Blender) which means you can’t edit the spline once its a mesh without undoing everything, whereas in max, you have a modifier stack and you can go back several iterations to make a minor change
Blender has more advantages though, it works on anything, I have it on my tablet, phone (as I am avoiding the iPhone at the moment), in fact, anything that includes OpenGL – that isn’t my remote desktop annoyingly. Plus Blender 5.0 completely changes the file format, making it incompatible with earlier versions apart from 4.5 LTS. Which means the version on my tablets is Version 3.6.22. Yeah, annoying. The version on Ubuntu ARM from what I tried is 3.0.1 from memory, which is even older!
Getting it to work on my Windows On ARM laptop – the Lenovo Thinkbook X13s is a royal pain in the arse and requires some hackery and I’ve not tried the Mac yet.
Max? If it runs Windows, it works. If it runs Wine, it doesn’t, even more frustrating as I have had 3D Studio Max 5 working for a demo in Wine – once. That’s it. Otherwise, Virtual Machine time for Windows. More space needed, more overheads for limited resources and more hopes and dreams needed. It does work without Open GL on the 2 old versions I’ve tried – and they work in a virtual machine.
If you want to play with the source files, download below.
(Download here – Google Drive)
3 file formats included, blend (original), glb (used on this site) and FBX (if you fancy a different program as well as the blender iterations I went through. (3 of them)
I didn’t think I’ll get this far with Blender, but I am making progress.
The “spur of the moment and I want to learn a new skill” thing is actually getting somewhere, once I got the hang of Blender.
However, some bits have made it in that shouldn’t on export like the sky box, hence why there are a couple of things that most certainly shouldn’t be there. The polycount is also rather high for my liking. Now I am getting on with Blender, my next challenge is to buy an ARM based laptop for Linux and for a big reason, battery life as I spend more time away from a plug that actually on it. (Anyone like to help? Theres a donation button available)
Hopefully, I’ll have this out in the next month when/if I finish it. There is already a space for it on the page.
This object is a tank full of trouble! Literally.
It should be no secret that I am a MAX developer, I’m trained in it, I worked with it for years and well, it makes sense. So, I tried Blender, like I’ve been doing for years, I did have previous experience, but as in the future , I’d like to go over to Linux and therefore Blender, it would make sense for me to try it. I just wish I could get hold of a PineBook Pro (they look interesting), I would go for the MNT Reform, but the prices are quite “Galactic” for what they are. They have some nice features and nice Right To Repair ideas, but still. Or even Framework would be a choice, despite my laptop of choice is actually a Toughbook.
So I started my first object as a test, this used splines, just splines, this is how it looked.
It was meant to be a Wickham Railbus, downsized to 25% of the screenshot size, which was built out of lines, or spline modelling, using diagrams as a start, then using a surface modifier or Blenders equivalent of, to form the shape. It wouldn’t be out of my comfort zone if it was max as I now do this almost all the time. But as the UI on Blender and the naming of tools is vastly different, its a lot harder. So I left it, wanted another go for something simpler to get the basics of it, so I built this thing.
Now I spent about 3 hours on it, the screenshot is what I started with, however, its not how it looks. I noticed a lot of mistakes and I keep finding them, so I had another go and the model below is how it looks.
Yeah, not much, but there is one bigger twist! So I tried it on my Hyper-V virtual machine which I use in and outside the house. Then found that Hyper-V doesn’t support a feature that Blender requires, meaning it won’t start Oh well, back to the drawing board. Hopefully, this will look more like a 10T or 12T wagon, its slow, but I’m learning how Blender works and my god, the amount of tutorials (and Google) I needed to even get this far.
God, pretty much half way through my life (I am guessing, but with the age I’m expecting to live to) and this year, my birthday sucks, hard, literally. You’ll see below what I mean.
The time came to deal with being 40, to be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to it, until I got my pressie which for birthday’s, is a rather odd choice, considering that if someone was given it, it will be thrown out the window pretty quickly, especially if your husband buys it and you didn’t ask for it.
So, leading up to my 40thh (the day I write this), it was marked with depression issues, of them and even at 6 months out, my family wanted to know “what do you want for your birthday?”, lets just say, if you had the same idea I had, 116 123, call that. To be honest, I have a lot of issues with depression recently, not because I don’t want to feel depressed, but things aren’t quite going the way I would like them to and the horrible habit of comparing myself to other people, especially from the school I came from. What makes it worse, is that I am focusing on the stuff I don’t have, which is a wife, kids, a house (although I now have the money to move out of my dads place when needed – with a little help with a mortgage) and I feel held back considerably.
Actually, it is the first time I’ve talked about this on my blog and don’t worry, I have thought about seeking help, its on my todo list. Also recently, as I became an eBay seller to reduce my computer collection substantially, I’ve been doing a lot of selling, my god, one package has become extremely stressful, because Royal Mail decided not to deliver it, instead, it was at my local delivery office for 10 days with no activity. It was suppose to go elsewhere (not Chichester). So, I had a pretty understandably frustrated buyer wondering if I scammed them.
I’ve tried to be helpful as much as possible as well. Yes, registered a complaint and guess how far that got? Nowhere!
So there is that, the thing I have to focus on and I am not very good at doing that, is what I achieved. Now I’ve not really spoken about it, but I was considered a SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) pupil at school – before SEND was a thing, so my education hasn’t been great, left with 2 GCSE’s when many leave with 5 or more, one C and one E grade, couldn’t go any further, couldn’t do A levels, couldn’t do six form, so ended up in college. But what I didn’t expect was to go into university, that was a very last minute decision, because of a course I liked and that was thanks to “Trainz”.
Now I am working in London. I broke records at the school, now I am probably still breaking records after I left. I’d love to know how many pupils actually did go to University and graduated, even more so, how many actually work in London for a large company that millions depend on daily. Many from my school will be going “you’re boasting about what you have done”, actually no, I’ve actually got a bigger challenge and its not about me, its not about others, its about SEND and this is borne out of my frustration of life, you see SEND, jobs and education becomes hard, VERY hard. IT shouldn’t be, but the stigma is still there, the stigma of society as a whole see people like me with Asperger’s Syndrome as “pretty stupid” when actually, we are really really smart, its changing perception of that and as much as I hate to say it, when I come from a far more diverse background, I’ve had that exposure of seeing what the person can do, those that come from state school where SEND isn’t a thing, still have that stigma. That’s what I want to change, just became my education background isn’t that good, doesn’t mean I am less able, in fact, I prove I’m just as able – I just need a bit more support to understand what is the social norms and how to interact (as I interact differently).
I actually had a longer post prepared on SEND, but I never completed it, so that is on the back burner.
So why does my 40th suck? What did I ask for, for my birthday? Well, everything I touch either doesn’t work, needs emptying frequently, the filters clogged very quickly, you need to untangle the bloody thing and no matter what manufacturer you use, its the same situation, so when I go and clean the house, I want the bloody thing to just bloody work. I asked for something that became my companion at work, I remember them at school too, with his great big smile and eyes, that great big trunk sticking out and made a machine human. Outside the UK, he’s not as well known, but inside the UK, he has a dependable reputation and has many other friends in different colours…
.. he’s not a machine, he’s a life long companion! Many people would absolutely hate having a hoover for their birthday. Me? I wanted a Henry. So I finally got my own Henry Hoover. Finally, I can clean the house with a hoover that is reliable and easy to fix. That’s the other complaint, every Dyson I’ve touched, breaks, can you find the bits for them? God, nope, because they stopped making them. Henry’s? Dead easy and dirt cheap! That’s why he isn’t a machine, but a companion for life.
(Side note, I managed to complete a yearly task, trains and daffodils, this is on the flower bed at Haslemere station with the only daffodil I snapped at the time.)
… Passenger Point Queue Generator, the program that took my site offline once.
Its not often you hear a site taken offline for a program that well, does what its not supposed to. I spent quite a while developing PPQG (Passenger Point Queue Generator – for Trainz) and it’s suppose to help with randomising and creating queues for rolling stock for passenger trains. I might enhance this to include freight queues as well, as some of my projects also have freight queues (parcels) included. Not unusual for Railbuses.
I wrote this about 8 years ago in Visual BASIC 6, yes, really, on the train to and from work and it took quite a while. Across several computers and never finished. The reason why I never considered it finished, is because I left a module unfinished and never went back to it. Yes, I use it a lot, I’ve offered it out with its source code on this site which was fine for a number of years, until suddenly, my site got shut down because of it – because it contained malware. Got it back online, hosted it on Google Drive and it looks like its been deleted again. I have scanned it and some sites saying its clean, some are saying it has malware.
It looks like this, doesn’t actually do any file handling and its only 40KB long. I hope it’s bugless but it can probably be buggy accidently. (If you do find some, let me know please).
So used VirusTotal and it says 3 out of 71 providers consider it to have a virus which isn’t bad news, it just means that there is a way and style of my code writing matches a pattern in a Trojan or Virus. After all, all virus scanners look for is patterns in the code, if it matches that pattern, its a false positive. This could also be related to the VB6 libraries and embedded code to identify it as a VB6 programs but without asking a question to why, I will probably never find an answer. Nor would they tell me how their virus scanners work, because of intellectual property and secrecies that could be used to beat the virus scanner. So with that in mind, I started thinking about completely re-writing from scratch, this time, I used Visual Studio Community edition and the skills I already learnt.
The thing I find is that to understand the language as VB.net is vastly different than VB6 (the language structure is different and its more Object Orientated and its compiled rather than interpreted. I could develop it in C++ which isn’t beyond my capabilities, or C# or Java, just all 3 take a lot longer for me as I rarely program in those languages. When I go over to Linux, I might look at that, but then I may end up using GAMBAS anyway.
So, I started off like this on an old laptop that I was going to get rid of and ended up in use on my desk. (Dell Latitude E6430 ATG).
To get the randomisation to work took…. ages! But I worked it out with little help from the internet, which shows that I understand the basic language structure. When I started programming, I had high expectations of myself, thinking an experience programmer would understand off by heart all the required libraries. C++ is a strictly typed language and my god, it can be hell to work with. (Actually, in the office, that is a point, I wonder if the other 2 capable programmers understand C++?) until one of my tutors at the time pointed out that there is 25,000 libraries from memory, approximately! Yeah, I can’t memorise 25,000 libraries and what they do, that would be nearly impossible. Its bad enough understanding union rules for train crew or understanding the limits what you can do on the infrastructure. I know the other 2 understand VB, but Visual BASIC for Applications (which I avoid due to its flexibility). One has a basic understanding of VBA and had to explain to them how the VBA IDE (integrated Development Environment) window, like debugging features – inserting break points and the intermediate window, which is VERY powerful and you can understand how the program is working. But the code? That’s something else. The other understands VBA to a deeper level than me. (Oh one understands I believe Python that I find it difficult to get on with and understands Blender, whereas I tried Blender and struggled.) I like structured rather than spaghetti code, so all my loops and decisions are always indented to which one I am applying my code to (good programming practise) and I was always taught “Do not use GOTO statements”, its not quite true, but yeah, avoid them. Your code is messy! I always use modules; they allow reuse and small code. Goto statements? Don’t. How to get into a mess quickly and have zero usability of code.
On Err GoTo Hell.
You may not understand that! Anyway, I think I topped out for PPQG VB6 at less than 500 lines of code. I’m waiting to find out how this one is doing, but you will need Windows 10/11 at least as I’m building it for .Net Version 8. I prefer 3.5 as it doesn’t need 8.0 or even 10. No doubt I’ll talk about more of its development over time.
In other news
You may of noticed I’ve done some changes to the site too, small ones on some pages. I finally found the problem with my templates, so I’ve locked the sidebar, footer and header which resolved most issues on most templates and there is a search bar now. I’ve also put some files up, I had a separate page that just directly linked to a Google Drive as I wanted a publicly accessible drive for all the stuff that I’ve not put onto a page, but that didn’t, so I went the manual way. I’ve got some sources to put up and yes, you can download them and do what you like with them. There will be more in the future. That came from my WIP server and if you are after something that isn’t on my site, just drop me an email, the contact me page should work now and I’ll send it over. I also plan to add some sort of feedback to the side bar, so I’ll see how that goes – more importantly, time. Considering I’m feeling like “Bob the builder” at the moment. “Can I fix it? No I f***ing can’t!”
As well as – going around the country on the coldest week on record!
Lets just say a Northern guard had a bit of a shock when I hid under a hood and a scarf covering my face, then presented them with my Southern ITSO card, my Staff ITSO card, my PRIV card and my PRIV rate ticket. – it was blowing a gale at -2°C. I had a good laugh, just the Class 150 I was on, (between Ribblehead and Salford Cresent) went from nice and toasty, to the time we got to Blackburn – (or was it Bolton?), it was bloody freezing.
Yes, that is an Class 805 Evero, yes, that is Ribblehead, Yorkshrie. Unfortunately, I’m not friends with Class 800s now, one took me and a lot of passengers prisoner at Carlisle by refusing to release the doors on 5 out of 10 coaches, with loads of alarms going off in the cab as the train refuses to co-operate with the door release buttons. Considering I was a full fare paying passenger in that I actually brought an advance single on a Disabled Railcard.
EDIT much later (next day in fact!):
A partially wasted Sunday with little to do, I was able to get it working. Well, I say wasted, I did manage to rearrange my desk so it was more usable for my height. But, after a lot of head scratching and finding out why variables weren’t parsing, I managed to fix it:
Only 4 or 5 hours to get back into it and produced something useful. VB6 skills are still relevant. (And I didn’t resort of Xojo – another BASIC IDE!) – hopefully, it’s easy to read. I can add a crap ton of comments if you REALLY want.
(And yes, I’m that “old school” that I try to follow the Visual BASIC coding standards)
