Sunday, 7th January, 2024
I’ve embraced doing things vs. just looking at them. We’ve setup a family Minecraft server and, amazingly, if you make a Microsoft family with everyone’s account attached to it you can all share the game. Could do with another computer though…and in this instance it has to run Windows 10/11. That is actually a good thing with Microsoft buying Minecraft. Also they rewrote it in some faster language than java, maybe C# or some other note, which runs on all platforms. It is so much more efficient that the old Java version.
We’re running two computers, one of which is just a T490 with 8th gen intel cpu, an xbox and the iPad, and we can all play together on the world running on my server. I even have a copy on the Switch, but the Switch is annoying in that it doesn’t let you join LAN games, only paid for servers. No doubt some protection thing Nintendo insisted on. Someone runs a DNS server that somehow tricks the Switch into getting a menu to enter your LAN server. I’ve run it before and it worked fine but now it doesn’t work for me whatsoever. I wondered if it was our new router but even when I hotspotted from my phone it still didn’t work. You can self host a BIND9 server and run it but that seems rather extreme, plus it’s just doing the same thing so not sure why it would be any better. It’s hard to troubleshoot and then raise an issue as there’s literally nothing to configure except the DNS settings. Oh well I’ll come back to that some other time.
Right now I’m looking at another 8th-10th laptop…probably ThinkPad. Some are pretty cheap and maybe I can get one for £120 or so.
Doing all this with one version of Minecraft I bought for about $10 back in 2010 and perhaps I paid for it on iOS at some time in the past. I did pay for it on Switch but think that was $15 in a sale a few years back.
As part of all this effort, each account needs to log into the computer, and as they’re all kids accounts they automatically have usage time and other parental controls set. I mostly turned them off but the level of detail you can go to is extreme. I then looked in the parent portal and my goodness is it detailed. You can see literally everything they do. My wife was using the computer in the evening whilst I was on the other one and she just logged in under the kids account and I could see all her web searches, time spent on everything and then when a website wasn’t working under Edge, she opened Firefox but it closed it and she had to request permission to open it. At which point I got a notification on my phone to approve.
Clearly Microsoft knows everything you are doing on a Windows machine (at the risk of stating the obvious). I should see if it can see what’s going on if you use Firefox…I assume it can’t. Anyway, as much as my rms alarms are going, we want to play Minecraft together and unless I’m buying an account each to use the java version on linux, then this is the only way. (I guess it’s good there is still a way, although there’s minetest and probably other open source versions, but it’s never quite the same.)
👆would probably make a good blog post, which I’ll likely never write even though I just did.
Speaking of blogs, I can’t be bothered to redo mine right now. I’ll just leave it as is. For a time I thought about deleting it completely, and then it wouldn’t be the burden I feel, but that seemed excessive. Plus once or twice over the years people still ask me about my 2016 post on using beancount. I think my Hugo theme has two different front page settings, I wonder if I use the other one if that’ll change it enough for me that I’ll be content.
I also bought Children of Morta game in the Steam sale. Was only £5, and is online co-op, so my friend and I have been playing it. The co-op implementation isn’t the greatest but still good to play. Like a Diablo action RPG but a bit of rogue like about it, in when you die you have to start the level again but you can spend money on upgrades, and you can play as different members of the family and level them all up.
So computer time during the day I’m playing Minecraft and in the evening I’m playing CoM!
Booked accommodation to the wedding we have this year that none of us can be bothered to go to (7-8 hour drive or a fortune in flights//car hire and overall hassle of logistics). Least it’s done as I’ve been putting it off for about 7 months since knowing of it.
I have another laptop, why do I need to go and buy one more? Is it because it’s got linux installed or is it because it’s an older gen…maybe 6th or 7th or something. I should just install Windows on it and play mc.
