I bought a new mechanical keyboard. The Vortex Race 3, to replace my Pok3r.



Something that I really liked about my Pok3r was using FN + I J K L as arrow keys, so I've programmed this one to do it too and now I'm in love.

Greetings, Zalost here, I've been tinkering a bit on a personal website of mine, and while it's far from finished I've got it working well enough that I feel it's probably ok to share now.

https://zalost.neocities.org/index.html

go ahead, check it out, there's still some empty areas that I will fill in as I find stuff to put there, and if you have any suggestions feel free to let me know and I'll see about adding them to the site.

I dug these up out of some old archives of mine, got a good response when I posted them back in 12, figured I'd re-post them here.
enjoy!


Sensory Overload.

    It was Thursday, the Light was beginning to rise over the endless cityscape, shining across the gray concrete structures, mixed with the neon glow of the Led and Holographic signs signifying what the different places were.
Within one of these buildings we find a young woman, around the age of twenty five sweating profusely, her sheets soaked from the strange nightmares people had come to know as sub-con's, subconscious adverts designed to make sure you were informed and given an opportunity to buy something even in those six to eight hours normally allocated to sleep.
The woman's name is Ellis, but her friends call her ell, and she hates those invasive ads, the endless screaming, the odd coloring, like being in a TV show from the 1960's only it's one endless advertisement after another, all mixed together into some strange dream, unfortunately for ell, her subconscious usually turned these into an unconscious hell.
As she felt the buzzing in her fingertips, she realized it was time for her to wake up, the alarm clock a tech-modding friend gave her designed to activate the magnets in her right hand, something kids thought was all the rage not too long ago.
She climbed out of bed activating the OLED screen on her wall, it wasn't that big, similar in size and shape to a wide poster, and placed like one too, the screen sprung to life as electricity surged through the leds, news feeds, her morning play-list, the current weather forecast traffic between here and her part time job, all this fed into the room from a fiber connection given by the government as part of an incentive program several years back.

    After skimming through the info for anything of value she stepped into the other room, using the oddly rustic bathroom which in most places these days had been replaced by compartmentalized Cleansing rooms making sure to get cleaned up before heading out.
As she left the house she made sure to put her tablet in her bag and grab her bike from it's resting place just inside the door, glad that she had the day off today, rushing out the door and taking the elevator to the roof top garden which lead to the city wide pathway she mounted her bike and rode off to the local hangout which she and her friends frequented.
The place used to be an old warehouse, something from the twentieth century which was refurbished sometime around the 2020's, it was converted into various places, but none larger than Cyberia, a multipurpose facility owned and run by an old hacker going under the name ghost cypher, and an old friend of hers who had helped her out a few times.
She approached the place and hauled her bike inside to the storage closet setup for regular customers/visitors then browsed around a bit playing a few rounds of asteroids on one of the seriously outdated arcade machines.
After a while she began loosing concentration causing her to loose the game, and so close to the high score too, the odd thing was it was a strange image just outside her peripheral view that caught her attention, wavering and glowing like those pop up ads which were outlawed a while back due to high levels of malware infecting them.

    As she turned around trying to bring it into view it seemed to vanish, figuring it was a hallucination she made a mental note to get more sleep that evening, there was a tap on her shoulder which caused her to jump since she wasn't really paying attention to her surroundings, a man in his sixties with a large mow hawk and a very obvious data-port protruding from the side of his head.
“gah! Cypher you spooked me, haven’t I told you not to sneak up on me like that?”
the man grinned
“not that I can remember, you are usually paying attention, I trust everything is going ok?”
“yeah yeah just more of those weird sub-cons I've been getting lately, d*** things should be illegal” she looked at him unable to stay mad and smiled
he spoke up
“tell ya what, why don't you go sit on the couch over there and Ill bring ya some coffee to help shake those nerves?”
“sure thanks cypher”
as he walked away she noticed that strange glowing again, as she turned she was able to get a clearer look, it was a simple white picture with words on it, the words read, Data-net what you want we can get, this was like one of those holographic billboards frequently seen around town but what was it doing in Cyberia, Cypher would not normally agree to this sorta thing.
She blinked to make sure it wasn't another hallucination only for it to vanish again, so she tried to put it out of her mind, still this was twice in the last few minutes that she had seen that image, the first hiding just out of sight, shaking it off she remembered that sub-con she suffered through, it was odd because it seemed to inter-mix with her memories rather than just per-recorded stuff they pumped into your head.
Figuring it was just her nerves she sat down as cypher brought her the a cup of what passes for coffee these days, in reality it's a fake made from various chemicals and caffeine designed to taste like coffee, well the kinda coffee which was common at the turn of the century anyway, but Starbucks had been bought out decades ago.

    She drank it diligently hoping the caffeine would shake her out of her hallucinations, and it seemed to work for a while so she pulled out her tablet and began sifting through her news feeds again checking recent events when something caught her eye, 5 people committed to a hospital after going into a coma shortly after reporting commercialized hallucinations.
She began reading closely, the symptoms reported so far had been increasing hallucinations then collapse, presumably from some form of sensory overload, doctors were at a loss as to the cause of the hallucinations.
then another article caught her eye, this time from a small time news paper, stating that data-net had been experimenting with a next generation version of the sub-cons supposedly it had been successful so far since there was an increase in commercial purchases for their data services.
She motioned for Cypher to come over and read the articles, he just looked at her like she was mad, trusting news articles when everyone knew that most if not all media was controlled by data-net these days, ever since they grew out of the old News Corp which owned most of the newspapers and news broadcasting stations in North America and Europe.
“more rubbish in what passes for free press these days eh ell?”
“I'm not so sure Cypher, I just hope I don't start having hallucinations as well.”
“she finished going through her news feeds, read a couple web comics she had been following and began back to her apartment hoping to relax and get this sense of dread out of her mind.

    As she settled in to enjoy the remainder of her day however the image began showing up more frequently, after a few hours there was suddenly two of them, this continued until around the evening. she was browsing through her tablet again absentmindedly clicking links when she ran into another data-net sign up page, they seemed to be more and more aggressive today as even clicking on a song link seemed to bring her to one.
The strange image appeared before her again, this time rather large accompanied by a voice stating more commercial gibberish “Buy data-net, we have what you are looking for”
she tried to tune it out but it began getting louder and louder, not even listening to music could tune it out, it was like it was screaming inside her head.
She began running from it, but it seemed to follow her no matter where she went, chasing her like some  unholy demon out of an old horror novel, picking up pace until it stood in front of her screaming at her to buy data-net.
“go away!” she cried trying to make the screaming apparition go away to no avail, running only made it worse, it continued screaming, her head began pounding as flashes of light began sparking in her vision, the voice screaming at her to buy data-net the image blinding her and taking up most of her vision.
Finally she collapsed right there in broad daylight her body convulsing as if she were having a seizure, a medi-trans came not too long after taking the unconscious woman to the hospital a doctor looked at her report, “put her with the others” he said, “I don't think she will be getting up for a while”

    the doctor looked at the now 10 or so patients in the ward which had been set aside for these unusual patients, not much more we can do now, make sure these test results get back to data-net R&D ok?
The man nodded walking out of the room, the sun setting on the sprawling metropolis, daylight giving way to colorful neon, life moving on like before, only now with a few less people in their homes resting this night.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ghost Trap

    The Metroplex, a sprawling collection of cities smack dab on the western edge of middle America, between the plains and the mountains, my home, looking at it now it's funny in a way, the last thing I see is this place, and then I have to submit to that which has brought me here.  It started a few days ago, I had just finished a job which was posted on the local forums via the cybernet, compared to the internet it was small, but the information was independent, and hard to track down due to it's decentralized nature, if only those few outcasts and anarchists that made it possible knew how it would be used years after they were gone.  You see I'm not exactly what one would call an upstanding member of society, rather I've mastered a set of skills that come in handy in my line of work, unlike those isolated capitalists in the denmet group, who sit in their towering spires of glass while the rest of us live in run down apartments scraping to get by, I actually have to work for a living.

    Unfortunately my most recent job didn't go all that well, I should have known something was up, all the signs were there, the missing net jackers, the absurdly high pay grade, the secretive meeting points.  Usually I do small time work, but I was hoping to make it big just this once, guess I fracked up big time.  You see I was following the instructions for contacting an anonymous poster from the cybernet, since you can't very well track users you have to rely on where and when they setup meetings, granted I found it strange that it would be in a back alley somewhere as that's usually for black market stuff, but I went anyway.

    The man even had code words setup, after speaking the phrase a random person walked past me and dropped a letter into my hands then walked off, inside it was my target and half the pay for the job.  The directions seemed odd since they were in the net but were through a new VR matrix interface, probably why he gave me half the pay now.  After getting the rig setup I jacked into the cyberspace link for the internet, and followed the instructions, I knew something was off when I picked up a blip on my radar, but I kept going anyway since it vanished, making me think it was a sensor ghost, man was I wrong.

    Having arrived at the coordinates I found something rather normal, a large data tower, probably belonging to some conglomerate, and from the surface it seemed to be guarded quite well, the instructions told me to locate a file in archive sector L, considering my line of work, it's not my place to question it so I went in.  I quickly found a back door into the system and began to work my way through the archives, locating what appeared to be a fairly empty sector labeled L, from there I managed to find file number 3325, which after looking at the encryption it was clearly something nobody wanted getting out, this was my second warning to get the hell out of there, unfortunately it was too late by then.

    There was a surge and I couldn't feel my arms and legs anymore, it was like my mind was still working but my body had gone dead, finding the call back command I quickly realized that I had made a huge mistake, as I began to be surrounded by ominous red glowing tendrils, it was like I was trapped and couldn't move.  I began getting weird feedback from my body, indicating that I had in fact not died, but rather that I had lost connection, something that should be impossible.  There were sensations of movement, though my body should still be laying in the bed of the run down inn that I was using as a setting off point,  instead I felt a cool air sensation on my face, I knew it was night time, but unless somebody turned the AC on or opened a window this shouldn't be occurring.

    There was another surge of energy, more painful this time, suddenly I find myself standing on the ledge of a building looking out over the metroplex, the lights of the com towers atop the mountains in the distance to the west blinking onwards to warn aircraft away.  And I guess this brings me back to where we started, still staring out over the sprawl, expanding out in all directions, then I hear a whisper in my head, “your fate is nigh.”.  There is a sudden rush as I begin falling towards the ground, the lights of the tower rushing past beneath me, the ground coming up faster and faster, time seemed to be slowing down, and then there was an instant of pain, but some how I was still there, standing in that room in cyberspace, but I knew then that my body was gone, there was no way of returning to what I was, it seemed that whatever this thing was, it had trapped me here, a ghost in the machine pathways of cyberspace.

Mind you, this is for a sizeable company that needs multiple servers for their website. Chmodded SSH to 777 to upload a couple keys for server synchronization, and my computer crashed before I could change it back. If .ssh has the wrong permissions, it refuses all connections. Whoops... 

And well, I spent all of last night completely redoing multiple servers for this website from scratch. Was a noobie mistake for sure. 

I suppose they say you're not truly an experienced server administrator until you've done this at least once. Glad I never made this mistake with MS.

so I'm looking into creating a neocities website for myself and It's been about 10 years since I last dabbled in HTML and web design proper... back then I used macromedia dreamweaver MX.

so any advice on what are some good modern website building software?

or possibly an alternative like dreamwever?
I really don't want to touch the adobe creative cloud lol.

so I've been following this for a while but it was announced recently that the big ole M$ would be introducing something called the "managed Desktop" to it's "enterprise" customers.  it's exactly what you think, you pay a monthly fee to access windows update and driver updates, apparently managed by Microsoft staff and they make sure your computer still works.  now having worked in an enterprise environment I could see where this might be a good thing, gods know it's a pain to get employees to stay up to date if you don't force it on them, usually at inopportune times but my question is, will they be releasing this to consumers?

unfortunately the magic eight ball says maybe.



see this is exactly what the big fear was that microsoft might be moving towards when they released windows 10 the way they did.  First get the consumers to all switch to one single operating system (windows 10), then feed them updates and security patches to keep them content until you can hold security flaws over them with a simple "that's a nice system you got there, shame if it were to be hacked."  it's not 100% certain this will be forced on regular PC users but microsoft hasn't been shy in it's continuing trend of anti-consumer practices as it focuses on enterprise and business over the layman.

so what are your guy's thoughts on this?
anyone have any more insight into their machinations

it boasts a lot of features that my previous broken tablet didnt have. like:

ASUS ZenPad 8.0 is an 8-inch tablet with a 76.5% screen-to-body ratio — an incredible engineering achievement made possible by reducing the bezel width to the bare minimum. 2GB ram and 16GB memory

intelligent contrast (asus true2life), sharpness optimizations, DTS premium surround sound (speaker), DTS headphone connect, MediaTek 8163 processor (quad-core, 64-bit) pixelmaster camera...it doesnt have a slot for micro memory card, only online storage with google. now i can go back to binge watching all my fave travel and food vlog channels



the camera is pretty decent clarity-wise. sound from speakers is ok, but better if use headphones. battery run time is only 8 hours.

Several users have recently reported a new round of bugs on our forums. Most evidently, this affects our login forms, as users have had quite a bit of trouble logging in. Luckily we have a backup login form that does work (as reported by VSS and Brian, thank you). I have linked to this for guest users through an announcement on our homepage. 

Anything that depends on what's called a "popup modal/dialogue" (fancy jargon our forum software uses) basically is non-functional right now in what appears to either be a javascript issue or a theming issue. I'm not sure which yet, but it appears to be related to some software upgrades we did a couple weeks ago. As far as I'm aware, this includes reputation, profile visits, and a few other features, and this issue should be resolved this weekend. I will have a little more free time to get some of the features of our forum back.

In the meantime, I apologize for the inconvenience this has probably caused several people here. It's a known issue and will be resolved shortly, and as always, thank you to everyone who helped report the latest round of bugs here on the forums! As always, it is greatly appreciated, and thank you all for being a part of this community! 

-Darth

This city journal will document the development of the "United Cities of Talaran", also known as "The Talaran cluster", under SimCity 4. It is a continuation/resumption of the city journal that existed on the Simmania site before that site's closure.

The development of the cluster started in October 2014. For many reasons, including a lack of available time, and until the end of last year a serious involvment in the RTMT project, the progress on the cluster has been quite slow. I run the Deluxe version of SC4 on a Windows 8.1 platform; the main mods are CAM 1, NAM (currently at NAM 36), and a very bastardized version of RTMT that is rather close to what should be RTMT V4. I run the Traffic Simulator with the Ultra setting.

The basic idea was to develop in parallel 9 cities, arranged on a 3x3 set of city tiles of the largest size. Since I am mostly interested in transportation matters with an emphasis on public transportation, I wanted to study the effect of the interconnection between multiple cities. I also wanted to explore the effects of 'pushing to the limits' on the game. The 9 city tiles, in their initial state, are shown here:




The terrain chosen has many bodies of water of various size and width, including a lake in Desognes. These waterways pose interesting challenges, especially when designing the global highway network. I decided to respect their layout and respective shapes, with very limited filling. Otherwise the terrain is essentially flat and the few small hills were flattened out - I am not very good when it comes to developing on slopes.

In order to avoid the dreadful "eternal commuter syndrom" that had plagued some of my earlier developments, I defined how the intercity connections should be set up:


The highway and the railway networks were laid out right at the start, respecting the connections as shown above, and they have essentially remained in place since then, with a few corrections, and some suppressions of unused railway lines. Later I started to add subway interconnections to reduce the bus traffic if possible - more about this later.

The highway network was based on RHW-6S. Meanwhile, the observation of traffic volumes has led me to widen some sections to RHW-8S and reduce other sections to RHW-4S or RHW-2. These changes are ongoing. There are no complete highway intersections requiring the use of full clover leaf setups; all highway junctions are of the T-type. Initially all these junctions were designed as partial cloverleafs (parclos) - this was mostly because I didn't know much about RHW at the time and was reluctant to delve into it. Here is a typical parclo:




Lately I have started a gradual replacement of the parclos by better interchanges, adapting the various ramps to the respective traffic volumes, and making use of FLEX features in NAM: For example:




In the cities, the surface road networks use, until now, exclusively the streets, roads and avenues supplied by Maxis. I have plans to upgrade some avenues to NWM networks to increase their traffic capacities. In general I do not use one-way roads because previous experiences with them were unsatisfactory.

With very few exceptions, where streets, roads and avenues need to cross highways, this is done with FLUP underpasses rather than overpasses; likewise, there are no surface crossings of railway tracks by roadways, FLUP underpasses are also used in those cases. Railway tracks cross highways with overpasses.


Public transportation within the cities is based on a combination of subway + tram (or: GLR) with buses acting as feeders. I use the 'German model', as implemented in particular in Köln, Düsseldorf and Hannover: trams run on roads and avenues in the residential and industrial areas, and enter tunnels to run as subways in the CBD. This is because I am a tram fan since my early youth and I like to see their automata running in my cities. All stations are RTMT stations and always feature a bus stop. I use tram on right-of-way sparingly.

Here is an example of GLR-on-avenue on 2 intersecting avenues, with a 'grand union' set of tracks inside the traffic circle, and a GLR+bus station on one of the branches, adjacent to the traffic circle:




In an area under developement, GLR-on-avenue tracks enter a GLR-to-subway transition to run as subway in the CBD on the right of the picture (this is an old picture, the area has most likely been developped in the meantime):




Because there is no 'tram-in-road' FLUP ramp, alternatives need to be used: the tram tracks leave the road and use a tram-to-subway transition to pass for example under railway tracks as a short stretch of subway. The following setup was required because of the 2 railway tracks:




In my city journal on Simmania I once posted a long rant about the way the subway was implemented in the game by Maxis. I won't reproduce that rant here. Suffice it to say that I think that Maxis did a poor job with that implementation, which severely limits realistic setups. I avoid what I call 'unrealistic setups', such as 2 subway tunnels crossing outside of stations, because of the impossible paths followed by commuters (and subway trains...) in those cases.


I don't spend much time and effort on eye candy stuff, but I like to keep my cities nice-looking (at least, to my eyes), and I place many parks and monuments of various kinds, to increase the desirability. This usually works out well. Because I want the highest possible traffic volumes, all areas are zoned with high density, including the residential areas (this means that you won't find in these cities the extended suburban areas with their individual houses; this is probably anathema - or at least, very strange - to most north-american players).


These were the design objectives for the cluster. Where are we close to four years later? The global view is this:




5 cities have populations of over one million Sims, and a 6th one is very close with about 999'000 Sims. One city has over 940'000 Sims, and there are 2 'laggards' with populations in the 660'000 range. Today the total population of the cluster is 8'811'188 Sims.


In general, 'region playing' works as described and discussed in countless threads and city journals in SC4-related forums - that is, not as well as one would expect. (I was warned about this many times, especially by my good friend Brian). The traffic figures across inter-city links (highways, railways, subways) are rarely matched, with sometimes glaring discrepancies. Some links that function well for many years suddenly become inactive.

I didn't pay enough attention to the following fact: when residents in a city look for a job, the boundary to a neighbor city is considered by the traffic simulator as the neighbor city itself - in other words since the simulator doesn't know what lies beyond the boundary it 'assumes' that the boundary is the neighbor city. When the distance between a given residential building and the inter-city link is shorter than that between the building and a commercial or industrial area in the same city, the Sims in the residential building will be sent to the inter-city link to find a job.

The (quite sound) advice is to zone the residential areas so that the distance between those areas and the CBD or an industrial zone is shorter than the distance to an inter-city link. I generally overlooked this when zoning, and this has led to various difficult traffic situations in some cities.


Then there is the issue of 'pass-thru commuting', that I illustrated with the following picture:



It shows the 3 cities of Arcens, Deramey and Cherenne. In blue the defined inter-city links as per the global links picture shown earlier. In red, the 'pass-thru commuting' between Arcens and Cherenne, that is made possible by the defined links. In the course of the development of the cities, such commuting has generated very high volumes of traffic on the highway and railway in the median city, here in Deramey.

In this particular case, I implemented a direct subway connection between Arcens and Cherenne, with a subway tunnel but no station in Deramey. That direct subway connection became rapidly saturated, so that a second one, and later a third one, were placed. The usage is not yet well spread between the 3 connections:




There are currently several further cases of saturation of inter-city connections in the cluster, which need to be addressed. This is on my to-do list. A special case is Arcens, which sits in the middle of the cluster, and must support pass-thru commuting between all other cities, in addition to its own inter-city commuting with its immediate neighbors.

I expected Arcens, because of its central location, to prosper due to the numerous links with the other cities. In fact, Arcens has consistently lagged behind the other cities in terms of development, and has remained the least populated city. To a limited extent it is due to the surface of the city tile occupied by water, leaving less land for zoning. But the main reason, I think, is the way I zoned the various areas, as illustrated here:


Nearly all residential zones (green) are closer to the city boundaries than to the CBD: SIms tend to 'escape' to the neighboring cities to find work, and Arcens' CBD doesn't develop as well as it should.


Another case of sub-optimal development is that of Polsay. Here the geography, with the very large body of water separating the two land masses, plays a role. Essentially, two separate cities have developped, one on each piece of land. Although bridges for highway, avenue or road, and railway have been provided, as well as metro tunnels, traffic between the two parts remains extremely low, close to nil for some modes of transportation.



The city is mostly built, so that its population won't grow much beyond what it is currently. Still, Polsay plays an important role for pass-thru traffic, therefore its infrastructures will need close observation and upgrades where required.


In general, inter-city railway traffic is unsatisfactory. Some links are heavily used, to the point of saturation, while other links see very little usage, and I haven't been able to identify why this is so. (Admittedly I didn't spend much time looking into that).


Where inter-city railway traffic is low, inter-city bus traffic is usually high - way too high in some cases. Inter-city subway tunnels have been placed in attempts to reduce the loads on buses, This has worked only partially sofar, and a few situations are under close observation. Here is an extreme case observed at the border to Arcens in Marlande.



(By the way, I remember having a discussion with Brian about the interpretation of figures for buses and railways. Although the query produces 'Bus 55234', this cannot mean that there are 55234 buses per day going across the highway link. Spread evenly over 24 hours this would mean 38 buses per minute, or more than one bus every 2 seconds. Obviously we need to interpret the figure as '55234 Sims riding on buses every day'. Mind you, this is still a rather high figure: the articulated buses running in my home city of Geneva, model EVO O530G, have a theoretical capacity of 150 passengers (47 seating, 103 standing) but in reality with 120 passengers they are already very crowded. So let's assume an average 100 passengers per bus in the game, this is still 552 buses per day, or about 1 bus every 2 minutes 40 seconds, 24 hours per day. This is possible, although I fail to imagine the size of the bus fleet and the staffing requirements necessary to ensure the required service, but hey, this only a game...)


Then there is the dreaded 'limit' of 65535 'things to count'. This is because Maxis used many 16-bit counters in the game. (65535 = (2 power 16) minus 1). Since the game was released in 2003, we can't really blame Maxis for this, the developers probably thought that 16-bit counters were sufficient for the expected volumes. Still, this is quite annoying since, once the 'thing to count' (for example, cars, buses, in the above picture) reaches 65535, the counter ceases to work and all excess 'things' get dropped from the count.

This limit does not apply to all counters. For example, in the following query we can see that the maximal capacity of the Surbiton train station is 125'000, and the actual occupation is 268'311 (yielding a used capacity of 214% - this has been fixed since the picture was taken, I won't get into that fix here):



Still, the 65535 limit is encountered often and may force the layout of excessive infastructures.


-----------------


Further posts will of course not be as extensive as this introductory one. I'll try to post not too infrequently, and of course I'll reply to any queries related to this CJ.

a special thanks to  Darth for his help in getting this thread set up for Pierre
and myself and of course any others that are still playing the great game of Sim City 4
.. About to go into its 16th year soon !





this is my newest city which has just surpassed the population milestone of 600 K
I had to recently double track the glr because of traffic congestion on the previous single line..
and i put in a new station there also ( neal's glr to bus transfer station..)