Gary Lucero Writer

Category: Modding

  • I Don’t Miss Obsidian One Bit

    I Don’t Miss Obsidian One Bit

    When I found Obsidian it felt like a major score. OneNote by then was long in the tooth. Useful, yes, full-featured, absolutely, but also old and hard to work with. Plus, OneNote often creates ugly notes as you copy from various sources and paste into it. If you don’t take the time to format notes consistently, the fonts and other formatting get out of control quickly.

    Obsidian not only offered a gorgeous font that was consistently applied to every note, but notes are plain text (markdown), easy to back up, and formatting is as simple as typing a few characters.Then there’s plugins. Thousands of them. Able to handle just about any task Obsidian can’t handle on its own. 

    Problem is, it seemed like I needed a new plugin every week. Every single shortcoming in the application could be overcome by a simple download. This became tiring. Exhausting even.

    Suddenly I was a slave to an application instead of its master. What at first was simple, beautiful even, became ugly, tiresome, and I began to hate it.

    Yes, I hate Obsidian. I can’t stand using it anymore. 

    Then someone at work mentioned using Google Docs for notes. 

    I investigated and it appealed to me for a number of reasons.

    1. While Obsidian requires a plugin to allow semantic search, as long as what you store in Google Drive, which is where Google Docs is hosted, is in a format and structure it understands, it’s fully searchable with Gemini
    2. Similar to OneNote, and unlike Microsoft Word, a Google Docs document can have multiple tabs, or sections, which means one document can serve as the container for many different notes
    3. It’s all backed by Google, which is already my main provider of mobile operating system, e-mail, reminders, calendar events, and AI
    4. It gets me away from plugins, which are a blight on humanity as far as I’m concerned
    5. It offers the same sorts of formatting options as OneNote, but is less complicated

    There are a few downsides because it’s mostly web-based, at least on PC. But so far that hasn’t been an issue. And it has excellent native support on Android.

    In the end, it’s yet another note taking application, but it’s also more than that. Similar to Microsoft’s Office suite, I can create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations all in one place, and I no longer have to keep notes in a completely separate application.

    It doesn’t mean I’ve done away with a family subscription to Office 365. My daughter and I need all the cloud space it provides for our legacy documents, photos, and other files, and I still use Excel on occasion, but I’m finding Google Drive and Google Docs a welcoming new home for most everything else I do.

  • Getting The Sims 3 to Work on a Modern Gaming PC

    Getting The Sims 3 to Work on a Modern Gaming PC

    EA’s The Sims 3 dates back to 2009. At that time, a typical gaming PC had an Intel Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad CPU, or an AMD Phenom II X4. The GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 275 were hot GPUs, as well as the AMD Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870. Most computers had 2 to 4GB RAM, and video cards had 512MG to 1GB RAM. Mechanical hard drives were all the rage.

    Today, those specs have been completely oblierated by even the cheapest modern gaming PC. And while EA has given The Sims 3 a few updates over the years, the game still can’t handle the CPUs, GPUs, or the available memory of current PCs. Gamers have had to rely on community modders and hackers to trick the game into believing it’s running on old PC hardware.

    Recently I spent a day and a half scouring the Internet with the help of Gemini, trying to get The Sims 3 working on my daughter’s PC, to no avail. I tried all the mods, all the hacks, but nothing worked. Later, she had some success by going through a ritual of uninstalling and reinstalling the game, and rebooting her PC. Sometimes she would have to do this for hours until she got it working.

    Enter Cursor.

    I gave it all the info I could find about how to get the game working, plus it performed online searches, and it created a patcher utility that it claimed would allow the game to run. But every time my daughter would patch the game, it wouldn’t work. In the end, I installed Cursor, Git, and GitHub CLI on my daughter’s PC, cloned the code, and worked with Cursor to investigate the issue.

    Cursor scoured the game’s installation folder, examined her saved games, and made fixes. I would test those fixes, provide feedback, and it made more changes. Finally, after a couple of hours of me inputting requirements then testing, the game started running reliably. Further testing, where I shut her PC down, powered it on again, and launched the game, proved it worked. Then I completely uninstalled and reinstalled The Sims 3, patched it, and tried the game.

    It worked.

    Now she can consistently run the game every day, and it works.

    If you’d like to try the patcher, you can install it from my GitHub repository.

    The Sims 3 Patcher Tool

    Please let me or the various Sims communities know if it helps you run the game reliably.