Yes, I noticed that with all the papers here – there is quite the rabbit hole to explore.

Thanks! I glanced over this article - looks very detailed, and quite interesting.

This is an excellent list of articles. Thank you very much!

It indeed appears the rabbit hole is deep on this topic…

I haven’t used sar in over 10 years. I used to use it to monitor resource usage of jobs that I was running while I was at work. Now that I look back, I was using isag (no longer maintained) to generate reports for me.

I would think it should be possible to package ksar in an appimage or docker container - but I don’t know if one exists.

But - there is a newer option:

sadf -g your_datafile [ – sar_options ] > output.svg

This is part of the sysstat package - no need to install anything else, and no java. sadf allows you to make graphs that you can view in your browser. Check the man file for sadf for more information. (Can’t comment any further on this since I haven’t used it.)

Forgot to mention, there are ways to build reports from the sar output - which would give you a chance to filter the logs.

https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/identifying-linux-bottlenecks-sar-graphs-with-ksar.html

Ahh - yes - I haven’t looked at this for a long time – the sysstat and ksar packages.

Sar is the old school way to keep a rolling log of used resources:

https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/4/html/introduction_to_system_administration/s3-resource-tools-sar-sar

https://www.networkworld.com/article/969982/checking-linux-system-performance-with-sar.html

I think the mistake is assuming they actually hold all of those beliefs.

Umm, more like any beliefs. Well, okay, they do hold the belief in their expanding pocketbooks.

So: update… After all of this, I got 4 new sets of converters: one set of Hongdian, one set from Schmidt, and 2 “generic” chinese sets.

And, I will say, one of the two sets of generic converters does actually fit better than the original converters that shipped with the M2’s. However, all, except the replacement Hongdian converters, were too long. (TBH - I knew the Schmidts weren’t going to work - I only ordered them to have on hand for a couple of other pens that I know have Schmidt feeds / nibs, and will take them).

In the end - the replacement Hongdian converters fit much better than the converters that came with the M2’s, and don’t have the issue of the piston bumping the feed tube. These are so good that I only get about a .5mm air bubble instead of the 2-3mm air bubble I was seeing before.

Although, I wish one of the others could be used. I think one of the generic sets is actually better designed / manufacture than the Hongdian converters. Oh well.

Now I just have a big pile of converters that I can’t use at the moment. 😆

With most of the converter pens, I can get a good fill by running the ink up and down the converter a few times to get most of the air out. (I could, pop the converter off, syringe in a bit more ink - but meh.) It’s just annoying to not be able to get rid of a large air bubble all because the seal is bad.

Unfortunately, the converters were probably chosen just for the dimensions and aren’t actually made by Hongdian.

Oh, no… These are Hongdian converters, they came installed with the pens and are Hongdian branded…

a) is what I did initially - but found the weak fit annoying as it results in less than half-full converters. :)

b) is what I did to get a mostly full converter for now.

c) I didn’t find any indication of a bad assembly…and I don’t think it is mis-assembled. I bought some extras (after starting this topic) and tried taking one apart… It appears even the new ones have the same issue, and disassembling one doesn’t look like they were assembled incorrectly. IMO - I think this is a case of Hongdian designed a generic converter and didn’t account for different tolerances in the M2’s design.

I’m on option d) I’ve ordered a bunch of other converters to see if a different one will fit better. I mostly ordered generic Chines converters, but some of them look better constructed (like having an extra ring on the portion that fits over the feed tube). We’ll see what happens with them.

I was thinking about options (e) and (f)… (e) would be to just use cartridges (either dropper filled, or pre-loaded), and (f) would be trying to use them without a cartridge or converter as a dropper pen. I don’t know that the o-ring would be good enough for option f - and I don’t know if I want to find out the hard way…😂

Someone had mentioned The Well Appointed Desk on Mastodon, but not the “Pen Friends” on Pen Addict. Cool - thanks.

Yeah, Mojang’s conservative development style is arguably the reason for Minecraft’s success, while also being a source of frustration and friction for the community, IMO.

MS is another story altogether, though. While Mojang is a very thoughtful company, MS is driven by profit. I’m honestly surprised there aren’t more collisions between the two cultures.

Thanks - I added all of those to my feed reader.

Yeah, I had already seen their YouTube channel (watched a series of videos of a couple of employees trying to identify different ballpoint / rollerball pens – not as entertaining as I’d hoped for, but still good).

I did manage to add their blog to my feed reader – but I will be taking it with a grain of salt since they are a retailer trying to sell products that they carry.

Okay - I am a bit of a dreamer, but I hope that Mojang dropping the obfuscation side of things is a sign that they are interested in working more closely with the community.

Of course, if I were to put on my pessimistic hat, I might think this is a move for Mojang to distance themselves from the Java edition as it’s likely that Microsoft thinks from a business perspective focusing on Bedrock is a better deal.

Get Mojang to pull in large optimizations. Thus far, they have been uninterested in this (though some controversy over Optifine may have left a bad taste).

I remember that. I think the issue there was it mostly handled badly… It seemed like Mojang was trying to go behind the communities back (which I thought sounded a lot like the way Microsoft does things…so I blamed them instead of Mojang). IMO - if this is an era of more open-collaboration it may be possible for Mojang to benefit from working with the community. (There is an excellent example of this in the way AMD has worked with the Open Source community…)

Pull the changes into a modding framework. Understandably, Fabric/Forge aren’t willing to pull in a huge overhaul they’d have to maintain. Mojang may have similar feelings.

I can see that too… That’s why I am thinking that it might be possible for there to be a more collaborative effort… Like a repository set up where community devs can submit PR’s for changes, and Mojang can either approve or deny them. If that started working well, I could see a situation where there are specifically Mojang employed community devs, the role of working on changes that will help both the main Minecraft tree and the modding community.

(Okay, I am probably more optimistic than I should be – after all Microsoft is in the mix here…)

Worse, there’s an outright un-democratic coup in our government right now. It’s corruption knows no bounds now… Accountability is just another word that has no meaning.

Right, but this means these efforts can be undertaken on the current release, and done without having to work around Mohjang’s obfuscation.

Removing this kind of barrier is a major change. Less time will be spent on trying to understand code that has been obscured from view. It will be easier to ensure “correctness” in code that is optimizing the server (ie, that new code will not break internal dependencies). It will be easier to ensure compatibility between the official release and community based extensions.

I understand that the modding community has been able to do a lot up to this point…(I play on an optimized modpack). But, I’m betting this will actually produce a larger jump in terms of the efficiency of all codebases - including Mohjangs. Just the reports that document issues (not CVE level issues) for Mohjang will lead to them improving the base code.

Not only do I think this will generate a fair number of CVE’s, I think there will be a lot of optimization of the code going on.

Look at what happened with OpenOffice a few years back – the Oracle buyout of Sun Microsystems forced the forking of OpenOffice to LibreOffice – during which the new Dev team took the time cleanup and refactor the code. This resulted in a suite that was about 10 percent smaller, and removed a bunch of redundant things (like multiple copies of icons).

I bet we see something similar with Minecraft – even if it can’t be an “authorized” version.

Yeah, benefits of age. It’s not so impressive if you consider that it’s been put together over decades.

Doesn’t make a difference. IMO, pens aren’t something that should be a race to build a big collection. Afterall, these are tools that we use on a daily basis. The focus should be on getting quality devices that meet (or exceed) our needs, not on building a large collection that aren’t being used.

Pelikan is a choice. Great writers, and beautiful pens.

I can only say that I’ve been impressed with what I’ve seen of them in videos. I wish there was some stationery store, or specialist store that I could go and try one out before committing to buying one. But, that’s just not in the cards right now. (Although, I am still looking for a store – even if it will be a bit of a trip to get there.)