Blog, Cyclone's World

The relaunch of my silly websites

April 23, 2026April 23, 2026CycloneLeave a comment

Over the past few days, I’ve been working on completely redoing my two silly websites, Flatiron Specials, and Endless Drunk Ron Swanson. The Flatiron Specials page went through a lot of changes, and has hundreds more ingredients added which means it can generate up to 2 billion combinations. Drunk Ron Swanson was just modernized so it works consistently across desktop and mobile browsers.

Flatiron Specials

The addition of the Share button was a nice touch. It provides a link back to the website as well, so that others can play with it, and learn about The Flatiron.

Far as Drunk Ron Swanson goes, well – the link is https://www.drunkronswanson.net. Someone swatted the .com address, so I’ll never acquire the original.

Oh yeah, this entire website has a new design too. I’m still playing with the CSS so there are probably things broken.

Vibe coded an 808

March 26, 2026March 26, 2026CycloneLeave a comment

I know that AI is definitely one of those things that people either embrace or absolutely loath. I’ve joined on team embrace, and use it for quite a lot of random projects. Anything from create stupid images, fixing the code on my websites, helping re-write an email to sound less passive aggressive, writing up Powershell scripts, etc. Lately I’ve dived into some of the more useful things it can do like vibe coding, since I’ve heard all the kids raving about it. I was impressed at how quickly it can spit out something useful. For this project, I prompted ChatGPT “Create me an 808-ish style drum machine, in HTML5, and have it contained to 1 page/file”. And the results were rather impressive. Check it out.

My personal opinion regarding AI, I don’t really care if people are using. So long as it’s being disclosed. If you’re trying to sell AI generated art without notifying everyone that it is AI, that’s just rude. I understand there is a huge division with artists and AI, and personally the people who are selling their art copying Disney IPs, etc, are kind of hypocrites for being mad at AI. “It’s just ripping off other peoples art!” and you’re not? But anyways, here we are.

The things that I create with it, I could probably do on my own if I put my mind to it. Or had the time. But it’s not like I’m going to pay some artist to make me an image of a unicorn shitting ice cream cones. As far as the resources data centers are using, well this page is hosted in one of those. All of the internet is. And it’s growing constantly.

Buy a house they said, it’s wonderful

October 15, 2025October 15, 2025CycloneLeave a comment

What a nightmare the past 2 months have been. We discovered an issue with our downstairs toilet, in the bathroom I renovated during the Covid lockdown, where the toilet was leaking water from the drain every time we flushed it. An issue that we knew about for awhile finally came back to haunt us. The flange the toilet mounted to, the pipe it was attached to was a little bit warped, which caused the seal to not be great. However, this had never been an issue before because so long as things go down and leave the house, then it’s no big deal. That stopped happening however, and when we were flushing, water was coming up under the toilet instead.

After having a plumber out to take a look, we discovered that our old sewer pipes were actually lead instead of cast iron, and they started deform and were creating bellies in them. Essentially letting little pockets of water form. This caused an issue with the toilet since being on the ground level, it didn’t quite have as much force as everything else to push through, and that was causing it to back up. In fact, it seemed like it handled flushing solids better than liquid only. If we had a proper basement, this fix wouldn’t have been too bad. Replace the sewer drain pipes and call it a day. Our place however, we’re on a concrete slab. That meant that they would have to do some digging.

It took 2 months and nearly $20k in work to get this fixed. We had to get half of the downstairs dug up, destroyed a lot of flooring, new concrete laid down, etc. But we’re back to living the normal good life of pooping downstairs. And since we had to rip everything out of the bathroom again, we took the opportunity to put up some beadboard to give it a more finished luxurious look.

How to disable web browser Efficiency Mode in Windows 11

June 23, 2025June 29, 2025CycloneLeave a comment

If you’ve noticed your web browser slowing down or acting weird in the background on Windows 11, you’re not imagining it. Microsoft’s Efficiency Mode (part of Power Throttling / EcoQoS) can kick in for apps like Chrome, Edge, or Firefox, throttling CPU usage and lowering priority to save power, especially when the browser is minimized or idle. This can lead to sluggish video playback, etc. Especially when you have multiple videos playing for education purposes.

Here’s what I did:

Wrote a PowerShell script that bumps browser processes to High Priority
Wrapped it in a VBScript so it runs completely hidden
Scheduled it with Task Scheduler to run every 10 minutes

Update – June 29th, 2025 – I removed the link with the scripts because Google is listing my site as being Dangerous. I’ll update this when I have a resolution

To use:

Drop the 3 files, .xml, .ps1 and .vbs in C:\Scripts\
Import the .xml into Task Scheduler
That’s it. You’re done.

You can change the settings in Task Scheduler for how often you’d like it to run. I figured every 10 minutes is a good starting point. Hopefully one day Microsoft will let us just disable this feature no one asked for. But until then, this method will work.

XBCX Material Market searching

May 7, 2025May 7, 2025CycloneLeave a comment

I’ve been playing an unhealthy amount of the Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition release on the Switch lately. I really hated the Wii U release back in the day, but I don’t even remember why I had problems with it. I just struggled to get into the game.

With this new release, I am absolutely hooked. I’m trying to max out everything and 100% the game as much as I can. A lot of upgrades require finding materials to craft stuff, however the game does have a material market built in which means you can just buy stuff instead. Kind of handy, except for the layout is absolutely garbage.

There are almost 500 items you can buy for crafting. This doesn’t sound bad except for the menu only displays so many at one time, and there is zero options for sorting. Which gave me the idea, I was going to type out everything on that list and what page it appears on, into Excel, so I can just search for items I need. That lead me down another path, and I just created a website for anyone to use instead.

I am pretty happy with how it turned out. For full disclosure, I did use a lot of ChatGPT to generate the page for me, based on the data I was feeding it. It took a ton of trial and error to get it to work properly, but the end result functions perfectly.

If for whatever reason you find yourself here and want to check it out, click this link!

Every single meeting ever

April 28, 2025April 28, 2025CycloneLeave a comment

Good morning everyone, how is everybody doing today? I can’t hear you, I said. HOW IS EVERYBODY DOING TODAY?!

Everyone in the room looks defeated. Slightly horrified to be forced into excitement that they were not expecting.

Unfortunately I can’t draw very well. But I can graft together BS to feed into ChatGPT and get results. Because I am a go-getter.

Guess I’m ready for the PS5 Pro?

October 30, 2024November 6, 2024CycloneLeave a comment

The real question here is if Sony is the fool for releasing an updated console for $599, or if I am the fool for buying it? Little bit of both perhaps? It’s definitely some kind of weird obsession to chase after the latest shiny technology thing, but I went for it anyways.

The biggest slap in the face with the price however is the fact that it’s digital only, and then doesn’t even include a friggin’ stand. So I’m $110 into a device that hasn’t shipped yet. Factor in the $699 price of the console, it’s easy to see why the PC Master Race crowd laughs at game consoles.

Chrome update blocking your favorite extensions?

October 16, 2024October 16, 2024CycloneLeave a comment

So it finally happened, Chrome is starting to wage war on extensions that Google isn’t a fan of. These are mostly ad blockers such as uBlock Origin, but also some other extensions such as FrankerFaceZ for Twitch, among others.

Luckily there is a pretty simple fix that works with the latest version of Chrome. It does require using regedit, so that is something to consider if you’re not sure what you’re doing.

Open RegEdit and navigate to – HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome

Create DWORD and name it ‘ExtensionManifestV2Availability’ then set the value to 2.

That’s it. There is another easier solution however, which is stop using Chrome.

The Ultimate Dreamcast Upgrades (Part 1)

May 22, 2024May 22, 2024Cyclone1 Comment

In this video I am working on some of the best Dreamcast mods you can make to the system. These enhance the usability and looks of the system which really gives it new life. Part 1 we’re replacing the gdrom with the gdemu, the power supply, the case, and the dead clock battery.