September 2025

I've been wrestling with one of the most frustrating bugs I've encountered in a while on Windows 11. The scenario is simple: I'm in an application like VS Code or another editor, I go to File > Open, and the moment the File Explorer dialog appears, the entire application instantly crashes. 💥 No warning, no error message, and worst of all, absolutely nothing is recorded in the Event Viewer. It's as if the app just vanishes into thin air.

For a game development course I'm taking, I've started working on a concept that blends two of my passions: arcade racing and music creation. I'll open with the elevator pitch and then get into some of the details of my progress so far.

My game is tentatively titled Rhythm Racer, an arcade-style racing game where your performance as a player composes the soundtrack in real time.

I've been kicking around the fediverse for a while now. I jumped into Mastodon pretty early on, setting up shop across various instances—from the big public squares like mastodon.social and mas.to, to more focused communities like fosstodon.org for open-source fans and, of course, drupal.community. I even got my hands dirty and spun up my own instance, icom.lol, for the IronChefOfMusic project. 🎶

For starters, to preserve a .GIF animation for the header image, I want the original image to display rather than a rendered image-style. 

The default image style is Image style: Wide (1090), which converts the image to .webp, disabling the animation.

If you are trying to connect using the Cisco AnyConnect GUI client, and you are encountering an error message that appears immediately after clicking "Connect", you can get more information by exiting the app, and initiating it from the terminal. 

/opt/cisco/anyconnect/bin$ ./vpnui

You may then recreate the error within the GUI, and get more diagnostic information from the terminal window.

/opt/cisco/anyconnect/bin/acwebhelper: error while loading shared libraries: