Ok, let’s talk about Stalker 2, and let’s immediately clear the elephant in the room… I’m not entirely fond of it.

I’m a Stalker fan since the first epic episode of this fantastic series of videogames came out, I played and finished several times:

• Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl
• Stalker: Clear Sky
• Stalker: Call of Pripyat

I repeat, I finished them SEVERAL TIMES…

On top of it I played SEVERAL TIMES the mods that I consider the best Stalker experience:

• Stalker: Lost Alpha
• Stalker: Anomaly

It’s a game I kept playing, over and over for the experience, for the lore, for the atmosphere, for its mechanics, and I’m not talking about decades ago, the last time I played Anomaly was just before I bought Stalker 2 this year.

As today I played 96 hours with Stalker 2, and honestly I don’t feel very interested in the game anymore.

From a technical point of view Stalker 2 is fantastic, it’s beautiful, it’s immersive, it’s… real, there’s no comparison with the old Stalker games on this aspect… but that’s the only positive aspect for me.

Stalker 2 combat seems like CoD or any frenzy FPS around, there’s almost no sneaking combat. Enemies keep spawning like crazy from nowhere and they spot you so far away that’s almost impossible to sneak behind them.

Same goes for mutants, they keep spawning from nowhere and without any logic imho, and any long range or silent sniper approach is basically useless, 90% of the times you have to grab an automatic gun and shoot ammo like a Serious Sam game.

NPCs are dumb as f..k, for 90% of them the only interaction you can get is “Talk to our boss”, 4,5% of them are available for a useless trading (you can’t trade any weapon with them) and 0,5% of them are NPCs that can give you missions… but not too many, one at the time, and between them you have to wait hours…

Even NPCs on key locations are basically useless, they can give you side missions… You finally think you’ve found some nice chain of missions, right? Sorry but no, they give you only a couple of missions and you’re done.

Merchants always sell the same things, no dynamic market while you progress in the game. 90% of weapons are basically useless, same goes with armors (those you find exploring or doing main missions are way way better).

Compared to Stalker mods like Lost Alpha and Anomaly weapons and armors upgrades are too few, and making money is so easy that basically you almost fully upgrade a weapon or armor as soon as you get it.

Speaking about making money, 99% of it came from selling weapons and armors to merchants, and that makes Stalker 2 something like a Death Stranding clone, because 90% of the times you end up crawling back to the nearest base struggling with stamina and slowly walking back to sell all the stuff you collected, because missions do not pay enough to repair your gear.

Finally main missions are beautiful and well done, but honestly it’s not enough for me, what always made Stalker games great for me has never been the main quest.

I’m not done yet with Stalker 2, I want to finish it, but I have to admit that each time I start it I found myself bored after 30 minutes of playing, I think I’ll go straight with main missions and ignore the rest… and maybe start a new game with Stalker Anomaly after that…

I just finished my first long ride on my bike (~ 2000 Km in 4 days) after 3 years of riding and more than 42k Km on the bike.

This was my fist group ride, until now I done all the 42k Km on my bike as solo rider.

It was a blast, I really enjoyed it but I also made mistakes and learned a lot, here’s some suggestions I can give as a newbye:

Don’t underestimate the “emulation effect” of the group.

Riding with people with more experience or more powerful bikes than you means that you’ll always try to keep the pace and ride like them: DON’T DO IT.
Keep your pace, ride at your speed, nowadays everyone has a phone which can work as a GPS navigator, maybe you’ll arrive later, that’s fine, but don’t underestimate the danger of riding at other people speed or pace.

Riding comfort matters.

Riding is hard for your body, don’t feel ashamed to stop to make you butt rest or to drink some water.

Long rides are like marathons, completing them is already like winning them.

Consider riding underpants (like these https://www.revitsport.com/us_en/motorcycle-pants-airborne-2-black ) and a comfort seat, usually riding gear is not comfortable and will scratch you skin after hours of riding, those underpants prevent this and will help with sweat.

A mistake I did was using underwear like this and the last days they caused me a huge pain on the edges because of rubber bands, small details like that can make a huge difference between a comfortable and fun ride and a constant pain in the ass (literally).

Take it easy, take your time

Don’t let the trip consist only in riding riding and again riding, otherwise you’ll end up exhausted.

If you found a stunning panoramic view stop and enjoy it, this will help your mind and your body.

If you want to take a photo stop and do it, remember: it’s not a race, it’s an holiday.

Start early, end early.

Usually I hate to get up early in the morning, but in a riding trip it’s the best solution.

Riding when you’re exhausted is too dangerous, you’ll risk mistakes that can be fatal; also consider that, as I said, riding is hard for your body, you’ll see very soon that even if you to sleep early (early than your usual habits) you’ll fall asleep in no time.

Get a good H2O protection gear.

Riding wet is an awful experience, that may seem obvious but it still true.

Get an helmet with pinlock

Ride early in a chilly morning or under the rain may cause your visor to get foggy.

Buy a helmet with a pinlock ready visor, and mount the pinlock, it’s the cheapest and most effective way to prevent this problem, it will make a huge difference, believe me.

Stop when you don’t enjoy riding anymore.

After hours and hours of riding is perfectly normal to not feel the ride enjoyable, that’s the moment you have to stop, take a break or find a place to rest, don’t force you to reach your goal for the day.

Just a quick tip to remind myself how to properly commit some data that needs to be encrypted with git-crypt.

First of all, if you need to change files pattern or paths of the data you need to encrypt you have to change your .gitattributes file:

1. git clone the encrypted repo
2. modify .gitattributes
3. git add & git commit
4. git push

In case you only have to change encrypted files or add new encrypted files

1. git clone the encrypted repo
2. unlock it with “git-crypt unlock <key path>”
3. verify files are not crypted with “git-crypt status ; file <encrypted files path>”.
   If they’re shown as “data” it means they’re still encrypted (unless they’re binary data by themself)
4. add/change files
5. git add & git commit
6. git-crypt lock
7. verify files are encrypted before pushing repo with “git-crypt status ; file <encrypted files path>”
8. git push

After all this you can blame yourself for turning one more simple thing into a hard one.

These days I’m playing a little bit with Authentik, quite a pretty piece of software if you need a flexible identity provider for your services and don’t want to pay a ton of money for Okta or some other humongous commercial idp.

To be honest the more I spend time on Authentik the more I think It’s probably the best option if you’re looking for an “open source” Okta.

Honestly I don’t need a service like this, I have a basic experience with federation (mostly with SAML2 protocol) but I never had to setup and idp.

This time I tried to federate WordPress and Matomo with Authentik.

With WordPress it was fine, I had only one problem with the RedirectURI that has a querystring, and that means that the question mark needs an escape character, for example:

/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php\?action=openid-connect-authorize

With Matomo… well It was a different story:

1. first of all I had to install the only plugin available (LoginOIDC)

2. as for WordPress I had to escape the querystring question mark for the RedirectURI

3. I had to create a rewrite rule to accept a static RedirectURI

RewriteRule oidc/callback /index.php?module=LoginOIDC&action=callback&provider=oidc$1 [R=301,QSA]

4. I had to manually create the database table for the plugin to work, because the plugin installation procedure missed.

I used this SQL syntax onMariaDB 10:

CREATE TABLE piwik_loginoidc_provider (
user VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,
provider_user VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
provider VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
date_connected TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT current_timestamp() ON UPDATE current_timestamp(),
PRIMARY KEY (provider_user, provider),
UNIQUE KEY user_provider (user, provider),
FOREIGN KEY (user) REFERENCES piwik_user (login) ON DELETE CASCADE
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb3 COLLATE=utf8mb3_general_ci;

…and finally the OpenID federation plugin start to work.

A couple of considerations:

WordPress: how is it bloody possible that in 2024 the most used CMS, the platform that runs more than 70% of the web does not support out of the box at least one federation protocol?!?!?
This is absolutely crazy imho… stop working on the damn interface and fix this nonsense…

Matomo: c’mon guys… you pretend to be a serious alternative to Google Analytics and you don’t support out of the box at least one federation protocol???? Seriously?!?!?
And the only plugin available was updated almost 1 year ago, we have two options:
1) it has no bugs, maybe it’s the best written piece of software ever made in human history
2) its development is basically abandoned

I would like it’s the first option, but if I had to bet some money I’ll bet on the 2nd one…

Today I did my longest trip so far, around 160 Km, here is what I learned.

Lesson number three: be humble
I know, this may sound obvious but it’s always good to remember.
You have your first bike, you have your license, you have your safety gear, what can go wrong? Well everything.
No, nothing bad happened to me, but the more I ride the more I understand there’s always something to learn, and the moment you feel too comfortable is the moment you’re closer to make mistakes, bad mistakes.
A few days ago I went to a grocery store for buying some stuff, while I was coming back there was a bump in the road and I though I was some sort of enduro superstar, so I was standing on my footpegs just before a turn. I was too fast for it so I started to brake, but while I was braking I was still twisting a little bit the thrust and I almost crushed on the side of the road on a small wall.
Thanks to the ABS I stopped… but I went so close to ruin my day. In that case I don’t think I can get some injury because I was not that fast, I was riding on an empty street and nobody else was involved… but it was a good lesson :’

Lesson number four: your body needs to adjust to riding
Serious adventure riders can ride for hours, hours, hours, and if you look to their fantstic videos you can think that’s a piece of cake, right?
Well, no :)
I’m not speaking about commuting or a small 50Km trip, I’m speaking about riding for 200-300 Km a day, that’s exhausting for your body.
Don’t get me wrong, you can do it, but you need your body to get used to it, you need training and, most important, you need to be patient, Rome was not built in a day, right?
The last time I went to the lake I did about 100Km with one break in the middle, when I returned home I was happy as a child but my legs were really really tired and specially my butt was hurting.
Today I did 160 Km in total, I did 3 breaks; when I stopped for the first break my butt was hurting and I felt my legs tingling a little bit, after a 5 minutes break I was as good as new, same after each of the other breaks.
At the end of the day the trip was fantastic and I was really happy, I felt like I was able to go around the world and more… but no, remember the previous point, be humble, be patient and train yourself :)