If you've been following some of my recent work, you might've caught my latest blog post on enabling hidden game modes and maps in Halo Infinite. Well, clearly my curiosity got the best of me, because this post is very much a continuation of that story.

You might've seen over the course of the past couple of months since the Halo Infinite release some news and rumors about upcoming game modes in the game. I wondered how those folks got their hands on the new experience and just assumed that it's typical data mining in game files to look for new assets. That was until I really got hooked on the Halo Infinite story, started exploring the undocumented Halo Infinite API, and realized that the answer to my question was here all along!

If you've been following me on Twitter, you probably already know that I spend inordinate amounts of time on reverse engineering the Halo Infinite API. As I am working on my .NET wrapper for it (astutely called Grunt, I realized that putting together a nice-to-use blanket over the many GET HTTP APIs is relatively straightforward. There are some permissions here and there that I need to figure out, or in some cases fiddle with undocumented query parameters.

Last year I was upgrading my computer's power supply unit (PSU) in an effort to prepare for the GeForce RTX 3090. It so happened that I swapped PSU manufacturers as well while I was at it.

There comes a time when a unique opportunity presents itself to upgrade your secondary machine GPU to something a bit beefier and up-to-par with some of the more recent specs. Such an opportunity just happened to come up this week - in the midst of the crypto crash there are now magically GPUs available at MSRP again. It’s like Christmas in the middle of Summer. With Founders Edition (FE) versions being available at select retailers, I decided to invest in a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti that will replace my (not yet aging) EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Super which I will now use as a backup card, or at some point - as an external pass-through GPU for a Linux gaming box.

NOTE This post is part of a series about the Halo Infinite Web API. You can read more about how I started in the first post, where I talk about the process of figuring out the data endpoints, as well as more about the authentication process. You can also explore the .NET wrapper for the API that makes endpoint interaction a bit easier. If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’ve been fiddling quite a bit with the Halo Infinite API.

I like reading papers on arXiv, but I like discovering them more through Andrej Karpathy’s arxiv-sanity-lite. The little challenge with the latter is that there is no way to get those papers in a RSS feed, that I can then hook up to an RSS reader, like feedly or NetNewsWire if you’re on a MacOS machine. So, as a starting step, I thought I’d try and fix this with an open-source project, called arxiv-sanity-feeds.

Back in January I mentioned that I managed to continue the tradition of beating Halo on Legendary with the release of Infinite. At the end of that post I also mentioned that I was contemplating whether I want to do a Legendary, All Skulls On (also known as LASO) playthrough. Well, it so happened that I managed to get through this part of the experience as well this past weekend.

After four months of waiting, I finally got my hands on a Steam Deck! I am particularly excited to get to use this device a bit more because it's basically the cleanest version of "Gaming on Linux" that you can imagine.

We need to talk about Windows priorities as a product. And I am saying this as someone who wants Windows to succeed - it's a great OS that, despite it's naysayers, is still one of the best when it comes to backwards compatibility and richness of functionality. I mean, I can literally run a game written for Windows 95 on Windows 11 without major issues.