Ok. I will buy a pizza and have my son come out 
It will likely be next week though. Way too much going on this week. I really want to play my Sims 4 though. I have too much invested in it to not be able to access it.
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I use pizza to get my kids to visit too. 
Tomorrow night, my son, grandson, great-granddaughter and more at Old Chicagoās for pizza.
Just for interest, at least 6 of the connections persist even after the EA App supposedly closes down. Connections to Amazon, Google, Linode, Edgecast, and New Relic (Dynatrace I think). Dynatrace helps companies detect network outages and response time problems by having servers all around the world pinging the company. I wonder if Dynatrace has deal with EA or wine to help with testing their network from remote areas of the world and they are using the launcher to gather the data. They would only need a few tens to hundred bytes every 15 minutes or so to give us the stats that we got from them. Hmmm
The command to stop wineserver didnāt work. killing it left the EA app running (but exposed so I could kill it as well). These game app launchers seem to think they can use your computer between games. Maybe we should write a script or program to clean them off when they are not needed such as when playing a different game from Steam etc. Even after closing down EA and the wine server, there was another process left (winedevice.exe) consuming 2% of the computer. Whack-a-mole.
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Youāre a pretty hard-core family. The only computer advice I have to give to my dad every now and then sounds more like āNo, Dad, thatās just the EULA. Yes, you have to accept it before you can install. No, itās not a virus. Just click it already! Yes, now you have to click install. No, I still donāt think itās a virus. Ah no, here you donāt have to mark the checkbox, thatās where they want to install useless chunk on your computer along with what you actually wanted.ā
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Well that sounds like me and my mom. Except it is, āNo mom. That is an ad that plays before you can watch the video. It did not send you to a porn site.ā
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Itās good that they ask these questions though, they donāt want to be fooled. On the other hand itās annoying that there is nothing like a driverās license for the internet, one test that covers everything. Communication is more commonplace than driving a car, but weāre a whole generation whose computer literacy is a mixture of āthe anti-phishing training they made me take at work + listening to the guy who sat in school next to meā.
Our parents had neither opportunity and more and more often they are told to ādrive a car without a licenseā (to use a web site or app).
I noticed that people who didnāt grow up with games and websites donāt āseeā them as we do. They cannot tell where an ad (or an ad filled column or header) starts and where the actual site begins. We think we are helping them by giving them the URL of, say, a harmless online dictionary and 5 min later they have signed up for some offer from the first ad and complain why it asks for payment info. They didnāt see the free dictionary on the pageā¦
They also donāt see any meaningful elements in games, they donāt see ādamage numbersā or āskill slotsā or āfirst/second person perspectiveā, they donāt even know which character is being controlled and the HUD looks like random noise to them. A streamer said he was watching his partner start to learn how to game and she had zero intuition what was plausible or typical in games. We expect certain things to be interactive and other things to be non-functional decorations.
To go back to the car metaphor - I canāt tell apart the exits on the highway and I canāt tell in which kind of weather itās still save to drive, and they donāt remember learning that either.
My point is, donāt sound too annoyed when answering their questions, find something they know and you donāt, and say, could you sum up all your experience in a minute? Do I expect you to? No, I have to ask you every time as well.
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I laugh.
And yes you are correct. My motherās fear is real. She actually had a scammer call her and try to get her social security number. They got enough out of her, sounding like the Medicare office calling, that she started getting phone calls about needing treatments for her bad knees, when she had already had replacement surgery. Someone was trying to use her Medicare to get medical supplies.
She also had a guy call her and act like he was my brother and had been arrested and needed bail money.
Both times, she was fooled for a few minutes but then realized something was not right.
Scum of the earth is what scammers are. Trying to take what little an elderly widow has to live on.
So her concerns are merited. But I still laugh. 
My son got skimmed at WalMart recently. But the guy doing it was an idiot. First, he spoke to my son, so he knows what he looks like. Second, he walked to his car, so my son knows what he drives and he had noticed the car, which is rare, and he knows where it is parked during the week and thus where the guy works. So my son went straight to the police dept and was standing there when the guy phoned my son, because all he managed to skim was his phone number (I taught my kids to put their cards in blocking wallets) and accused my son of stealing $600 from him. My son was like, I am standing in the police station reporting you now, I gave them your description, I know you drive a such and such and I know it is parked at this place where you work and I have the phone number you just called me fromā¦the guy hung up.
The very next week, this same guy stands outside WM and says he is raising money for a cause. Some poor sap donates $10 thru an Apple Square device on the guys phone and gets charged $100. Turns him into the police. Guy finally gets caught.
Apparently he wanted my son to buy baby formula for him by using his debit card in the square device. Of course my son did not.
I told him, I have an answer for people who ask me for money. I tell them, the local police have a program that helps people in need. Let me call them for you.
They leave every time.
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My son is working on all the info @GullyFourmyle sent. Thanks again for all that! He thinks he has run across another issue but did not elaborate. He has so little time to help since he runs tech support at work and for several other people. He also had the head man come in and ask him if he could keep their 20 year old equipment running 5 more years to which he replied, If I can find the parts. He is finding them. In Poland.
I think the main reason he loves the job is just to prove he can make old stuff work. The whole system is still running on Win95. Boss man told him to pick out any PC he wanted and clear a spot in the office to set himself up.
They just paid $1500 for a capacitor the size of your hand, from Poland. It was wrapped in so much bubble wrap when it arrived, the box would have fit 3 PS5s. Took 20 minutes to carefully cut thru all the wrap.
Anyway, maybe one day, I will get to access EA once again.
I am trying to stick with Linuxā¦if only I can remember what I need to type in the terminal.
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Tried Litrus. Almost worked. Said there was a conflict with my version of wineā¦
Changed the topic to general discussion
For reference the versions of what I installed are:
[gully@archlinux ~]$ uname -a
Linux archlinux 6.5.2-arch1-1 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Wed, 06 Sep 2023 21:01:01 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[gully@archlinux ~]$ wine --version
wine-8.15 (Staging)
[gully@archlinux ~]$ lutris --version
lutris-0.5.13
Arch Linux doesnāt display a simple release id anywhere that I found except to show its build date (06 Sep 2023 in this case). The wine that I have installed was from Archās multilib repo, package wine-staging. I used the command found in the docs for Lutris (posted above, not reposted since the forum complains lightly if I post it a second time). Of note here is that Lutris wants a lot of 32bit libraries.
sudo pacman -S --needed wine-staging giflib lib32-giflib libpng lib32-libpng libldap lib32-libldap gnutls lib32-gnutls \
mpg123 lib32-mpg123 openal lib32-openal v4l-utils lib32-v4l-utils libpulse lib32-libpulse libgpg-error \
lib32-libgpg-error alsa-plugins lib32-alsa-plugins alsa-lib lib32-alsa-lib libjpeg-turbo lib32-libjpeg-turbo \
sqlite lib32-sqlite libxcomposite lib32-libxcomposite libxinerama lib32-libgcrypt libgcrypt lib32-libxinerama \
ncurses lib32-ncurses ocl-icd lib32-ocl-icd libxslt lib32-libxslt libva lib32-libva gtk3 \
lib32-gtk3 gst-plugins-base-libs lib32-gst-plugins-base-libs vulkan-icd-loader lib32-vulkan-icd-loader
(There was some setup before running the command that I didnāt have to do with the new fresh install of the OS.)
While researching this I did see several notes about problems with the EA App and wine but those notes were fairly old and it āseemsā like wine was upgraded to fix the problems somewhere around 7.17 (ish, I forget the exact version). And there were a lot of game incompatibilities with older wine versions which lead to a proliferation of wine forks. All I really know is that wine 7.12stable which I have on my main desktop was too old, and that 8.15staging that came from the Arch repo worked for me in this one instance.
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Oh my! EA app installed and running! Downloading a bajillion Sims4 files
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