Posts

I’m (re)reading a lot of Brad Warner’s books during these holidays. If you ever feel like learning about no-bullshit hardcore Zen buddhism from a punk bass player and ordained Zen master (who hates that term), I can recommend: Sit Down and Shut Up, Don’t Be a Jerk and It Came From Beyond Zen, in that order. You can also try Hardcore Zen, the original work Brad explains Zen itself and Eihei Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō in plain English so you don’t have to spend 30 years studying classical Japanese. Dōgen was about 800 years ahead of his time, so reading him now is excellent timing ...

A few kernel versions (or Steam versions) ago, my Dual Shock 4 controller spontaneously stopped working in Steam. Big Picture mode said “no controller detected” and only games that had their own native DS4 support managed to still use it. Looks like you need some udev rules to make sure all things are good. For my wired DS4v2 I stuck this: SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="28de", MODE="0666" KERNEL=="uinput", MODE="0660", GROUP="myusername", OPTIONS+="static_node=uinput" KERNEL=="hidraw*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="054c", ATTRS{idProduct}=="09cc", MODE="0666" into /etc/udev/rules.d/99-ds4.rules. And reloaded udev. Thanks Xard and others from Freenode’s #gamingonlinux for the pointers. ...

If you’re forced to use newer and more bizarre USB wifi sticks that rely on the rtl8812au/rtl8814au chipset, you need to do two things: Compile the driver yourself, since most distros don’t include one Tell NetworkManager to stop randomizing MAC addresses for that device You can get the updated source from diederikdehaas’ project on GitHub. The build instructions there are great and the driver integrates with DKMS. However, you won’t be able to connect because NetworkManager is scrambling your MAC address. To make it stop, add this to /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf: ...

This is what I needed, I put it in /etc/udev/rules.d/80-dolphinbar.rules: SUBSYSTEM=="hidraw", ATTRS{idVendor}=="057e", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0306", MODE="0666" I can’t remember where I found this, I’m pretty sure I didn’t figure this out for myself. If you need a DolphinBar, Aliexpress should have you covered. It could be that the vendor code differs for yours, so make sure to watch dmesg when you plug it in.

JYDGE by Finnish twin-stick shooter experts 10tons is for you if you enjoyed Hotline Miami, Robotron 2048, Crimsonland or JYDGE’s sister game Neon Chrome. ...

Note 2024-10-07: None of this should be necessary nowadays as the components in play here have come a long way since 2018. So the proprietary Nvidia driver is a large, steaming, smelly pile of shit. At least that’s the impression you get when you read what developers say about it. There’s a bug here and a workaround there, and we haven’t even started talking about the messy situation that is EGLstreams yet. So why do people use Nvidia cards on Linux? Because so far, they give good bang for the buck, use relatively little energy for what they do and work with all commercial games. I’m pretty sure those are the reasons, anyway. ...

If you run a combination of newer (4.9ish) kernels and systemd, your USB wifi networking gear probably now gets funky names such as “wlx74da387e95fe” instead of “wlan0” like you were used to back in the good days. This wouldn’t be so bad, only that the firmware on those dongles can mess up when the device gets a long name. Suddenly it won’t let you connect to your wireless network, claiming that the network does not exist, even though you know for a fact that it does. What your machine is actually trying to say, I believe, is that the network device doesn’t seem to exist. ...

Update: There are now easier ways to manage this, for example through Lutris. If you manage your WINEs in Lutris, you simply have a checkbox whether to include dumbxinputemu or not. If you need to use WINE to play some Windows games, the lack of Xinput support might get on your nerves. WINE maps joystick devices to Dinput. That works for some older games, but buttons need to be mapped manually, and many newer games don’t detect the controllers at all because they expect Xinput. ...

TL;DR (1072 words): The current trend towards closed communications systems like Slack, Facebook and the like can only hurt us as society. An open standard needs to emerge. Who’s volunteering to support things like Matrix and the “new decentralized Internet”? I’m trying to illustrate the newly closed nature of the Internet using team chat and team collaboration as an example. But you can expand this example to pretty much anything nowadays. Because the solution to combat this closed-ness applies equally to all of these issues, I hope you can extrapolate from this as necessary. ...

Update: With XMPP slowly dying (at least IMHO), maybe you should consider Matrix instead of XMPP and ignore everything I write below. Google just shut down the last piece of Google Talk, killing XMPP. This means that people using standards-based open and interoperable chat systems can no longer talk to their friends who use Google’s proprietary and closed chat system, Hangouts. For example, people who use Pidgin on any of the thousands of free and open XMPP servers in the world cannot message Google users anymore. ...