A while ago someone (not pointing fingers but it wasn’t me) broke the Raspberry Pi my Jellyfin server was running on. I have no idea what exactly happened and why it doesn’t work anymore but it was incentive enough to finally tackle the project of acquiring or building an actual home server to host my stuff on. So far I’ve been making use of the two Raspberry Pis I own and they’ve been working mostly fine but every once in a while I came across some hiccups or ran into limitations of these devices (the Pi 4’s RAM being saturated for some reason) so I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. Also, it’s a good opportunity to separate concerns because the Pi that was running Jellyfin was also the driver for our digital frame which isn’t ideal. ...

Here’s another piece of gaming nostalgia: Freelancer. It’s celebrating its 20th birthday this year which seems like a good opportunity to me to get it up and running again. Prerequisites Although this can probably achieved in any number of ways here is what I used: Lutris (flatpak or native), the version used here was 0.5.14 from Flathub Freelancer install script for Lutris (the following is a customized version of this which contains various fixes including a no-CD fix). This script contains a custom return code after the initial installation. This is necessary because this step does not exit cleanly resulting in the Lutris installation crashing. Expand to see script ...

This game is an interesting one. It was infamous after its release and I haven’t been in the habit of paying attention to new game releases for a long time. For the most past that’s because for the longest time in my life I didn’t have a powerful enough gaming PC and my disposal (also no gaming console) so I couldn’t have run them anyway. Now that I own a Steam Deck I’m in a sort of narrow window where somewhat recent AAA games are available to me which is why I tend to look around the Steam Store a bit more nowadays. ...

Dear reader, I recently had an experience so bizarre that I feel like sharing it with the world wide web for all the good that will do. Take it as my way of blowing off some steam. Without further pretext here goes… A while ago I bought Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) on Steam. I own a Steam Deck and read many good things about the game and that it runs pretty well on the Deck. Also it was on sale for about 20 bucks so I figured I should go for it. It sat in my library for a while because I had other games I wanted to finish first. Recently I did so and proceeded to download and install RDR2. It quite a chonker so it took me a while. ...

Disclaimer: Ripping BluRays with Handbrake is discouraged by its developers. They recommend using MakeMKV instead which is more robust in this respect since it’s built for the task. By now I’ve adopted this workflow myself. I recently gained a renewed interest in moving my media from discs to hard drives so I can integrate them with my media server. For music and DVDs this is fairly straightforward, although there is a hoop to jump through if you’re on Fedora because it doesn’t come with all the proprietary codecs and whatnot preinstalled. However, all you need to do is get your hands on the RPMFusion repo and install libdvdcss and you’re good. ...