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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. ...

I’ve wanted a digital frame at home for a while now. I’m notoriously bad at organizing pictures, even worse at sorting, printing, arranging or displaying them. So when I found out that digital frames were a thing it seemed like this would be a natural solution to this problem. Unfortunately, the commercially available ones either don’t have the features that I want (e.g. some way to connect with my images stored in my Nextcloud) or feature worrying amounts of integration with various third-party services, clouds, phone apps and whatnot. I’m absolutely not inclined to yield control of my pictures to some provider who is supposed to sell me a device for displaying them but maybe that’s just me. ...