Linux

A few days ago I started noticing strange behaviour of my shell. When typing commands or working with pasted ones, especially with tab completion, duplicated characters started showing up at the beginning of the line or in the middle in the case of working with a pasted command. Something like hx became hxhx or docker became dodocker. These duplicated characters were not editable, I could only clear the line and start fresh but the same thing would occur again, although not quite deterministically. ...

Sometimes I don’t work from home but at my family’s or a friend’s place. Turns out the router at one of these places is terrible and can’t reliably provide WiFi for my laptop sitting some 4 meters away (with 2 doors in between). I thought this was rather odd because my phone didn’t struggle with this so I asked around and thought about it some and the most obvious culprit seems to be the WiFi radio band that’s used. ...

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 ...

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. ...