TIL

Over the past four days I’ve been doing a personal crash course on game development together with my partner1, ending up in building a small platformer in two days. We decided to use Godot Engine, as I had been circling it for a while now 2, and it turned out this decision was good because it was been a quite amazing experience, even for a total gamedev beginner like me 👍 What cost me a bunch of time however is trying to figure out how to create an animated tile in a tilemap, which I finally figured out yesterday, and so I’m writing it down here for future me and everyone else wondering about this. ...

OpenSSH’s ssh command supports a bunch of escape sequences while a session is running, by default triggered by the ~ character. According to man ssh a list of available commands can be requested with ~?. And indeed, hitting ~? within an open SSH session prints some helpful information: $ ~? Supported escape sequences: ~. - terminate connection (and any multiplexed sessions) ~B - send a BREAK to the remote system ~C - open a command line ~R - request rekey ~V/v - decrease/increase verbosity (LogLevel) ~^Z - suspend ssh ~# - list forwarded connections ~& - background ssh (when waiting for connections to terminate) ~? - this message ~~ - send the escape character by typing it twice (Note that escapes are only recognized immediately after newline.) I most commonly require ~. to disconnect from a broken SSH session (e.g. something I still had open on my laptop when I sent it to sleep). ...

After recently switching to work under Linux, I needed a way to replicate my existing solution for delaying audio under Windows under Linux/Pulseaudio. To once again explain my situation, I use OBS also for video conferencing, through the virtual camera1. OBS does not offer a built-in way to provide a virtual microphone with all the filters and such applied as well (in my case noise reduction and a limiter), so I need to solve this in a separate way. Additionally, my camera setup has a small delay of around 350ms that I also need to compensate by delaying my audio. ...

Edit 2024-09-09: Please be advised that this post refers to an older version of keyd that still used a different configuration format. An older version also stated the config file was stored at ~/.config/keyd, that was an error on my part. Thanks to a reader for the related heads-up! As a German living in Germany with umlauts in my last name and a US ANSI keyboard layout on all my devices1 I need to remap some stuff to be able to easily type ä, ö, ü and ß. On Windows I solved this with Autohotkey, mapping AltGr+a to ä, AltGr+o to ö, AltGr+u to ü and AltGr+s to ß (well, technically RAlt - the right Alt key). That has burned itself into my muscle memory now, and so while currently setting up my new Framework laptop under Linux, with Gnome running on Wayland, I was looking for a way to remap the keys to this layout as well. ...

I’m currently in the process of setting up my new Frame.work laptop, and since I’ve been using Debian-derivatives for the past two decades now, I decided to use the opportunity, try something new for once and installed Fedora1. Something that got annoying quickly is that the package manager command dnf defaults to “no” when asking if you really want to install a package plus its dependencies. I’m very used to apt’s behaviour here that allows me to type sudo apt install <package> and then just hit Enter on the sanity check. I wanted the same for dnf, but without bypassing the sanity check altogether. I did some digging together with my buddy Ben and we found the answer. ...

I’m currently setting up some alternative game stores on my Steamdeck, specifically Emudeck for my retro collection, Heroic Launcher1 for GOG and Epic, and also itch.io. I stumbled across this Reddit post that recommended to use the itch.io Windows launcher instead of the native Linux one: Itch.io has an app, that even has linux version. But it has issues - it can only use one wine version, if you have it installed globally, it can’t even handle linux games well. It pretends to install them, and when you launch them it opens a directory with the zip file… Or it just doesn’t work after installation. Then you need to add all the games to steam, setup their images, and other stuff. There’s boilr for that, but it doesn’t find everything, and most of the indies are not in the database anyway. ...

As a follow-up to my earlier post about how to sync screenshots to Google Drive here’s how to achieve the same but with a dedicated “Steamdeck” album on Google Photos instead. Once again we are using rclone for syncing. First I created a new target gphoto by running ~/bin/rclone config again and then following these steps. Quick summary: New remote gphoto Empty application ID and secret Full access No advanced config Use web browser to authenticate I then created a new album: ...

This is admittedly something I did not learn today but rather learned and adapted a couple years ago from this post on the Home Assistant forum, but I just had to use it again today and so I figured I’d write it down with all the bells and whistles just in case I ever need this information again - or anyone else does. First of all, in your unifi controller you should create a new user that Home Assistant will act as to manage your port forward(s) for you. So, log into the controller, go into Settings > Administrators and add a new Administrator user1. ...

I wanted to automatically sync the screenshots I take on my Steamdeck to some cloud, without having to manually do it for every single one in the Steamdeck’s own uploader. I came across this gist by pegasd that accomplishes this via rclone, a path monitoring systemd service and some reconfiguration in Steam. However, I had to adjust things slightly for everything to really work - I could imagine that some past Steam update changed things slightly vs when the gist was created: ...

I just had to trim a bunch of screenshots that had some black borders around them. I didn’t want to do this manually or via a GUI, but ideally batch-able via the commandline. Thankfully, that’s one of the many things that ImageMagick can do for you. I put all my screenshot PNGs into a folder, and then in that folder ran this mogrify command: magick mogrify -trim -define trim:percent-background=0% -background black -path output/ *.png I found that I had to add the -define trim:percent-background=0% option to get rid of all black borders, as otherwise on some of the images a very slim one ended up remaining. I also specified the background color with -background black to make sure that it really only trimmed the black borders. ...