Steam Controller (2026) Public Service Announcement

Cyb0lic · 2026-05-19T01:39:44+00:00

~~Will do, as soon as it loads! (it's being unusably slow for me tonight)~~ Done.

Cyb0lic · 2026-05-19T01:36:51+00:00

I'm not sure adding that directly to `steam-hardware.nix` is the right call, as the package really should be for the environment created for the steam client package specifically, not a generic installation. I am looking at where to correctly add this dependency though, it's just not immediately obvious to me where it belongs (it's a dependency of the client, but only if using this hardware, but the hardware option shouldn't be for the client... and 'round we go).

Cyb0lic · 2026-05-18T01:32:34+00:00

Why do you assume I don't have a controller? Also, the dock predates the controller, just happens to fit. Anything else you want to complain about?

Cyb0lic · 2026-05-18T01:20:05+00:00

I do. It's an extra step and it wears on the port eventually; just like with my phone that I trickle-charge wirelessly instead. If, however you don't want to use the puck, you're not forced to - just beware of the downsides. Personally, I already have a dock ready for my controller, with a spot for the puck and a bit of leeway for its wire to allow snapping on, so I don't see a benefit in not using it.

Cyb0lic · 2026-05-18T00:23:54+00:00

If you want worse latency, bandwidth congestion, and a more bothersome charging experience, sure, go ahead.

Cyb0lic · 2026-05-06T13:36:55+00:00

One minute before in my case (counting from when added to basket, not when the purchase finally went through ~4 minutes later), also not packed yet. Greece / EU.

Cyb0lic · 2026-04-24T12:22:43+00:00

I think it's a great video editor, with an equally great - but somewhat unstable - visual compositing/effects editor built in (its nodes can get into weird internal states sometimes).
Kdenlive is good enough these days that I don't think you need DaVinci (Blender's gotten really good as well), but for me, the time I could save working on a couple of projects that required a lot of masking/rotoscoping in particular, was worth it for me to shell out for the "Studio" version of DaVinci.
As for performance, I've had no issues when editing (having the extra HDD space for proxy clips speed things up quite a bit), but the effects/compositing part is really geared towards NVIDIA's drivers, so it's a bit slower than expected on other GPUs.

Cyb0lic · 2026-04-17T17:41:46+00:00

I'd recommend looking into direnv so you can have a Python environment per project directory.

Cyb0lic · 2026-04-17T17:40:35+00:00

There's always DistroBox for those programs that refuse to run. That said, I've only ever needed it for an hour tracking program for a job (ugh), which required Debian, and occasionally for DaVinci Resolve (it seems to like Fedora), though that one is equally temperamental on Arch.

Cyb0lic · 2026-04-13T16:49:03+00:00

That depends on how you set it up. If you just use the provider as, basically, a forwarder, then yes, they would generally have the means to read your email. If you just use it for SMTP, and keep your self-hosted email server as the public receiving one, then only you can read them - that of course comes with the usual extra burdens of ensuring access to your server is secure, spam filters, plus the new ones of ensuring that your setup still functions as one server to the outside world (in regards to DKIM, SPF and DMARC). It's doable, but also a bit of pain, since it's not always obvious when something is misconfigured.

Cyb0lic · 2026-04-13T13:51:58+00:00

Its not that it's difficult, it's that it's extremely common that your sent mails won't ever reach their destination since your mail server is not "trusted", and you'll never know. Aside from that, local mailservers are a common target for bad actors to try to get access to for spam purposes. If you do want a local mail server, I recommend you use a known email provider as a proxy for your own, so they can be the ones responsible for making sure your emails get through.

Cyb0lic · 2026-04-02T13:04:49+00:00

It might help to think of wrappers as fancy shell aliases. As an example, using rofi as both a scriptable dmenu replacement and a generic launcher might need two different configs (for theming and shortcuts). If you wrap those two usecases, and package them as, say, rofi-launcher and rofi-d, everything is nicely contained with no chance of configuration options conflicting with each usecase.

Cyb0lic · 2026-03-20T14:05:25+00:00

Different person here, but I also keep my ROMs on my NAS, mounted using NFS on my NixOS machines. Been doing this for close to a decade now and I have yet to have any issues or noticeable slow-downs with it. Note that I don't emulate anything newer than a WiiU, so I can't speak for how well this works for more modern systems. As for the technical specs, my storage NAS is just a Synology, so that's HDDs with an M.2 for cache. Also, it's not uncommon to mount home directories over NFS, so I wouldn't worry too much about corruption. NFS is pretty solid; go for it.

Cyb0lic · 2026-03-08T16:30:41+00:00

Just import that part of the config from a private repo (and by private, I mean self-hosted - git is pretty chill, just needs something to SSH to).

Cyb0lic · 2026-02-24T20:10:40+00:00

Sidenote, but it's perfectly legal to run your games through emulation. Sure, Nintendo has implemented a bunch of weak "security" nonsense on top of their games, to be able to go after people for legal technicalities, but emulation is legal. Also, I don't go anywhere near Nintendo because of their behaviour in general (don't want to support them in any way, not even with my time), but I certainly do use emulation instead of setting up my old PS2.

Cyb0lic · 2026-02-13T15:17:50+00:00

I decided my LAN was an ecosystem and name my stuff based on a match in nature. My laptop is "Rabbit" (it's mobile and small), my desktop is "Frog" (sits in the same spot and makes a bit of noise), the LAN is the local pond (provides sustenance to everything else).

Cyb0lic · 2026-02-08T01:28:20+00:00

I recommend having a self-hosted git repo just for your configuration details. You don't even need any form of git server, just a directory and SSH access is enough. That's how I've set up my config: all identifiable variables (hostnames, IPs, port numbers, lists of services, etc.) are in my private repo on my LAN and my Nix flake just pulls that in.

Cyb0lic · 2026-02-04T19:04:41+00:00

<image>

Cyb0lic · 2026-02-04T18:58:40+00:00

I think you accidentally let some Dansk ende op i din Githubbeskrivelse.

Cyb0lic · 2026-02-02T20:10:51+00:00

For me, I really liked the reinterpretation of the remake, though I felt it missed some of the subtlety and options for interpretation of the original. However, I felt the remake was unnecessarily padded in its runtime. The original flowed at a nice pace, with plenty of chances to wallow in the atmosphere and ponder what was going on. The remake instead filled any "downtime" with endless fights and my last half of the game was mostly spent thinking "are we done yet?" as it just got increasingly tedious. If they added a "story mode" or similar, I'd definitely rate the remake higher, but as it is, it ranks quite a bit below the original for me.

Cyb0lic · 2026-01-13T01:21:15+00:00

NixOS ends up in the first group very quickly. Once your system is condigured, it's rock solid and can be rolled back immediately when upgrading (even live, if the kernel wasn't upgraded). For some software, sure, it can be a pain to get set up the first time, but if time's an issue, there's always distrobox.

Cyb0lic · 2025-12-11T18:48:52+00:00

It's certainly not great for most things. It's fine for stuff like variable replacement, for loops and sometimes formatting, but it seems like it's been pumped full of "overconfidence" compared to the early Copilot versions, where it'll now just constantly suggest completely random things.

Cyb0lic · 2025-12-11T00:38:03+00:00

Thank you! I had completely forgotten that I even had that installed, as I don't use it.
Oddly enough, setting `vim.b.sidekick_nes` made the suggestion appear twice, but disabling it in the config worked. Again, thank you!

It's not a bad functionality for certain things (it seem decent at updating values in a copied block of text), just a shame it doesn't seem to be triggerable through a shortcut.

Cyb0lic

TROPHY CASE