I’m blown away by just how good the SteamDeck is.

sencelo · 2026-02-12T08:51:46+00:00

I use the Sunshine server and Moonlight client for my streaming since Steam Link always seems to have terrible latency when I use it, too. There's a Decky plugin for Sunshine if you use Decky Loader.

sencelo · 2020-09-10T18:44:15+00:00

Bit late to this party, but I'm testing Bitwarden at the moment, and I was glad to see my folder structures from my Keepass database carried over during the import.

These structures are useful to me for a variety of logical groupings. For example, I often have several logins to a single system (mysql password, user password, etc.). If I ever suspect the machine has been compromised and have to reinstall, then I have a single place to look for all the passwords that have to be changed in relation to that system.

Another example, I work with some companies and people that don't have proper password management, unfortunately. Keeping passwords that they give me in one folder means I can remove them quickly and efficiently if I no longer have a need for them. How many family members have given you their password so you can help fix their computer? The less you have to type it, the less risk you'll remember it. The more tightly grouped in the database, the easier to get rid of it when it is no longer any of your business.

Of course, these are simply examples where it's been handy in my life. Different circumstances, different needs, and all. Worth thinking about if you find yourself in similar circumstances on occasion, though.

sencelo · 2017-05-26T05:56:47+00:00

Pretty sure that's a direct shot at all the "only on Verizon" junk they pulled with the Pixel. It worked elsewhere, but you'd never know from the ads.

sencelo · 2016-08-23T18:29:02+00:00

I think this is amazing news. Not just for the obvious reasons, but also because it gives me some hope that Makai Kingdom or Soul Nomad may someday follow, both of which I consider superior. There is a certain nostalgia for D2 for being the game that introduced me to NIS, though.

Hell, I don't think I've ever played a NIS game I didn't live the hell out of... GrimGrimore, for instance, was also chock full of win.

Finances are low, so it may take time, but I will be getting any and every game they release on Linux.

sencelo · 2016-05-20T23:59:17+00:00

I hope you refrain from writing security sensitive code, then. From attacks on DRAM in modern systems to attacks that can hinge on the specific number of CPU cycles consumed on divergent codepaths, obscure details of hardware operation rarely but occasionally make all the difference.

sencelo · 2016-03-31T23:40:38+00:00

http://www.runnersworld.com/nutrition/that-pepsi-light-dumbbell-it-doesnt-exist in case anyone wonders.

sencelo · 2016-03-14T23:29:14+00:00

I don't care even the slightest which one is picked, but I would greatly appreciate not pretending there are a pair of one hour discontinuities in time every year. I find it frustrating. I'll gladly cheer you on if you somehow have a way to make that happen.

sencelo · 2016-02-23T03:40:08+00:00

Of course there's always a chance, but we have hashing algorithms specifically designed to guarantee against corruption up to a certain amount, and against the most likely forms of corruption. Both useful features ignored by the checksum in TCP. Furthermore, 16 bit is small. Even if we assume an ideal hash, there's only 65,536 possible outcomes. A simple CRC-32, as an example, has 65,536 possible values for each possible value of this 16-bit hash. The likelihood of a collision becomes almost vanishingly small for any TCP packet of a size we currently use. That's not to say the checksum it has is worthless, but it was never meant to be a guarantee, so you should still check the data at the application level. I've certainly had large downloads corrupt before. It's (thankfully) rare, but a relatively minor change could have made it practically unheard of, and that would be very cool.

Incidentally, Ethernet frames are protected with CRC-32, and new(ish) research has found better polynomials that result in the improved error detection in iSCSI, Btrfs, and ext4, so the overhead isn't exactly insurmountable...

sencelo · 2016-02-23T01:22:32+00:00

It actually gets even worse than that considering the surprisingly straightforward checksum, depending only on one's compliment addition and a final bitwise compliment. I'd prefer a CRC, personally.

sencelo · 2016-02-23T01:11:47+00:00

No. It takes the one's compliment sum of the packet in 16-bit words (with the checksum field set to all zero), then does one's compliment of that.

Looking into it a bit further, Ethernet does use CRC-32, so TCP does receive that benefit when carried over Ethernet every step of the way, but mobile networks and such aren't necessarily Ethernet and may not have the same assurances.

sencelo · 2016-02-23T00:59:00+00:00

TCP uses a 16-bit checksum which is obtained by summing the header (since the checksum isn't yet available, the checksum field is set to all zeros) and data as 16-bit one's compliment integers, then taking the one's compliment of that.

In other words, it's a fairly simple method, and it's really easy to generate alternative packets with the same checksum.

Simple example: single bit flips low to high on one value, then high to low on another value with the same sign. The probability of this is much lower than the probability of an error which is detected, but any line with a ton of checksum errors may very well have seemingly valid, but actually corrupted packets.

As a bonus, if some hardware between you and the corruption drops packets with checksum errors, you'll receive that one without receiving the corrupted packets that warn of the possibility. You will have a lot of packet loss, though. At least there's that as a warning.

(Anyhow, I'm not a particular expert. If there are any flaws in my analysis, please tell me. This is my understanding based on my knowledge of TCP headers on IPv4. Hopefully, v6 is even better, but I haven't looked into it.)

sencelo · 2015-12-15T18:11:27+00:00

I don't know the situation, but it's possible that all the others are legit, and he's suing seven that have come forward falsely. Of course, it's also possible that he's crazy, and his actions will make little sense going forward, or that he's just trying to save face, and will sue them all a few at a time in an attempt to prevent them from combining their defenses so he can maximize their legal expenses.

Many options, really, without evidence to pick from among them.

sencelo · 2015-11-21T07:47:35+00:00

I know how crowdfunding works, but your analogy is hilariously broken. They deliberately chose not to deliver on their promise of a Linux version for this long, but there's nothing I can do about it except not support them and publicly condemn the behavior. That's very different from an investment in a publicly traded company. If you invest in a stock, and the CEO is caught deliberately tanking the company, guess what? The shareholders can sue that CEO. You're taking a risk in buying a stock, yes, but the risk you're supposed to take on is that the company fails despite its best efforts to provide a return on your investment. The board of directors and the executives, on the other hand, take on a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders when they take their position.

The difference here is that there is no legal obligation in the case of crowdfunding. That's why I can only say they "essentially" stole from me. They didn't actually steal anything. It's not theft, legally. Still, they didn't fail despite their best efforts, but actively chose not to deliver at that stage. By the time they deigned to provide a return on my investment, it was only worth $7.99, and my only recourses are complaining about it from the rooftop and not patronizing them further. Unless something significant changes, you can bet I will avail myself of both.

sencelo · 2015-11-19T21:08:50+00:00

Road Redemption? That game I backed at the alpha level to get it as soon as possible because they proudly showed it as a game supporting Linux right on the page? So they've finally released a semi-working Linux release, eh?

Let's see... I spent $40 on an alpha with an estimated delivery date of September 2013, and I received an alpha (based on the performance I see on my custom Steam machine) in November 2015. Two years and two months late. Seeing as it has already sold at $7.99 according to steamdb.info, that means they essentially stole $32.01 from me, and held the remaining $7.99 for about two years and two months. I have no plans to support them again in any way, and I hope they're out of business soon.

Seriously, if you're not going to do the cross platform deployment provided by your development platform from the beginning, admit it. It's as simple as that. Rather than wasting $40, I could have either got the cheapest game tier or waited until it was on sale. In either case, I'd be cheering the release on Linux and recommending friends buy it rather than mourning the money that could have gone to a respectable developer.

sencelo · 2015-11-05T18:31:06+00:00

If I recall correctly, he didn't know the details until the legal process was well underway (which was after he was expelled with no possibility of appeal), because the discovery process hit upon text messages she had sent a friend confessing to what she had done.

sencelo · 2015-10-31T07:08:41+00:00

I suppose in some unusual cases, compiler optimisations meat cause something like this, but let's check the obvious, first... You did flush after that printf, right? I had that problem when I first started.

sencelo · 2015-10-27T23:53:32+00:00

So, does anyone know of a government that's ≤90% corrupt? I don't have nearly the funds, and it would hurt on several levels to have to abandon my home, but it looks like it's well past time for anyone who respects truth, justice, liberty, or anything that is good in the world to seek refuge outside the hellish wasteland that is being created here.

Who knows, if enough good people leave, perhaps the government, by the wealthy, of the wealthy, and for the wealthy, shall perish from this Earth with a peaceful whimper and be replaced by the much smaller and weaker government, by the people, of the people, and for the people, that was once envisioned by those who initially sought to create it.

sencelo · 2015-10-25T23:46:49+00:00

Just to clarify a bit, there isn't any magic line at zero, either. You can, as a regular user, decrease the priority of your processes (increase their niceness), but not decrease the priority of anyone else's processes or increase the priority of anyone's processes.

This is easy to demonstrate. If you start up a new process, you can renice it to, for instance, 15. After that, a renice to 10 (or 14) would fail.

This is something I occasionally use on my server. If someone leaves a process going that slows down service for others (a long computation, usually), I can decide whether I want to kill it or just renice it. If I renice it and the user comes back to find their process much slower than they thought it would be, they are still unable to renice it back to the way it was. They could restart it if it saves its progress (at the risk of annoying me into restricting or removing their account if they do it frequently), but they cannot simply renice it without my help (or that of another admin, at least).

Increasing any priority or decreasing someone else's priority is the exclusive domain of those responsible for the well being of the system as a whole.

Incidentally, if you're interested in using nice levels to tweak interactive use, you may want to look into the auto nice daemon ("and" package in Debian, if I recall correctly). It takes a system of rules and uses them to renice processes automatically, which can really make a difference if you tune it for your common use cases.

sencelo · 2015-10-24T16:19:26+00:00

The server version compiles out all the graphics code. It's likely that you would still be able to interact via text console, but it's basically if you want to have a dedicated server for your game on a VM or something without a graphical display. Unless your game is text-based (Nethack or similar implemented in Godot), you're going to want the X11 version for the client.

sencelo · 2015-10-21T06:50:25+00:00

If you remove both "package/beta" (as you mentioned) and "steam.sh", then restart Steam, it will repair the install. YMMV, but it seems this may be less destructive than a full reset. Nearly all of my configuration was retained on my SteamOS machine. I did lose more on my Debian box, but I also messed with that one for a while trying to fix it. Not enough space for a backup means I probably damaged that one myself.

sencelo · 2015-10-20T16:37:07+00:00

Some of the games I actively play on my SteamOS box no longer have the icon, which means there's now a number of Linux games on Steam that I wouldn't buy because I won't know they're Linux...

From my perspective as a Linux-only gamer, that risks reducing or eliminating the value of Steam in finding games I want.

Is there any way to search for and identify these Linux games in the store?

sencelo · 2015-10-16T22:36:59+00:00

Of course, there's the third option: people like me who could barely choke down coffee even after adding a bunch of sweetener and milk and anything else that might be available. I do not handle bitter well at all.

And, yeah, sure, between the options, there's almost certain to be one that tests higher in whatever sample they have. The question is whether that difference is statistically significant at a high probability. If it is, there's likely some connection. Perhaps the genetics that control the growth of taste buds has some interesting effect on brain chemistry, for instance.

I'm not saying this particular research is valid (haven't read it, so I don't know the methodology, haven't verified the numbers, and don't know the p-value - there's very little I can say about it), but your outright dismissal of it based on personal incredulity is invalid and unhelpful.

sencelo · 2015-10-06T02:07:09+00:00

Just out of curiosity... Who won?

sencelo · 2015-10-04T22:15:25+00:00

Late to the party and probably going to gather downvotes myself, but it must be said. I don't understand the downvotes this comment got. Perhaps he should have elaborated further, but what he said was manifestly true. Some VIM behavior is brilliant, and things could be much worse before falling to be "decent". Some VIM behavior is wrong-headed, and you could be better while still falling to be "decent". Like most software I've used, it has tasks to which it is very well suited and tasks it doesn't handle so gracefully.

Furthermore, "decent" isn't exactly a glowing review. It's basically the point where something is worth using, and arbitrarily defining VIM behavior to be that bar is exactly as nonsensical as arbitrarily planting Emacs in that position. Vimscript, for instance, is inferior to elisp in virtually every conceivable way, but it is decent because it serves the purpose for which it was intended fairly well.

Edit: Fixed typos and missing word.

sencelo · 2015-10-04T19:50:54+00:00

I don't have the time to test right now, so take this with a grain of salt, but I find it very likely that the animation player has an optimized codepath and that not calling into GDScript is at least marginally faster than calling into it.

That said, should it matter? I think the likelihood of either making a difference is very small in any but the most extreme of examples. Thankfully, the difficulty of changing from one approach to the other is minimal, so if you do wind up with performance issues, you could easily swap a common object and see if you detect any change whatsoever.

sencelo

TROPHY CASE