Month: November 2019

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We are living in instant messenger hell (petermolnar.net)
I had to install WhatsApp, because some friends are refusing to communicate in any other way, which made me realise how tired and disillusioned I am when I have to face yet another instant messenger network - at least, with some work, Pidgin can still connect to more or less everything and anything.

Note to self: Check Pidgin again. Looks like it learned some new tricks:

https://petermolnar.net/instant-messenger-hell/

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Matthias Pfefferle on Twitter (Twitter)
“I am thrilled what @BekoPharm has done with #SemPress on his site! https://t.co/Gq8Afr7500”

Thanks, glad you like it Matthias. I’ll eventually make a proper child theme someday. Still tinkering with the CSS. is a great theme for styling 👍

Stared https://github.com/pfefferle/SemPress so I won’t miss any upgrades 😁

I can now use Micropub to publish to my blog by Jan-Lukas Else (jlelse.blog)
I can now make use of Micropub to post on my blog! More information: I am in search for an easier way to blog from the go for quite some time now. Recently, I implemented a web-based form to submit new posts using the API of my self-hosted Gitea. While that worked, it was still not optimal. I alread...

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One of the things about I love most is it’s flexibility. This may astonish some but I am gaming on my Linux system for approximately 15 years by now. Situation for improved a lot lately but it was always possible to keep myself distracted 😉

So one of the games I just love to play is XCOM (UFO series). I don’t think I skipped any part and Terror From The Deep will always have a special place in my heart. Anyway, when XCOM was relaunched and eventually ported to Linux by Feral Interactive in 2014 I thought I couldn’t have been happier. Firaxis Games topped this in 2016 with XCOM2 and Feral Interactive once more got the job for the port.

Sadly with all the expansion sets it takes quite a toll on the required hardware. Huge fan of all sliders on maximum and see how it goes and while my box can mostly keep up I notice that I run out of RAM towards the end of the game fast and my machine starts swapping. I’ve 16GB RAM and this game eats it away like children their candy.

I’ve got additional 4GB of swap installed on slow spinning rust disks (legacy) so I notice the moment it starts swapping like hitting a wall. After another frustrated restart of the game I paused for a moment. I don’t know why this games needs so much RAM and frankly I don’t even care. Maybe I’m spoiled nowadays since stuff tends to “just work”.

So I decided to throw more power at it but RAM is expensive and I usually have enough of it for my daily work (or other games). I did get a decent SSD (Solid State Disk) recently tho so it’s to my rescue:

swapoff -a
fallocate -l 16G /games/swapfile
mkswap /games/swapfile
swapon /games/swapfile

…and that’s it. I stopped my previous slow swap partition(s), created a new swapfile of 16GB size on my SSD, formatted it as swap partition and activated it. Now I tabbed back into my game and enjoyed the rest of the evening. Let it swap. The SSD can keep up with it. Not minding a few more seconds during loading screens 😀 I’m considerung to add the activation sequence to my “gaming mode” script.

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Indieweb Updates and Thoughts by Roy Tang (roytang.net)
I mentioned before that I was looking into indieweb stuff. There’s a whole wiki of information about it if you’re into that sort of thing, but also here’s a recent post which kind of serves as an overview. I have some comments on the content of this post, more on that later. Indieweb things I?...

Hej @roytang,

about that reader. I find the parser php.microformats.io very helpful to see what’s going on. There’s also microformat-node if you fancy JS.

I also understand your critism. Same boat here. I wonder all the time how one could convince Joe Webuser why is a thing. I’d say it’s lacking some nifty videos that introduce the principles to new users. Sending users to that Wiki is a disgrace. It’s hard to wrap the head around especially since it’s not a final product but just a collection of ideas around living standards.

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"Uncle" Bob Martin - "The Future of Programming" (YouTube)
How did our industry start, what paths did it take to get to where we are, and where is it going. What big problems did programmers encounter in the past? Ho...
Programmers were not allowed to touch the computer. “Uncle” Bob Martin
Just so you know. Wonder if we should go back to this 😀 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc