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Yes, does only support one gamepad. Single digit. This gamer doesn’t care. Here have and in . Vanilla. No mods. Thanks , and ❤️

Mebbe I’ll do a proper recording someday:

No Man’s Sky with headtracking and HOTAS (on Linux PC)

Wondering about that button box? Didn’t use it in this demo but you can find plenty more examples on the channel and more details on my blog: https://beko.famkos.net/category/simpit/

How it’s done? NMS does support a gamepad but it also reads/maps all gamepads to a single device. It makes no difference between multiple gamepads!

This leaves me with a very limited amount of possible buttons on the HOTAS after mapping that to one virtual gamepad using MoltenGamepad (I usually split that one up into multiple gamepads for braindead games).

So for additional buttons I used AntiMicroX to map the rest as keyboard presses.

Doing so I noticed that NMS does “look-around” on the right stick and this is where OpenTrack comes into the play. It offers a joystick output (using evdev) and that is also just… a gamepad! Needs some remapping though to get pitch and jaw to the proper axis for NMS. This is done via SDL env (basically what Steam does under the hood but boy their GUI for that sucks): SDL_GAMECONTROLLERCONFIG="000022e86f70656e747261636b206800,opentrack-to-nms,rightx:a3,righty:a4,platform:Linux,crc:e822,"

And there you have it. NMS with my trusty old X52 Pro and a DIY headtracker for 5 bucks 🤓

PS: I’m aware that the recording quality sucks. This was very spontaneous with a webcam sitting on my chair. I basically just finished my happy dance that this started working properly and decided to smash that recording button. PC was not even in “gamemode”.

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Putting this here so I don’t forget it next time: Required packages to build on Linux PC (with joystick output support): dnf install cmake git qt5-qttools-devel qt5-qtbase-private-devel procps-ng-devel opencv-devel libevdev-devel

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Originally I was going to replace a disk on my hardware controlled RAID 5. That didn’t work out well. The controller supports hot-plugging but the LED indicator stayed on faulty. To debug this I had to boot into the controller to check for the error message and lo and behold it appears my spare has an invalid block size and the controller is too dumb to format it with another, unlike e.g. sg_format.

And this should have been the end of the story until I can reformat this on another SAS capable PC. Alas grub rescue greeted me on reboot with “error: disk `lvmid/foo/bar` not found.“

and I could not persuade it to boot the LVM member. The thing is that this disk is NOT under control of the hardware RAID controller. It’s plain SATA and it’s boot order is before the RAID controller so I really did not expect any trouble here.

Turns out I was running into this rare bug https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=987008 where the words “time-bomb” and “critical” are dropped. The gist is that grub has a bug that prevents it from reading LVM meta data sometimes and this results in a broken bootloader.

This is not fixed with the usual reinstall dance from another boot-able medium. The trick is to manipulate the LVM meta data in some way, e.g. by adding another volume temporary.

This means running a vgscan after booting from another medium and *in my case executing* e.g. lvcreate -L 4M pve -n foo

The name doesn’t matter as it can be removed afterwards. Updating the initramfs should run without errors now and is a good indicator if this worked. Now it’s possible to reboot again.

The two problems have basically nothing to do with each other. It was just my lucky day to run into this sequence of chained issues during my free Saturday night 😩

Oh yeah, meanwhile the RAID recovered also. Another spare was added until I have time to take a closer look at the block size issue.

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TIL: “Skype For Business” is not really possible on Linux PC in 2023. There is no native built. It’s “Web App” requires a plugin that comes with an MSI installer. Not that it really matters, since it’s superseded by “Teams”. In theory.

So if you need it anyway you’re not really looking for “Skype”, that may sound similar but has nothing to do with “Skype For Business”, but for “Lync”. Did I say “Lync”? I meant “Office Communicator”. And if you do you’re in luck. There is a Pidgin plugin called “Sipe” which does that. In theory. I couldn’t get it to sign in because my “Office 365” account, that supersedes the BPOS (Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite), has no more “Office Communicator” or “Lync” or “Skype for Business”. It does have “Teams” and to add insult to injury also “Skype”.

There is however an Android app “Skype for Business” and lo and behold it’s on API Level 30 from 2020 so chances are good that it works on most recent devices (it will request all permissions though and refuse to start without). And while I still have no account for this, or the possibility to create one, since Microsoft simply redirects me to “Teams”, I can now open an invitation link in a browser which in turn opens the app again where I now get the previous unavailable option to _join as guest_.

Stay tuned if it picks up the microphone too as there is no speech indicator and no echo chamber to test this. At least video seemed to work fine.

(And hell no I will not even try that with a Google Chrome Brower EXE in Wine)

This was a triumph. Great success… 😁

Three days of BBQ and chilling out. Very tired now. Should go on vacation now 😜

Pic: Fireplace with lots of empty chairs around now that everyone is gone again.

Blogs brauchen mehr Links – Mein Plädoyer – Conterest by Sven Lennartz (drweb.de)
Links sind die Blutgefäße des Internets. Über Links organisiert sich das alles. Und wenn wir im Netz etwas brauchen, dann sind es Links.

Re: https://www.drweb.de/blogs-links-verlinken/

Naja, mehr Links schön und gut aber sorry, Twitter geht halt gar nicht mehr. Und Pingbacks? Klar ist das geil aber warte mal ab bis du Webmentions gesehen hast. Pingback mit Intend! Oder gar… ActivityPub! Wie RSS nur in toll, so mit Replies und Likes und so Zeug. 🤓