As Minnels pointed out, Wube put in work to make the game controller friendly for the Switch. On Deck, the trackpads make it even better. I play with the default settings but, like the OG Steam Controller, the controls are further customizable through Steam’s own interface. There are a few community layouts people seem fond of, which probably map some toggles or whatnot missing from the default layout, but I think it’s incredibly playable as is.

I’ve been on a hiatus from Factorio for about a month now but I’ve set up a dedicated server on the aforementioned NAS. I think I’m going to go another another bender soon and use it as an excuse to learn a little LUA and maybe Grafana as well. I think it’d be fun, once my build is semi-stable, to let it run unpaused even when players aren’t connected and have alerts set up based on the tracked stats. Will see how that pans out.

Instead of a gaming computer, the last time I had some spare cash, I built a NAS. When I had a little again, but not enough to really build out a high end rig, I got the OLED Deck and immediately bought Factorio. I’d been binging Factorio content, recently found some channels like Dosh Doshington, DocJade, etc and knew I wanted in. For a PC game, that really wants a keyboard and mouse, it plays friggin fantastic on Deck.

More recently, because I was watching SMW romhack players a while back and Pangaea Panga just released Super Dram World 3, I’ve gone all in on learning Kaizo Mario games. Panga’s “Kaizo Kindergarten” is a great intro, along with “2Kaizo2Learn.” “Joy of Kaizo” is a beautiful dedication to Bob Ross’ “Joy of Painting” where level backgrounds are recreations of paintings from actual episodes of the show. It also features difficulty options and the beginner mode is pretty noob friendly. At least for someone like me who hasn’t played SMW since my SNES was hooked up in the 90s. Anyway, if you’ve fond memories of SMW it’s almost a crime not to revisit it and its hacks, either on a Deck or any portable emulator.

Sure thing. I got on a fuzz rock and stoner metal kick for a while and that album cover stuck with me. Then the usual compulsion took over and I ended up on a deep dive through old sci-fi, pulp comics, etc.

Cover of Utopia Zukunftsroman #299, 1961 by Karl Stephan. I’d never heard of it but it reminded me of the cover art for Truckfighters’ album “Gravity X” (which itself is from the cover of an issue of Space:1999). Turns out he didn’t do that cover but he did actually do some work for Space:1999.

I usually set vi mode to have vi(m)-like line editing but I’ve always liked Ctrl+u over Esc d d. Thankfully it still works even with vi mode enabled. Seems to also be implemented as a shortcut for a lot of login managers and in DEs for settings menus, dialog boxes and such.

It’s less relatable now, and the technology was fucking stupid to begin with, but: Imagine printing out a document and feeding the sheets into a fax machine instead of just sending the file directly to the machine.

Or using a cassette tape adapter to play music from your phone through a stereo system when that system has a built-in Aux port you could plug directly into (“Useless Use Of Cassette?”).

cat’ing into grep, and a handful of other programs people commonly pipe into from cat, is pointless when grep can be called directly against a file. cat is being run for no reason; a useless use of cat (uuoc). It means fuckall for most people today but I imagine it could’ve been an actual concern when hardware was much more limited and multiple users were connecting to a single system.

Win+R, wt, enter

Alt+Space, wt, enter (or .term and auto complete will fill in “Terminal”)

It’s pretty much identical in terms of keystrokes. I just always forget “wt” is the way to launch Windows Terminal from Run, and that it works with PowerToys Run as well. My main sell was that the latter is a decent quick launcher with some useful tools built in to keep you from ever bothering with the start menu. I’m sure if I played with the Keyboard Manager a bit more I could probably go for something like Super/Win+Shift+Enter and skip Run or PowerToys Run altogether. I just haven’t bothered for whatever reason.

On my one remaining Windows machine, I installed PowerToys and use the “Run” launcher. Alt+Space opens Run. If you lead with a . you’ll search programs. Alt+Space, .term, for example, should immediately show Terminal and you can slap enter to open it. You can also do stuff like = 1 + 1 or = 0b101 + 0xf for quick calculations, %% for unit conversion (%% 10MB to Mb), etc. It’s not KRunner, dmenu, etc but it definitely beats the hell out of the start menu.

PowerToys “Keyboard Manager” might let you reclaim some shortcuts as well. I used it to swap Caps Lock and Escape but I’m pretty sure it can be used to create custom shortcuts. There’s also some option to remap shortcuts on a program specific basis. So you can say Alt+T should send Ctrl+T but only when Firefox has focus, for example. Haven’t messed with it myself but I can see the value.

Still looking forward to ditching Windows entirely but, in the meantime, MS has some decent tools that aren’t included by default and don’t seem to be advertised because power users aren’t the target market and “they already know to look for it” I guess.

Intended to prevent accidental input from the side of your palm, when it’s resting on the screen, while using the stylus.

Unfortunately I can’t help in that regard. I keep everything local/unexposed so my solution for them was just running Jellyfin at their place. I was already rsyncing some stuff to a NAS I set up for them (and vice versa), as off-site backup. Since the files were already there it made the most sense to just give them their own instance.

I don’t have the link(s) on hand but there’s a Tizen build of Jellyfin for Samsung TVs. It runs rather slow on my old tube so I wouldn’t recommend it outside of a last resort. It’s actually smoother for me to just open the app on the TV and then remote control it from a browser/app on another device (my Steam Deck is my homelab universal remote). But you can use the Tizen dev tools or a simpler docker container to push it to the TV.

For my folks I got a cheap Walmart brand Android box (Onn 4k Plus). I installed Jellyfin from the app store then black hole’d the thing because I’m wary of cheap Android apps and their history of supply chain attacks. It’s much more responsive and also leaves me with the option of installing additional stuff like Smart Tubes, Retro Arch and whatnot.

I’m a fucking dolt that dabbles and picks up the gist of things pretty quick, but I’m not authority on anything, so “grain of salt”:

You’re already familiar with OCR so my naive approach (assuming consistent fields on the documents where you can nab name, case no., form type, blah blah) would be to populate a simple sqlite db with that data and the full paths to the files. But I can write very basic SQL queries, so for your pops you might then need to cobble together some sort of search form. Something for people that don’t learn SELECT filepath FROM casedata WHERE name LIKE "%Luigi%"; because they had to manually repair their Jellyfin DB one time when a plugin made a bunch of erroneous entries >:|