A dice game with a sense of humour If games like Torchlight II, Diablo III, or my favourite - Grim Dawn are your thing, Knights of Pen & Paper II will seem like a snooze-fest to you. While Knights has elements of a role playing game, it’s not an “Action” role playing game (ARPG), but more mimics the kind of play you might get from playing Dungeons and Dragons with a game master. Unfortunately the game is NOT multiplayer, so one of the best parts of D&D is missing from Knights of Pen & Paper II, but if you’re okay with playing solo, this might be a fun title for you. ...

Previous GameMaker experience I bought version 1.4 of the Gamemaker game engine on a Humble Bundle many years ago. At the time Gamemaker ONLY ran under Microsoft Windows. It was possible to export games to Linux (Ubuntu/Debian-specifically), but you couldn’t run the game engine itself under Linux. Version 2.x came along, and I paid to upgrade to 2.x as well. Some time between when I bought 1.4 and 2.x I started working on my Asteroids-like clone, Fasteroids: (https://chaslinux.itch.io/fasteroids). Many professional developers suggest starting and finishing a project as quickly as you can, then moving on to something else. Of course I didn’t listen and kept adding “features” to Fasteroids, which lead to the game being pretty messed up, and me losing interest. ...

After this experience, and some back and forth with GameMaker, the GameMaker team switched the licensing back to a one time fee (except for console exports), and they released a beta version of the engine for Ubuntu-based systems. The team continues to update this beta along with the normal code. Since I previously had experience with GameMaker I’ve decided to stick with it. I’ve been really thrilled with it as bugs I’ve run into have been fixed a short while after I’ve reported them, and the community have been great helping me solve issues. ...

Reviving an old project Today I realized that, since redoing this web site, I still haven’t added any information about the game I made back in 2017-2020. Recently I revived Fasteroids, and made some changes to both simplify the game, but also with the idea that the game should be able to scale to 4k in the near future. Before I ramble on more, you can download Fasteroids for Linux or Windows from: ...

Vikings – Wolves of Midgard (crashes after the Kalypso video) Vikings – Wolves of Midgard is a linear action role playing game (ARPG) that lets you go back and repeat quests several times until you’re overpowered. Recently I’ve tried a number of role playing games only to find they were lacking in graphics, the controls were too jank, or they just required obscene amounts of time to make any progress. I like Vikings – Wolves of Midgard, because I find that despite the fact that the story is almost aways the same, you can complete quests over and over again until you’re overpowered. The controls are not bad, especially compared to some of the games I’ve played lately. Best of all it runs natively under Linux. ...

Bards Tale III – my introduction to 3D like adventure Back in the late 1980’s I worked for Simcoe Computer Consultants at the 400 Market, outside of Barrie, Ontario. The 400 Market was a mixed market of many vendors, one of which was Simcoe Computer Consultants. I spent the weekends manning the company’s booth, selling the odd item, and spreading the word about the company’s computers and services. One weekend Cec, one of the company owners, mentioned that a lead from the market had helped them sell a bunch of computers, and I was welcome to pick a piece of software as a reward. I picked Bard’s Tale III, Thief of Fate, a dungeon crawling game with a 3D-like interface. Bard’s Tale III quickly became one of my favourite games, it mixed D&D elements with a more urgent element where one wrong turn could lead to a face to face encounter with deadly monsters. ...

Almost 11 years old, and still fun Torchlight II (opens to Steam page) was released in September of 2012, several months after the release of Diablo III. Max Schaefer and Matt Uelmen, both developers who worked on Diablo and Diablo II, helped form Runic Games, the company behind Torchlight II. While both Torchlight II and Diablo II are considered ARPGs (Action Role Playing Games), Torchlight II feels like it has less linear gameplay. Both games drive you to destroy an end boss, and both have side quests, but Torchlight II is purposefully moddable, and a lot less dark. In Diablo and Diablo II you fight demons, devils, undead, and other demonic monstrosities. In Torchlight II you find yourself pitted against more Dungeons & Dragons variety monsters, Mind Flayers, Werewolves, Bandits, Manticores, and a more mixed variety of monsters. ...

About findmonitor.sh Note: Note: This script is NOT compatible with systems running Wayland. We use Xubuntu Linux at our project. The Working Centre’s not-for-profit Computer Recycling Project sometimes receives donations of many monitors all at once. Our previous method for handling monitors was to set them up, run them through a bunch of tests, print a label on our label printer, and enter the monitor into our point of sale. This method hasn’t worked very well for us when we’ve received a lot of monitors all at once. Large amounts of monitors were sitting untested for awhile because we didn’t have the resources to do the old process for each monitor. We needed a faster way to figure out some of the details of monitors, and make them easier to sell without needing to create labels and enter everything into the point of sale. ...

Diminishing returns after 6 cores, but not for all media Handbrake is a video transcoder. It’s normally used to convert and compress video from a format into a more compressed format. Handbrake comes in a command line version, handbrake-cli, and a graphical version, handbrake. I’ve seen it mentioned several times that Handbrake is best at 6 cores or less, after that the encoding returns are diminishing. I thought this was the case with some of my experimentation, but it seems the answer is more complicated – it depends. ...

About the script I wrote the hardware.sh BASH script to make it a bit simpler for volunteers at The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project to figure out what hardware was in a computer. For more than a dozen years we’ve been asking volunteers to gather information from the BIOS, or using phoronix-test-suite under our PXE booted Debian Live environment. Volunteers would write the information on quarter page-sized sheets we would attach to each computer. While this was a useful function to help volunteers get to know hardware in a computer, there were a few problems with this method: ...