Linux Mint

OBS is awesome! Open Broadcasting Software, also known as OBS Studio, is an awesome piece of free and open source software that lets you capture audio and video from a wide variety of sources: screen capture, webcam, audio capture from the system, from an external source, from static images, slide shows, etc. It’s been awhile since I’ve used OBS to capture the desktop of one of the systems at work, an ASUS M51AC desktop with an i7-4770 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. I installed OBS 30.0.1 and started to record a video of the desktop, using the webcam microphone for audio. After a bit of tweaking, adjusting Xubuntu’s microphone sensitivity, I managed to get audio recording correctly so audio levels did not “clip” (go into the red) in OBS. ...

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 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: ...