Programming

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. ...

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. ...

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: ...