Linux

My website was hit by a DDoS from an abusive scraper a few weeks ago. I wrote a Python script to help identify the subnets involved and then an Ansible role to block them using ipset. Here’s a quick blog post to share this.

A few months ago, my Steam Deck arrived. So, obviously, one of the first things I did was play Luanti. Whilst Luanti isn’t available on Steam yet, it is available on Flatpak and so can be installed from desktop mode.

Luanti plays very well on the Steam Deck, it performs great and Steam Input makes setting up controls easy. The Deck is an open console, so there’s full support for modding and you can cross-play with other platforms.

In this article, I will explain how to set up Luanti on the deck, and review the controls, performance, and experience. I’ve already written my thoughts about the Deck in another article, and recommend checking that out.

Using a fingerprint to unlock your computer or elevate privileges (sudo) is a nice convenience, saving time during daily use of a computer. This article will show you how to set up fingerprint authentication on Ubuntu KDE. You’ll still need to enter your password to login, but once logged in you will be able to use a fingerprint to unlock or use sudo.

This guide is based on a Thinkpad X1 running Kubuntu 22.04, but it should work for most laptops with supported fingerprint sensors. You can check whether your fingerprint sensor is supported by searching for “Linux fingerprint” and your computer’s make/model. The Arch wiki is especially useful for this sort of thing, even if you don’t use Arch.

It goes without saying that this comes without warranty; backup your data, and have a LiveUSB ready. There are some pointers on recovering from mistakes at the bottom of this page. Luckily, I never needed to use a LiveUSB, I could easily recover from a virtual console.

Steam Deck is a new portable gaming console from Valve. The Deck is a very open platform as it’s a full Linux PC, making it very easy to use third-party games and stores. All Decks can act as a devkit machine, and come with devkit tools preinstalled. There was a Steam Deck Devkit edition, but that was a preproduction version of the hardware to allow game developers to test their games.

This article will show you how to upload and run your games on the Steam Deck from your development computer, using a VSCode task or a script you can use in any editor. Whilst you could develop on the Deck directly, it would require setting up a new dev environment. Being able to develop on your computer and test on the Deck allows you to reuse your current dev environment.

My Steam Deck arrived two months ago, and I’ve been having a blast ever since. I’m not much of a gamer; RimWorld and Skyrim are the only two games I’ve spent more than 100 hours in. I find it hard to play a game without wanting to do game dev instead. But with the Deck, I’ve been playing the games that have been on my play list for a while.

This article contains my thoughts about the Steam Deck. It’s not meant to be a review applicable to everyone; I’m not your average user nor do I claim to be. I recommend reading a wide range of reviews before buying something expensive.

I wrote a Bash script to sort git commits into buckets, to be used as the first step of making a change log. It supports rewording commit messages, can be stopped and resumed, and supports automatic filtering based on keywords.

During the second year of university, I created a kernel for the ARMv7 instruction set. I went above and beyond what was required on this project, achieving a clean design and features such as a blocked process queue, piping, kill, and a simple filesystem. This was my favourite coursework so far. I found it very interesting to learn about and implement the things that we take for granted as programmers.

I tried to stick to POSIX as much as possible, and stuck to the Linux method of having everything as either a file or process. Because pipes and standard in/out were both “files”, I was able to implement both popen and piping of the output of a process to another process.

Whilst Maya claims to have Linux support, it only officially supports RedHat and CentOS Linux. It is, however, still possible to install it on Debian and Ubuntu based systems with some leg work.

This tutorial will show you how to create a new MonoDevelop solution and project, and how to properly connect it to RimWorld. You’ll need to have an installation of Mono that supports .NET 3.5 - here is a tutorial on how to install it.

This tutorial will show you how to install Mono and Monodevelop in order to develop .NET 3.5 projects. This is useful when writing C# assembly mods for Unity engine based games, such as RimWorld, as they tend to require .NET 3.5.

I use a dual monitor setup. For each monitor I have a panel, and each panel has a whisker menu. I found that the favourites section of each of these panels is not synchronised. To fix this, I wrote a simple script.

I recently successfully dual booted Ubuntu on an ASUS X555LA laptop, the X555LAB variety. This guide will work on most Ubuntu derivatives, I installed Xubuntu using these steps. The only things that are different between them are window managers and preinstalled software.

Here is a shell script specific for GNU/Linux based operating systems to use. On different operating systems the convert commands will be the same, but the for loop will be different due to a different batch file syntax.

rm /tmp/imageex -r
mkdir /tmp/imageex
for filename in *.png; do
    echo "Processing $filename"
    convert $filename -background White \
        label:$filename -gravity Center \
         -append -pointsize 14 \
        /tmp/imageex/$filename.png
done
echo "Exporting to PDF..."
convert /tmp/imageex/*.png output.pdf
echo "Done."