A while back I became quite disappointed when I noticed that my Steam Deck started to drift in games that utilized the gyro controls. Even if I were to calibrate the controls, the drift would return every time I powered on the system or woke it up from sleep.
I contacted Steam support who recommended to do a factory reset, but then I would need to download all the games anew. There had to be another way!
I scoured the internet in hope to get some answers, but all I got was either the normal calibration “trick” (it’s not a trick if it’s an actual function, lol) or some random scripts that forced the calibration settings automatically every reboot which didn’t work.
So, this started around when I got myself a dock for the Steam Deck. Because of this, I was afraid that it might have caused some damage to the system. Too bad, because I loved having a powerful, albeit a clunky Nintendon’t Steam Pro™…
However, one day when I was about to play I had it laying flat on the desk next to me while it was booting when an update had been received. Without picking it up, I applied the update and rebooted. Back in business, when I started the game and was about to do the calibration as per usual, lo and behold, the gyro drift was gone!
I wonder if the drift had anything to do with the Steam Deck resting on the dock, slightly tilted? It sure seems like it, I have now restarted the Steam Deck (both laying flat and while holding it) and the gyro is all calibrated now. However, I noticed a slight drift when I started the Deck while resting my thumb on the capacitive area of the joystick. I guess it’s like when you start up a console holding the stick in a certain direction, and the console thinks that direction is the resting position.
So if you’re having issues with the gyro, remember – for great justice, don’t fiddle the sticks while booting.
For this period, I’ve settled on getting a nice Window Maker environment working. I like Window Maker because of its simplicity, low resource requirements and the use of dockapps. Dockapps are small apps that are designed to sit in the dock and show information or perform tasks. I’ve installed a couple that have similar look between them. From top to bottom:
Time – wmtime What can I say, it display an analog clock as well as day of week and the date
CPU/RAM – cputnik This displays how much all cores are working and also shows how much RAM has been used up. When clicking on the dockapp, gnome-system-monitor opens up Misc – wmmisc This dockapp shows exactly what it’s called, namely miscellaneous information about the system. Logged on users, uptime, ongoing processes, etc.
Network – wmifs This is a blinkenlights for the ongoing network traffic. You can see the amount of packets being sent as well as lights for receiving/transmitting data
Audio control – wmusic This is a general audio controller which is written for use with XMMS but can work with any audio player with support for multimedia controls. By double clicking the dockapp, it tries to launch xmms, but I’ve circumvented this by creating a bash script that launches Plexamp instead
Volume control – wmamixer Last but not least, a nifty volume controller. It can controll both left and right channels as well as master/capture. Worked out of the box for me.
Most of these dockapps are available in the normal Ubuntu repository, but some of them I had to compile myself like cputnik and wmamixer.
The rest of the dock is occupied by quick launcher for Firefox, Thunderbird, Tilix (I will create a blog post about this lovely little gem later!) and Thunar. For those familiar with Window Maker may also notice that I’ve also disabled the workspace dock, a.k.a. the clip, as I’m not really fond of its functionality.
No, you should not make your passwords complex and super long! This will only lead to you forgetting the password and then later reset to one that you will actually remember – which, of course, we know will be super dumb and easy to crack.
Instead, you should go for passphrases. These are basically passwords, but longer and easier to remember. For example, a passphrase can be:
pancake lord on moon vacation three times left turn
According to Security.org’s password check, this would take a computer of today’s capacity about 1 unvigintillion years to crack. How many years is one unvigintillion? I don’t know, but I do know that I definitely won’t be around by then.
The reason for it being hard to crack this passphrase, isn’t the complexity, but rather its length. The longer the passphrase, the more possible combinations any brute force attempt needs to perform.
But, you ask, what about the required password complexity of sites, operating systems and the like? The lowercases and uppercases, special characters and such?
Well, that’s where password managers come into the picture! You see, there’s a lot of password managers out there and chances are you’re using a web browser with one built-in, right now! There are even services that let you store and access your passwords in the cloud for convenience, for example when you’ve lost access to your computer or device.
With a password manager, you can generate a super random and hard to remember password that fulfills any uptight requirements of an account registration. The point is that you will never need to remember it, the manager will!
The problem with most built-in managers though, is that they are exposed to the internet, meaning that if the client or browser is compromised – so are your passwords. The same goes for any online service that promises security – it’s all fine and dandy and cherries until the service is hacked and your passwords are stolen. This happened a while back with LastPass where, even though encrypted, users’ vaults were stolen and could potentially be cracked. This is exactly why centralization is bad – it gives hackers a single point of entry for thousands if not millions of users.
Now, how to avoid this? Well, firstly you should avoid centralization. But you cannot avoid hackers on the internet unless you go offline, of course. It might sound like a bummer, but that’s why I’m writing this post, you see!
Here’s where KeePassXC comes in. KeePassXC is an excellent password manager and vault that is secure, open source and totally free. KeePassXC is an application only, meaning no servers to connect to – all it needs is the database to keep its records. Already here, we’ve eliminated one potential threat in that we’re not exposing our passwords to the intertubes. The database can be safely stored where ever you like, for example in your home folder or on an encrypted drive. You can have multiple databases, for example one for private passwords and another for work related passwords (which I would recommend.)
So it’s easy to get started, just download and install the application. For Ubuntu/Debian users, I strongly recommend to install the PPA and use APT to install, instead of snap.
After installing and running it for the first time, you can create a new database. Set a passphrase, one that you can actually remember, because if you forget it you lose access to the database. I also recommend that you create an encryption key which can preferably be stored onto a physical drive for added security.
Once the database is up and running, all you have to do is store all your passwords. As you can see in the above screenshot, you can even use it for two-factor authentication. You can associate the entries to their respective sites and applications, organize them in groups and add icons to the entries.
I would however recommend that you install a browser extension, otherwise you would need to go back to the application every time you need to log onto a site. There’s an official extension for the most popular browsers, called KeePassXC-Browser. Once installed and configured (and the main application running in the background) it will ask for database password and fetch the associated entry when autofilling the login forms on a site.
A word of warning though: It’s known not to work with snap installations of browsers, which is the default installation method in Ubuntu. Be sure to use the APT version of both the web browser and KeePassXC and you should be good to go. Oh, you might have to add a permission entry in AppArmor if you’re getting “Cannot connect to database” errors, though.
Also, you might want to have some sort of cross-device sync. I know, this contradicts what I mentioned earlier with having the database offline, but the alternative would be manually copy over database and encryption key to every device each time you’ve added or updated an entry. Not too convenient. As long as you don’t use a centralized service, I believe you’re good though. For example, using a Nextcloud instance, you can sync between selected devices. As for mobile applications, for Android, there’s KeePassDX that’s fully compatible and also can use Nextcloud mounted storage to access the database. This is the one I’m using and can recommend.
All in all, I’m really satisfied with KeePassXC knowing that I’m in total control over my password vault and that I’m one step further from allowing Big Tech to have control over my online life.
I have just connected the blog to the Fediverse, so now you can follow it via platforms like Mastodon. Just search for and follow @thanius and all upcoming posts will appear in your feed!
It’s been a while since I’ve written any long form posts. To remedy this, I’ve now installed the WordPress app on my phone so that I can post on the go.
So, what’s been up lately? Well, for starters, we’re getting a dog! It’s a still some weeks away, since doggo’s only a couple of days old. She was born on May 14th and her current name is Fia-Lotta, although I’m not too keen on that name so we’re thinking of renaming her once she gets home. The name candidates are Lexi, Chili, Hilda and Cilla. She’ll be ready for pickup in the middle of July, we can’t wait for her to join our family!
Our newborn pup
What else, what else… Oh! I’m off to see Bruce Dickinson in Stockholm and Gröna Lund on June 11th! It’s going to be awesome. Even though his latest album ain’t no Chemical Wedding, it still has some bangers. Also it’s likely that they’ll play some classics as well. Anyway, as soon as I heard about the concert I booked all the tickets immediately. I wasn’t sure if any of my friends were going, but it seems like I’m getting some company after all – one of my best mates even booked in the same hotel! Did I mention it’s going to be awesome?
Promotional photo of Bruce Dickinson for the album The Mandrake Project
In other news, my birthday was this week! Yes, you’re now looking (?) at a 41 year old fart. It was quite low key since I’m not too excited over birthdays that aren’t major milestones, like last year. I was happy that my wife got me the NES game Micro Mages on physical cart, as well a rechargeable air duster and a HDD Clicker. Unfortunately, the HDD Clicker doesn’t seem to like the LED signal from my 486 (it was clicking non-stop), so it will have to live in my Pentium 2 instead. And for those who haven’t heard of Micro Mages, it’s an awesome arcade platformer with some tiny mages scaling towers full of baddies. It’s amazing how they managed to fit everything in just 40 kilobytes, there’s a great video on YouTube explaining how they did it.
Micro Mages by Morphcat Games
How can I have such a thoughtful wife that knows exactly what I wanted? Well, I just gave her the link to my nifty Wishlistr.
“Adventure Island” is a run-and-jump game for the Game Boy that despite sharing name and cover art (at least in the PAL region) bears more resemblance to the sequel rather than the original outing on the NES.
You play as Master Higgins, a somewhat heavy lad with an underbite wearing nothing but a loin cloth and a baseball cap being in a constant state of famine. You must explore 8 critter-infested islands in order to save your girlfriend Tina from the monsters holding her captive. That’s it, that’s the whole story.
The gameplay is all about running from left to right, defeating and avoiding flora and fauna on the way, while hatching eggs containing axes, skateboards and friendly dinosaur to ride. These dinos each has their own ability which can wary from shooting electricity from the tail to taking off to the skies. They won’t alter the overall experience dramatically, but will make traveling a bit faster and easier.
Stash items and dinos between stages for later when the going gets tough.
Being released 1992 here in euro territory, it feels heavily outdated standing next to contemporary titles such as “Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins” and “Kirby’s Dreamland”. Not only does the graphics feel bland, but the repetitiveness of both sounds and level design wears my patience thin throughout the entire game. About half-way through the levels starts to be rehashed and there’s nothing new that entices the player to continue their journey. The bosses are incredibly simple and even if you do reach the end, the reward for beating the game isn’t worthwhile the roughly hour it takes to complete it.
Should this have been a release title I could have seen through its shortcomings, but unfortunately I cannot recommend this game to anyone who wants to experience a varied, challenging platformer on the go.
Steam, Xbox One/Series X, Playstation 4/5, Nintendo Switch
Genre
3D puzzle-platformer, collect-a-thon
Players
1
Developer
Splashteam
Publisher
tinyBuild
Released
2022
Playtime
Around 7h normal playthrough, 12h completionist
So, what do you get if you take equal parts “Pikmin,” “Paper Mario,” and “Banjo-Kazooie” and add a dash of French animation? Well, if you answered “a Frankenstein’s monster of game concepts,” then you’d be right. However, the point being that “Tinykin” is a marvelous game that takes a little inspiration from each of these mentioned titles, culminating in its own thing.
In “Tinykin,” you play as Milodane, an archaeologist from the planet Aegis, who is determined to find the origins of the human race by following a signal emanating from a nearby galaxy. Unfortunately, something went wrong during the bubble teleportation, and he wound up the size of a dust bunny inside a gigantic house! Now, it’s up to you to assist Milodane in exploring the house and unraveling the mystery of the intergalactic human migration. And, of course, to help him regain his proper size.
You soon run into these small, round creatures – tinykin, if you will – that are helpful in several ways. Sure, you can pick them up and throw them around to your heart’s content, but they actually possess special abilities which are determined by their colors. Pink tinykin help you haul small and large household items around, while red ones explode upon impact and can light stuff up. Green ones stack together and are used as vertical ladders, whereas yellow ones can bridge large gaps (where applicable). Blue tinykin are electrically conductive, which is quite useful when you need to turn on appliances. Don’t worry, they actually enjoy the pain.
The house consists of five different levels, with two areas acting as connecting hubs between them. The levels are actually rooms in the house, while one of the connecting hubs is the foyer and a level in itself, all of which are open to explore as you please once you have unlocked them all. Each room is inhabited by an assortment of people, or rather, insects such as ants, praying mantises, and shield bugs. For each level, you are tasked with completing a list of objectives requested by these insectoid citizens, and successfully doing so will reward you with one of the machine pieces necessary for Milodane to return home. Each objective is a quirky little happening in the world of these insects, for example, starting up a CD player so that a group of religious dragonflies can sing the canticle of their deity, Arwin, or helping resolve a dispute between anxious dung beetles and partying silverfishes.
Besides completing these chores, one of the main objectives of the game is to gather pollen. A challenging but fun task as there are about a total of 1200 pieces scattered around each level. Pocketing around 900 of these rewards you with bubbles which let you float through the air. In your aid in finding and reaching every pollen, you have the tinykin, the aforementioned bubble floater, as well as a soap bar that is unlocked early on in the game. The soap bar acts as a sort of hovercraft/skateboard, which lets you travel fast and grind upon furniture edges like a miniature Tony Hawk. Who would have thought that cleaning the floors would be such fun?
One of the great aspects of the game is that there are no enemies to encounter. It’s just you, the insects, and a buttload of pollen to collect. The lack of enemies means that this is a game you can play at your own pace and leisure without worrying about being killed. Although there are a couple of environmental hazards such as water, spikes, and carnivorous plants (which I guess could count as an enemy), meaning there are times you’ll see Milodane pop as a balloon more than once, if that indeed is your sort of thing.
The game is otherwise an excellent platformer, which despite being in 3D, has the characters rendered as high-resolution 2D sprites. Their animations and designs are of such high quality, though, that soon enough you’ll accept them as being as fully fleshed out as the objects around them. The music is also top-notch, with each level having its atmospheric composition. Very enjoyable, but alas, there unfortunately weren’t any tunes that got stuck in my head, and I could barely hum them after turning off the game. But still, I very much liked the soundtrack.
The main takeaway from the experience I’ve had is that “Tinykin” is a wonderful indie gem that will be a great addition to my favorite collect-a-thons of all time. This is because it’s fun and approachable, has an imaginative level design, and the fact that the actual collecting didn’t feel like a necessary chore to forward the plot. There’s also a new time trial update to the game where you can zoom around the levels and clear courses in a race against the clock. This was quite an endeavor which I soon gave up on upon collecting my first platinum medal. The stress these races invoked wasn’t quite worth it as it only awards you with different outfits in the end. Fortunately, being an add-on bonus, the time trials won’t affect the achievements so you can still complete the game 100% without grabbing all the medals.
Tired of the constant hunt for those elusive CR2032 batteries? Fear no more, retro gaming enthusiasts! The SatBat™ is here to revolutionize your Sega Saturn experience. With The SatBat™, you’ll never miss a moment of gaming action. Features include:
Power on Demand: Swap out those old, underperforming CR2032 batteries for the robust, easily replaceable AA batteries. Two in series deliver a seamless 3V power surge directly to your console
Universal Compatibility: Whether you’re a fan of traditional or rechargeable batteries, The SatBat™ welcomes them all. Enjoy the flexibility and ease of use, no matter your preference
Unmatched Battery Life: Leap from a mere 200 mAh to up to an astounding 3000 mAh. That’s right, with The SatBat™ you can enjoy up to 15 times the battery life! The game doesn’t end until you say so
🔋 SatBat:Transform Your Gaming, Amplify Your Adventure. Say goodbye to frequent replacements and hello to uninterrupted gameplay. Your Sega Saturn deserves the best. Give it the power it needs with The SatBat™!
In all seriousness, though. I’ve been waiting for a product like this to come along in a long time, until I decided to create it myself.
One of the worst things with the Sega Saturn is the SRAM, which tends to die once the CR2032 dries out, after about a year or two but sometimes even less. Yes, you can perform one of those fancy FRAM replacements, but what if you don’t want to do open heart surgery on your beloved Sega console? That’s why I made the The SatBat™.
It’s nothing fancy really: A 3D printed battery box which holds two AA in series, outputting a total of 3V. Don’t mind the Kapton tape in the photo above, that’s just a precaution on my side.
My initial idea was to design a doublesided PCB for the coin cell replacement, but settled upon 3D printing and copper instead. The copper tape is soldered directly to the battery pack, I was impressed of how well it worked. I had to print the coin cell 95% smaller because my model wasn’t a perfect reproduction of a CR2032, but would still sit nicely. The box was a snugly fit instead of the old cover, and there’s even plenty of room for the Satiator! See?
You can download the STL file from Thingiverse if you fancy creating one yourself. Just be sure to either label the sides of the coin cell simulator (pat.pend.) or take note of which cable goes to the negative poles of the battery pack (negative is always the underside of the CR2032.)
And remember: DANGER OF EXPLOSION IF BATTERY IS INCORRECTLY REPLACED
Ps. If LaserBear Industries would like to create this as a professional product, feel free to do so but in that case please give me some credits (perhaps some in-store credits, wink-wink.)
Here’s a little tutorial on how to get rid of nasty stickers and residue off Nintendo cardboard boxes. Just because a box is full of stickers, doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed! Using this method you can still transform it into a presentable state.
What you will need is basically three things:
High percentage Isopropanol Alcohol
Cotton buds
Patience
Here’s my latest attempt at removing some nasty tamper-evident stickers off this copy of Super Mario Land in otherwise nice condition. This is how it looked on the Tradera/eBay listing:
The first thing I did was to empty the box so that its contents wouldn’t be affected should anything go wrong. I proceeded to lay out some paper for the table’s protection, and then soaked a cotton bud plentiful in alcohol before starting massaging the stickers.
Even though these stickers were thick they accepted the alcohol pretty well and started to loosen up after a minute or two. Once you see that the stickers are starting to fade and you can notice the artwork underneath, you’re almost at the finish line! Keep adding alcohol if it has dried out, but don’t overdo it at this point. You’ll want to gently rub in the alcohol, not scrub as I did and managed to ruin some of the box.
Once the stickers start to become translucent, try carefully feel the corners to see if they are willing to let go of the priceless artwork. Don’t force them, they should just slide off. If not, add some more alcohol on top and around the edges.
This was the final result. Not perfect, but a hell of a lot better than it was before. You can see the result of me rubbing a bit too hard, but still, I’m pleased with the outcome. Looking up close, it’s barely noticeable where the stickers used to reside.
Once done, I celebrated by playing the game. I know this game by heart so it took me about half an hour to complete. I simply love Hip Tanaka’s ending theme for the game. And I must admit, the game does look good in the cabinet.
(I just realized it’s been over a year that I’ve written anything on this blog. You may also have noticed that it looks a little bit different now. This is because I intend on making this blog a part of a bigger website – a homepage, if you will.)
Why Aegis?
I’ve been jumping between different two factor authenticator (2FA) apps the past year or two. I had earlier for a long time settled for Authy, mostly because I wanted to get away from Google and Microsoft. This app seemed robust enough, had some customizable logos for the connected services and also employed a backup feature – which at the time was MIA over at Google’s and Microsoft’s departments. It also had a desktop version that was synced, which at least at the time seemed like a good idea.
As the months passed by I started slowly to realize the flaws in Authy. Not only could you actually not customize the logos yourself, but the search engine used was simply a Google image search wrapper; meaning that logos showed up that either aesthetically didn’t fit or was totally unrelated to the service you tried to configure for. I tested this theory by simply searching for some random crap and Authy downloaded the image without hesitation.
Not only that, I realized that while it’s nice to have the OTP’s synced between devices, it did this through centralization. This, in my opinion, isn’t secure at all and could potentially invade my privacy.
Enough about Authy. I’ve moved on, and so should you.
This means that not only is the code available for anyone to examine and contribute to (which, contrary to popular beliefs is actually very important for security applications), it’s also available to download without the involvement of Google as it’s available through the F-Droid repository.
Second, it has all the features needed for a proper 2FA application and some quality-of-life improvements over its competitors, which I’ll get into shortly.
The only real downside for Aegis is that it’s not available for iOS. But if you’re using iOS, you’ve got other problems to attend to. Yes, by all means, please be offended.
Features
Customizable views
This is one of the most important features for me, as I’ve got almost all my accounts configured with 2FA and will be picking up my phone several times a day to fetch their one-time codes.
Since Aegis allows you to pick your own icons, or even download icon packs from them, the account is instantly recognized through its branding. And for a better overview, you may also configure how the codes are displayed in different sizes: normal, compact, small and tiles. I personally like the setting “small”.
You can also separate the codes between groups. Say you want to have your work OTP’s in the same app as your private, you can create a group for those and have those filtered out by default. This is especially useful if you have two or more different accounts on the same service.
Security
The configurations are safely stored on your device with encryption, which can be unlocked by a password or by using bio-metrics such as fingerprints and/or face unlock. It also allows for a separate encryption password for the backups, should you want an extra layer of security.
Aegis can also be configured to disallow screenshots from being taken, should you ever have been infected by malware that tries to steal your OTP’s. You can also configure to have the codes be hidden from prying eyes until you tap on them.
These are just a few of the security settings I figured was worth mentioning.
Backup, import and export
Another key feature is being able to restore your 2FA configurations should your device ever be lost. Instead of having the vault sync using a centralized service, you can configure continuous backup instead.
Since the vault is encrypted, this means you can put your backup wherever you want. You can use your device’s automatic cloud backup as well as backup through Storage Access Framework in Android, perfect if you’ve got a personal Nextcloud server.
If you’ve got multiple devices, these can be synced using the import/export functions of the app. You can also use the import function to fetch configurations from other 2FA apps, but unfortunately it does not support Authy (this isn’t Aegis fault though, it’s simply because Authy doesn’t support export at all.)
Final words
I mean, there isn’t much else I can share with you guys. It’s only a 2FA app, after all.
It works securely and with personal customization, it’s open and free and has awesome features. So if you’re ever in need of two factor authentication, look no further than Aegis.
So what makes Aegis any different? Well, first and foremost, it’s completely