I love my Steam Deck. I also love that it’s a full-on Linux computer. I also love the Trails series, and I’ve been playing them for ages. They usually include new-game bonuses if they can detect save or system data from the prior games in the series. But this detection relies on Windows’ “Saved Games” folder structure, which is emulated, but per-game in Proton/Steam Deck. Here’s how to get Trails into Reverie to detect your save data from the other games.

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Look. I use Rails for side projects because I’m lazy. But not so lazy that I’m willing to put up with really really bad multi-selects.

This is a quick and not very dirty way to get clean and largely seamless multi-selects for Rails forms that still send data over REST, without changing the way anything works. It uses React, Stimulus, and Rails ActionController.

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This is a warm, often spicy, chili recipe. Black beans only. Smoky chipotle chilis and toasted cumin. Poblano peppers.

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Recently I posted about getting fractional scale factors for GNOME 3 on Ubuntu. I’ve since abandoned GNOME in favor of Mate because GNOME was crashing on me on a default install, and could be quite slow at times when loading large resources. Mate has neither of these problems, and as an added bonus, scales in a reasonable way out of the box.

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I’m going to go out there and say it, I really like GNOME. I know that a lot of people don’t. Whatever. I’m usually on hardware fast enough that it can handle this beast of a DE. But, having just installed it on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon with a nice WQHD display, I was a little irritated that the only 2 display scale factors were 100% and 200%. Which is to say, “too tiny for most people without a microscope”, or “dangit now I can only see like 5 characters on the screen”. Basically, I needed 150% scale factor. This is how to get it.

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Recently I set up a fully encrypted Linux install alongside Windows using LVM to encrypt the / and /home partitions, as well as swap. This all went fine and dandy until I realized I had been a little greedy and given root nowhere near enough space (I was trying to horde it all for the /home volume). So, I had to figure out how to shift that space around. This, for my own memory, is how:

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So, this is going to be one of any number of posts out on the web about setting up a dev environment on Linux, but it’ll be good for me as reference in the future. This is going to cover setting up Ubuntu 19.10 on a ThinkPad X1C (7g), dual-boot with Windows 10, with both OSes fully encrypted at the partition level (full-disk encryption is technically impossible since we’re splitting the disk for Windows and Linux).

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In the application I work on most of the time, we pass a lot of data from Rails to the React frontend by writing constants to the window object in the browser. Testing this can be a bit of a pain though.

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I’m in the process of moving from OS X to Ubuntu (via WSL2) for all of my development work, and ran into an odd behavior with a zsh function I use all the time to diff my current work against the master branch, that it turns out, is caused by the case-sensitivity of the Linux filesystem (unless I’ve misunderstood things).

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Every now and then I need to build up some complex hash/JSON data in Ruby to feed over to a JS frontend. I tend to work slowly and iteratively as I push the nesting deeper, which helps me find mistakes before it gets too complicated… but sometimes that doesn’t work.

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