FZCO

Linux on Mac

This link is all you need: How to Install Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro - LaptopNinjaUbuntu on your MacBook can give your aging Apple product new life. Learn how to install Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro by following this guide.LaptopNinjaMatt GarrettMy NotesI installed Budgie 20.04 LTS on my

Game Notes

Shapez.io

I've joined the party late. For $5 on Steam you can play this accessible game with purest game play and ample amount of challenge, but all at a pace that you decide. Game MechanicAt the very basic level, your task is to assemble and paint complex shapes that are made

Random Notes

Tesla Solar Roof Install Journal

Notes and rants about my experiences with Tesla energy products: solar panels, roof, and Powerwall batteries.

Build

More GitLab Continuous Integration

How to trigger CI only when source code changes.

Media Format

PNG Image Format

PNG is an image format commonly used where lossless encoding with alpha information is required. It does have some issue with inconsistent gamma correction in some context but is never the less a popular format to support. License and Source You can use libpng to work with this format; source

Random Notes

WSL2

If you access your Windows drives from Linux, it is very slow under WSL2. This thread reporting the issue is more than a year old. If you are like me and value the convenience of being able to access Windows files from Linux, you can convert your distro instance back

Build

Continuous Integration with GitLab and Synology NAS

Set up GitLab runners on NAS to automatically run unit tests after a push.

C++ Notes

ANSI Colors in Command Prompt

{fmt} has this nice feature allowing you to use colors for your output via ANSI escape code. Too bad when I tried to run it under Windows the first time all I saw was the escape code and no colors in Command Prompt. Enable Virtual Terminal ProcessingThis article explains how

Build

Debugging DLL, CMake, and Visual Studio 2019

One of the reasons why you want to use Visual Studio is because it has nice debugging interface. Support has been around for a while and now it is much easier to construct a cross-platform project using CMake. But if your project is like mine where you build a DLL

Game Notes

Kingdom Rush Frontiers

This is a very addictive tower defense game. There are a lot of these, but this one focuses on the most fun elements of this genre. HeroesEach hero has different specials and abilities that can be upgraded over time as you earn more experience. They dramatically change how I play

Game Notes

Inside

Inside is serious entertainment. AtmosphereThis game is beautifully designed with quite varied environment that makes expert use of lighting. At the beginning the main character is running through forest and corn fields, and the layers of parallax scrolling elements captures a great sense of depth even though player is just

Game Notes

Celeste

I haven't played a game this hard in a while... How to Make Dying in a Game Less FrustratingBy allowing players to continue and start playing again quickly. I died often in this game. My family were placing bets on death count by the time I finish the game. Dying

Build

Filesystem Case Sensitivity

There may be many reasons why you must have filesystem that is case sensitive. For example, you are trying to run ct-ng build command and it fails under Windows WSL. Solution is to mount your filesystem with case sensitive enabled, or use per-directory control. The second option gives your more

Game Notes

NieR: Automata

I finally got around to playing and finishing the game. Music is great, story is engaging, and there are some fun game mechanics I want to remember. Various Game Types Combined Into OneEarly on when player is piloting an air frame that transforms into a robot, and after the playable

Build

Ghost Theme Development

Set up local Ghost instance to develop and test theme.

C++ Notes

Date/Time Manipulations

C++ provides std::chrono::system_clock::time_point that represents time, that works well with other classes such as durations (std::chrono::milliseconds, etc.). However, it isn't always sufficient for date time manipulations because of daylight savings and leap years. Since time_point represents time interval since the clock's epoch,

Random Notes

Symbolic Link With NTFS

This command has been around for a while, but recently I used: mklink /J <link> <target> to create a directory junction, which is the NTFS way of creating a link to point to directory target. I was wondering why my home directory was using up (a

Random Notes

Building A Computer, 2017 Edition

Ever since the Ryzen processors became available I've wanted one. I remember back in the Athlon days, AMD provided the much needed competition against Intel's expensive Pentium processors, and everyone benefited as a result. The early reports showed a great multi-core processor that is once again a great deal, but

Toys

LEGO Cars

I've been buying cars made from LEGO pieces. I don't get to build all of them, as my kids have now the understanding and motor skills to do that. LEGO releases new cars all the time, and it is amazing what my kids and I learned from them. As my

C++ Notes

JSON Parsing

Update: I now use JSON for Modern C++ with really nice API and reasonable performance. I recommend checking out what other options are available. The library jsmn is a C library that allows parsing of JSON stream into tokens. License and Source Source repository is available here. jsmn is Open

C++ Notes

Web Socket Client

The library libwebsockets is a C library that allows opening and two-way communication via web sockets. License and Source Source repository is available here. libwebsockets is Open Source, license is available here, LGPL2.1 with static link exception. Concepts Web socket communications require a pre-defined protocol in place since both

Game Notes

Recore

Recore has some serious issues that takes away from the nice character and robots that I really want to like. Slow Loading Times Nothing steals the fun away faster than a slow boring loading screen that one must wait through. Made a mistake and died? It could take minutes for

Toys

Mini Famicom

It took a while, but Nintendo has finally decided to release a plug-and-play console with 30 games. Artificial Supply Shortage Nintendo is extra thoughtful and released two different versions to match the products available in different regions. Japan has the Mini Famicom and U.S. the NES Classic Edition, each

Game Notes

Splatoon

Takes a company like Nintendo to make a squad-based multiplayer shooting games so much fun and intuitive. Anyone enjoy Splatoon after just a few minutes. Many things I want to remember and incorporate into my own game, if I ever make one... Kids Friendly Splatoon has squids that can transform

Game Notes

Quantum Break

I played Quantum Break an episode a day over several days. I thought it was very well made with good characters and stories. Beyond the excellent video presentations with branching storylines, it has some interesting combat mechanics. Stacking Attacks This is surprisingly intuitive and satisfying to pull off. While freezing