Last weekend Spiel 2016, the biggest board game trade fair, took place in Essen, Germany. While there, I had a chance to catch up with Antoine Bauza, designer of such gems as Tokaido, 7 Wonders and Samurai Spirit. Currently, he is working on Attack on the Titan: The Last Stand. The game based is on the hugely popular Japanese manga and anime, where the remnants of humanity live in a wall-protected city, defending themselves from titans, who have an appetite for humans. In this board game, one player takes on the role of a titan. Their goal is to eat innocent citizens, destroy the city’s defenses and kill the members of the defense corps. The other players team up, trying to take the titan down.

I got to try out the game prototype as well. The game-play was very immersive and action packed, even though it was a bit too dice heavy for my taste. That was quite surprising for me, since Bauza’s games usually do not utilize dice at all. But I will be definitely buying the full game once it comes out in February 2017 anyway.

Raspberry Pi is my little busy-bee, working as a torrentbox and a Nextcloud server, among other things. But man, those blinking LEDs are not good for your sleep. So, I have written a small script with a systemd service to keep the LEDs turned off at night. You can find it at my Gitlab page. Enabling it on your own Raspberry is as easy as 1-2-3:

1. First, download the script with git clone https://gitlab.com/radek-sprta/automate-raspberry-leds (you might have to install git first).
2. Then copy raspberry-leds.sh to /usr/local/bin.
3. And make it executable with sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/raspberry-leds.sh.
4. Afterwards, raspberry-leds.service and raspberry-leds.timer to /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants.
5. Finally, run sudo systemctl daemon-reload.

Well, that was more like 1-2-3-4-5. But still pretty easy I would say. No more blinking lights bothering you at night anymore. Yay!

Just days after the release of Darkest Dungeon for PS4 and PS Vita, Red Hook studios have announced a new DLC called “The Crimson Court”. Truthfully, the official announcement does not say much except the release date - early 2017. And that the DLC will focus on vampires. As is Red Hook’s tradition, they will probably not be your typical vampires. But that still leaves a plenty of room for speculation. So, my guess is we can expect a new dungeon. Perhaps also some new classes - a vampire hunter, vampire or even a dhampir. What is it going o be? Let’s see! I feel excited already.

Darkest Dungeon is probably my favorite game released this year. It is a Gothic rogue-like about the stresses of dungeon crawling. You lead a party of heroes trying to stop an ancient evil encroaching upon your birth village. But you do not stand only against creatures of the dark. Hunger, diseases and unimaginable horrors that your heroes encounter will all take a toll on their mental state. They will despair, they will go mad, they will die… and they won’t return. The game features challenging tactical combat and gloomy Lovecraftian hand-drawn graphics. Yesterday, the Red Hook released the long- awaited PS4/PS Vita version. I am personally invested in this one, because supposed features a remade Czech localization. The original localization was plagued by inconsistent, too literal, and sometimes outright wrong translations. I took upon the task of bringing it up to standards. And many sleepless nights later, the Czech gamers should have a much more pleasant experience. So, for those of you who have not tried the game yet, this is the perfect chance. If you are still not convinced, take a look at the is a release trailer:

Edit: And now there is a DLC on the way too!

I like to change my wallpaper to reflect the current season. Since I spend large parts of the day in front of computer, this gives me a glimpse of the outside world. My favorite source of high quality photos has for the longest time been Flickr. There is one thing though, that has always bothered me on Flickr. Some authors do not allow download of their photos. I don’t see the point doing of this. If someone has the picture open in their browser, it is already stored stored on their computer. Therefore, they can just copy it from the cache. Or look for link to the picture in the source code. What I’m trying to say is, that if someone wants to download the picture, they will. Don’t upload the picture to the Internet in the first place, if you don’t like other people having it. I tend to download a lot of wallpapers at once. Because of that, digging through the source code can get a bit tedious. To deal with that, I wrote a simple script to download Flickr images in Python to do the heavy-lifting for me. You can use it with the URLs as arguments or saved in a text file, one per line. By default, it downloads the original image, but you can specify the size. Enjoy!

While greatly improved since the beta days, Steam on Linux is not perfect yet. After updates, it is often neccessary to fix Steam. You might be familiar with the following error:

SteamUpdateUI: An X Error occurred
X Error of failed request: BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)

The problem is caused by the Steam’s bundled libraries. But luckily, the solution is straightforward. All you need to do is to remove them. And to make your life easier, you can make a simple script to handle that. Let’s call it steamfix.sh:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -exu
cd $HOME/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu
mv libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6.bak
cd $HOME/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
mv libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6.bak

Don’t forget to make it executable with chmod +x and put it into /usr/local/bin. Now every time your Steam stops running after an update, executing steamfix.sh will make everything alright. Do you also have a Steam controller? If so, check out how to configure it on Linux.