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Council and the Integrity Commissioner posted on 10 Oct 2020
Okay, so let me just make sure I'm getting the latest City of Hamilton council misadventure straight. It's been hard to keep track of this overlaid in all the pandemic pandemonium.
edit (2020-10-12): Thanks to Ryan McGreal for helping me out with some details.
Cameron Kroetsch is a local activist who is an unpaid volunteer on the city's LGBT advisory committee. He's butt heads with the city before, like when said the city shouldn't fly the rainbow flag during Pride because they hadn't really stood up for the city's LGBT community properly. This attitude of his was vindicated when the police failed to protect the Gage park pride event from violent homophobic activists, despite (according to Kroetsch) having been specifically told exactly where and when to be. The police defend this because Pride's leadership had asked the police not to patrol the interior of the event or set up a recruiting table (the violence was on the edge of the park).
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Covid Cocktails 2 posted on 26 Sep 2020
Continuing on from my previous round, I've done another 14 days of cocktails. This time it's a more '70s theme.
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Covid Cocktails posted on 09 Sep 2020
So thanks to watching too many "How to Drink" Youtube videos, I've gotten into mixing cocktails. We're all drinking at home anyways, right?
So I made approximately one cocktail per day, mostly things I've never tried before.
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Saving Uranus posted on 16 Jun 2020
So I'm finally getting myself a new computer. Had it all figured out - new off-lease desktops were coming available for my kids, and I was going to buy myself a brand-new gaming machine. No hard feelings because everybody's getting a new machine at once.
Just had to wait until August.
Which is why it's awesome that my kids' computer (named Uranus) died. And died in an infuriating way - it was murdered by its own software.
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Mineclone2 Skins (rpi minetest-server part 4) posted on 30 May 2020
Continuing on our marathon process of setting up the perfect Mineclone2 server, this is going to be a brief side-guide - how set up skins in mineclone 2. I tried several approaches to this problem - the popular skin mods in minetest are meant to manage a connection to an online database of skins, and I just wanted to pre-load enough skins so the kids would have a library to choose from.
I couldn't get any of the existing skins mods to work fully, so we're going to just set the files up manually.
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Minetest Mods (rpi minetest-server part 3) posted on 23 May 2020
Now that we've got our Minetest server built (see previous entry ), now it's time to learn how to install mods and games into it, and how to run multiple instances of minetest. In particular, we're going to be installing Mineclone 2.
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Minetest Pi4 Recipe (rpi minetest-server part 2) posted on 12 May 2020
Continuing from my previous article on my daughter's Minetest birthday party, here's how I built my Raspberry Pi 4 minetest server that powered the party. To be clear: this is only my second time this century setting up a linux-based server from scratch, so I'm pretty novice at this. I'm handy with a terminal console but only on Windows. The intended reader of this article is... well, somebody like me. Somebody new to Linux but very comfy with Windows.
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Minetest Birthday (rpi minetest-server part 1) posted on 05 May 2020
Okay, this is part one of a multi-part... well, I guess we can't use the term "postmortem" that's popular in software development, since it's kind of morbid for a birthday. We'll call it an "after-action report".
Basically, we had to handle the challenge of "how do you run a 10th birthday party with kids under social distancing"? My answer was cupcakes, Zoom, a Raspberry Pi 4, and the open-source clone of Minecraft called Minetest.
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Using your phone as a Webcam on Windows and Android posted on 08 Apr 2020
What with covid-19, a lot of people are remoting and not a lot of people have webcams. But everybody's got a smartphone. So here's a guide on how to use your smartphone as a webcam with Android an Windows over wifi.
This is pretty adminny. If you're not comfy with that you might need to look at other approaches.
One important wrinkle is performance: It runs down the battery on my phone, and it slams the CPU on my desktop with interrupts.
Note that none of the software I'm recommending in this guide is open-source. I cannot guarantee that the software discussed below has no malicious secret intent.
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XOutput v0.2.0 posted on 11 Mar 2017
I've released my first version of my fork of XOutput.
It's a simple wrapper that allows you to rebind a DInput gamepad as an XInput gamepad.
Since most games are standardized on XInput (XBox360 controllers), this allows you to make an existing gamepad masquerade as an XBox360 controller.