Category: software

Beaker Browser

~ cafebedouin

“Beaker uses a peer-to-peer protocol called Hyperdrive. ‘Hyperdrives’ are like websites. They store webpages, pictures, media, user data, and so on. Hyperdrives power a lot of Beaker’s best features.

Peer-to-peer means that you host data directly from your device.

One fun attribute of peer-to-peer is ‘co-hosting.’ This is where you help keep a hyperdrive online by storing the data and contributing bandwidth to other users. It happens temporarily when you visit a hyperdrive, but you can turn it on permanently for sites you like.”

–Beaker Browser

Min, The Minimalist Web Browser

~ cafebedouin

See quick definitions and answers with information from DuckDuckGo, including Wikipedia entries and more. Jump to any site quickly with fuzzy search. Or search through the full text of every page you’ve visited, even if you don’t remember the title.

—Min

I haven’t tried this browser. I like the idea. But, I think being able to use a SOCKS5 proxy is important, and I don’t see that functionality on a casual scan. Still, I thought it might be worth looking into as a secondary browser.

NetHack / The NetHack Learning Environment

~ cafebedouin ~ 1 Comment

Reminded of NetHack this morning after hearing of Facebook’s release of The NetHack Learning Environment.

“NetHack is one of the oldest and arguably most impactful videogames in history, as well as being one of the hardest roguelikes currently being played by humans. It is procedurally generated, rich in entities and dynamics, and overall an extremely challenging environment…”

I’ve only played this casually, but it’s very complex. It might be a fun project to learn a little bit about artificial intelligence. Or, you might simply wish to play the game yourself.

Worth a look. It’s free and runs on pretty much any computer you’d want to use. Almost everyone will want to get a version with graphic tiles.

A Community is Defined By Its Center and Not Its Periphery

~ cafebedouin

“My sense is that you need to build up a nucleus of people who know each other and who can network and support each other [in developing a proficiency in a technology with the complexity of R.]”

—Hadley Wickham in an interview with Dan Kopf, “What’s next for the popular programming language R?” Quartz. August 17, 2019.

Made me think of a Larry Wall Slashdot interview, question 7, from back in the day.

The tidyverse style guide

~ cafebedouin

All style guides are fundamentally opinionated. Some decisions genuinely do make code easier to use (especially matching indenting to programming structure), but many decisions are arbitrary. The most important thing about a style guide is that it provides consistency, making code easier to write because you need to make fewer decisions.”

-Hadley Wickham, “The tidyverse style guide.” style.tidyverse.org

Probably the definitive guide for writing R code. See also Hadley Wickham’s Advanced R.

GOG Games on Linux, Featuring Blade Runner

~ cafebedouin

“Blade Runner is a point-and-click adventure, a genre that was still very popular on PCs at the time of its release. Games like Beneath a Steel Sky had already used the format to tell Blade Runner-inspired cyberpunk stories. Given the usual state of movie adaptations, a Blade Runner adventure game wouldn’t necessarily have been anything to get excited about.‘Blade Runner’ really does make you feel like a detective

What Westwood did with the license, however, was inspired. The game isn’t a straight retelling of the movie. (Harrison Ford’s Deckard is nowhere to be seen.) You play a detective named Ray McCoy on the tail of replicants linked to vicious animal murders. While the story takes place at the same time as the movie and involves some of the same locations and characters, it plays out in parallel without intersecting too strongly. This was a great decision for a narrative adventure, allowing the game to evoke the movie without feeling predictable.

-Sam Byford, “The resurrected Blade Runner game is a genuine classic.” The Verge. December 18, 2019.

Blade Runner is currently on sale for $8.99 until January 2nd, 2020, at 2 PM UTC. And, if you are into free (as in beer!) games, and who isn’t, you could also download the previously mentioned Beneath a Steel Sky for nothing.

But, there’s a catch. GOG doesn’t provide much help getting these games installed on a Linux system. I didn’t see any instructions, but let me save you some time. I documented what I did to get it to work, and now, you have the very instructions that should be on the GOG website, but are somehow, inexplicably, not there. We’re going to use Blade Runner as our example, but while I was looking into how to get this thing running, it was apparent that these problems happen on the Linux platform with many of GOG’s games.

Installing & Getting the Games to Work

Before starting, let’s make life easy for ourselves and get an outdated audio library that is needed in order for the game to launch.

$ dpkg -i libsndio6.1_1.1.0-3_amd64.deb

You’re also going to need Simple DirectMedia Layer 2, which you can install the standard way, through the repository:

$ sudo apt-get install libsdl2-net-2.0-0

Now, with those preliminaries out of the way, let’s get to the task at hand, shall we? Download the Blade Runner file from the GOG website. Open a terminal:

$ cd Downloads
$ chmod +x blade_runner_1_0_varies.sh 
$ ./blade_runner_1_0_varies.sh

After installation, it should be in your Show Applications, which is in the bottom right corner for people using the standard Gnome window manager, and then, select the game you’ve just installed, if it isn’t Blade Runner.

Or, maybe you’ve learned to love the terminal, you could launch the game from the command line by opening a terminal:

$ cd GOG\ Games/Blade\ Runner/
$ ./start.sh

The game should launch from this point. If not, contact GOG and …Good Luck!

An Introduction To Data Science On The Linux Command Line

~ cafebedouin

…provide[s] the reader with a brief overview for a number of different Linux commands. A special emphasis will be placed on explaining how each command can be used in the context of performing data science tasks. The goal will be to convince the reader that each of these commands can be extremely useful, and to allow them to understand what role each command can play when manipulating or analyzing data.”

-Robert Elder, “An Introduction To Data Science On The Linux Command Line.” RobertElder.org. October 16, 2019.