Hooray! I actually bought a legit CD on eBay and couldn’t get it to work some years ago. I shall try again with Heroic. Thanks!

Has anyone managed to play “Black & White” this way? Ive tried so many ways I’m not sure I have it in me to do it again.

That’s both rude and inaccurate:

“Only release every two weeks.”

No. Nowhere did I say that. In fact, the team I wrote this about worked on a 1 week sprint. And as I said, I generally prefer kanban these days, but note the date on the post: this was essentially before continuous deployment was in common use, so sprints were very common and deploys were often a manual process that had to be greenlit by management. Many companies still do something similar. It is far from “insane”.

“This includes bugfixes”

This is true. It’s is primarily because deviating from the commitment you made with the company to have x jobs done by the end of the sprint necessarily means being unable to meet that commitment. If the bug is catastrophic, you obviously have to fix it right away (this isn’t religion, use your brain), but doing so busts the sprint and that has a real cost so yes, bug fixes should be delayed when possible. What I said was to show discipline in keeping “can you just fix this?” out of the sprint because it can introduce unexpected behaviour (new bugs!) and undermine your relationship with the client and sow frustration and discontent with the team as they’re driven to context switch.

It’s much easier to say:

“We found this bug on Thursday, and a fix in the works to have it patched for the next sprint due out next week”

…than it is to say:

“We failed to have bugfix/feature/whatever done by the end of the sprint as promised because our developers were taken off-task, catering to the latest freak out session by the COO”.

“Emergencies can be dealt with immediately, but any root cause analysis or deeper work on underlying issues must wait for the next sprint.”

Absolutely. Are we here to get work done, or throw everything out the window to sit around and talk through a 6-person meeting whenever something goes wrong? You can, for example schedule a post-mortem for the next sprint when something breaks, but (a) more often than not, this can be handled in retro, and (b) if you need something bigger, then there’s no way you know everything right away anyway.

“If it can’t be done in 4 hours, it can’t be done at all.”

That’s a gross misrepresentation. What I said was that a job must be limited to roughly 4 hours of work. If that job is going to be more, then you should break it up to allow the work to be spread around.

“Don’t document things.”

I didn’t say that. What I said was that much of the time, people waste time/energy on writing documentation that is shortly out of date. What I didn’t say however is that I meant “commenting your code” here rather than “documentation”. I will die on the hill that most code comments are a waste at best, and a dangerous lie at worst, while obviously user documentation is very different and obviously important. It should however be listed as a ticketed job and therefore added to the sprint.

“Don’t write bad code. (Also: You must use classes and methods, and variable names must be words.)”

Yeah I stand by this.

“Rigid adherence to the “agile process” is required”

Yes. That’s the whole point. You be as rigid as possible (within reason, again, use your brain). Rigidity provides structure and manages expectations on both sides. Being flexible leads to a mess. I know this because I’ve been doing this for 27 years and it has been my experience everywhere.

“The job of a software developer is to crank out code and nothing else, especially not design, testing, or documentation”

It should not be a surprise that one would expect software developers to develop software. If you want design, you hire a designer. Testing is part of the process though, and I never said otherwise. Don’t be shitty. I’ve noted documentation above.

“Don’t even think about ethics.”

FUCK THIS. Don’t you dare suggest to me that I wouldn’t demand ethics of everyone I work with. You know nothing about me, or my career, or what I’ve sacrificed to stay on the right side of the moral line. Engineers have a responsibility to do right by the world they live in, and nothing I’ve mentioned in that post would suggest otherwise. This was a post about building an efficient team capable of building great things quickly and well, while keeping the client happy with the progress. Of course you should refuse to do evil on the job. That should go without saying. Your decision to pretend that I care nothing about ethics says more about you than it does me.

As someone who worked in an actually agile team years before the project managers co-opted the idea and contorted it into “Scrum” I feel this comic in my bones.

It is absolutely maddening how these people have perverted a system that worked so beautifully into the concentration-breaking wasteland we have now just to make themselves feel relevant.

While I’m presently a fan of Kanban, my happy agile experience was under sprints. If anyone is curious what that looked like, I’ve written about it here.

That can come with its own problem that’s worth looking into. I’ve got 2 USB3 SSDs attached to mine, and the minute I add another one, I get complaints in the logs about insufficient voltage… even with a powered USB hub.

It seems that there’s a limitation in there somewhere, though I’m not clear on what it is. To be safe, I’d make sure that each drive is independently powered rather than relying on getting enough juice from the device or hub.

The Pi should be able to handle torrenting no problem, but, note that you’ll want to use a separate hard drive as the Pi uses an SD card as its primary disk and those things aren’t known for dependability under the load of constant IO from the torrents.

You can also do this with New Pipe.

Croc can be especially good for this.

Sadly, no. That game is definitely keyboard-only. Though I have played successfully with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse in the past.

Some games just don’t lend themselves well to a controllers based input.

Don’t think too hard on it. Just use git. For example, I have a repo called handy-scripts that hosts all my dotfiles. I just check that out into ${HOME}/projects/handy-scipts and then symlink everything from where it’s expected to its corresponding place in the repo.

As you make modifications, remember to occasionally do a git pull --rebase && git commit -m WIP && git push so that all your devices are synced up.

While the Deck is capable of running some big AAA games, I personally find that it shines in the low-power, “chill” games that you can play for a while, put down, and come back to when you’ve got some more time.

I’m a big fan of RPGs, so my #1 recommendation is Sea of Stars. Dragon Quest: Builders is also good, along with it’s sequel, which is arguably better.

A good multiplayer game with endless hordes of monsters vs. your magic is The Spell Brigade.

You may not know this, but the Deck can also be plugged into a TV or monitor, and with the help of a USB-C hub, can support a keyboard and mouse too! If you go that route, then I can’t recommend Dyson Sphere Program enough. Ooh! and Timberborn! It’s both adorable and beautifully designed.

If you’re more of a 3rd-person shooter type, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is fan-fucking-tastic (my favourite series of all time) and it’s currently on sale for £5. There are 3 games in the series, and make sure you start with the first one! You don’t regret it.

Finally, note that you’re not bound to the Steam store if you don’t want to be. If you install the Heroic Launcher for example, you can get DRM-Free games from GOG for example. Sometimes you’ll find that games are available on both platforms, but cheaper on one of the other, and GOG games don’t come with controls on how many people can be playing it at the same time.

Ooh! Has anyone managed to do this with Majel Barrett’s (the Enterprise computer) voice yet?

Basically the IP stops responding to any traffic. At one point I set up a constant ping, and every once in a while I got something like “destination host unreachable”. It doesn’t happen often enough for me to move the service onto a physical device though. That’s work and I’m tired like, a lot.

16: I’ve had more headaches getting multiple monitors to work in Windows than I ever have in Linux. Try connecting 2 monitors of wildly different resolutions in Windows and witness the abject failure of windows to handle that elegantly. Your mouse can slip off into a “void” where no monitor exists, and yet your content can just disappear to, dragging the mouse between monitors slips the cursor way off and to the right, screenshots are a mess, etc. etc.

17: I only play games in Linux and I never use emulators… unless it’s for things like SNES.

18: I don’t know what you’re getting at with this one. Software is way more shareable in Linux. You just say “it’s in your package manager” or “install this Flatpak”. Windows and Mac on the other hand have half-assed app stores and a culture of "just go to ${URL} and click “download, ok, ok, ok” which inevitably leads to stuff breaking and no discernible way to determine what failed 'cause your machine is full of rando installations.

19: This is fair, though most high-profile stuff like CrowdStrike works for Linux now.

20: I cannot begin to tell you how much Windows and Mac don’t work. Like, at all. Just today I spent an hour on a call with another developer stuck in Windows trying to get a JDBC driver to work. The constant ambiguous error messages, useless documentation directing you to "just go to ${RANDOM_SITE} and install some-cryptically-named-executable.msi that craps out with error messages about missing runtimes… the whole operating system is hot garbage and that’s before you factor in the missing keyboard shortcuts, flaky monitor support, creeping AI, and ads shooting into your eyeballs. The only way Windows “Just Works™” is if you redefine “works” entirely.

#3 is what does it for me. There are few things more enraging than something I own refusing to do what I’m instructing it to do.

I installed a Pi-Hole largely to serve as a local DNS, but enabled the ad-blocking 'cause it seemed silly not to. My wife got very upset. Apparently she likes the ads.

With that aside though, it seems to work quite well. Just make sure to (a) use a reasonably-powered device (my Pi Zero appears to be taxed by it) and you should probably use an Ethernet connection 'cause my Pi Zero regularly flakes out so DNS requests fail due to the IP being “unreachable” for a half second.

What’s the recommended VPN for a case like this?

I suspect it’s because they allowed users to select multiple, 'cause if you add all the personal Linuxes together, you get 61% on their own.

Regardless, it’s actually looking really good for Team Free Software.

I am terribly jealous. Congratulations on finding a company with a (somewhat) sensible IT policy.

“My Time at Portia”: it’s not exactly the best-coded game ive ever played (weird geometry and animation bugs, and some of the plots feel half-assed) but the world is big, and complicated, and there’s lots of crafting and relationships, and overall Good Vibes. I built a bus stop last night and married a nice girl who sells flowers. I recommend.

It’s currently on sale on GOG for €3.