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Dealing with latency sensitive processes on Linux
We’ve had an issue with players complaining about micro lags on our DotA bots over the summer for no apparent reason. After lots of debugging and well timed clues from the players, I pinpointed the problem to non-bot processes spiking the CPU and causing this lag as a consequence. Even a simple thing like logrotate…
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Encrypted root on Debian without LVM
If you want to set up encrypted boot drive through Debian Installer you are only given an option to use LVM in the guided process. If you don’t want to use LVM the setup is a bit more involved so I am documenting it here. If you want to try this in virt manager, make…
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ZFS on Debian: load-key keyboard issues
I have a systemd service which decrypts my ZFS dataset on boot. It essentially runs /usr/sbin/zfs load-key -a but randomly on some boots, my password is “incorrect” and by experimenting I figured out that if I type everything slowly it works almost every time, but if I type it fast it regularly fails. I suspect…
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Love hate relationship with conan.io
Introduction conan was supposed to finally solve the decade long issue of getting your build dependencies on Windows (and Linux but to a lesser extent because package managers have already solved that problem there). Before that you either had to build from source or find pre-built binaries from sometimes questionable sources. Building from source is…
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Hogwarts Legacy quick review
I would never expect a game such as this to be anything nearly as good as it actually is. I would put it in a category of games such as Witcher, Mass Effect and Skyrim, but one level below these legendary games overall. Being a fan of Harry Potter universe helps a lot to enjoy…
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Protecting your vBulletin 4 registration against spambots with email domain whitelist
If you are still hosting a vBulletin 4 forum for whatever the reason may be, you are probably experiencing the spambot hell. Captcha plugins are out of date or simply bypassed and protections like human verification questions just do not seem to work. You could throw Cloudflare in front for some bot detection and that…
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Automatically resize cloud VM filesystem when disk size increases on Linux
One of the good things that cloud brings is that you can easily increase size of your VM disks as they fill up. Unfortunately the process is a bit manual because you also need to resize your filesystem in order to see the change. GCP has this process documented. We can automate this with a…
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Using extra mouse buttons to quickly switch to a task in KDE
I had a bright idea to use my extra 2 mouse buttons to quickly switch to a task in Debian KDE, for example to terminal or browser. Since the mouse is in the palm of your hand most of the time this is quite a bit faster than actually clicking on a task or hitting…
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Divide and Conquer, Medieval II: Total War mod (DaC) experience
Divide and Conquer is a Medieval II: Total War Kingdoms mod in Lord of the Rings setting. Technically a “sub” mod of Third Age: Total War, but at this point it is fair to say it is a mod on it’s own since it greatly imroves and expands almost every aspect of TaTW. I have…
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Building Qt 5.15 on Windows with OpenSSL
I have written about the many problems of building Qt 5 with OpenSSL in the past. Several years later, it is time to upgrade to latest Qt 5.15 which is presumably the last in the Qt 5 series. This time I decided to drop the Windows XP support since it is just too much work…