January 2023

Link List

Tuesday 2023-01-31 – Link List

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Blogging Intensifies Link List for Tuesday 2023-01-31

23-Jan-2023 – JWST Heralds a New Dawn for Exoplanet Science

Brief Summary: “The James Webb Space Telescope is opening an exciting new chapter in the study of exoplanets and the search for life beyond EarthAn illustration of th”

31-Jan-2023 – Overwatch 2 is making it easier and cheaper for you to get older skins

Brief Summary: “Image: Blizzard EntertainmentTo coincide with the release of season 3, Overwatch 2 is reintroducing Overwatch credits, giving players ways to earn tho”

31-Jan-2023 – Colossal Cave returns from the 1970s in a 3D reimagining

Brief Summary: “Colossal Cave, originally released in 1977 from Will Crowther and Don Woods has been revived and reimagined for modern audiences.”

30-Jan-2023 – Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer – Part 23: Ready, Set, Go!

Brief Summary: “If you look at the commercial Linux gaming catalogue at the turn of the millennium, in amongst all of the 3D shooters and strategic simulations being “

30-Jan-2023 – Free Minecraft-like game MineClone2 v0.82.0 for Minetest out now

Brief Summary: “A free and open source survival sandbox game pack for the voxel game engine Minetest, MineClone2 is as close to Minecraft as you can get without playi”

31-Jan-2023 – Rest in Virtual Peace, AltspaceVR: 2013 – 2023

Brief Summary: “I love VR. I’ve loved it for years, and I am excited to see what it still has to offer in the years and decades to come as an immersive, interactive d”

31-Jan-2023 – Netflix’s Password Sharing Cash Grab Finally Arrives In The States

Brief Summary: “After years of saying password sharing wasn’t really a big deal and was akin to free advertising, Netflix recently announced it would be cracking down”

30-Jan-2023 – Twitter Sued For Not Paying Rent On Its SF Headquarters And Its London Offices

Brief Summary: “There have been a bunch of stories about how one of Elon’s big “cost saving” techniques was to stop paying for basically anything, including rent.

To”

30-Jan-2023 – Asteroid’s sudden flyby shows blind spot in planetary threat detection

Brief Summary: “The discovery of an asteroid the size of a small shipping truck mere days before it passed Earth on Thursday, albeit one that posed no threat to human”

30-Jan-2023 – Hacker finds bug that allowed anyone to bypass Facebook 2FA

Brief Summary: “Hacker finds bug that allowed anyone to bypass Facebook 2FAA bug in a new centralized system that Meta created for users to manage their logins for Fa”

31-Jan-2023 – Will Smith and Martin Lawrence announce Bad Boys 4

Brief Summary: “They ride together. They Die Together. And now Will Smith and Martin Lawrence have announced Bad Boys 4 together.  Taking to Instagram, Will Smith, ak”

30-Jan-2023 – Mario battles Donkey Kong in The Super Mario Bros. Movie promo

Brief Summary: “Illumination has released a new TV spot for the animated feature adaptation of the iconic Nintendo video game series, The Super Mario Bros. Movie whic”

Link List

Saturday 2023-01-28 – Link List

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Blogging Intensifies Link List for Saturday 2023-01-28

28-Jan-2023 – American Truck Simulator DLC will head to Kansas after Oklahoma

Brief Summary: “American Truck Simulator hasn’t yet received its already-announced Oklahoma DLC, but work is underway on the state that will follow it: Kansas. You’ll”

28-Jan-2023 – Dungeons and Dragons scraps new OGL plans after backlash

Brief Summary: “Wizards of the Coast has scrapped their plans for a new Dungeons and Dragons Open Game License (OGL) after massive backlash from players, content crea”

28-Jan-2023 – Wine 8.0 Released — and Plenty of Improvements are Included

Brief Summary: “An anonymous reader shares this report from OMG! Ubuntu:

Developers have just uncorked a brand new release of Wine, the open source compatibility lay”

28-Jan-2023 – D&D Won’t Change Its Original 1.0 OGL License, Reference Document Enters Creative Commons

Brief Summary: “An anonymous reader shares a report from PC Gamer:

In a blog post published Friday, Wizards of the Coast announced that it is fully putting the kibos”

27-Jan-2023 – Reverse-Engineering the Conditional Jump Circuitry in the 8086 Processor

Brief Summary: “The condition PLA evaluates microcode conditionals.As simple as a processor’s instruction set may seem, especially in a 1978-era one like the Intel 80”

09-Jan-2023 – Neon Modem Overdrive

Brief Summary: “Neon Modem Overdrive

Neon Modem Overdrive is a BBS-style command line client that
supports Discourse, Lemmy, Lobsters and
Hacker News as backends, an”

25-Jan-2023 – Factorio is about to increase in price so be quick

Brief Summary: “The developers of the awesome Factorio have announced that the price is about to go up, so if you still haven’t purchased it now is the time.”

23-Jan-2023 – Free open source RPG ‘FreedroidRPG’ arrives on Steam

Brief Summary: “It’s not going to win any awards on style but some of you may want to know that the classic free and open source RPG FreedroidRPG is now on Steam.”

27-Jan-2023 – Selfie: An educational platform for teaching systems engineering

Brief Summary: “Comments”

22-Jan-2023 – PHP Will Not Die

Brief Summary: “PHP, the programming language that has been declared dead more times than a cat has lives, is still very much alive and kicking. Despite what some eli”

27-Jan-2023 – Mumbling actors, bad speakers or lazy listeners? Why everyone is watching TV with subtitles on

Brief Summary: “Subtitles aren’t just for the hard of hearing, with Netflix reporting 40% of its viewers regularly use them. But do we just enjoy them or is there a m”

27-Jan-2023 – Taylor Swift has shared a video for ‘Lavender Haze’ – watch

Brief Summary: “Taylor Swift has released a video for ‘Lavender Haze’. The latest visual from her 2022 album, ‘Midnights’, features transgender activist and actor Lai”

27-Jan-2023 – Maisie Peters is kicking off a new era with her track ‘Body Better’

Brief Summary: “Maisie Peters has dropped a new single, ‘Body Better’.

The first single from her soon-to-be-announced second album, it was penned alongside Ines Du”

26-Jan-2023 – Zara Larsson has dropped her massive new single, ‘Can’t Tame Her’

Brief Summary: “Zara Larsson has released her new single, ‘Can’t Tame Her’.

The track was co-written by the artist herself alongside MNEK and MTHR and produced by”

26-Jan-2023 – PVRIS has dropped her new single ‘Goddess’

Brief Summary: “PVRIS has released a new single, ‘Goddess’.

The track coincides with a bunch of UK and European dates, with Lynn Gunn commenting: “It’s a celebrati”

27-Jan-2023 – Adam Driver battles dinosaurs in new trailer for sci-fi 65

Brief Summary: “Sony Pictures has released a new trailer for writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ upcoming sci-fi thriller 65. The film follows pilot Mills (A”

Link List

Friday 2023-01-20 – Link List

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Blogging Intensifies Link List for Friday 2023-01-20

20-Jan-2023 – [GOG] Haven Park (-100%, FREE)

Brief Summary: ” submitted by /u/n_wolf6 [link] [comments] “

20-Jan-2023 – [ITCH] 100+ solo RPG and journaling games bundle for charity ($10)

Brief Summary: “submitted by /u/JavierLoustaunau [link] [comments]”

20-Jan-2023 – Factorio will increase in price next week “to account for the level of inflation”

Brief Summary: “New games have become more expensive in recent years, but older games have continued to remain the same price or to get cheaper. Excellent factory con”

20-Jan-2023 – GTA Trilogy – Definitive Edition is rubbish on the Steam Deck, too

Brief Summary: ”
Now that the Rockstar-embarrassing, staccato-titled Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Definitive Edition is out on Steam, this terrible trio of remaste”

20-Jan-2023 – Deep Rock Galactic’s Lunar Festival event is now available

Brief Summary: “Deep Rock Galactic is no stranger to seasonal events, with the Halloween and Holiday events happening a few months ago, but the space rig never stays “

20-Jan-2023 – Suiting Up for Their First Spacewalk

Brief Summary: “Expedition 68 Flight Engineers Nicole Mann of NASA and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency are pictured on Jan. 12, 2023, during a”

20-Jan-2023 – NASA Observes Day of Remembrance Ahead of Columbia 20th Anniversary

Brief Summary: “The agency will honor members of the NASA family who lost their lives while furthering the cause of exploration and discovery, including the crews of “

18-Jan-2023 – Rebecca Black has shared a new album taster, ‘Sick To My Stomach’

Brief Summary: “Rebecca Black has shared her brand new single ‘Sick To My Stomach’.

The track, which is from her highly anticipated debut album, is an honest and “

18-Jan-2023 – Watch Soccer Mommy’s NPR Tiny Desk Concert

Brief Summary: “Soccer Mommy has shared a new NPR Tiny Desk Concert.

The Nashville-based singer-songwriter performed four tracks from her three full-length albums”

19-Jan-2023 – [Ubisoft] Rayman Raving Rabbids (Free/100% off)

Brief Summary: ” submitted by /u/wayward_wanderer [link] [comments] “

19-Jan-2023 – [Epic] Epistory – Typing Chronicles (Free/100% off)

Brief Summary: “submitted by /u/Musth [link] [comments]”

19-Jan-2023 – [Itch.io] Will Glow the Wisp: (100% off)

Brief Summary: “submitted by /u/KeySam [link] [comments]”

19-Jan-2023 – [GX.games] Princess Farmer (free/100% off) | ends Feb 2nd

Brief Summary: ” submitted by /u/TheBubu22 [link] [comments] “

Linux & Open Source

SQL Woes

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

For the most part, managing my web server is pretty straightforward, especially because I don’t really get a ton of traffic. Its mostly just keeping things up to date through standard channels.

Occasionally I have a bit of a brain fart moment. I recently was doing regular Linux updates on the server. I noticed a message I had seen before about some packages being held back. Occasionally I will go through and update these, because I am not real sure why they are being held back, but don’t really see any reason they should be.

Then MySQL broke.

So I went digging in some logs and searching for solutions, and decided I needed to roll back the version. Following a guide I found, I discovered… I had done this before, which I now vaguely remebered. Because the old .deb file was still there from last time I broke it.

Anyway, this didn’t fix it, MySQL still was not launching.

I decided that maybe it was time to just switch to MariaDB, which I believe is the spiritual successor to MySQL. And the process was simple enough, I would not even need to dump my Databases. So I uninstalled MySQL, installed MariaDB and… It worked!

Then it stopped working.

I restarted the SQL service and it worked!

Then it…. Stopped working… Again…

So I checked logs again and corrected some issues there and again it worked, then a half hour or so later it stopped working.

One thing I had come across in troubleshooting the original MySQL issue was that there was a command, mysql_upgrade that needed to be run to change how some tables are configured. I couldn’t do that before because I couldn’t even get MySQL to run. But I could get MariaDB to run at least for a bit, and had successfully gotten this upgrade command to run.

So I decided to, once again, try MySQL again, so I uninstalled MariaDB, and purged everything out, rebooting a few times to be sure. And MySQL would not even install anymore, so more purging, this time, including the Databases.

One thing I was glad I had decided to do, “Just in Case” when MariaDB was “working” was dump the databases out with backups. I was glad I did at this point. So with absolutely everything purged, MySQL installed and was working.

I set about recreating the databases from the dumps, and while I was at it updated all the passwords, since I had to recreate the user accounts used by WordPress anyway.

And now everything is working smoothly again.

A couple of links that were actually helpful in solving my problem.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67564215/problems-installing-mysql-on-ubuntu-20-04

https://learnubuntu.com/install-mysql/

Programming Projects

Code Project: Automated List From Reddit Comments

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

This is one of those quick and kind of dirty projects I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Basically, I wanted a script that would scrape all of the top level comments from a Reddit post and push them out to a list. Most commonly, to use on /r/AskReddit style threads like, well, for this example, “What is a song from the 90s that young people should listen to.”

Basically, threads that ask for useful opinions on list. Sometimes it’s lists of websites or something. Often it’s music. The script here is made for music but could be adjusted for any thread. Here is the script, I’ll touch on it a bit in more detail after.

## Create an APP for Secrets here:
## https://www.reddit.com/prefs/apps

import praw

## Thread to scrape goes here, replace the one below
url = "https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/10c4ki0/name_one_90s_song_kids_born_after_2000_should_add/"

## Fill in API Information here
reddit = praw.Reddit(
    client_id="",
    client_secret= "",
    user_agent= "script by u/", # Your Username, not really required though
    redirect_uri= "http://localhost:8080",
)


submission = reddit.submission(url=url)
submission.comments.replace_more(limit=0)
submission.comment_limit = 1

for x in submission.comments:
    with open("output.txt", mode="a", encoding="UTF-8") as file:
        if "-" in x.body:
            file.write(str(x.body)+"\n")
            # print(x.body)

The script uses praw, Python Reddit API Wrapper. A Library made for use in Python and the Reddit API. It requires free keys which can be gotten here: https://www.reddit.com/prefs/apps. Just create an app, the Client ID is a jumble of letters under the name, the secret is labeled. User Agent can be whatever really, but it’s meant to be informative.

The thread URL also needs filled in.

The script then pulls the thread data and pulls the top level comments.

I’m interested in text file lists mostly, though for the sake of music based lists, if I used Spotify, I might combine it with the Spotify Playlist maker from my 100 Days of Python course. Like I said before though, this script is made for pulling music suggestions, with this but of code:

        if "-" in x.body:
            file.write(str(x.body)+"\n")
            # print(x.body)

It’s simple, but if the comment contains a dash, as in “Taylor Swift – Shake it Off” or “ACDC – Back in Black”, it writes it to the file. Otherwise it discards it. There is a chance it means discarding some submissions, but this isn’t precision work so I’m OK with that to filter out the chaff. If I were looking for URLs or something, I might look for “http” in the comment. I could also eliminate the “if” statement and just have it write all the comments to a file.

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