Movember 2020 Preparations

Almost time to run the bracket again... Lemmy won last year... Does anyone have any suggestions for new styles this year? Must be things I can manage in 30 days.

If you're not sure what I'm talking about, this Movember I'll be both growing something disgusting for your amusement and trying to up my jogging to 60km over the month of Movember. Here's the twist: you can help decide what horrible things happen to my face fuzz. I'll be putting up a voting bracket in the next couple of days where 16 styles will go head to head, single elimination bracket style til only one style stands alone.

Here's last year's contenders, each of these is a few days growth as a preview to the finished style:

All funds raised go to support suicide and mental health support services. To donate or sponsor, head to https://mobro.co/ajfclark

Star Realms on Steam Linux

It was simpler than I thought to get Star Realms running on Linux.

First up, we need to enable Steam Play for unsupported titles. This can be done in two ways:

Just for Star Realms or For all Steam Apps

Just for Star Realms

From the Star Realms library page, open up the cog menu and pick properties:

From there, enable "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" and select Proton as the engine (3, 4 and 5 have all worked for me):

You should now be able to install and start Star Realms.

If it crashes on startup, you may need to tweak the Proton settings, see below.

For all Steam Apps

From the main Steam menu, pick settings:

Head to the Steam Play section on the left, checked "Enable Steam Play for supported titles" and "Enable Steam Play for all other titles" and se "Run other titles with" to Proton:

Select OK and Steam will restart. Head to the Star Realms library page and you should now be able to install and run Star Realms.

If it crashes on startup, you may need to tweak the Proton settings, see below.

Crashes on Startup

On my laptop, Proton crashes on startup. To get around this, I needed to tweak the Proton configuration.  To find the setting that work, from the Star Realms library page, open up the cog menu and pick properties:

From there, head in to the "Set Launch Options" dialog:

Here you can override the default Proton configuration. There is a list of available settings in:

~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Proton 5.0/user_settings.sample.py.

The setting I needed was:

PROTON_USE_WINED3D11=1

This can be passed as:

Once you've found which settings work, you can rename user_settings.sample.py to user_settings.py and then edit it so your settings are global:

Once this is done, you can remove the Star Realms specific settings.

OBS Remote Control

Head to the obs-websocket releases page: https://github.com/Palakis/obs-websocket/releases (linked from the resources section of the OBS site itself)

Download the installer.exe and run it. That will install the plugin.

Start OBS. In the Tools menu there should now be an option Websocket Server Settings:

 

 Make sure "Enable Websocket Server" is checked. You can turn on authentication if you want.

We will need to know the IP address of the machine running OBS. There's a bunch of ways to find this. The one I usually use is windows key+R and type cmd:

Run ipconfig, you're looking for the IPv4 address:

 

On your tablet or phone (which must be on the same network), open a browser and head to http://t2t2.github.io/obs-tablet-remote/ and bookmark it so you don't have to remember that later.

Enter the IP address we found above and press connect. You should then have a simple interface that will allow you to transition scenes:

You can add additional tools like start/stop recording/streaming, change transitions, etc. By pressing the pencil. For example, because I'm using a phone, I changed the horizontal split to vertical, the scene switcher from 4 to 3 columns and added the start/stop streaming buttons underneath:

By nesting splits, you can get quite a complex but useful layout. e.g.

becomes

It'll remember your layout between sessions. If you get in a mess, the cog can reset the layout to the default.

Direct firmware load for i915/kbl_dmc_ver1_01.bin failed with error -2

I saw an error on booting my new Debian 9.1 Stretch desktop and searching for the error message didn't pull anything useful at first. Here's the error message:

aclark@discus 0 ~ $ sudo dmesg | grep i915
[    2.705848] i915 0000:00:02.0: firmware: failed to load i915/kbl_dmc_ver1_01.bin (-2)
[    2.705851] i915 0000:00:02.0: Direct firmware load for i915/kbl_dmc_ver1_01.bin failed with error -2
[    2.705852] i915 0000:00:02.0: Failed to load DMC firmware [https://01.org/linuxgraphics/intel-linux-graphics-firmwares], disabling runtime power management.
[    3.030402] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1f.3: bound 0000:00:02.0 (ops i915_audio_component_bind_ops [i915])
[    3.030406] [drm] Initialized i915 1.6.0 20160919 for 0000:00:02.0 on minor 0
[    3.165047] i915 0000:00:02.0: fb0: inteldrmfb frame buffer device
aclark@discus 0 ~ $ 

Then found this Debian package which looked useful: https://packages.debian.org/sid/firmware-misc-nonfree

Installed that and the machine boots without errors.

Alternative client for Aldi Crane GPS watches

While I'm writing about GPS Master and some of its quirks, it's worth noting that there is now an alternative, open source client that can talk to the Crane GPS watches. The crane_gps_watch software is available on github. It currently supports many of the features of the GPS Master software and compiles under both Windows and Linux (so I assume MacOS works too?)

I'm currently in the process of getting proper lap data into the TCX files in creates (although RunKeeper sadly ignores this information) and after that I'd like to get the same level of statistics out. Also on the agenda is decoding the proprietary TKL data that GPS Master uses to store workouts as I'd prefer not to lose that information.

Empty error dialog in GPS Master v2.0.14.1218

Recently my Aldi Crane GPS Watch has been giving me some trouble, or more specifically, the GPS Master software that's bundled with it.

Of late, when attempting to view an activity, I get a blank error dialog and the map is not displayed. This also seems to prevent the graph drawing and the system tray icon from displaying.

Tracing the process with Process Monitor, I found it trying to access a non-existent Registry Key (HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\Shell Folders\Common AppData) and immediately after, attempting to create a bunch of invalid paths with leading Chinese characters.

Populating HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\Shell Folders\Common AppData with C:\ProgramData and restarting the app (exiting from the menu, not closing the window) allows the program to generate valid paths and now GMap.html is correctly generated and displayed.

Why it is pulling registry keys when there's a path for data storage set in the ini file I'm not sure, and why this used to work and suddenly stopped I can only guess was due to the removal of the key by some Windows update or buggy uninstaller?