I've acquired a classic 1977 124 Spider that hasn't seen much action in ~1 decade. I've had it ~1 week & the most important stuff works. I've done a number of small trips around town. Yesterday in the garage I wanted to catalog everything that needs repair by flipping all knobs/switches and marking what's not working. I found that the wipers don't work (but the wiper fluid pump does) and the cabin air/defrost fan doesn't come on, and one of the air levers is locked/frozen. I left the car for a couple of hours and when I returned I thought I could smell plastic burning. I hunted for the smell & found a small electronic component under the hood that seemed like it might be hot, but I wasn't sure. I left the car overnight with the hood up and when I returned I the smell was gone but the battery was dead!

I figured I must have left something on by mistake so I went through all knobs/controls using the owner's manual to make certain that everything off (it was). Then I jumped the car & drove it around for ~20 minutes. Left it in the garage ~1 hour being very careful that the doors were closed, no lights were on, etc. & checked on it to see if the burning smell returned (it hadn't). Left it overnight & in the morning it was dead again!

I don't think that there's anything wrong with the battery or alternator because it had run fine all week with multiple short trips around town. I think it's more likely that an electrical component is shorting somewhere & draining the battery. Perhaps turning knobs & flipping switches pushed an old brittle electrical part over the edge?

My question is: what is the best way to find the malfunctioning electrical component? I was thinking of the following:

• Jump the car & recharge battery by driving around town

• Park in the garage and disconnect all fuses

• Return every ~8 hours and check the battery, if it looks OK then replace a fuse

• Repeat the above step until the battery dies

Using that approach I can isolate the bad component to the circuit running through that fuse. It's a slow process though, is there a faster or more efficient way to do this? Any other ideas as to root cause? Any thoughts appreciated, thanks!

Happened on this 1998 game by sheer chance and I'm really digging it! As far as I can tell it was never popular. It's a mixture of an RTS and a "god game" where one unit (your shaman) is very powerful & special (chess analogy: sort of like mixing the central role of the king & with the power of the queen).

Strong "tribal" vibes that were popular in the '90s (think Deep Forest music, the game Riven, etc). Very nostalgic for me as I was a kid at the time. I'm playing the PSX version, looks like the PC version was even better!

Has anyone ever heard of this "Populous" series? I'm curious to try other titles, and to try more in the "god game" genre (a genre I never even knew existed!). Any other "god games" worth checking out?

I want to sync retroarch save files across devices on my local network using a bash script. Plan is to run the script as a cronjob to keep all machines synced.

This does the trick as a one-off in the terminal: rsync -a /home/localuser/.config/retroarch/states/ remoteuser@192.168.1.12:/home/remoteuser/.config/retroarch/states/

• Copies new save files to remote location
• Updates any save files which were modified

But when I put the same line in a bash script rsync's behavior changes. My bash script looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
rsync -a /home/localuser/.config/retroarch/states/ remoteuser@192.168.1.12:/home/remoteuser/.config/retroarch/states/

I call it with bash sync_saves.sh

• Copies new save files to remote location
• ~~Updates any save files which were modified~~

Strangely, rsync doesn't update modified files when run as a script. But it's not failing altogether, because it transfers new files OK. What am I missing?

Update: if I do the rsync in the reverse order (remote machine -> local machine) then the bash script works as expected. So my issue exists only when rsync goes local machine -> remote machine. Why would this matter?

Update 2 (Solution): I changed the command to rsync -razu /home/localuser/.config/retroarch/states/ remoteuser@192.168.1.12:/home/remoteuser/.config/retroarch/states/, but I'm not sure that made any impact. The issue was how I was doing my testing. I was doing touch testfile.txt to change the modification date on a file & then I'd try to transfer it with the bash script & watch the modification date on the downstream machine as confirmation that it moved correctly. Problem is that rsync must be smart & doesn't transfer a file if only the modification date changes. It requires the contents to also change. Whenever I tested this way I would never see the file transfer, but when I changed my testing method to change the contents of the file instead (not just the modification timestamp) then all worked fine!

I feel like a dummy for initially mixing testing methods & coming to the wrong conclusion about what was happening, but happy it's working now & maybe I learned a lesson!

I've seen it asked (on Reddit) how to play custom background music while playing games on ArkOS. I wanted to share how I do it, in case others want to try it as well. I'm sure these instructions could be modified slightly for other Linux handhelds.

• Gain terminal access (via SSH or directly on the device)
• With your device connected to wifi run sudo apt install mpg123 to install the CLI-based music player
• Transfer your desired music mp3s to a folder on the sd card
  • I use /roms2/Music/
• Create the file start_music.sh in your ports folder which contains the line nohup mpg123 -z /<path>/<to>/<my>/<music>/<folder>/*.mp3 >/dev/null 2>&1 &
  • For me that line was nohup mpg123 -z /roms2/Music/*.mp3 >/dev/null 2>&1 & and the file was at /roms2/ports/start_music.sh
• Create the file stop_music.sh in your ports folder which contains the line pkill mpg123
  • For me that file was at /roms2/ports/stop_music.sh
• Log out of the terminal and restart EmulationStation

Now start_music and stop_music options are available in the 'Ports' section of EmulationStation. Running start_music starts a shuffled playlist of everything you put in that music folder. stop_music stops the music. Of course, you'll want to turn off the native background music in whatever game your playing too :)

EDIT: Updated the nohup line to dump outputs to the null output rather than to file (which could eventually grow to be large).

I like text-based games (like from ifdb), but I don't like sitting at attention in front of my computer like I do all day at work. Any ideas for how to play these effectively without being on a computer?

• I've hacked a Kindle Paperwhite & used an on-screen virtual keyboard to play these games. That worked OK, but the virtual keyboard is very imprecise and frustrating.

• I've similarly hacked a Kindle 3 (the last model to include a physical keyboard). I hoped the physical keyboard would do the trick. Unfortunately, the key buttons are convex & very stiff - which hurt my fingertips after even short play sessions.

Any other ideas? Or is this a fool's errand?

Super Metroid's color palette and lanky sprite were always a turn off for me. But I'm finally giving it a chance on SNES (MSU-1 version) & I'm really enjoying it!

Vibes are: Quake + the movie Alien + Nine Inch Nails' album The Downward Spiral. Pretty cool aesthetic after all!

I've noticed that some apps sometimes don't start from the GUI. I've seen it on several computers (all running Ubuntu 22.04). That includes double-clicking an appimage icon from an explorer window, or launching an app through a launcher shortcut. But if I open them manually from a terminal window they never fail to start.

The terminal workaround is fine... But any ideas what could be wrong with the GUI? Is there a service I can restart to try to get the functionality back?

EDIT: I'll add that the issue is sporadic. Steam will open fine from the GUI today, but tomorrow it won't, etc. (It's not as simple as a bad path in a shortcut)

In many games there are a lot of stupid filler items that you don't know what they do and they don't matter. (i.e. crafting ingredients). They are so ubiquitous across games that there ought to be a word for them. Sort of like a "MacGuffin" (except a MacGuffin moves the plot along, and these filler items don't).

Is there a name for these filler items? If not, got any ideas?