Why the Epic Games store is bad for consumers

Epic Games has made the best games of every 90’s kids childhood with the ever popular Unreal Tournament even though before Fortnite Epic was no longer releasing games regularly they still develop one of the best game engines known as Unreal Engine. However, ever since the release of Fortnite things have taken a turn for the worse. Epic has released a new online game store similar to platforms such as Steam and Origin and although there is nothing wrong with that their approach is outright damaging to the entire industry. The Epic Games store offers a lower share on producers […]

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Fix disappearing emails send with WordPress

Email complexity has increased drastically since its first release. The now ever growing stack of email components no longer just consist of SMTP, MTA, MTP and MDA. Over the years technologies such as POP & IMAP were introduced along with security features such as SMTPS & STARTSSL. Now a days almost every addition to email is a security feature with recent introduction such as SPF and DKIM. And it is precisely their were Wordpress bites a bitter bullet. Wordpress uses the phpmailer backend and fails to correctly set the return-path parameter in the mail it sends. The return-path parameter is critical to pass SPF email protection mechanism and as a result any decent email server such as those of Google or Microsoft will reject the email send by Wordpress.

Encrypted swap partition that enables upon boot with dm-crypt

Setup an encrypted swap partition that automatically gets unlocked and enabled upon boot. Normally setting up a secure swap outside a logical volume is not supported out of the box by most Linux distributions, these few lines of shellcode allow for quickly setting up an encrypted swap.

Installing Manjaro 18 with Nvidia GTX 1050 TI

Manjaro its bleeding edge releases cause installation problems while using an GTX 1050 TI graphics card, these instructions allow Manjaro to install and successfully boot with an 1050 TI even if you are using Linux 4.16. Detailed instructions are provided for the unexperienced Linux users and a short step-by-step list is also available for the more seasoned veterans.

Simplified dm-crypt & btrfs disc creation

Most Linux users recognize the importance of data protection and security. Many of us will be familiar with encrypted partitions, almost all of the time these encrypted partitions will be managed, mounted and created with dm-crypt. A key or password will be used to decrypt the partition and mount the contents within. In an ideal world the data would be safe against many forms of unfortunate and maleficent intent. However traditional filesystems like Ext3, Ext4, NTFS, and HFS+ have a serious flaw. This flaw can lead to incorrect or damaged files being treated as undamaged and correct files. These filesystems fail to account for the physical phenomena known as bit-rot. Bit-rot is when bits on physical media or ssd’s flip from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0 over time. In modern filesystems this is accounted for by creating checksums

Installing Ubuntu on Acer Spin UEFI devices

Installing Ubuntu on the Acer Spin 1 has been proving to be quite the hassle to me. Fortunately; following these steps allows other to easily install Ubuntu on the Acer Spin 1 and possible many other Acer UEFI devices. Installing the bootloader will likely fail steps are provided to recover from this and perform bootloader repair. The steps require a 4gb usb drive for the Ubuntu live usb and later for installing rEFInd.

Typical rEFInd boot splash screen with 2 possbile operating systems found

Short demonstration of raid10 with btrfs

Short demonstration of modern software raid options using btrfs. In this example raid10 is used to show what happens when a whole disc is lost. We use common btrfs commands to repare the raid10 architecture and as a result can see that no data is lost.

Unreal Engine game development Linux pitfalls & resolutions

Unreal Engine its support for working and building for Linux is ‘lacking’ to say the least. Not only in the documentation about the tools that now have to be run manually from the commandline; generally what is and which features are not supported and common issues and resolutions are at least for Linux barely documented. So I will list some of the problems I have encountered and how to resolve them. Resolving all these problems will make creating a cross-platform game, using the UE4Editor on Linux and creating binary releases for distribution possible.

Cross platform video playback in unreal engine

The unreal engine supports Windows, Linux and Mac but each has its own different video player framework. If you try to have a simple single video player in Unreal this will likely only work for one or at most two platforms. By following this guide a video player can be made within Unreal engine that allows for playing back videos on Windows, Linux and Mac.

Configure exim4 smtp relay to use tls on connect (smtps)

Exim has seen many changes over the years and is up to date on modern standards such as the use of STARTSSL. This however leads to problems when using other protocols or standards such as smtps otherwise known as tls on connect. In this guide we configure exim4 to use the smtps protocol with a remote smarthost configuration.