Declaration of VAR

How to block Apple TV updates

Apparently, Apple thought that we will be delighted to get fullscreen update prompts on Apple TV like this one from time time but mostly when you expect them the least:

They just show up randomly on system start or simply on top of an application, if you leave it unattended for some time. And there is no setting in system preferences which would allow you to disable those.

You can, however, blacklist Apple update servers with firewall or DNS, and that will stop these prompts from showing up.

New server and Remark42 comments

I decided to move from GitHub Pages to my own server with my own domain. Also I switched from commenting system based on GitHub issues to Remark42 comment engine.

So the main website and the origin is now on https://decovar.dev/, and https://retifrav.github.io/ will continue to exist as a mirror on GitHub Pages.

Let's Encrypt certificate with acme.sh instead of Certbot

I needed to set-up a new website with HTTPS and so I took Let’s Encrypt procedure from my past instructions. But to my surprise, Certbot is installed via Snap now, which is just retarded. That discovery triggered me to remember that I read about other ways of getting Let’s Encrypt certificate, such as acme.sh.

On top of that, last month Electronic Frontier Foundation (creators of Certbot) announced that they have joined the hounding of Richard Stallman (here’s a screenshot, “just in case”), so now they can go fuck themselves for sure.

Building RetroShare on Mac OS

A couple of weeks ago RetroShare has released version 0.6.6. But while download page offers quite a variety of pre-built packages for different operating systems, there is no 0.6.6 build for Mac OS (only 0.6.5 is available).

I found this peculiar, so I decided to try to build it from sources myself. It also seemed like a good opportunity to finally try RetroShare, as it has been available for more than 15 years, and I’ve heard many good things about it.

Creating a C++ library with CMake

All of the sudden I found myself in a situation that I have been successfully avoiding so far - I needed to make a C++ library with CMake.

To clarify, this will be about so-called normal kind of library. And right away, the picture above shows a bad example of naming a library, because there should be no lib neither in the beginning nor in the end of the library name.

Постоянный вид на жительство в Норвегии

Наконец-то прошло больше трёх лет как я в Норвегии, и стало можно получить постоянный вид на жительство (в оригинале “permanent oppholdstillatelse” или “permanent residence permit”).

Забегая вперёд, самое сложное (долгое) во всём процессе это прохождение необходимых курсов по норвежскому языку. Разумеется, помимо ожидания пока наберётся минимально необходимый срок проживания в Норвегии.

Gollum - Git-based Markdown wiki

We needed to create an internal knowledge base, preferably based on a wiki-engine. The requirements were:

• in-house hosting
• simple maintenance
• no vendor-lock - ideally, storing articles as plain-text files
• customization and styling
• not overloaded with gigabytes of fancy JS-frameworks
• version control
• Markdown markup

From my own researching and evaluating, there are very few wikis that meet all the requirements, and out of those Gollum seems to be the best.

Even though it has its own installation guide, for me that wasn’t enough, so here are my guides for Linux and Mac OS, plus some customizing and tweaking.

How to manually upload VIVE VR screenshots to Steam

I was playing Half-Life: Alyx and wanted to take some screenshots. To my surprise, standard F12 screenshot button did nothing, so I had to use the screenshotting functionality from the HTC VIVE software. Annoying enough, screenshots made this way do not end up in Steam Screenshot Uploader, so I’ve spent quite some time till I found how can I add them there manually.

Essentially, the process consists of cropping half of VR screenshots, sorting them by setting their modification timestamp attribute and placing them to the right folder.

Installing Qt without installer

At some point (beginning of 2020 year) Qt installer started to require users to have Qt Account (again), otherwise you can’t proceed with the installation. More details in the Qt’s official blog post.

That’s something that already happened before, but back then community got really mad about it, so The Qt Company reverted that, and installer started to work without Qt Account. And now they fucking did it again, and apparently this time community wasn’t that mad (or there is nothing left of that community after all the stunts The Qt Company has been pulling over the past years).

Anyway, I won’t tolerate such anal-probing, so The Qt Company (or rather its management) can go fuck itself, and I’ll be just building Qt from sources - it’s not that scary as it sounds.

Finding optimal 7-Zip parameters for creating a ZIP archive

We were packing our builds into ZIP archives for distribution right in TeamCity using its built-in artifact packaging. But then we decided to try to do that explicitly with 7-Zip as a dedicated build step, and that turned out to be a faster option, providing a better compression ratio too.

The only question remaining was finding the right balance between compression level and compression time.