Just my blogroll - BlogFlock

Marathon Steam pre-orders no longer automatically try to install Destiny 2, as Bungie fix Freudian slip/bug - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-21T12:19:02.000Z

Ah, no, not that one. That, I assume, has been the reaction of folks who've gone to pre-order the Marathon reboot on Steam, and immediately been informed that Destiny 2 is sneaking its way back onto their machines. Thankfully, Bungie have now fixed whatever issue was causing the latter to take pre-purchases of the former as a cue to re-install itself.

Life is Strange: Reunion, the time-fiddling finale of co-protagonists Max and Chloe's tale, arrives in March - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-21T11:30:24.000Z

The next Life is Strange game, dubbed Life is Strange: Reunion, is set to arrive in March. Officially revealed following an impromptu teaser from PEGI earlier this month, this new entry sees series stalwarts Max Caulfield and Chloe Price serve as co-protagonists. The former's still able to stick time in reverse and the latter's return provides the verbal prowess necessary to solve a blaze-based mystery.

SPLITGATE: Arena Reloaded to get a new 'Arena Royale' mode in the next update - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-01-21T11:23:51.000Z

1047 Games have revealed that SPLITGATE: Arena Reloaded is getting a big upgrade tomorrow (January 22nd), with a completely redesigned battle royale mode.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Build up your Steam library with the latest Fanatical Titanium Collection 2026 - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-01-21T10:58:10.000Z

Fanatical have another chance here for you to build up your Steam game collection with a bunch of lovely indie games all at a great price.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

The Witcher 3 now has online multiplayer thanks to a mod, allowing gaggles and gangs of Geralts to gather - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-21T10:13:47.000Z

As much as single-player solitude's a big reason why I love getting lost in The Witcher 3, running around its world with a small crew of mates also seems like it'd be a nice time. A good thing it is then that a new mod for the decade old RPG allows it to host online multiplayer sessions with several players running amok at once.

Ghostship - the new Super Mario 64 PC port gets a Linux release - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-01-21T08:46:52.000Z

Ghostship was a recent announcement from the HarbourMasters team bringing a new Super Mario 64 PC port, and now there's a fresh release with a Linux version.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

French indie studio Accidental Queens are closing and delisting their games from Steam - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-01-21T08:40:02.000Z

A few more games are going to be lost to history, as the French indie studio Accidental Queens announced they're closing down.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

TR-49 review – a code breaking puzzle game where you get all up in some dead authors' gossip - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-21T05:00:00.000Z

I am in the dusty basement of Manchester cathedral. On the streets above me, there are police searching for anyone who would challenge the state. Someone like me. I am supposed to be working on a weapon to use against these fascists. It isn't a gun or a bomb, it is a machine that eats books.

At least, that's what I should be doing; instead, I'm searching for the final letter between the members of a love triangle of 1950s academics. I've tracked down all their trashy novels and papers on temporal dynamics, but I want to find the last bit of saucy gossip. Smashing the state can wait a moment.

There is a lot I won't tell you about TR-49, Inkle's latest puzzle game. I don't want to ruin any of the epiphanies that lie in wait for you. But it is a treat for anyone looking to get all up in the personal lives of some long-dead fictional authors.

I know there are many of you curtain twitchers out there.

Ryabitsev: Tracking kernel development with korgalore - LWN.net

2026-01-20T21:34:31.000Z

Konstantin Ryabitsev has put up a blog post about korgalore, a tool he has written to circumvent delivery problems experienced by kernel developers using the large, centralized email systems.

We cannot fix email delivery, but we can sidestep it entirely. Public-inbox archives like lore.kernel.org store all mailing list traffic in git repositories. In its simplest configuration, korgalore can shallow-clone these repositories directly and upload any new messages straight to your mailbox using the provider's API.

Remote authentication bypass in telnetd - LWN.net

2026-01-20T20:45:46.000Z

One would assume that most LWN readers stopped running network-accessible telnet services some number of decades ago. For the rest of you, this security advisory from Simon Josefsson is worthy of note:

The telnetd server invokes /usr/bin/login (normally running as root) passing the value of the USER environment variable received from the client as the last parameter.
If the client supplies a carefully crafted USER environment value being the string "-f root", and passes the telnet(1) -a or --login parameter to send this USER environment to the server, the client will be automatically logged in as root bypassing normal authentication processes.

Emacs and whisper.el :Trying out different speech-to-text backends and models - Sacha Chua

2026-01-20T19:21:46.000Z

I was curious about parakeet because I heard that it was faster than Whisper on the HuggingFace leaderboard. When I installed it and got it running on my laptop (CPU only, no GPU), it seemed like my results were a little faster than whisper.cpp with the large model, but much slower than whisper.cpp with the base model. The base model is decent for quick dictation, so I got curious about other backends and other models.

In order to try natrys/whisper.el with other backends, I needed to work around how whisper.el validates the model names and sends requests to the servers. Here's the quick and dirty code for doing so, in case you want to try it out for yourself.

(defvar my-whisper-url-format "http://%s:%d/transcribe")
(defun whisper--transcribe-via-local-server ()
  "Transcribe audio using the local whisper server."
  (message "[-] Transcribing via local server")
  (whisper--setup-mode-line :show 'transcribing)
  (whisper--ensure-server)
  (setq whisper--transcribing-process
        (whisper--process-curl-request
         (format my-whisper-url-format whisper-server-host whisper-server-port)
         (list "Content-Type: multipart/form-data")
         (list (concat "file=@" whisper--temp-file)
               "temperature=0.0"
               "temperature_inc=0.2"
               "response_format=json"
               (concat "model=" whisper-model)
               (concat "language=" whisper-language)))))
(defun whisper--check-model-consistency () t)

Then I have this function for trying things out.

(defun my-test-whisper-api (url &optional args)
  (with-temp-buffer
    (apply #'call-process "curl" nil t nil "-s"
           url
         (append (mapcan
                  (lambda (h) (list "-H" h))
                  (list "Content-Type: multipart/form-data"))
                 (mapcan
                  (lambda (h) (list "-F" h))
                  (list (concat "file=@" whisper--temp-file)
                        "temperature=0.0"
                        "temperature_inc=0.2"
                        "response_format=verbose_json"
                        (concat "language=" whisper-language)))
                 args))
    (message "%s %s" (buffer-string) url)))

Here's the audio file. It is around 10 seconds long. I run the benchmark 3 times and report the average time.

Download the audio

Download

Code for running the benchmarks

(mapcar
 (lambda (group)
   (let ((whisper--temp-file "/home/sacha/recordings/whisper/2026-01-19-14-17-53.wav"))
     ;; warm up the model
     (eval (cadr group))
     (list
      (format "%.3f"
              (/ (car
                  (benchmark-call (lambda () (eval (cadr group))) times))
                 times))
      (car group))))
 '(
   ("parakeet"
    (my-test-whisper-api
     (format "http://%s:%d/v1/audio/transcriptions" whisper-server-host 5092)))
   ("whisper.cpp base-q4_0"
    (my-test-whisper-api
     (format "http://%s:%d/inference" whisper-server-host 8642)))
   ("speaches whisper-base"
    (my-test-whisper-api
     (format "http://%s:%d/v1/audio/transcriptions" whisper-server-host 8001)
     (list "-F" "model=Systran/faster-whisper-base")))
   ("speaches whisper-base.en"
    (my-test-whisper-api
     (format "http://%s:%d/v1/audio/transcriptions" whisper-server-host 8001)
     (list "-F" "model=Systran/faster-whisper-base.en")))
   ("speaches whisper-small"
    (my-test-whisper-api
     (format "http://%s:%d/v1/audio/transcriptions" whisper-server-host 8001)
     (list "-F" "model=Systran/faster-whisper-small")))
   ("speaches whisper-small.en"
    (my-test-whisper-api
     (format "http://%s:%d/v1/audio/transcriptions" whisper-server-host 8001)
     (list "-F" "model=Systran/faster-whisper-small.en")))
   ("speaches lorneluo/whisper-small-ct2-int8"
    (my-test-whisper-api
     (format "http://%s:%d/v1/audio/transcriptions" whisper-server-host 8001)
     (list "-F" "model=lorneluo/whisper-small-ct2-int8")))
   ;; needed export TORCH_FORCE_NO_WEIGHTS_ONLY_LOAD=1
   ("whisperx-server Systran/faster-whisper-small"
    (my-test-whisper-api
     (format "http://%s:%d/transcribe" whisper-server-host 8002)))))

3.694	parakeet
2.484	whisper.cpp base-q4_0
1.547	speaches whisper-base
1.425	speaches whisper-base.en
4.076	speaches whisper-small
3.735	speaches whisper-small.en
2.870	speaches lorneluo/whisper-small-ct2-int8
4.537	whisperx-server Systran/faster-whisper-small

I tried it with:

parakeet
whisper.cpp (as whisper.el sets it up)
speaches, which is a front-end for faster-whisper, and
whisperx-server, which is a front-end for whisperx

Looks like speaches + faster-whisper-base is the winner for now. I like how speaches lets me switch models on the fly, so maybe I can use base.en generally and switch to base when I want to try dictating in French. Here's how I've set it up to use the server I just set up.

(setq whisper-server-port 8001 whisper-model "Systran/faster-whisper-base.en"
      my-whisper-url-format "http://%s:%d/v1/audio/transcriptions")

At some point, I'll override whisper--ensure-server so that starting it up is smoother.

Benchmark notes: I have a Lenovo P52 laptop (released 2018) with an Intel Core i7-8850H (6 cores, 12 threads; 2.6 GHz base / 4.3 GHz turbo) with 64GB RAM and an SSD. I haven't figured out how to get the GPU working under Ubuntu yet.

View org source for this post

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

"Nobody's reinventing the wheel" with Marathon's mechanics, says former art boss, so the visual design needed to take risks - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-20T18:01:31.000Z

Marathon's franchise art director Joseph Cross left Bungie in December, shortly after the Destiny developers announced a March 2026 release window for the sci-fi shooter reboot. Now, he’s talking about what it was like to work on the game, which has a fair bit of lingering negative press to contend with – extended delays, mass studio layoffs and restructuring, repeated accusations of plagiarism , money troubles owing to Bungie’s ailing shooter Destiny 2, and apathy about blockbuster live service games at large, epitomised by the cancelling of Sony’s once-touted Concord.

The Democrats of the Seven Kingdoms - McSweeney’s

2026-01-20T18:01:00.000Z

“As support for abolishing ICE grows among Democratic voters, party leadership continues to argue for reform instead.” —Salon

- - -

The Delegation to the Wall

When word reached King’s Landing that the dead were stirring beyond the Wall, the brave Democrats of the Seven Kingdoms sent a delegation north. They did not bring dragonglass, nor men for the Night’s Watch, nor coin to repair the Wall where it wept with meltwater. They brought parchment marked with sternly written words.

The Lord Commander thanked them while a savage wind cut through his heavy cloak and the dead moaned incessantly down below. The letters expressed concern about the White Walkers, but urged restraint. They reminded the Wildlings, should they be listening, that their murderous behavior did not represent who the Realm was. The delegation stayed long enough to be seen shivering as they glanced briefly northward, then rode south, satisfied that the issue had been thoroughly acknowledged.

The Edict on Names

As the dead marched inexorably south, nearly 90 percent of the Realm insisted on calling them monsters, abominations, and evil incarnate. The Democrats of the Seven Kingdoms cautioned against such language.

They proposed referring to the White Walkers as “nontraditional state actors” and urged all to consider how such incendiary labels might escalate tensions.

A Listening Tour in the Riverlands

Deep in the Riverlands, smallfolk had begun to vanish. Some were taken by raiders, some by famine, some by dark creatures in the dead of night that no one dared name aloud. The Democrats of the Seven Kingdoms arrived with colorful tents and an ancient octogenarian septon to advise them, and asked the people to speak freely.

The people did. They spoke of burned fields and stolen children and soldiers who took innocence first and paid for their crimes never. One man said his wife had been dragged into the river at dusk and came back wrong. A woman said the gods had turned their faces away.

The Democrats nodded gravely while promising nothing concrete, as was their way. A framework for a peace plan was developed. Later, in a warm hall with wine, crisp capons, and steaming boar that fell easily from the bone, the Democrats agreed the suffering was real, but the language around it needed softening.

The Brief Matter of the Wildlings

Many in Westeros demanded that the Free Folk beyond the Wall be welcomed south, if only to swell the ranks against greater threats. A small minority warned that this would upset affluent bannermen with deep coffers, who disliked the look of their shaggy, unkempt beards.

The Democrats of the Seven Kingdoms proposed a compromise: The Free Folk could be acknowledged as people, in principle, while remaining north of the Wall, in practice.

The Roundtable at White Harbor

A meeting was convened between a flesh-hungry wight and a Stark of Winterfell, the kingdom most at risk of the Night King’s wrath.

Maesters were appointed to moderate. Debate rules were read aloud. Each side was encouraged to share their essential truths. By the end of the discussion, there was very little of the Stark left.

Afterward, the Democrats of the Seven Kingdoms celebrated the robust exchange of ideas.

A Journey to the Iron Islands

Seeking unity, the Democrats of the Seven Kingdoms sailed west to reason with the Ironborn, who were actively raiding the coast. They brought proposals of mutual respect, economic incentives, and a shared vision of peace.

The Ironborn took their ships, their silver, and several delegates. Later, the Democrats who lived praised the “frank dialogue” and vowed to continue civic engagement.

The Flickering Fire

As the snows deepened and the dead marched on King’s Landing, the Democrats of the Seven Kingdoms issued one final statement. It acknowledged the living’s fears in the face of absolute evil, yet urged them not to overreact.

Somewhere on the Kingsroad, a hedge knight and his young squire used the note to create a fire that fought the creeping cold and kept them alive till morning.

It was not much—nearly nothing, in fact—but the meager warmth it afforded was still slightly more than anything proposed by the Democrats of the Seven Kingdoms. The donors were happy, however, and that’s really all one could ask for these days.

Mozilla introduces Firefox Nightly RPM package repository - LWN.net

2026-01-20T17:26:37.000Z

Mozilla has announced a repository with Firefox Nightly channel packages for RPM-based Linux distributions such as CentOS Stream, Fedora, and openSUSE. Mozilla has provided a Debian repository since 2023.

Note that this repository only includes the nightly builds of The firefox-nightly package. Mozilla is not providing stable builds as RPMs at this time. However, the package will not conflict with a distribution's regular firefox package; both packages can be installed at the same time for those who wish to test the nightly builds. See the blog post for instructions on setting up the repository.

Find out if you can run a Marathon with the extraction shooter's system requirements - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-20T17:05:51.000Z

Following such recent news highlights as "It’s out on March 5th" and "It’s got that Ben Starr guy in it," Marathon’s announce-o-blaster continues firing with a newly unveiled set of PC system requirements. As seen on the Bungie FPS’s Steam page, they’re nicely accommodating to cheapo rigs and older tech, though are missing any storage requirements.

I knew I'd enjoy Rubato's demo from the moment the Earth blew up and I fell in the toilet - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-20T16:48:15.000Z

Rubato is "an experimental, 2D physics-based take on the collect-a-thon genre", according to developer dconn, which doesn't really do justice to the below trailer full of screaming skulls and Mode 7 first-person driving bits and fleeting Minecraft references and PS1-era dancefloors. I guess I'm too used to the watering down of "experimental" as a descriptor. The blurb doesn't even communicate that you play as a frog. Seemingly. Fortunately, there is a demo. Please watch the trailer while I go play it.

[$] An alternate path for immutable distributions - LWN.net

2026-01-20T16:22:09.000Z

LWN has had a number of articles on immutable distributions, such as Bluefin and Bazzite, in recent years. These distributions have taken a variety of approaches, including using rpm-ostree, filesystem snapshots, and bootable container (bootc) images. But those approaches, especially the latter, lead to extra complexity for a user attempting to install new software, instead of just using the existing package manager. AshOS (Any Snapshot Hierarchical OS) is an experimental AGPL-3-licensed "meta-distribution" that tried a different approach more in line with traditional package management. Although the project is no longer updated, it remains usable, and can still shed some light on a potential alternate path for users worried about adopting bootc-based approaches.

Even in 2026's component hellscape, AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT is that rarest of things: a high-end GPU that’s still decent value - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-20T16:21:53.000Z

As we sink ever deeper into a squelching mire of memory shortages, price gouging, and abandonment in favour of AI fantasy farms, there is one word above all that game-playing PC owners should keep front and centre in our doomscroll-addled brains: "relatively."

Steam's 'complete the set' bundles can now be gifted, with bits your mates already own accounted for - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-20T15:42:07.000Z

If you've been waiting to bless one of your friends with an entire dump truck worth of games in a series they've enjoyed one entry of, then good news. Valve have made Steam's 'complete the set' bundles giftable, with prices adjusting to match whichever bits the recipient might already own - so you're not in danger of hurling someone their second copy of Fallout 4 on one storefront.

Pathologic 3 is a sickly horror story about time pretending to be an 'easier' game - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-20T15:38:06.000Z

The following contains abstracted discussion of my own experiences of disease.