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The Sunday Papers - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-01T10:17:31.000Z

Sundays are for heading into your kitchen at 7am to find the neighbour’s cat squatting with her back to you on the windowsill. The neighbour’s cat spooks easily and every time you scare her away, you worry she’s never coming back. So let’s very quietly make a cup of coffee and ever so softly click on some links to internet articles and read them as frictionlessly as we can manage.

You! I can hear your eyelids squeaking. I can hear the little wheels chewing and rattling between your temples, as you digest these very words. Please wrap some cotton wool around your head before we continue.

One year on from Citizen Sleeper 2, I'm tempted back into its world with a physical release of its TTRPG spin-off - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-31T22:55:06.000Z

Crafting a world that begs to be explored is a tricky thing to do, especially when the world is kind of sucky, doubly so when it's woven mostly through words with only supplementary imagery to provide a broader context. Yet Citizen Sleeper's is one I'm often thinking about because amongst all the grand sci-fi concepts is a grounded sense of reality that you'll always find in the best of the cyberpunk genre. And here I am, a year on from the second game's release, tempted to return once more, but this time in a form based on its tabletop origins.

Trust Me, I Nailed It is a turn-based strategy game where you make sick video edits of a really rubbish hero - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-31T21:35:49.000Z

There are not enough games in the world where it feels like the initial concept was born from the thought, "wouldn't it be funny if…" I'm no fool, I know this is because developing a video game is akin to getting hit by a car, miraculously coming away from it unscathed, only to be hit by six more cars as you continue your journey. In any case, this is still how I would like to imagine Trust Me, I Nailed It was born, a turn-based strategy game where you have to make cool video edits of some warrior to make him seem like a monster slaying legend.

The Sims 4's next expansion looks perfect for all your reality TV show fantasies - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-31T19:06:57.000Z

You know, I'm surprised that EA has never made a Sims reality show where contestants have to act out odd, Simish challenges on a Truman Show-esque production lot, given how much the games themselves feel like simulators for the trashiest (said lovingly) TV show genre. In the meantime, while it isn't at all themed reality shows, The Sims 4's next expansion, Royalty & Legacy, seems like a perfect fit for a fictitious one of your own making.

RuneScape: Dragonwilds's next big update ups the level cap to 99, even though it's literally pointless right now - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-31T18:01:52.000Z

RuneScape: Dragonwilds just held its 2026 summit this week, and with it came a bevy of details about future updates and plans for the survival game. Oh what joy for you scaper or runes! The main thing that got a look-in was the game's next big update, Dowdun Reach: Madness of Zamorak, which certainly has an air of someone looking at any section of a given Dark Souls and thinking "yeah, I want a fortress like that."

While the jury's still out on it, Highguard gets a temporary new mode that ups the headcount in matches - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-31T16:52:26.000Z

I'm sure there's been many a Dweet and forum post about Highguard is already a dead game or some such silly thing to say about a game that's not even a week old, but it does at least seem like developer Wildlight is paying attention to some of the more constructive bits of criticism about the game. Namely, that many aren't fond of the shooter's 3v3 Raids simply because it feels like there aren't enough people for such large maps. So in turn, there's already an update adding in an experimental new raid mode.

Revisiting The 500 Mile Email - Irreal

2026-01-31T15:57:21.000Z

Someone reposted Trey Harris’ famous story about the 500 mile email. The TL;DR is that Harris, working as a university system administrator, received a call from the Statistics Department claiming that they couldn’t send an email further than about 500 miles. If you know anything at all about how email works, your reaction would be the same as Harris’: Yeah right.

Oddly, though, it turned out to be true. It was the Statistics Department, after all, and they had all sorts of data supporting the claim. Harris ran his own tests and discovered to his astonishment that it was true. Email to a site closer than 500 miles worked fine. Those to sites further away than a little over 500 miles invariably failed.

I’ve written about this at least a couple of times before but it’s such a good story that it’s worth repeating now and then for people who haven’t heard it. The solution makes perfect sense once you know what it is but until you do it’s seems like an impossibility.

Take a look at Harris’ original post for the answer and for the amusing story. You may even learn a new way of thinking about network problems. Sometimes you need to look under the layer where the problems seems to exist to discover what’s actually going on.

What are we all playing this weekend? - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-31T08:00:00.000Z

In the past week, two keen cyclists I know have both ruled out getting on their bikes until March. Too cold, they say. Too wet, they say. I'm trying to put their warnings out of mind because I've seen a glimmer of sun and I am desperate to get on my velocipede, ride it out to Epping forest, and see some green.

Maybe I'll get five miles through the big smoke before I have to turn back because my hands have gone blue, but gosh darn it I'm going to give it the old college try.

Emacs and French: Focus flycheck-grammalecte on the narrowed part of the buffer - Sacha Chua

2026-01-31T03:22:49.000Z

After learning about French spellcheck and grammar checking from Emacs expliqué à mes enfants, I added flycheck-grammalecte to my config. Nudged by @lann@mastodon.zaclys.com, I finally got around to figuring out why my setup sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. When I checked flycheck-verify-setup, I noticed that grammalecte kept getting disabled. A little digging around showed me that it was getting disabled because of too many errors. That was because it was trying to work on my whole file instead of just the portion that I narrowed to with org-narrow-to-subtree (ooh, just noticed an org-toggle-narrow-to-subtree command).

After some fiddling around, I figured out how to define a checker that runs only on the narrowed part of the buffer.

(defun my-flycheck-grammalecte-buffer (checker callback)
  (let* ((temp-file-name (make-temp-file "grammalecte"))
         (output-buffer (get-buffer-create temp-file-name))
         (buffer (current-buffer))
         (cmdline (delq nil `("python3"
                              ,(expand-file-name "flycheck_grammalecte.py"
                                                 grammalecte--site-directory)
                              ,(unless flycheck-grammalecte-report-spellcheck "-S")
                              ,(unless flycheck-grammalecte-report-grammar "-G")
                              ,(unless flycheck-grammalecte-report-apos "-A")
                              ,(unless flycheck-grammalecte-report-nbsp "-N")
                              ,(unless flycheck-grammalecte-report-esp "-W")
                              ,(unless flycheck-grammalecte-report-typo "-T")
                              (option-list "-f" flycheck-grammalecte-filters)
                              (eval (flycheck-grammalecte--prepare-arg-list
                                     "-f" flycheck-grammalecte-filters-by-mode))
                              (eval (flycheck-grammalecte--prepare-arg-list
                                     "-b" flycheck-grammalecte-borders-by-mode))
                              ,temp-file-name)))
         (args (mapcan (lambda (arg) (flycheck-substitute-argument arg checker)) cmdline))
         (command (flycheck--wrap-command (car args) (cdr args))))
    (write-region (buffer-string) nil temp-file-name)
    (make-process :name "grammalecte"
                  :buffer output-buffer
                  :command command
                  :sentinel
                  (lambda (process status)
                    (let ((errors (with-current-buffer (process-buffer process)
                                    (message "%s" (buffer-string))
                                    (flycheck-parse-with-patterns
                                     (buffer-string)
                                     checker
                                     (current-buffer)))))
                      (delete-file temp-file-name)
                      (kill-buffer output-buffer)
                      ;; offset
                      (funcall
                       callback
                       'finished
                       (let ((offset (save-excursion (goto-char (point-min))
                                                     (line-number-at-pos nil t))))
                         (mapcar
                          (lambda (err)
                            (let ((new-err (copy-flycheck-error err)))
                              (setf (cl-struct-slot-value 'flycheck-error 'buffer new-err)
                                    buffer)
                              (setf (cl-struct-slot-value 'flycheck-error 'line new-err)
                                    (+ (flycheck-error-line new-err)
                                       offset -1))
                              (setf (cl-struct-slot-value 'flycheck-error '-end-line new-err)
                                    (+ (flycheck-error-end-line new-err)
                                       offset -1))
                              new-err))
                          errors))))))))

(defun my-flycheck-grammalecte-setup ()
  "Build the flycheck checker, matching your taste."
  (interactive)
  (unless (grammalecte--version)
    (advice-add 'grammalecte-download-grammalecte :after-while
                #'flycheck-grammalecte--retry-setup))
  (grammalecte--augment-pythonpath-if-needed)
  (flycheck-define-generic-checker 'my-grammalecte-narrowed
    "Report Grammalecte errors, but only for the narrowed section."
    :start #'my-flycheck-grammalecte-buffer
    :modes flycheck-grammalecte-enabled-modes
    :predicate (lambda ()
                 (if (functionp flycheck-grammalecte-predicate)
                     (funcall flycheck-grammalecte-predicate)
                   t))
    :enabled #'grammalecte--version
    :verify #'flycheck-grammalecte--verify-setup)
  (setf (flycheck-checker-get 'my-grammalecte-narrowed 'error-patterns)
        (seq-map (lambda (p)
                   (cons (flycheck-rx-to-string `(and ,@(cdr p))
                                                'no-group)
                         (car p)))
                 flycheck-grammalecte--error-patterns))
  (add-to-list 'flycheck-checkers 'grammalecte)
  (flycheck-grammalecte--patch-flycheck-mode-map))

After I use my-flycheck-grammalecte-setup, I can use flycheck-select-checker to select my-grammalecte-narrowed and then use flycheck-buffer to run it. Then it will underline all the number/gender agreement issues I usually have. It's nice that I can practise editing my text with this script before I run the text through an LLM (also via flycheck) for feedback on wording.

Figure 1: Screenshot of grammalecte providing grammar feedback

This is part of my Emacs configuration.

View org source for this post

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

Wreckfest 2's career mode is based around a fender bending moral alignment chart of lawful racers and chaotic crashers - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-30T17:25:11.000Z

Are you more of a supervan wrecker or a bone stock maniac? Can you be best described as a British couch racing champion, or is your calling more in the realms of Finnish folk? These are the sorts of questions you'll have to pose to yourself whenever you fire up Wreckfest 2's still-in-the works career mode, which devs Bugbear Entertainment have just laid out a bunch of plans for.

Turtle Beach Burst II Pro gaming mouse review - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-30T16:44:37.000Z

The Turtle Beach Burst II Pro’s raison d'être is to bung a Valorant esportist’s Christmas list of premium features into an ultra-lightweight gaming mouse; a class of peripheral that’s more accustomed to jettisoning luxuries than hoarding them. Thus we have a desk rat that weighs 57g, less than half of the apparently immortal Logitech G502 Hero, while packing pleasantly clicky optical switches and an 8K polling sensor – meaning it sends its latest positional info to the PC eight thousand times a second. That’s Windows 11 levels of notification spam.

Emacs Carnival February 2026: Completion - Sacha Chua

2026-01-30T16:41:18.000Z

For the Emacs Carnival theme for February, let's learn more about completion together. There are all sorts of cheesy puns one can make about completion and Emacs and Valentine's Day, like "You complete me," but beyond the jokes, it's actually a really good topic to help us work with Emacs more efficiently.

First, what's the Emacs Carnival?

From Christian Tietze:

A blog carnival is a fun way to tie together a community with shared writing prompts, and marvel at all the creative interpretations of the topic of the month.

You can get a sense of previous carnivals by checking out the previous ones:

Month	Host	Topic
June 2025	ctietze	"Take Two"
July	gnewman	"Writing Experience"
August	takeonrules	"Your Elevator Pitch for Emacs"
September	rodiongoritskov	"Obscure packages"
October	AndyDrop	"Maintenance, server or home or garden"
November	donaldh	"An ode to org-babel"
December	GeorgeJones	"The People of Emacs"
January 2026	ctietze	"This year, I'll…"

You don't have to be an expert in order to post. In fact, this is a great way for all of us (beginners and otherwise) to focus on a topic together. Let's treat it like a kind of book club where we can share our notes as we learn.

What do we mean by completion in Emacs?

Completion can make it faster to enter text and to reduce errors. You can use it to find Emacs commands even if you don't know their full names or keyboard shortcuts. You can use it to expand abbreviations or even fix the typos you usually make. You can use it when you code and when you write. I've heard some people define common abbreviations across different programming languages so they don't have to remember the differences between syntaxes, and minibuffer-completion-based interfaces like consult-ripgrep let you flip through search results astoundingly quickly.

Let's start by talking about two types of completion:

minibuffer completion, which happens in the small window at the bottom of the screen whenever you use M-x, find a file, etc. This is where you can type a little and then find matching options so that you don't have to remember the full names of commands or files. Be sure to check out Understanding Minibuffer Completion - Mastering Emacs!
in-buffer completion, like when you expand an abbreviation, insert a snippet, or fill in the rest of a variable name.

Here are some ideas for things to explore. Pick an idea or come up with your own and write a post sharing what you're figuring out!

Minibuffer completion
- Do you know about S-M-x (execute-extended-command-for-buffer - available with Emacs 28.1 or higher), which suggests commands relevant to the current mode?
- Have you gotten the hang of using M-p to go back through your history? (Did you know you can interactively search through that history with C-s and C-r?)
- Do you know about using M-n to go into the future history?
- Have you tried saving your minibuffer history with savehist?
- Do you want to experiment with recursive minibuffers so that you can do something else in the middle of a completion?
- Do you have nicer completion set up, like icomplete-vertical-mode, fido-mode or fido-vertical-mode, ido-mode or ido-vertical-mode, ivy, or vertico? This makes things like M-x (execute-extended-command) and M-y (yank-pop) soo much nicer!
- Have you experimented with other completion styles like orderless so that you can type parts of the completion name in any order?
- Have you checked out the convenient search and navigation commands in more complex completion frameworks like consult, counsel, or helm?
- Have you experimented with other sort orders like the built-in historical option or more complex sorts with prescient.el?
- Do you want to see additional information when you're choosing completions? Try out marginalia.
- Have you checked out embark for doing other things with your completion like inserting a file name instead of opening it, or changing the command that you wanted to do, or acting on multiple items?
- If you use Org Mode, do you want to make your own custom Org link type with completion? (I really like being able to quickly link to blog posts, parts of my config, or project files with completion)
- Do you want to define your own completion commands, maybe even with previews, dynamic collections or asynchronous data?
In-buffer completion
- Have you set up your own abbreviations to fix common typos or expand text quickly?
- Have you tried using dabbrev-expand to expand words based on what you have in the current buffer or in other buffers?
- Do you want to try hippie-expand to try different functions for expansion?
- Have you defined your own snippets for prose or code? (Yasnippet is popular.)
  - Did you know you can embed Emacs Lisp in your Yasnippet templates?
- Have you tried icomplete-in-buffer, corfu, company, or some other in-buffer completion framework?
  - If you use Yasnippet and you've just added completion at point, have you added your snippets to the completions with something like yasnippet-capf?
- Do you want context-sensitive completions for your shell commands in Emacs? Try pcomplete - you can even define your own.
- If you code, do you have LSP, Eglot, or something similar set up to offer you completions in your programming languages?
Meta: What else can you bring into Emacs so that you can take advantage of all the completions that you've set up, like note-taking or e-mail? (Ex: mastodon.el + org-contacts + a little code to insert a Mastodon handle with completion = I can think of people by name instead of by handle!)

Things I want to learn about

For example, this month, I want to…

Minibuffer:
- Figure out some kind of approximate speech-based minibuffer completion for commands
- Create a custom Org Mode link type for emacswiki and other things I refer to frequently
- Write about the completion functions I'm using to help me learn French
In-buffer completion:
- Notice where I keep typing the same kinds of things and define more snippets for them
- Figure out some kind of speech interface for expanding snippets
- Sort out completion in programming buffers so that I can finally take advantage of LSP
- Complete French words in-buffer ignoring accented characters
Organize tons of completion-related links from Emacs News onto EmacsWiki: Category Completion and other pages
Revisit the completion-related code in my config to dust off things that I can update, remember to use, or document with gif-screencast

I'll publish my notes on my blog and I'll add them to this post as well. I'd love to check out your notes too!

How to submit your entry/entries

Please e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com or DM me via Mastodon with a link to your post(s) by February 28 so that I can add them to this post. I'm happy to link to multiple posts. For example, here are some things you might like to write about:

what you're thinking of figuring out (in case other people have suggestions)
your notes along the way
your current setup
things you're particularly proud of

Looking forward to hearing from you!

View org source for this post

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

[$] Compiling Rust to readable C with Eurydice - LWN.net

2026-01-30T16:09:24.000Z

A few years ago, the only way to compile Rust code was using the rustc compiler with LLVM as a backend. Since then, several projects, including Mutabah's Rust Compiler (mrustc), GCC's Rust support (gccrs), rust_codegen_gcc, and Cranelift have made enormous progress on diversifying Rust's compiler implementations. The most recent such project, Eurydice, has a more ambitious goal: converting Rust code to clean C code. This is especially useful in high-assurance software, where existing verification and compliance tools expect C. Until such tools can be updated to work with Rust, Eurydice could provide a smoother transition for these projects, as well as a stepping-stone for environments that have a C compiler but no working Rust compiler. Eurydice has been used to compile some post-quantum-cryptography routines from Rust to C, for example.

Beyond Good & Evil 2 director confirms team are "unaffected" by Ubisoft cuts, "remain committed" to the game - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-30T16:07:09.000Z

Ubisoft recently unleashed a raft of cancellations, delays and studio closures as part of a brutal bout of corporate restructuring. We've still yet to see how all of the repercussions of it will go, with proposed voluntary redundancies at the company's Paris headquarters having seen unions put plans in place for a three day strike in February.

One of the games which wasn't among the cancellations was long-in-development sequel Beyond Good and Evil 2, and its director has now confirmed as much, offering a brief message to reassure fans and encourage folks to support devs affected by Ubisoft's bloodletting.

Extracting Data From Journelly Entries - Irreal

2026-01-30T15:33:40.000Z

As you all know, I am always writing about how much I like and use Journelly. One of the things that I always say is that since Journelly saves it data as an Org mode file—or, if you prefer, as a Markdown file—the file is essentially a database that can be queried and processed to produce other files.

Álvaro Ramírez has a very interesting post that describes one such workflow. Much like I might do, Ramírez adds an entry in his Journelly when he comes across some data about a movie he might want to watch. It may be an IMDB entry, a Reddit post, or even just something someone told him so that all he has is the movie or director name. The common denominator is that he adds a tag such as #film or #watch to mark those entries having to do with movies he should watch. Journelly can, of course, search on the tags but Ramírez has a better way.

First he extracts all the entries having an appropriate tag into a watchlist.org file. That gives him a file with all the movies he might want to watch. He uses this and the Claude Code agent to look up each entry in IMDB and to retrieve all the metadata for each movie from IMDB and put it in a db.org file. Finally, he uses the db.org file to generate HTML so that he has a browsable file showing each movie along with its poster.

Take a look at his post for the details and to see the final results. As Ramírez says,

At the center of all it all my beloved org syntax. Thanks to plain text formats, we can easily peek at them, query them, poke at them, tweak them, and bend til our heart’s content. It’s just so versatile and now we can throw them at LLMs, too.

Almost none of this is something you’d expect a text editor to do but the Combination of Emacs and Journelly provides a way of moving from free form capture entries to a polished, browsable file.

The Award for Excellence in Open Source goes to Greg Kroah-Hartman - LWN.net

2026-01-30T15:26:14.000Z

Daniel Stenberg, the recipient of last year's Award for Excellence in Open Source from the European Open Source Academy, presented that award to this year's recipient: Greg Kroah-Hartman.

It's impossible to overstate the importance of the work Greg has done on Linux. In software, innovation grabs headlines, but stability saves lives and livelihoods. Every Android phone, every web server, every critical system running Linux depends on Greg's meticulous work. He ensures that when hospitals, banks, governments, and individuals rely on Linux, it doesn't fail them. His work represents the highest form of service: unglamorous, relentless, and essential.

Three stable kernel updates - LWN.net

2026-01-30T14:45:40.000Z

The 6.18.8, 6.12.68, and 6.6.122 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

Security updates for Friday - LWN.net

2026-01-30T14:43:59.000Z

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (curl, gimp:2.8, glibc, grafana, grafana-pcp, kernel, osbuild-composer, php:8.3, python-urllib3, python3.11, and python3.12), Debian (chromium), Mageia (ceph, gpsd, libxml2, openjdk, openssl, and xen), SUSE (abseil-cpp, assertj-core, coredns, freerdp, java-11-openjdk, java-25-openjdk, libxml2, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-1_1, python, python-filelock, and python311-sse-starlette), and Ubuntu (kernel, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-fips, and texlive-bin).

CachyOS founder explains why they didn't join the new Open Gaming Collective (OGC) - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-01-30T14:04:15.000Z

The Open Gaming Collective (OGC) was an interesting announcement recently from a few bigger names, but the CachyOS team opted out of it and now we know why.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

GPD release their own statement on the confusion with Bazzite Linux support - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-01-30T13:06:08.000Z

In the continuing saga of GPD versus Bazzite Linux, the GPD team have now posted their own statement on what happened.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.