"Retrocorder" - Using a spare PC to make a fully automated retro-gaming recording solution

Persistent nostalgia

The past few months, I've spent some time to set up a room in my house to be a pretty sweet space dedicated to retro-gaming. This includes a vintage PC, a CRT TV, and a multitude of classic games consoles hooked up to four RCA/AV switches. This works well, and to play the console we want, one can just flip a couple of switches instead of having to unplug and shuffle around literally 8 different sets of RCA cables.

Thing is, when you're playing games, especially during couch coop, things tend to happen. Some of these things, depending on the types of games you play, can be utterly hilarious, and worth saving for posterity. With the two last generations of consoles I own, PS5, PS4 and the Nintendo Switch, you can just press a single button on the controller to save recent gameplay as a file to the system storage, which is awesome. When you also enjoy playing on 20-30 year old game consoles as well, this part becomes a bit trickier.

How to make a partially defective speaker stay powered on (or: The Five Stages of Annoyance)

Acquisition

I bought a new TV a year and a half ago. Much to my dismay, I discovered that while the picture quality is great, the audio quality is not, unlike my previous TV. My daily driver Linux PC is connected to my TV, and is my main entertainment hub for TV shows, movies and video games, and also general PC usage, so I figured I had to get an external speaker or sound bar. My dad had a spare speaker which he had replaced with a newer unit, so I inherited the spare - a "Geneva Sound System Model S DAB".

It came with a small caveat: the speaker will not turn on using the remote control. Mind you, it will turn off just fine with the same exact button, and every other button on the remote works as advertised - it just will not turn on using the remote. I figured that this was no big deal, and accepted the speaker with thanks. I get the speaker situated and hooked up, and the audio quality is great - a big upgrade from the built-in TV audio. Great for music, great for movies, great for games, just all-round great...

Quickie: Using hdldump to transfer PS2 HDD games under Linux

The PS2 homebrew scene is an absolute mess, and whenever I try to find any information on any operation about it online, I find the following:

A truckload of conflicting information
A myriad of different guides spanning back 20 years
A bushel of different software tools, none of which are usually available on Linux
And a partridge in a pear tree

This time, all I needed to do was to figure out how to get my ISO and BIN/CUE PS2 backups onto an internal HDD for playing through Open PS2 Loader (OPL). All of the above points of note came into play, but after digging and sorting through it all for a bit, I found a reasonable way to do this without having to involve a Windows computer:

Using a Mac Mini as a bedroom PC for Kodi, Moonlight and YouTube

Issues in the bedroom

I have a wall-mounted TV in my bedroom. This TV has a PS4 and a PC hooked up to it. I use the PS4 to remote play my PS5 (which is situated in the living room), and in the past, have used the PC for Kodi/Jellyfin and YouTube in bed, using a USB remote control with support for moving the mouse cursor. Unfortunately, it doesn't do that very well, as the Wi-Fi adapter I have for it keeps presenting issues under Linux. No matter how much I re-compile and reenable the drivers, it just won't work properly, and will randomly cut out after a while. This also happens with several different adapters, so I've kinda just left it there, and used the PS4 to access the web UI of Jellyfin. This is not ideal, and I don't want to spend any more hours fighting with it.

ntfy: Send notifications through libnotify to Linux desktop

I've recently started using ntfy to send notifications to my phone from some scripts I'm running on my home NAS. This works great, but when I'm on my PC, I'd rather get notifications there instead of on the phone. There doesn't seem to be a desktop app for ntfy, but luckily the API is extremely simple. I've also recently started picking up Python, so I decided to whip together a simple ntfy notification delivery system for the Linux desktop. To use this, you need notify-send (provided by the libnotify package), and python3.