Hi, I’m Benedikt

Welcome to this obscure spot of the interweb that I call mine own! This is where I write up thoughts, observations, notes for myself and/or others and the like. If you want to get to talking to me about anything I write, there is a “Reply by Email” button at the end of each post. If you’d like to suggest changes, you can use the respective button above each post, it will lead you to the repository where the code for this site is hosted where you can file an issue. You can also hit me up on mastodon and yell at me there.

Reproducible development environments with Nix

A while ago I became aware of Nix, NixOS and people who actually use it. I was intrigued by the proposition: configure your whole system declaratively so you can avoid configuration drift and combat issues with reproducibility. I tried it out and found that Nix is not straightforward to learn. Also, the documentation is gruesome. I decided that knowing Nix and applying it might be nice but I just don’t want to learn it right now....

December 7, 2023 · 6 min

Playing Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy again

“Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy” celebrates its 20th anniversary this year! Reason enough to dust it off and play it yet again. This time I went to hunt for mods to make it more interesting this time around and I found JKHub. This has a list of recommended mods for the game here featuring cosmetic ones, new textures, new lightsabers, new character models but also conversion mods, new missions and more!...

December 7, 2023 · 2 min

How To: Fix duplicated characters (and other artifacts) in your shell

A few days ago I started noticing strange behaviour of my shell. When typing commands or working with pasted ones, especially with tab completion, duplicated characters started showing up at the beginning of the line or in the middle in the case of working with a pasted command. Something like hx became hxhx or docker became dodocker. These duplicated characters were not editable, I could only clear the line and start fresh but the same thing would occur again, although not quite deterministically....

December 5, 2023 · 2 min

How To: Play Zelda - Majora's Mask (and Ocarina of Time) with 4K Textures on the Steam Deck

I recently decided to revisit the childhood memory of mine that is “Zelda - Majora’s Mask” on my Steam Deck. I’ve never owned a Nintendo console and was only ever able to play at a friend’s place or watch them play. I figured that after so many years it was finally my turn to play, especially because I now have a console (sort of) that is quite powerful at emulation....

December 5, 2023 · 3 min

How To: Choose a specific WiFi radio band on Linux

Sometimes I don’t work from home but at my family’s or a friend’s place. Turns out the router at one of these places is terrible and can’t reliably provide WiFi for my laptop sitting some 4 meters away (with 2 doors in between). I thought this was rather odd because my phone didn’t struggle with this so I asked around and thought about it some and the most obvious culprit seems to be the WiFi radio band that’s used....

November 29, 2023 · 2 min