Spiffiness

Latest — Sep 20, 2023

Developing GUI App (Bevy) in VSCode DevContainer (Wayland)

I wanted to experiment with developing a game using the Bevy Engine, but didn't want to install a bunch of dependencies on my computer. I wanted to keep things contained in a VS Code Dev Container. The tricky part was getting Wayland support working for the demos. This required crafting

More issues

AWS (or other service provider) SMTP Port 25 Inbound

tl;dr: Some ISPs block port 25 outbound. For a project I'm involved with, I wrote an email server only for receiving email. My intention was to host this on AWS. AWS block port 25 outbound in order to protect AWS from being used for spam, but everything I read

Allow unfree in a shell.nix

I recently made a switch to NixOS on my primary laptop, and have been exploring the use of nix-shell to build and run declarative, ephemeral environments. Each environment comes with different packages installed. For those unfamiliar with NixOS, it's a Linux distribution that takes a unique approach to package and

How to Use systemd-nspawn for Lightweight Linux Containers

Are you tired of cluttering your OS with unnecessary dependencies and dev tools for side projects that you might only use once? Do you want a simple way to keep all your project assets together? If so, you should try using systemd-nspawn to create lightweight Linux containers for your projects.

TI-89 Multiple Variables on One Line

I have an old TI-89 calculator and it has the ability to use a variable in a formula and then assign it at the end in one line: x+12|x=5 17 But I never could quite figure out how to use multiple variables at once without storing them

Clever preprocessor macro in HLSL

I've been working on implementing various data structures (octrees, queues, and sorting algorithms) in HLSL to execute in parallel on a GPU. I quickly discovered that I was doing a lot of copy and paste because HLSL doesn't support fancy features like function pointers and lambdas. Most recently I implemented

Steam VR Workshop Content Update Loop

The cause was there were multiple workshop items in my profile that had been deleted on Steam. My client kept trying to download these items and was getting an Access Denied error, which is never displayed in the Steam client itself.

Unity: Getting GUILAyout: Mismatched LayoutGroup.repaint? Try EventType.Repaint

I built a great custom Unity Editor window. It does all the things. Except it's buggy. It's a sort of window-based GUI. I have mini windows inside of a normal Unity custom Editor Window. At some point I implemented the ability to rearrange which window is on top. Then the

Yes, you CAN serialize abstract classes in Unity

Over and over I've seen posts around the web and on the various Q&A sites like this: > I have an abstract class and two (or more) classes that implement this abstract class (not MonoBehaviours). All classes are marked Serializable, and I use them in a MonoBehaviour. But for some

A single method that can work with either a List or an Array (IEnumerable and ICollection)

A while back I wrote a method that takes an array of data that I use for inserting records into a database: public Promise InsertOrReplaceAsync(string table, Dictionary[] records) { //... } An annoying issue is in some parts of my code the records are a List instead of an array, so I