LucasCosti.com

The Lego Video Game Dimension

Sunday 25 September 2016 at 21:21Gaming, Lego

Lego Dimensions Over the past couple of months I played through Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Although I've liked the previous Lego Star Wars games, this is the first Lego game that I have played since my big Lego reawakening a few years ago.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed the game, I wouldn't say it was perfect, because it had more than a few rough edges: the 5.1 sound balancing was all wrong (the rear channels were obnoxiously loud), and there were quite a few other bugs. Overall though, it was a great game made even better by all the … Read more →

Monitor Colour Problems Over HDMI

Friday 26 August 2016 at 16:03Friday 26 August 2016Rants, Technology

colortest Although I've studied and worked in technology for over 15 years, every now and then an issue comes up which totally baffles me. Yesterday was one of those times.

The new monitor that I bought back in January started stuffing up a few weeks ago (weird lines, tint shifts), and I took it in for repair. Since then I've been using a borrowed monitor from work, and yesterday I got the repaired monitor back up and running again.

Ever since I got the new monitor back in January, the colours weren't quite right. They were generally dull, and I had … Read more →

Console Home Streaming is Great Too

Sunday 21 August 2016 at 21:57Sunday 28 August 2016Gaming, Geekery, Technology

PS4 Remote Play I've blogged a bit on how great Steam Home Streaming is to be able to play PC games remotely in the living room. Today I experienced the reverse, and it's equally as convenient!

Although it's been available on XBox for a while, and for a few months on the PS4, I've previously never had the need to play a console somewhere else other than its usual spot in the living room. That is, until Anastacia needed the TV today and I was in the middle of a level of Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Setting up and getting … Read more →

Talking at the UQ Engineering + Technology Careers Evening

Friday 19 August 2016 at 14:37Friday 2 September 2016Life, Technology, Work

On Thursday night I had the privilege of speaking at the University of Queensland for an Engineering + Technology Careers Evening. It was aimed at high school students looking at studying engineering and tech at UQ, and I was (surprisingly) selected as a graduate success story to speak for 5 minutes on my academic and career journey. I have uploaded the slides from my presentation. It was the first time since our wedding that I've spoken in front of so many people! :S

I have to admit, it was a little strange talking about myself as a 'success' … Read more →

PC Build History

Sunday 31 July 2016 at 19:30Geekery, Technology

As the three-year mark is starting to roll around on my current home PC, Executor, I am trying to resist the urge at looking at parts for a new computer. Having another +1 to take care of compared to before definitely helps ;).

To have a look back through history, like the mobile phone history page I put together at the start of this year, I have collated a page detailing the history of all the PC builds that I have done. This includes specs, any upgrades, and links to the relevant build blog post.

Without doubt, Executor has … Read more →

Steam Home Streaming Now Supports 5.1 Audio

Thursday 28 July 2016 at 19:06Thursday 28 July 2016Gaming, Geekery, Technology

I'm not sure when it was enabled in the stable Steam client, but it looks like 5.1 sound is now enabled for Steam Home Streaming on Windows hosts and clients. I said last year that this was a big missing feature for the platform, so I'm glad they actually did it.

It wasn't a smooth process to get it working, though. Although everything looked like it was configured correctly, whenever I tried the streaming there was no sound. I eventually found this forum post which said that the old DirectX9 runtimes ("DirectX End-User Runtimes (June 2010)") are need on the … Read more →

Work T450s and USB Switches

Saturday 16 July 2016 at 17:20Saturday 16 July 2016Technology, Work

Lenovo T450s For the past 10 months I have been using a Lenovo i7 T450s as my work laptop, and I have to say how impressed I have been with it. In my opinion, it's a great balance between portability and power. The SSD boots it up in a few seconds, and for the most part, it runs Fedora (with multiple VMs) admirably. The laptop keyboard is fantastic, and the dual batteries (one internal, one removable) last a while.

After my intense illness earlier this year, I have been doing a lot more working from home. As I use the same … Read more →

Open-Sourcing My .bashrc File on GitHub

Monday 4 July 2016 at 16:38Monday 11 July 2016Geekery, Technology, Work

gitprompt_Lucas_bullettrain_tags I've posted some pretty nerdy things on this blog over the years, but this would have to be one of the nerdiest things I've ever posted.

I use a Linux operating system on my work laptop (Fedora, to be precise). We're now fairly entrenched in a git workflow for the documentation we write: asciidoc(tor)-based source, and GitLab CE or GitHub as the hosted VCS.

For the non-uber-tech-savvy: because of the git workflow (amongst other things), I spend a lot of time running commands in a bash shell (or command prompt). One of the files that controls … Read more →

Similar Look, New Theme

Friday 24 June 2016 at 15:49Geekery, Internet

After a slow start to the year, I've done a lot of posting in the past month. So I also thought it might be time to tweak the look of the site.

Although the look remains similar., I've just enabled a new theme. The older theme was a bit bloated and wasn't being maintained by its creator any more, but I think that I got good use out of it since I switched my blog to WordPress just over 4 years ago.

I wanted a more lightweight theme that was still easy to customise, and I think I found … Read more →

Now Secure! Enabling Let’s Encrypt HTTPS

Tuesday 14 June 2016 at 19:19Tuesday 14 June 2016Geekery, Internet

LucasCosti.com Secured Well, that was easy. It just took me about five minutes to get this website going with a free SSL/TLS certificate using Let's Encrypt as the certificate authority. LucasCosti.com now has a padlock! 😀

Side note: here's a nice post explaining the confusing terminology of SSL vs. TLS, and I like Google's approach of sticking to HTTPS, where possible.

My host (Zuver, a VentraIP subsidiary) made the process of generating a Let's Encrypt certificate ridiculously easy. It was pretty much just logging into their admin portal and clicking a button for the domain.

The only things that … Read more →

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