Stephan Sokolow's Blog

UPDATE 2026-07-26: Added links to The Death Generator and The Spriters Resource as suggestions for how to make a custom welcome message more fun and a link to an example of how to sandbox a miniserve-based companion HTTP server using systemd.

Here are my 2025 tips too short for anywhere but Mastodon: Short term fix for rattly GPU fans: If your 3000-series nVidia GPU’s fan has started to develop a rattling/ticking noise and you either can’t afford a replacement fan or can’t wait, try going into…

I’ve been playing Stardew Valley with a few friends, with mods, and, when one of them started experiencing intermittent packet loss that messed up the Discord call, I decided to set up a private Mumble server since Mumble has a “Force TCP” checkbox which,…

Here are a few things that I posted on Mastodon because they were too short for a blog post, but which I think should be cross-posted anyway for archival: KVM “not compatible with” Linux or Mac OS: If you have a DVI KVM switch that says its “double-tap sc…

EDIT: It turns out hotplug wasn’t the problem.

Taylor Varga by mp3.1415player Length: 2,058,592 words Status: Ongoing Crossover: Worm + Luna Varga (but with the assumption nobody but the author has seen Luna Varga) Today’s fic is a doozy and not just for its eye-opening length.

If you have a Vorke V1 Plus that doesn’t want to drive its fan under Linux, or which doesn’t want to shut off the fan after the UEFI turns it on at boot, here’s what worked for me: Make sure you’ve got a kernel version that allows you to manually control…

…so you naively thought that continuing past the Windows XP compatibility warning and installing pcANYWHERE 8.0 would give you a working pcANYWHERE client but no server?

How does a completed Worm crackfic based around Taylor Hebert triggering with superpowered laziness sound?

If you’re trying to set up DOS games like Jetpack in something like RetroPie or Batocera, you might run into a problem where pressing the S key (“start new game” in Jetpack) doesn’t do anything, whether through a physical keyboard or through padtokey mapp…