Nintendo Switch and the Joy-Con Drift

By now there are so many occurrences of this problem and Nintendo is still not able to squash these problems.  I hope that this blog post can serve people who continue to suffer from this stupid hardware issue.

When dealing with Nintendo's bad joy cons, you should avoid it at all costs and use alternate controllers.  The natural option to deal with it is by looking at the alternate joy cons around (Youtube has plenty).  I've listed here the Dobe TNS-0163 as this is one of those alternative joy cons one can use.

You can also look at using specialized controller grips that will solve portable play but you'll need a separate controller when you dock the Switch.

• Hori Split Pad Pro (Daemon x Machina or Black or other recoloured versions) - This controller is amazingly good!
• Dobe TNS-19252
• Dobe TNS-18133
• Dobe TNS-19210
• Ipega-SW029 - it's a stretchable controller and since its max length is 280mm, the Nintendo Switch Lite can also use this controller.
• Ipega-9163A Tomahawk
• What I used for my Nintendo Switch Lite is the Ipega 9083 (Offline) (Take note that this is the non-upgraded version as the upgraded version Ipega 9083S removes Switch support!)

If you go this route, you will need the Pro Controller or the 8BitDos to serve as your controller on dock.  you don't have to suffer joy-cons.  Ditch the official Nintendo ones!

Google Chat Rooms sucks.

 Who ever thought Google Chat Rooms would be a productive way of communicating really should re-evaluate things.  It's confusing to have separate threads of discussion which, according to them, is the whole point of using the Rooms.  Very ugly.

Ubuntu 18.04 Update

Some things I've found regarding some of the issues.  On the network, it seems that r8168 is broken in Ubuntu 18.04.  Check the issues here and here.  I'll investigate solutions for this.

This was a router issue with my MAC Address filters.  Silly me banned my own laptop from using the router.

On the SMB issue, I managed to connect using cifs.  Here's my command-line mount:

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=guest,guest,vers=1.0 //router_ip/share /home/user/mountpoint

At least I am now able to connect and transfer stuff to the router's external drive.  I had similar issues with Linux Mint Rebecca (17.1) and the solution was to roll back to version I had back in 2016 (4.3.9).

Random Thoughts: PhD, Ubuntu, and Netbooks!

I've been way too busy to post anything on the blog but at the very least, one post for 2018 means this is still alive.

PhDCS is hard work.  Hard work remembering what Computer Science was like a long time ago, but I appreciate the course I've taken for the most part.

My current laptop is an Acer Aspire VX15.  It's wonderful and beefy in terms of performance but the latest Ubuntu is truly a shit sandwich.  I have done upgrades using Ubuntu with little issues.  My Acer had a fresh install of 16.04 LTS back when my laptop was new (Bye Windows 10!) and the upgrade to 18.04.1 was nothing short of a complete disaster.  I knew Canonical had put in big changes on the latest LTS with the trashing of Unity (sad) for Gnome 3 but I didn't expect it to break so many things.

• I can't run the update because it renders my laptop unable to boot which means I've got to do some voodoo with UEFI, boot and somehow luck myself into fixing the boot sequence / grub.
• I can't boot from DVD or USB to reinstall Ubuntu.
• LAN port seems unable to get an IP address anymore.
• Wi-Fi sucks now as there are hotspots that it won't connect to for some reason.
• Gnome 3, in general, is an unsatisfying desktop.  I really liked Unity and how everything was straightforward intuitive for me.  I'll live though and so, this is the least of my problems.

I'm hoping a full reinstall of Ubuntu 18.04 will fix my woes but seeing as I'm unable to get the install media to even boot.  I don't know how I'm going to fix all of this.  In due time, I hope to sit down and really dive into this thing.  In terms of data, since /home is in a different partition, I don't have to worry that much about that.  It's just the booting that is suuuuuuuuuch a pain.

Last thing on my mind is that I'm looking into getting a 7" or 8" Windows (gasp!) laptop for variety.  My Acer is going to be my primary workhorse but the truly portable machine is appealing to me.  I've seen GPD Pocket (and 2), One Mix (and 2S) Yoga, and Topjoy Falcon and all of them seem really nice buys.  Weakest one seems to be the One Mix Yoga but the 2S incarnation seems really slick.

Well, cheers till the next update (whenever that is).

Last King of Africa DS Walkthrough

Just a short little post here.  I've been looking for a walkthrough of the Last King of Africa on the DS and apparently, it's based on Paradise the PC game by Benoit Sokal.  In any case, YouTube seemed to be a very good resource in the form of the only Let's Play series.  However, the commentary got tiresome so, I found a nice video without commentary.  Click here to see someone play the PC version.  A decent PC guide can be found here.  You'll discover that the DS version has some variance in solutions as well as some puzzles entirely omitted.  In addition, the DS version has some touch screen puzzles inserted here and there.  Some of them do involve more pixel hunting unfortunately.  An actual DS guides in foreign languages can be seen here and here.  Also, pressing select shows the integrated help guide system for the hotspots in this pixel hunting mania.  After the jump is a brief run down on the differences from PC to DS. (Spoilers beware!)

Acer A500 Custom ROM vs Google Play Services

Those who have flashed to the custom ROM will probably now be running afoul with Google's latest versions of its Google Play Services.  Check out TO forums for more info on this.

Acer A500 Flashing

I had issues with the stock ICS rom until the point where Google Drive apps became virtually useless.  I couldn't edit spreadsheets and Hangouts was crashing crazy.  This post here is to list down resources from my attempted Linux only experience to getting from stock OTA ICS to TegraOwners Lollipop ROM.  A lot of the credit is from the hard-working folks at TO.  There's a huge amount of resources already in that forum so all you need is to search.  (They'll tell you the same thing!)  Since I don't dive in blind with these things, there was a tremendous amount of readings to be done just to get started.