Happy Birthday Steam
Posted on Tue, Sep 12, 2023
(Last modified on Thu, May 22, 2025)
| Alan Pope
Steam - the video game distribution and launching platform from Valve, is twenty years old today. Steam has become quite a fixture of PC gaming life in those two decades.
I didn’t really pay any attention to Steam initially. I wasn’t really into PC gaming in 2003.
At least partly because, coincidentally, my daughter also turns twenty today. She was born just hours ahead of Steam.
A short while later, here we are, probably not thinking about video games.
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i386 in Ubuntu won't die
Posted on Sun, Aug 27, 2023
(Last modified on Thu, May 22, 2025)
| Alan Pope
(yet)
tl;dr In a recent thread on Mastodon, it was revealed that Ubuntu 23.04 users can’t install the Steam deb package from the Ubuntu archive without jumping through some technical hoops. It turns out this was a mistake, a bug was filed, and future builds shouldn’t have this problem.
It’s not immediately apparent whether the (currently ‘broken’) ISO images for Ubuntu 23.04 will be rebuilt (unlikely) or if this will stay broken in 23.
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Kingdom Rush
Posted on Sat, Jan 23, 2021
(Last modified on Thu, May 22, 2025)
| Alan Pope
Last week I posted about my guilty collection of unplayed games in Digital Hoarding: Gaming Edition. In short, I have a ton of games I’ve bought over the years and never played, even once. I set myself an internal goal to play more of the games I already have, and reign in my game purchasing.
I used the dynamic collection feature of Steam to show me the unplayed games, sorted by their steam review score.
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Embarrassing Bugs
Posted on Tue, Jan 19, 2021
(Last modified on Thu, May 22, 2025)
| Alan Pope
Well, this is embarrassing! I recently filed a bug against an open source project because I genuinely thought it was broken. It was (almost, probably, entirely) my fault. I thought I’d fess up and explain what happened. It might be useful for others.
As I mentioned yesterday, I recently upgraded my Ubuntu machines, including my main desktop. It’s a funky Skull Canyon NUC with a weird hybrid Intel / AMD GPU setup and an external nVidia card in an enclosure.
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Digital Hoarding: Gaming Edition
Posted on Mon, Jan 11, 2021
(Last modified on Thu, May 22, 2025)
| Alan Pope
Another in a series of “I have identified a problem here!”. I appear have quite a few video games. More than I can probably play in my time left on Earth. Let’s set aside all the retro games I have for a moment, and consider only the ones that run on my primary computer, a PC. To be clear, I’m only talking about ’native’ games.
Aside: I hate the word ’native’ in this context, because what’s native?
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