Author: cb

Fixing Overwatch voice chat after upgrading to Fedora 33

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After upgrading my system to Fedora 33, I realized voice chat in Overwatch didn’t work. The symptoms included:

  • The microphone worked in other applications, and there was no permissions issues involved
  • When joining a voice chat (like a group), the message saying that you’re in a voice chat would never appear, and you would never hear anyone else
  • The microphone icon in the game was forced to mute

Switching the WINE audio system from Pulse to ALSA didn’t work. What did work was changing the system cryptography policies:

$ sudo update-crypto-policies --set LEGACY

No reboot is required. This is an awfully big hammer though – I’d like to know what exact ciphers or protocols that Overwatch needs that are disabled in the stock crypto policies.

Thoughts on The Man from Earth

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I recently watched the much-lauded-on-the-Internet film The Man from Earth. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s about a Cro-Magnon man that’s immortal, has experienced history, and lives to tell about it to his unknowing friends. This movie gets praised a lot for its thought-provoking plot and effective use of its budget. While it gave me some ideas to meditate on, and I thought it was a great example of a “bottle episode”, I think it falls short in the claim of being one of the best intellectual movies. I wonder if a lot of its praise might have been due to coming at the right time at the right place. Spoilers (and unpolished opinions) below!

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“xcrun altool” not found on macOS

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I needed to attempt a notarization of a Mac app (currently still in the middle of that long story), but I wasn’t using Xcode, so I had to run tools manually. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use xcrun altool, as it couldn’t find the command. I had upgraded the version of Xcode I was using, so I guess I had some stale links somewhere. Running xcode-select -r did the trick and fixed it.

Cursed MinGW cross-compiling techniques

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I tend not to like cross-compiling, but sometimes it’s just the simplest solution, particularly if Windows and autotools come into the mix. Recently, I wanted to build xz for Windows, and build it in some particular ways.

windres (the GNU Windows resource compiler) will eat CPPFLAGS, but it won’t process most of them the same way. I often like to use it as a shorthand for both C++ and C compiler options (like -O2), but if windres is in play, only put preprocessor related things. As an example, if you enter -O2 for CPPFLAGS, you get unknown format type `2'.

If you need to target pre-Windows XP, be sure that the compiler is before 7.3. This patch has a hard dependency on a symbol that exists only on XP.

The end result is now I have a cursed xz for an even more cursed operating system:

xz 5.2.5 on Windows ME

Can’t add email accounts in macOS (stuck on final step)

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When I tried to add an Exchange account (but it seemed to affect IMAP accounts too) in macOS (I was running High Sierra, but it affects other versions too), from either the Internet Accounts preference pane or Mail.app, it would let would let me add an account right until the final step where it asks what kind of services you want enabled on the account, then the Done/Next button just does nothing. You might get a throbber for a second, but it subsides and does nothing.

There’s a lot of somewhat convulted steps posted on the internet, but the simplest is to just reset your keychain from the Keychain Access application (Application Menu->Preferences, it’s one of the options there) and reboot. You’ll have to enter your passwords again (including iCloud), but I had no trouble adding mail accounts after that.

Streaming a virtual machine to Twitch: my setup

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Every so often, I do a stream of some odd 1990’s software. I usually run this in VMware, because streaming from an old operating system is either incredibly challenging or just downright impossible. However, VMware isn’t exactly a game, and I wish to do other things on my computer while I stream (if it’s something like a music stream), so I end up having to create a little ceremony to do so. These are the steps I take, and they might prove to be useful for others.

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