The problem#

I've recently been writing more series of blog posts or otherwise linking between posts using {filename} links. And also I've been adjusting the scheduling of my future planned blog posts, which involves changing the filename as my naming scheme includes the publication date in the filename. Which means there's opportunities for not adjusting the links to match and ending up with broken links between posts.

Pelican does generate warnings like

WARNING  Unable to find './invalid.md', skipping url        log.py:89
         replacement.                                                

but currently building my entire blog takes about a minute, so I generally only do it when publishing. So I wanted a more lightweight way to just check the intra-blog {filename} links.

The solution#

I wrote the script check_filename_links.sh:

#!/bin/bash

content="${1:-.}"

find "$content" -iname '*.md' -type f -print0 | 
  while IFS= read -r -d '' filename
  do
    grep '^\[.*]: {filename}' "$filename" |
      sed 's/^[^ ]* {filename}\([^\#]*\)\#\?.*$/\1/' |
      while read -r link
      do
        if [ "${link:0:1}" != "/" ]
        then
          linkedfile="$(dirname "$filename")/$link"
        else
          linkedfile="$content$link"
        fi
        if [ ! -f "$linkedfile" ]
        then
          echo "filename=$filename, link=$link,"\
               "file does not exist: $linkedfile"
        fi
      done
  done

Run it from your content/ directory or provide the path to the content/ directory as an argument and it will print out the broken links:

filename=./foo/bar.md, link=./invalid.md, file does not exist: ./foo/./invalid.md

The details#

The problem#

Continuing from the past two weeks, in my work on the Pacifist Factorio mod, I noticed there were rich text icons for military-related entities that I thought the mod had removed from the game. By "rich text icons", I'm referring to the dialog that some text boxes in the game (e.g. for naming a train stop) have a button to bring up which shows icons that can be inserted into the text box which include all of the items in the game along with a few other things. In that dialog, there were icons for things like biter corpses despite biters having been removed from the game.

The solution#

This PR, which is included in the latest version of Pacifist, hides all of the icons related only to items that have been removed or hidden by Pacifist.

The details#

The problem#

Continuing from last week, in my work on the Pacifist Factorio mod, I wanted to remove the character's gun slots. They are always visible in the bottom-left of the screen with gun and ammo icons, making it clear there's an expectation of weapons.

The solution#

This PR, which is included in the latest version of Pacifist, replaces the icon on the slots and rewords some of the text shown in the game about them.

The details#

The problem#

I wanted to introduce Factorio to some younger cousins but didn't think the military aspects of the game would be appropriate for them, both because their parents would rather they not be playing violent video games and it's simply an additional distraction and added complexity in a game that's already fairly involved, especially for a child.

Due to Factorio's active modding community, often if you can think of a mod you want, someone else has already thought of it and implemented it. And it turned out I'm not the first person to a less violent Factorio: Pacifist already existed and did most of what I wanted. Like many Factorio mods, it's open-source and has a GitHub page. The developer was very friendly and helpful, so I was able to contribute changes get them into the next release of the mod.

My contributions weren't fixing bugs in the mod as much as nudging its goals in a slightly different direction: it was already removing the military aspect from the gameplay, but I also wanted to remove hints of it from the UI as much as possible.

The solution#

Play Factorio with Pacifist, which now includes my changes. I recommend also including my mod BackpackRename. Additionally, I found the StartAlt and Attention Indicator mods good for playing with new players.

The details#

Introduction#

Factorio is a sandbox automation and logistics game notable for, among other things, very good support for mods. The developers often go out of their way to support features and fix bugs that only affect mods.

I've only just started to dip my toes in the world of Factorio modding, so I'm definitely no authority on the topic. But this post will be about things that weren't obvious to me starting out.

Resources#

As I said, modding is very well supported, which includes comprehensive documentation and tutorials. One detail I'd call out is that I recommend installing FMTK, which provides IDE tooling for writing Factorio mods, including a VS Code extension (don't worry, there's a Vim mode for VS Code). Also you will probably spend a lot of time looking at the log file. Additionally, you can find lots of examples by looking at the many existing mods; a lot them have links to source code repositories from their mod pages, but even if they don't, you can just download them and unzip them.

If you have a question that can't be answered by those resources or a web search, you can ask for help on the modding forum or the #modding-help channel of the official Factorio Discord.

Other tips#

The problem#

Last time, I built a user script that could run on the Folklife 2024 schedule page¹ and reorganize it so it would display the schedule as a grid. But it was brittle and awkward to use because it requiring careful ordering of the interactions with the page and reloading to view a different day's schedule.

The solution#

After failing to come up with an appropriate place to add an event handler, I gave up and took a different approach. I modified the script to work fine if it's run multiple times (and exit quickly if there's no work to do), even if the page is not in a valid state, and then simply set it to rerun every half second. Definitely a hack, but it worked.

Here's the final version of the user script and the Git repo showing the version history.

The details#

The problem#

The Folklife 2024 schedule page¹ is a schedule grid: locations are along the x-axis and time is along the y-axis. Except it's not actually arranged as a grid: each column is just stacked in order with no correspondence to the other columns or the absolute times of the events. Glancing at the code, I noticed the schedule data was available in JSON format, so it should be pretty easy write a user script to display the schedule in a slightly different format.

But when I went to actually make the changes, I found the code is obfuscated React that turned out to be tricky to modify.

The solution#

I was able to write this user script (git repo), which changes the display from the columns of events to a schedule grid. It even works on Firefox mobile, although only if you explicitly request the desktop site.

The details#

The problem#

I had recently done an apt upgrade that included upgrading ZFS and noticed zpool status showed a weird "(non-allocating)" message, which seemed concerning:

$ zpool status
  pool: tank
 state: ONLINE
config:

    NAME         STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    tank         ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-0   ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-***  ONLINE       0     0     0  (non-allocating)
        ata-***  ONLINE       0     0     0  (non-allocating)

errors: No known data errors

The solution#

This forum thread suggested the error may be due to a version mismatch between the ZFS tools and the kernel module. I confirmed there was a mismatch:

$ zpool --version
zfs-2.2.3-2
zfs-kmod-2.1.14-1

The easy way to load the new version of a kernel module after an update is to reboot the computer. But if you don't want to do that, here's the general outline of the commands I ran to unload and reload ZFS (run as root):

# Stop using ZFS
$ zfs umount -a
$ zpool export tank
$ service zfs-zed stop
# Remove modules
$ rmmod zfs
$ rmmod spl
# will show error: rmmod: ERROR: Module spl is in use by: ...
# repeatedly rmmod dependencies until spl is removed.

# Reload ZFS
$ modprobe zfs
$ service zfs-zed start
$ zpool import tank

The details#

The problem#

I use KeePassXC as my password manager in Firefox and while sometimes the connection between Firefox and KeePassXC drops and I have to explicitly click reconnect, it recently stopped working entirely.

The solution#

Install the keepassxc-full package instead of the keepassxc package. If you get the browser extension via the webext-keepassxc-browser package, then your package manager will automatically get the right one.

(This only applies to Debian Sid and Trixie or newer.)

The details#

The problem#

I was writing a user script where I wanted to be able to intercept the fetch() calls the web page made so my script could use the contents. I found a suggestion of simply reassigning window.fetch to my own function that internally called the real window.fetch while also doing whatever else I wanted. While it worked fine under Tampermonkey on Chromium, under Greasemonkey on Firefox, the script would just silently fail with no indication of why the code wasn't running.

(The script I was writing was this one for fixing the formatting on the Folklife 2024 schedule to reformat the schedule to display as a grid. I plan to write a devlog post on it in the future, but just writing about the most pernicious issue in this post.)

The solution#

The problem was that Firefox's security model special-cases function calls between web pages and extensions (and user scripts running inside Greasemonkey count as part of an extension for this purpose). And, furthermore, Promises can't pass the boundary, so you need to carefully define functions such that the implicit Promise created by declaring the function async lives on the right side of the boundary.

The following code combines all of that together to intercept fetch() on both Firefox and Chromium such that a userscript function intercept is called with the text of the response to every fetch():

const intercept = responseText => {
  // use responseText somehow ...
};

const w = window.wrappedJSObject;
if (w) {
  exportFunction(intercept, window,
                 { defineAs: "extIntercept" });
  w.eval("window.origFetch = window.fetch");

  w.eval(`window.fetch = ${async (...args) => {
    let [resource, config] = args;
    const response = await window.origFetch(resource,config);
    window.extIntercept(await response.clone().text())
    return response;
  }}`);
} else {
  const { fetch: origFetch } = window;

  window.fetch = async (...args) => {
    let [resource, config] = args;
    const response = await origFetch(resource, config);
    intercept(await response.clone().text());
    return response;
  };
}

The details#