Ancestors

Written by Author-ized L.J. on 2025-01-23 at 15:38

Today in niche technical problems, I've been unable to use the desktop mode of my #SteamDeck for a few days because the screen would go blank on switching, which was a problem because it's been my main e-reader lately since the demise of my stalwart old Kobo Glo. I actually like it better than regular e-readers in a few ways because I like using the controls rather than the touchscreen to turn pages.

Fortunately I finally solved the problem by opening the terminal from Game Mode with an external keyboard and deleting the contents of the .local/share/kscreen directory, as found in this thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675200/discussions/0/7198510808230711684/ I think the command needs to be "rm -rf *" without the quotes? "rm -r *" worked for me, at any rate. Also, on this particular Logitech keyboard I needed to press the fn key for F5, which is evidently dual-function with Search.

Switching to Desktop Mode worked without a hitch afterward, and I'm continuing my read of Let This Radicalize You 💖 After I'm done with this one I think I'll load a few of more books onto the Deck, including other books from the Haymarket Books sale and the liberated Kobo books from the Ursula K. Le Guin sale.

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Written by Author-ized L.J. on 2025-01-26 at 09:21

More Steam Deck weirdness, though fortunately one with a simple enough solution. I was getting no audio on an Itch game I was playing on desktop mode, though the Chrome browser on desktop mode had audio and the game's own audio settings & volume were normal. After looking up a few threads I found out that individual apps might be muted from volume control (a commonly-mentioned problem was this happening to the Steam app itself) and could be unmuted while the game is running.

And what do you know, pulling up volume control with the game running in the background did in fact show the game app to be muted, even though I'd obviously never muted it myself?? Anyway, game audio came right back when I unmuted it from volume control. Whew.

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Toot

Written by Author-ized L.J. on 2025-01-29 at 16:59

In my continued saga of weird Steam Deck problems, I had no audio in gaming mode even after I got it working again in desktop mode. Turns out that switching to gaming mode automatically changed the audio output device to Rembrandt. Once I took online advice to turn off the Rembrandt card in audio settings I got sound back in gaming mode.

All this is a lot more software troubleshooting than I ever had to do for Nintendo Switch which required pretty much none, but then again I have a lot more versatility and options on the Deck so it's a fair trade I guess. I'm not going to be reading ebooks or playing games bought off Itch.io on the Switch, not without a ton of hacking which would no doubt introduce its own complexities and bugs.

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Descendants