Merry Christmas from Santa and Rose (part 17)

 (from the Yup - That's Rose!!! department)

Hi everyone,

The streak continues - 17 years!!

So - I present to you - the Santa photo...

It's been a transitional year for the family.  I was let go by Indeed on April 1st - April Fools' Day.  (Heh - funny!)  I've been looking for a job since then.  Dana continues her volunteer work at the Seattle Aquarium, and has a new gig volunteering at the Seattle Asian Art Museum.  Rose has settled into her second year of High School - she's doing well!  This year she's been studying American Sign Language (ASL).  

Happy Holidays and Season's Greetings from the Pietromonaco family (Dana, Rose & I).

Cheers,
Paul

Haiku Writing - Moon Viewing 2023

 (from the Splish, Splish, Splish! department)

Hi everyone,

Dana, Rose & I attended the Seattle Japanese Garden Moon Viewing on Friday, Sept. 1st, 2023, at the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle. 

This is a nice evening event where you can stroll around the Japanese Garden, see luminaria and lanterns, hear traditional Japanese music played on flute and Koto, and attend a real Japanese tea ceremony.

(More info here: https://www.seattlejapanesegarden.org/events-calendar/2023/9/1/moon-viewing)

This year, all three of us participated in the tea ceremony.  Simply amazing!  Then - we got to make a wish and launch a small boat with a candle.  (Well - a battery powered candle - no fires for us!)

Because of the length of the tea ceremony, Dana & Rose missed the Haiku Contest this year.  I barely made it in time - I only had five minutes to create a Haiku masterpiece!  Needless to say - that didn't happen - but I did get an honorable mention!!  (1 of 12 they handed out this year.)

Here's the haiku I wrote:

Paul:

Tea ceremony -

Small round cake

Calls to the moon

Not bad for 5 minutes!

(You might notice that the haikus don't necessarily follow the traditional 5-7-5 syllable pattern.  Modern haiku are less formal.)

And the moon?  It did show up later that evening, after the moon viewing was over.  Gorgeous moon tonight after all!

Cheers,
Paul

Fix for Tomb Raider (2013) on Arch Linux

 (from the Gaming On Modern Linux department)

Hi everyone,

Quick post here - I've been trying to run the original Feral Interactive port of Tomb Raider on Arch Linux.  It starts - then stops immediately.  

Looking at the Arch Gaming troubleshooting guide here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Steam/Game-specific_troubleshooting#Tomb_Raider_(2013) they mention trying to see if there are missing libraries.  The output of that command is:

$ ldd steamapps/common/Tomb\ Raider/bin/TombRaider | grep found
       libssl.so.1.0.0 => not found
       libicui18n.so.51 => not found
       libicuuc.so.51 => not found
       libicudata.so.51 => not found
       libCoreFoundation.so.476 => not found
       libvorbis.so.0 => not found
       libSDL2_image-2.0.so.0 => not found
       libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => not found
       libcef.so => not found
       libpdf.so => not found
       libfmodex.so => not found

The weird part?  All of these libraries are already present in .steam/steam/steamapps/common/Tomb Raider/lib/i686

I thought "That's weird". I looked at the debug output in Steam - and yes - it can't find those libs.  I messed around with a few different approaches - adding LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the startup options, etc. - but nothing seemed to work.  

In desperation - and just because I like to be weird - I tried this:  

$ cd ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Tomb\ Raider/lib
$ ls
i686
$ cp i686/* .
$ ls
i686       libCoreFoundation.so.476  libcurl.so.4  libicudata.so.51  libicuuc.so.51  libssl.so.1.0.0  libtcmalloc_minimal.so
libcef.so  libcrypto.so.1.0.0        libfmodex.so  libicui18n.so.51  libpdf.so       libsteam_api.so

And tried starting the game again.  It worked!

That wastes 152M of hard drive space though - so I deleted the files and decided to create a symbolic link to the files instead:

$ cd ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Tomb\ Raider/lib

$ ls

i686

$ ln -s i686/* .

$ ls
i686       libCoreFoundation.so.476  libcurl.so.4  libicudata.so.51  libicuuc.so.51  libssl.so.1.0.0  libtcmalloc_minimal.so
libcef.so  libcrypto.so.1.0.0        libfmodex.so  libicui18n.so.51  libpdf.so       libsteam_api.so

Works just the same - and saves a ton of space!

So - the summary is - it should be loading the game libraries from the i686 subdirectory, but it doesn't seem to be able to find them.  Making them available one level up seems to solve the problem.

Cheers,

Paul