Got a "free" tablet when buying my wife's new phone. Galaxy Tab A9, 8.7" display,
128GB storage, 4GB memory. I had never intended to buy a tablet and a few days
into owning it, I don't feel I need it.
It's decent for watching media from my media PC in bed via jellyfin & reading
manga and PDFs. But that's it.
A few others on Gikopoi have tablets collecting dust. I think I'll send my
tablet out to one of my stores to serve as a POS. I do not recommend buying a
tablet unless you read a lot of PDFs or comics or need it for running a business.
2025-05-05 [Mon] 19:00 UTC
#tech
Are you overwhelmed about the state of your media directories -- particularly
your music and videos? I was for a long time, too. But we are in the 2020s and
going through the effort of manually organizing personal media collections
should be a thing of the past.
Continue reading...
A rare but persistant gikopoi bug has been troubling me for years, and
today, I finally found the cause.
Gikopoi is a free chat game with streaming options. 99.9% of the time it
functions perfectly well. But once in a blue moon, people attempting to
stream video/audio results in a strange bug: others are unable to grab
the problematic stream and attempting to grab the stream results in a
silent failure. Additional open streams also become broken once this
bug is triggered. The streams are not broken from the start but become
broken within a few minutes of beginning.
- Restarting the Giko server doesn't fix it
- Restarting the Nginx web server doesn't fix it
- Restarting the Janus media server doesn't fix it
I still don't know exactly what triggers the bug. It seemed like only
certain players trigger the bug, and I couldn't find any useful data in
logs to fully understand the problem. But today, I found how to resolve
it:
In the Gikopoi server directory, a file "persisted-state" exists that
keeps a json of all users with data like their ID, name, last message,
character, etc. This is useful for cases when the server resets --
everyone active resumes playing like nothing happens.
For some reason, when streams break on gikopoi, shutting down the server
and clearing out this file makes it work again. So I'm suspecting that
streams may break if users fail to exit the game properly... or maybe
players being logged on for too long triggers the bug... I honestly don't
know. I have a saved copy of persisted-state I can compare against a new
copy of persisted-state the next time streams break.
I really enjoyed playing an old Flash game known as Gikopoi. However, circa
2021, when Adobe pulled the plug on Flash, Gikopoi's days were numbered.
What happened between then and now is a long story, but long story short, I now
host the most active Gikopoi international server, and I set up some services
to support the community, even writing a few from scratch.
This post will look at the various services that are not the actual game/chat of
Gikopoi.
Continue reading...