Reduce whitespace in the source of Jekyll websites

A couple of days ago I noticed my websites source code had a lot of whitespace. Which in and of itself isn’t a big problem because the final page isn’t affected by it, but it’s a waste of space and bandwidth. The only question is what caused all this access whitespace…

This website is created with Jekyll, a simple static website generator. And Jekyll uses a system called liquid tags to define logic within the pages. These tags always render a newline even if the statement evaluates to false. So pages that rely heavily on logic, like my game collection, result in a lot of whitespace.

SNES Classic Mini: 5 Games I've added

The SNES Classic Mini just arrived in our hands, if you were lucky enough to manage to place a pre-order. Those 21 included games are awesome, but sometimes we want something different.

Luckily for us, ClusterM recently release a new version of Hakchi2, with support for the SNES Mini. Hakchi2 allows us to upload new ROMs to the system and with some adjustments even ROMs for other systems such as the Gameboy line and some Sega consoles.

It turned out that this version of Hakchi2 was surprisingly stable even though the SNES Classic just released, this is because the internals of the SNES Classic are almost exactly the same as the NES Classic from last year. So because Hakchi2 looked very stable, I thought I gave it a shot and added some new games!

Why I bought more than 300 old audio cassettes...

This might sound crazy but I just bought more than 300 audio cassettes. But Why?! It all has to do with one of my biggest hobbies. Besides playing games, I also collect them.

But what have old audio cassettes to do with game collecting? Well, nothing really… Okay, that’s only partially true. It has everything to do with the cases from those cassettes.

I mainly collect original Xbox and Xbox 360 games. These games come in DVD cases so they are well protected and easily presentable. Gameboy games, on the other hand, came in cardboard boxes, which got damaged over time or just simply tossed in the trash bin.

I have a couple of Gameboy games, mainly Gameboy Advance, but I don’t have a good what to display them. Luckily a Reddit user u/NCatfish has found an ingenious solution. Audiocassette cases can hold a Gameboy Advance game cartridge. So print a pretty label, and voila! You’ve got a custom Gameboy game case you can display on a shelf.

YouTubeRSS Userscript: RSS Buttons for channels and playlists

I have a confession to make. I’m addicted to YouTube, so much that it replaced ordinary cable tv for me. But YouTube has two major issues in my eyes!

Firstly YouTube is owned by Google. Everybody that knows me just a little bit, knows that I try to stay as far away from any Google service as possible. There just isn’t a good alternative for YouTube that is just as popular, so I’m stuck with Google for this one.

Secondly, it’s well known that YouTube can’t get their subscription service right. Every now and then there arises a problem with subscriptions, people not seeing new videos in their feed or they just get un-subbed from channels for no reason.

There is a solution to at least one of these issues I have with YouTube. Namely, the usage of RSS feeds to maintain your YouTube subscriptions, only Google pretty much hides the links for those feeds. Using these RSS feeds will make it more difficult for Google to track what I’m watching. Because I won’t be using their subscriptions system and I always browse the internet over a VPN.

Mount your STACK drive (WebDAV) on linux

STACK is a cloud service where you get 1TB of free storage, stored in the Netherlands and with 256-bit AES encryption. Yesterday I needed an easy way to get access to my STACK files on my linux server. So, I figured it would be a quick solution to just mount it. This is the method I used.

First of all, install the davfs2 package.

sudo apt-get install davfs2

Next, create a directory which we can use as a mounting point.

mkdir ~/webmount

Finally, mount your STACK drive or any other WebDAV drive.

sudo mount.davfs https://stack-username.stackstorage.com/remote.php/webdav/ ~/webmount -o rw,uid=username

Remember to replace stack-username with your username and username with your Linux user, to allow that user to have user-level access to the files. The -o rw part is used to set the webDAV as re-writable.