CaliMonk's Blog

Wish it, Dream it, Do it!

[calimonk]

El Capitan issues? How to fix running old STEAM games

I recently purchased the 3D Realms (Apogee) Anthology pack on STEAM (which I’ve started vlogging about as well). Although most games run just fine, there’s a few games that just wouldn’t start. 

When starting a game you’d get a message along the lines of:

An error occurred while starting the X11 server: "Failed to activate core devices."

The solution to resolve this on your Mac OS X El Capitan is quite simple actually, it has to do with ‘rootless’ (System Integration Protection) which is a protection by your Mac system that disables programs to write/change files in critical system directories.

Disabling this is quite simple (although be aware, there’s a reason that your Mac protects these directories; there’s a risk involved).

Shut down your Mac

Power it up, while pressing and holding CMD + R (not the +)

It will boot into OS X Recovery mode

Once this shows up, click “Utilities” (top menu) and choose “Terminal”

In the terminal enter the following command

csrutil disable; reboot

Your Mac will reboot and you’ll have disabled the System Integration Protection. The games will run fine after this. If you at one point want to turn it back on, simply do the same steps and type in “csrutil enable” instead of disable.

Again, remember, this is an advanced setting on your Mac and generally speaking you should not disable this. 

[calimonk]

A great classic that was dug up on Gamediggers.com, it’s Digger! 

[calimonk]

[calimonk]

We had a great Honeymoon to Australia, what a beautiful country! We’ll definitely be back some day!

[calimonk]

[calimonk]

Newest vlog, playing Mercenary Knights! Errr.. Kings!

[calimonk]

I’ve recently starting my own vlog, in which I regularly try to talk about great games! Mostly it’s focussed on games that involve arcade type of game play and lots of pixels. I’m just a sucker for pixels and have played these types of games my entire life. Fortunately for me, not only old games have these types of art styles but also new titles ;-)

[calimonk]

So I lost some weight in the last year+ :-)

[calimonk]

King's Day 2013 - The "Beer" edition

[calimonk]

Is this still on?

Well it's certainly been quite a while since I wrote anything on this space! Much has changed in my life since then, although I haven't really been providing any insights into how my life was back then, so this really says nothing :-)

The most written line on any blog is probably "Sorry for not writing a while, I'll try to write more", well I'm not going to do that. The things I write on this blog will pretty much be mostly for getting things off my chest, on a medium that's accessible for anyone to read. You'd get the exact same insights by talking to me in real life though!

I do however have the intention to start writing a lot more, to get things out of my system, give myself clarity and maybe along the way inspire others or hit certain brain-paths that stimulate others into chains of thought. Gotta love the brain.

To be continued!

[calimonk]

[calimonk]

[calimonk]

Prefetching - The way of the future

Great to see more and more browsers are starting to support Link prefetching. Support has now been added in Google Chrome as well and it's planned to be part of the HTML5 standard. Recent changes to the HTML5 draft have broadened prefetching to not only support the LINK element but also A and AREA. This will really speed up the loading of pages for end-users, I personally believe it's interesting to do prefetching for JavaScript and CSS files that will most likely (or even definitively) be used by other pages. Google already supports prefetching for some of it's search results and has been for quite some time (although only supported by Firefox). Most browsers already support DNS prefetching (like Safari 5) and I believe this link prefetching will be one of the definitive "things to improve performance" no brainers in the near future. It will most likely be supported by all mayor browsers. One thing to really keep in mind is how this will impact your web servers performance/logs, you'll obviously get a lot more hits! I however believe that user performance is always worth more than own annoyances, especially as long as it's only for static content. Keep data traffic in mind though!

[calimonk]

Always trust on your friends from Systems Engineering ;-)