2025¶

June 24, 2025
2 min read

GTA San Andreas on Arch Linux

Get the iso

Find the latest best place to torrent from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/all_purpose/

I can confirm GTA-San-Andreas-HOODLUM-Plus-SAMP-Multiplayer from https://1337x.to works.

Install Lutris

Info

Enable multilib in /etc/pacman.conf first by uncommenting:

[multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

How to install lutris instructions were clearly laid out by İbrahim Korucuoğlu at https://www.siberoloji.com/how-to-install-and-use-lutris-on-arch-linux. I'm just reproducing the steps here:

sudo pacman -S mesa lib32-mesa vulkan-radeon lib32-vulkan-radeon
# For Nvidia
# sudo pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils lib32-nvidia-utils
# For Intel
# sudo pacman -S mesa lib32-mesa vulkan-intel lib32-vulkan-intel
# For AMD
sudo pacman -S mesa lib32-mesa vulkan-radeon lib32-vulkan-radeon
sudo pacman -S vulkan-tools
vulkaninfo | less

sudo pacman -S lutris
sudo pacman -S wine wine-gecko wine-mono
sudo pacman -S lib32-gnutls lib32-libldap lib32-mpg123 lib32-openal lib32-v4l-utils lib32-libpulse lib32-alsa-plugins lib32-libxcomposite lib32-libxinerama lib32-ncurses lib32-libxml2 lib32-freetype2 lib32-libpng lib32-sdl2
sudo pacman -S winetricks
paru -S dxvk-bin

Install proton-ce-custom from aur

paru -S proton-ge-custom

Configure Lutris

Preferences > Runners > Wine

Select proton-ge-custom.

Mount the downloaded iso

sudo mount -o loop Grand\ Theft\ Auto\ \(GTA\)\ San\ Andreas-HOODLUM/hlm-gtasa.iso /mnt

Visit https://lutris.net/games/grand-theft-auto-san-andreas/ and press the Install button. This will open some dialog in Lutris. Go through the steps and point to the /mnt/setup.exe file.

Hit yes and proceed through the install. It will take a while. You'll know when its done, the red Abort button will go away and it will show Success.

June 5, 2025
2 min read

Transcribe videos with google colab and openai whisper

Google colab provides powerful GPUs with 12G of VRAM even at free tier. I foud this very useful to first generate srt files of chinese youtube videos and then translate the chinese srt files into english srt files.

Sample yt-dlp command to download video

# proxy, cookies, format and output name are not compulsory.
yt-dlp --proxy socks5://localhost:1080/ --cookies /tmp/cookies.txt -f "bestvideo[height=720]+bestaudio" 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlmWtg4ksaw' -o '藏南的诅咒：困死在喜马拉雅南坡的印度'

Sample ffmpeg command to extract audio from video

ffmpeg -i input.webm -vn -acodec libmp3lame -ab 192k output.mp3

First visit https://colab.research.google.com/

File
    > New notebook in Drive

Set the runtime type

Runtime
    > Change runtime type

Select python3 as interpreter and t4 gpu as hardware accelator

Each code bock below is inserted by pressing the +Code button in the UI first and then entering the text. Lines that beings with ! is run in the os shell environment, while the rest are run in the selected interpreter (here python3). After typing in each code blocks, press the run button:

The codeblocks (run in sequence)

!pip install openai-whisper

from google.colab import files

uploaded = files.upload() # (1)

Click on Choose Files, navigate to and select file.

filename = list(uploaded.keys())[0]
print(f"Uploaded file: {filename}")
import os
os.environ['FNAME'] = filename

!whisper "$FNAME" --output_format srt --language zh --model turbo

Note

Replace zh with the spoken language in the uploaded audio file

filename_without_ext = os.path.splitext(os.environ['FNAME'])[0]
files.download(f"{filename_without_ext}.srt")

Note

The generated srt file has the same name but different srt as extension.

Translate with google translate

At https://translate.google.com, in Documents tab you see that google only supports .docx, .pdf, .pptx, .xlsx.

To work around this limitation, use libreoffice.

libreoffice --convert-to "docx:MS Word 2007 XML" output.srt

This creates output.docx. Get it translated at google translate and download the resulting docx. Convert it back with

libreoffice --convert-to "txt:Text" output-eng.docx

Rename this file to your "video name.srt" and you're good to go!

May 30, 2025
2 min read

Configuration management with mkdocs and pymdownx.snippets

I believe this is a better way to manage your config files than uploading them to github. With this approach all you need to do is sync your configs file into the config folder within the root of your mkdocs site. They can easily be embedded as snippets in markdown files with appropriate syntax highlighting and contents of these config files also turn up in site search.

Here's an example:

$ mkdocs new vectorspace.xyz
$ cd vectorspace.xyz
$ nvim mkdocs.yml # (1)
$ mkdir configs
$ cp ~/.zshrc configs/
$ nvim docs/index.md # (2)

look down further for mkdocs.yml
look down further for index.md

mkdocs.yml
site_name: My Docs
markdown_extensions:
  - pymdownx.snippets # (1)

For pydownx extension, you need to install python-pymdown-extensions on archlinux

docs/index.md
# Welcome to MkDocs

For full documentation visit [mkdocs.org](https://www.mkdocs.org).

## Commands

* `mkdocs new [dir-name]` - Create a new project.
* `mkdocs serve` - Start the live-reloading docs server.
* `mkdocs build` - Build the documentation site.
* `mkdocs -h` - Print help message and exit.

## Project layout

    mkdocs.yml    # The configuration file.
    docs/
        index.md  # The documentation homepage.
        ...       # Other markdown pages, images and other files.

```zsh
--8<-- "configs/.zshrc"
```

Here I've just added:

```zsh
--8<-- "configs/.zshrc"
```

... to the end of the autogenerated docs/index.md file when you first create a site. Check the results of this by:

# Inside the directory that contains the mkdocs.yml file
mkdocs serve -a 127.0.0.1:9000

see the results for yourself at 127.0.0.1:9000

pydownx is just one of the many awesome extensions developed by github id facelessuser. Check out more at their site: https://facelessuser.github.io/pymdown-extensions/