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Games: GNOME, Steam, and More
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Hylke Bons: Icon Set for Crosswords
Jonathan Blandford asked me to do an icon set for Crosswords. What started as a request for a small group of symbolics, turned into a more flexible set of colourful sidebar icons.
Crosswords has been in the process of joining GNOME Circle for a while and hopefully this is another step in the right direction.
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Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games Playable on the Steam Deck: Awesome week with The Mermaid Mask and Denshattack! - 2026-07-18 Edition
Between 2026-07-11 and 2026-07-18 we selected 14 newly released games that are rated as Verified or Playable on the Steam Deck, and meeting specific criteria in terms of user ratings. Looks like game devs have stopped watching the World Cup as most teams are out and finally decided to ship their games! A LOT of good stuff in this past week - and if I had to pick two, that would be The Mermaid Mask which is an awesome adventure game about solving a crime, and Denshattack! which is a crazy Japanese arcade game where you control a train that gives 90s vibes like very few do. Full list below!
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Crazed enthusiast runs PC on 192 AA batteries, successfully boots into Hannah Montana GNU/Linux — System is stable during stress testing and even plays FreeDoom
A creator by the name of "Uwoslab" just jerry-rigged three battery banks together, each made up of 64 AA Alkaline cells, to form a giant 192-cell array that's enough to power an AM4 system.
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Mark-Jason Dominus ☛ The road to epsilon-zero: Nim always ends, even with infinite ordinals
If someone gives you a Nim position where all the piles contain beans, you can say ahead of time how long the game might last. A game starting with nim-heaps of size !!\{1, 3, 4, 8\}!! simply can't last more than 16 turns, because each turn removes at least one bean from a pile, and the game ends when someone takes the last bean.
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Avi Loeb ☛ How Will the Soccer Worlds Cup Look Like Once Humans Settle on Mars?
In that case, the local Martian population could hold their local soccer matches. Even though these Martians originated from Earth, their physiology may evolve as a result of the surface gravity being 38% of Earth’s value.
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XDA ☛ Proton got so good I keep forgetting which of my games were even built for Windows
Linux gaming has been a hot topic for the last few years, specifically since the advent of the Steam Deck. Valve's device showed that PC games can run just fine on Linux, and it's easy to forget that a lot of these games aren't actually designed for Linux at all.
It's actually quite rare for games to be adapted specifically for Linux platforms, but you wouldn't know it by booting up your Steam Deck. That's all thanks to Proton, Valve's compatibility layer that has made Windows games run on Linux almost as well as they do on Windows, even without any work from the developers.