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Episode 28 - Games Without Frontiers

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Published: January 5, 2026

In this episode, Tod and Paul discuss building your own Steam Machine with Bazzite, learning to sew, building analog circuits using synths, and more. Paul apologizes for his microphone issues and technical difficulties during the recording.

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Show Notes

Building my own Steam Machine (Paul #1)

Back in mid-November, Valve announcesd the Steam Machine, their first console-like PC that runs SteamOS, a derivative of Arch Linux. But there's also Bazzite, an immutable OS based on Fedora that turns your PC, handheld, or home theater PC into a full game console running Steam's Big Picture mode.

Learn Sewing Machines, they're cool! (Tod #1)

Sewing machines are pretty nerdy, actually. Incredible pieces of engineering. If you've never seen how a sewing machine work, it's amazingly complicated. Yet all that complication is hidden from you and they've worked the same say for over 100 years. I recently took some sewing machine classes, learned a lot, and had a lot of fun.

The standard sewing machine takes two different threads, one above and one below the fabric, and locks them together with a clever hiden mechanism. It does this a hundred times a minute. This lockstitch is very strong and both the horizontal & vertical spacing of the stiching can be easily modified to provide different physical effects like stretchiness. Sewing machines have a wide array of adjustment knobs & levers that can be daunting, but became pretty obvious after the class. The intro class walked us through how differnt settings changed the stich and that, most of the time, you can ignore all those knobs and just use the machine with standard settings.

If you're insterested, you can find cheap classes on sewing machines from community colleges, maker spaces, or even free from family members who sew. My grandma tried to teach me sewing as a little kid and I wish I had paid more attention. The classes were from a local craft-oriented makerspace and they had several other useful upcoming classes, like how to make your own hoodies and sweatshirts. I learned from the people there that many places that offer classes often let you have time on or borrow the machines so you don't even need to buy a machine to sew. But if you did, brand new good beginner machines are around $250. Pretty cheap compared to a much of tech gadgets we buy.

At the moment I'm mostly interested in making a custom bags and dust covers for my gadgets. And maybe sew up holes some favorite pairs of jeans. There's also a few tshirts that are way too boxy and it's really easy to hem them to make them look more tailored.

So yeah, try playing with a sewing machine. You may have one hiding in your house already. There's lots of youtube videos to help get you going too. I've included a playlist in the show notes.

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CAD Round-up (Paul #2)

A round-up of recent CAD news, starting with Hackaday's recent story on BREP.io. BREP stands for brand new, from-scratch boundary representation. BREP.io is a new browser based CAD where all computation is done on the client side, including complex operations like fillets, lofts and more. Check out the story at Hackday, follow the project page, or check out the GitHub repository.

Next up is Microcad, which is very young in its development and is still in alpha. Their home page calls it a new open source programming language that can generate 2D sketches and 3D objects. The easiest comparison is probably something like OpenSCAD. They've got some neat videos of how they're using Microcad to create models, including a logo, LEGO bricks, gears, and more.

Lastly is CADQuest, a website to help you level up your CAD skills. It has a free and paid tier, but I haven't tried it out personally. They claim it works with any CAD software, but it looks like they prefer SolidWorks. So if you're into gamification to level up your CAD skills, it might be worth checking out.

Learn Analog Electronics by Building Synths (Tod #2)

Moritz Klein is an online instructor of analog circuits on Youtube, who also happens to be very good at making analog synth circuits. His most recent video is about how to build a drum sequencer using just chips, no coding. And it's really understandable!
The resulting sequencer is simplified to make it easy to implement, but it's also very usable in its final form.

This video is the latest in his series on building a set of modules to implement an analog drum machine like the venerable TR-808 or TR-606. His videos are approachable and the sounds his simple circuits make really sound good. These videos do assume you know how to read a schematic and have a basic understanding of electronics, but he has another series for beginners that helps get you those skills too.

He also works with the famous modular synth company Erica Synths to make a set of DIY kits based on his videos. One of the interesting kits in that series is their "EDU Labor", which is an breadboard system with useful support circuits for making synths like buttons, knobs, tiny oscilloscope, power supply, and more. You can of course wire up these things yourself (this is what I do), but having the Labor would make getting started much faster.

Even though I've been doing electronics for decades, watching his videos has improved my my analog skills and has helped me think about how to implement emulations of analog synth circuits in code. So if you're interested in how analog synths work or just analog circuits, give his videos a try.

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The Indie Beat FM and Television (Paul #3)

Way back in episode 9, we talked about Radio Free Fedi, the streaming radio station made up of artists on the Fediverse, like Mastodon. Just over a year ago, Radio Free Fedi shut down on January 1st, 2025.

The spirit of RadioFreeFedi lives on in the Indie Beat Radio stations and now Indie Beat Television. The Indie Beat Radio federates with Bandwagon.fm and features over 4000 songs streaming. The Indie Beat Television just launched on December 28th and features videos from Fediverse artists.

'act' to run Github Actions locally (Tod #3)

Do you use Github Actions? They're awesome. By setting up a small YAML config file, Github will spin up a virtual server, run the code in the config file, any time some specific action you do on Github like commit files, publish a version, or create a new tag. This is mostly used for CI/CD tests where every commit causes the code to get recompiled and retested, which is amazing for discovering you just made a breaking change.

But how do you want to that config file code on demand, on your own computer? This is not easy and it's where "act" comes in. Just "cd" to your local repo checkout, run "act", and it will run any github actions you've got specified. Pretty magical!

"act" works via the power of Docker, of course. This isn't exactly like the virtual environments that Github uses for its action runners, but is pretty close. It's mostly for Linux-based actions, but it can do MacOS or Windows actions if you're on one of those systems.

I've found "act" to be great for when I'm trying to figure out exactly how to write the YAML config file for the github action. Normally this means making a change, checking it in, waiting for the action to run on github's servers, then seeing the results. It's pretty slow. And fills up the git history with a bunch of "trying to fix github actions" entries. I have a few test repos that I use just for figuring out how to set up github actions for real repos and still I have git history litter as I try to configure the actions. So I'm hoping "act" will help me iterate faster on github actions on my local servers before I need to touch github's.

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