I often have to share files with outside parties at work, a process which previously involved a lot of me manually running gpg commands. I finally decided to automate the process and was surprised at how little time it took. Now I have a very simple Lambda based encryption flow importing keys from S3, encrypting files for delivery to end users and then sending the encrypted message as the body of an email with SES.
from pprint import pprint
import sys
from pathlib import Path
from shutil import which
#Pass the key you want to import like this: python3 import_keys.py filename_of_public_key.asc
if which('gpg') is None:
sys.exit("Please install gnupg in linux")
gpg = gnupg.GPG()
key_data = open(sys.argv[1], encoding="utf-8").read()
import_result = gpg.import_keys(key_data)
pprint(import_result.results)
public_keys = gpg.list_keys()
pprint(public_keys)
Encrypt a File
import sys
import pprint
from shutil import which
#Example: python3 encrypt_file.py name_of_file.txt [email protected]
if which('gpg') is None:
sys.exit("Please install gnupg in linux")
gpg = gnupg.GPG()
with open (sys.argv[1], 'rb') as f:
status = gpg.encrypt_file(
f, recipients=[sys.argv[2]],
output=sys.argv[1] + '.gpg',
always_trust = True
)
print('ok: ', status.ok)
print('status: ', status.status)
print('stderr: ', status.stderr)
Decrypt a File
import sys
import pprint
from shutil import which
import os
#Example: python3 decrypt_file.py name_of_file.txt passphrase
if which('gpg') is None:
sys.exit("Please install gnupg in linux")
gpg = gnupg.GPG()
with open (sys.argv[1], 'rb') as f:
status = gpg.decrypt_file(
file=f,
passphrase=sys.argv[2],
output=("decrypted-" + sys.argv[1])
)
print('ok: ', status.ok)
print('status: ', status.status)
print('stderr: ', status.stderr)
So this is a request I get probably 4-5 times a year. "I'm looking to host a small application in docker and I need it to be easy to run through a GitLab/GitHub CICD pipeline, it needs SSL and I never ever want to think about how it works." Up until this point in my career the solution has been pretty consistent: Nginx with Let's Encrypt. Now you might think "oh, this must be a super common request and very easy to do." You would think that.
However the solution I've used up to this point has been frankly pretty shitty. It usually involves a few files that look like this:
This sets up my webserver with Nginx bound to host ports 80 and 443 along with the certbot image. Then I need to add the Nginx configuration to handle forwarding traffic to the actual application which is defined later in the docker-compose file along with everything else I need. It works but its a hassle. There's a good walkthrough of how to set this up if you are interested here: https://pentacent.medium.com/nginx-and-lets-encrypt-with-docker-in-less-than-5-minutes-b4b8a60d3a71
How it works is super simple. Caddy listens on the external ports and proxies traffic to your docker applications. In return, your docker applications tell Caddy Proxy what url they need. It goes out, generates the SSL certificate for grafana.example.com as specified above and stores it in its volume. That's it, otherwise you are good to go.
Let's use the example from this blog as a good test case. If you want to set up a site that is identical to this one, here is a great template docker compose for you to run.
Go to your domain and set up your Ghost credentials.
It really couldn't be more easy and it works like that for a ton of things like Wordpress, Magento, etc. It is, in many ways, idiot proof AND super easy to automate with a CICD pipeline using a free tier.
I've dumped all the older Let's Encrypt + Nginx configs for this one and couldn't be happier. Performance has been amazing, Caddy as a tool is extremely stable and I have not had to think about SSL certificates since I started. Strongly recommend for small developers looking to just get something on the internet without thinking about it or even larger shops where you have an application that doesn't justify going behind a load balancer.
I've been seeing a lot of these going around lately and thought it might be fun to write up my own. I have no idea if this is typical or super bizarre, but it has worked extremely well for me for the last few years.
Traditionally I've been a desktop person for doing Serious Work ™ but most jobs have gotten rid of the desktop option. With the lockdown and remote work becoming the new normal, it's unlikely we are ever going back to a desktop lifestyle. However, the benefits for me of a desktop still remain, which are a stable target of hardware that lets me maintain the same virtual terminal for weeks or months, easily expandable storage and enough CPU and memory to let it sit unattended.
While the $75 Raspberry Pi 4 probably doesn't seem like it would fall into that category, it is actually plenty fast for the work I do with the exception of Docker. Writing Terraform, Python and Go is fast and pleasant, the box itself is extremely stable and with the new option to boot off of USB, I have tons of storage space and a drive that is work ready with lots of read/writes for me. While the Raspberry Pi 4 as my headless work machine started as a bit of a lark, it's grown into an incredibly useful tool. There are also a lot of Docker images available for the Raspberry Pi 4 out of the box.
I know there are more options for Raspberry Pi OS than ever before, but I've stuck with Rasbian for a number of years now. A number of other folks swear by Ubuntu, but I've had enough negative experiences that I'm soured on that ecosystem. Raspbian has been plenty stable for development work, mostly getting rebooted for kernel upgrades.
I have no opinion on the merits of Vim vs emacs, I've only ever used Vim and at this point my interest in learning a new text editor is extremely low. Vim works reliably, never seems to introduce anything I would consider to be a shocking change in behavior. I understand that Vim vs NeoVim is really a conversation about community based development vs a single maintainer, but in general I don't really care until I'm forced to care.
If you are interested in learning how to use Vim, there are a ton of great resources. Vim itself has a tutorial but I've never seen newcomers get a lot out of it. For me Vim didn't click until I worked my way through the Vim Bible. In terms of hours saved in my life, working through that book might be one of the best decisions I ever made for my career. Easily thousands of hours saved. If you prefer a more practical tutorial I love Vim Golf.
Tmux terminal multiplier
I used Tmux a few hundred times a week and have nothing but good things to say about it. For those who don't know, Tmux allows you to have several terminal windows open and active at the same time, while still allow you to disconnect leaving them running. This means when I start working in the morning, I connect to my existing Tmux session and all of my work is still there. You can do things like run long-running scripts in the background, etc. It's great and you can get started using it here: Tmux tutorial.
I might be the last person on earth to discover this. For a long time I've been overloading my ~/.profile with all the different environmental variables needed to do my work. Since I spend a lot of time working with and testing CICD pipeline, serverless applications, etc, environmental variables and their injections are how a lot of application configuration is handled. Direnv is great, letting you dynamically load and unload those values per project by directory, meaning you never need to think if a program isn't working because you accidentally used the same environmental variable twice.
Chezmoi is an interesting tool and one whose utility is so obvious that I'm shocked nobody made it before now. It's a tool that allows you to manage all of those various configuration files with git, a tool you likely use a hundred times a day anyway. Basically you add dotfiles to a repo with the chezmoi tool, push them to a remote repo and then pull them down again on a new machine or just keep them updated across all your various work devices.
None of this is too amazing if all it did was make a git repo, but it also includes tools like templates to deploy different defaults to different machines as shown here. It also does all the hard work to make secret management as easy as possible, integrating with my favorite password manager 1Password. See how that works here. With Chezmoi the time I spent customizing my configurations to match my workflow exactly is not time wasted when I switch jobs or laptops and I can easily write setup scripts to get a new Raspberry Pi or Raspbian install back to exactly how I want it without having to make something like an Ansible playbook.
I just started using Starship a few weeks ago, and I'm still not sure if I love it. Typically, this sort of stuff annoys me, overwhelming my terminal window with useless information. But I have to say the team behind this tool really nailed it.
Very simple and easy to read
Without any configuration the tool understood my AWS region from my AWS Config file, told me my directory and otherwise got out of my way.
Even reminds me I'm inside of a virtual environment for python!
Inside a Git repo it tracked my git status, Python version for this project and even let me set a fun emoji for Python which definitely isn't required, but I also don't hate. One problem I ran into was not showing emojis by default correctly. I solved this by installing this font and setting it to be my font in iTerm. However, if that doesn't work Starship has more troubleshooting information here.
I use SSH all the time, my keys all have passphrases, but I hate entering them a million times a day. Keychain manages all that for me and is one of the first things I install.
If you write in a language where you want to trigger some action when a file changes, entr will save you from rerunning the same six commands in the terminal a thousand times. I'll use this constantly when writing any compiled language.
Moreutils is a collection of tools that you would think came out of the box. Tools like sponge which write standard input to a file, isutf8 which just checks if a file is utf8 and more. I use sponge on a weekly basis at least and love all these tools.
CLI tool to work with PDFs. I've used this in serious business applications all without issue for years. Lets you combine/modify PDFs in shell scripts.
I work with Git and GitHub all day every day. Hub lets me do more with GitHub, almost everything I would normally do through the web UI through the terminal. While I like GitHub's interface quite a bit, this just saves me time during the day and keeps me from breaking out from my task and get distracted from what I'm doing. For GitLab users this seems to be roughly the same: link
When you work with web applications in Docker, you spend a lot of time curling to see if stuff is working. I use this for healthchecks, metrics endpoints, etc. So imagine my pleasure at discovering a nicer to read curl with httpie. With options like --session= which lets you simulate having a consistent session and --offline to simulate the request without sending it off. I use this tool all the time.
I use man a lot with my command line tools, but sometimes I don't want to get into all the millions of options a tool has and just want some examples of commonly used things. For that, tldr can save me some time and tealdeer is a very nice interface for those pages.
Datamash is one of the weirder tools I use. Basically it allows you to run operations against txt files and sometimes do analysis of those files even if the format is messed up. I'm not exactly sure how it works, but sometimes it really saves me a ton of time with stranger files.
If you work locally with remote APIs, get ngrok. It handles all the tunneling for you, allowing you to simulate basically having a publically available server on your local laptop. It has revolutionized my workflow and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
You, like me, might assume that when you write a docker-compose healthcheck, it does something useful with that information. So for instance you might add something like this to your docker-compose file:
You run your docker container in production and when the container is running but no longer working, your site will go down. Being a reasonable human being you check docker-compose ps to see if docker knows your container is down. Weirdly, docker DOES know that the docker container is unhealthy but seems to do nothing with this information.
Wait, so Docker just records that the container is unhealthy?
Apparently! I have no idea why you would do that or what the purpose of a healthcheck is if not to kill and restart the container. However there is a good solution.
The quick fix to make standalone Docker do what you want
I'm pretty new to the whole audiophile world. It wasn't until I started working in an open office in Chicago that the need for headphones became an obsession. One concept I've run across a lot is the idea of "endgame headphones", which are presumably the last headphones you'll ever need to buy. I don't know if the SR80e's are that, but they're damn close.
Wait, who the hell is Grado?
Don't be embarassed, I also had no idea. As someone who spent years going through Apple headphones, I'm far from an audiophile. It turns our Grado is a fasinating business. They are a US-based family business, based in south Brooklyn and you would have no idea what you were looking at if you drove by.
They've been making the real deal since the 50s and for the audiophile community and started out making phono cartridges for turntables. I strongly recommend reading through their company timeline which they've put on their website in a easy to read scrolling page. You can find that here.
What's not to love about a global HQ like this?
Packaging
The SR80e came in one of the strangest packages for electronics I've ever seen. I bought it from Amazon and got a very nice but extremely flimsy cardboard box with the headphones. It didn't bother me, but I am glad I bought a carrying case. This is the one I ended up with.
This is minimal packaging at its best. You get: Headphones, Warranty, Grado story-sheet, 6.5mm Golden Adapter and that's it. So if you need anything more, make sure you buy it. I recommend a DAC at the very least, which I'll have a review up later about the ones I tried. One surprising thing was the headphones are made in the US, which shocked me at the $99 price point.
Fit and Feel
First impression is these headphones remind me of my dads ancient hifi gear. They feel solid, with a nice weight that is good to pick up but isn't too heavy on the head. The headband adjusts nicely to my head and the cord is remarkably thick, like industrial thick. There is something incredible in this modern age of aluminum and glass to having something that feel retro in a fun way. Throwing it on the scale, it weighs about 235 g without weighing the cord. I found these a lot more comfortable to wear when compared to the AirPods Max I tried around the same time that weigh in at 385 grams.
The best way to describe these headphones is "professional grade". They feel like they could last for years and I have no doubt I could use these daily with no problems. The foam ear cushions are comfortable enough and I love that they are replaceable for when I wear them out in years. There are no bells and whistles here, no mic or anything extra. These are designed to play music.
I love the grill mesh look that lets you see the drivers. The ear cups are fully rotatable and you get the sense that if you needed to break these open and soldier a wire back, you could. The sturdy design philosophy extends to the cable, which clocks in at an extremely long 2m or 7 ft. However Apple designs their incredibly terrible cables, Grado does the opposite with thick cables and durable straight relief at the jack.
Sound Quality
These are some of the best selling headphones in the "beginning audiophile" section of websites and once you start listening to them, you can tell why. I don't "burn in headphones" because I think its junk science, I think you just get used to how they sound which is why people report an "increase in quality". Most of the headphones I've owned have had some sort of "boost" in them, boosting either the bass or the midrange.
It's hard to explain but this makes music sound "correct". There's a smoothness to the sound that reveals layers to music that I have not experienced before. I've always been suspicious of people who claim they could instantly tell the quality of speakers or headphones with music, mostly because sound feels like a very subjective experience to me. But when relistening to old favorite albums I felt like I was in the studio or listening to them live.
Common Questions about Sound:
Are they good for an open office or shared working space? No, they're open-back headphones which means everyone will hear your music.
Are these good for planes? No, they have no sound isolation or noise cancellation.
What kinds of music sound awesome on these? I love classical music on these headphones along with rock/alternative that has vocals. EDM was less good and I felt I needed more bass to really get into it.
A dad posted on a forum I frequent in Denmark asking for some help. His child loves Mister Rogers, but he was hoping for a way to download a bunch of episodes that didn't involve streaming them from the website to stick on an iPad. I love simple Python projects like this and so I jumped on the chance. Let me walk you through what I did.
If you just want to download the script you can skip all this and find the full script here.
Step 1: Download Youtube-DL
My first thought was of youtube-dl for the actual downloading and thankfully it worked great. This is one of those insanely useful utilities that I cannot recommend highly enough. You can find the download instructions here: http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html
Step 2: Install Python 3
You shouldn't need a super modern version of python. I wrote this with Python 3.7.3, so anything that number or newer should be good. We are using f strings because I love them, so you will need 3.6 or newer.
I'm checking the version here but only to confirm that you are running Python 3, on the assumption that if you have 3 you have a relatively recent version of 3.
version = platform.python_version_tuple()
if version[0] != "3":
print("You are not running Python 3. Please check your version.")
sys.exit(1)
Step 3: Decide where you are going to download the files
However if you just want them to download into the Downloads folder, uncomment the line above this one by removing the # and delete the line I show above. So you'll want path = str(Path.home() / "Downloads") to not have a # in front of it.
Download the script and run it locally. The script checks if it is the first or third Monday of the month and only runs the download if it is. This is to basically keep us from endlessly spamming the servers hosting this great free content.
The first Monday of every month will feature programs from the early years 1968-1975. The third Monday of every month will feature programs from the “Theme Weeks” library 1979-2001.
NOTE: If you just want to download 5 episodes right now, delete these lines:
today = date.today().isocalendar()
if today[2] == 1 and (today[1] == 1 or 3):
logging.info("There is a new download available.")
else:
logging.info("There are no new downloads today.")
sys.exit(0)
Step 5: Set the script to run every day
This script is designed to be run every day and only go out to the servers if there is a new file to get.
If people actually use this script I'll rewrite it to use celery beat to handle the scheduling of the downloads, but for my own use case I'm comfortable writing cron jobs. However if you run into issues running this, either add a comment on the GitLab link or shoot me an email: mat at matduggan.com.
While working on my passport renewal, I realized the US Government official PDF isn't set up as a form. I googled it and it seemed like nobody had made one of these available for free that I could find. Just a lot of spammy websites trying to get you to pay or make an account to access the form. Anyway, for those of you looking for just a simple PDF download of the form with all the fields set up correctly:
One of the more common questions I hear get thrown around expat groups is "what should I buy before I move" or "what should I send to a loved one who is currently living in Europe". While I am not an expert on what is available everywhere in Europe, here are some things I miss in Denmark and likely are hard for most expats in Europe to get. Hopefully this helps you pack or buy some great gifts.
American Plastic Food Wrap - Denmark has this stuff, but the domestic stuff is terrible compared to the American version. I have no idea why, I assume some sort of super dangerous chemical. Anyway buy it.
Taco Seasoning - I have no idea why, but the stuff they have here is terrible. It has almost no flavor except for salt.
Twizzlers - If you like them, buy them because you can't buy these in Denmark.
Poultry Seasoning - mostly for Thanksgiving but you can't buy that here.
Cream Of Tartar
Good Doritos - they have some Doritos but they don't have any of the good flavors, so no cooler ranch or nacho cheese.
Everything Bagel Seasoning - honestly there aren't a lot of bagel places, but this seasoning goes great with everything
Aspirin
Pepto-Bismol
Tums
Melatonin
Corn bread
Grits / pancake mix - you can find it but it costs 5x what it should
Maple Syrup is available but only the expensive real stuff
Old Bay
Peppers! Spicy food doesn't exist in Europe like it does in the US. The only stuff you can get here is like tobasco sauce and red pepper flakes. So get some guajillos, puyas, chiles de árbol with the stems if you can find them.
A surprisingly good value for retro-gamers of all ages.
The Good Old Days
Retro gaming as a hobby has exploded in the last ten years, as gamers turn away from modern releases and return to the games of their childhoods. With less complicated systems, familiar art and music styles and stories that were famous among kids our age, retro gaming has become a much more legitimate hobby. Part of the appeal for me is the depth by which you can get obsessed with the hardware, trying to squeeze every drop of nostalgia out.
The idea of a retro handheld device was new to me until the Analogue Pocket. This incredible looking fusion of the Gameboy of my past with the power and convenience of modern systems blew my mind. I had long coveted one of the Analogue retro consoles. They are famously based on Intel FPGAs which, when loaded with "cores" allow for a copy of old gaming chipsets.
FPGAs?
A FPGA, or field-programmable gate array, is a really fascinating piece of technology. So most things you interact with that have computer chips in them have integrated circuits in them. You've seen them in every piece of electronics you've dropped on the floor and seen fly across the room. Game consoles historically used these to make their machines and add specific functionality to them.
For a long time it has been possible replay classic games on modern computer hardware, but all this conversion has happened on something called an emulator. Emulators work by recreating in software what used to happen in hardware between the behavior of processors and systems like the sound or graphics chips. Basically given the advances in computer speed we had enough overhead to recreate how those old systems used to work.
It's important to note that for many of these older game consoles, the machines continue to work but we're running out of things to connect them to. Converting the analog signal to HDMI to connect them to a modern television is not as simple of a task as it seems. If you happen to still have your old console and games and want to play them now, your basically have three options:
Get a CRT television and stick it somewhere in your house.
Buy a device that can play the old cartridges but plug into your modern television.
Why Does It Matter?
Well it kinda doesn't. See above when I was talking about how retro gaming is becoming a hobby as much about the journey as the destination. The reality is there are a ton of ways to play old games through emulation that human beings would struggle to tell the difference with, but the gold standard has been and continues to be the FPGA machines.
Analogue is sort of alone out there making these machines and they have become the high end headphone/audiophile version of classic gaming. They've made NES, SNES, Genesis and it seems finally they've turned their attention to the portable market. This is the device I wanted to desperately buy:
The Pocket runs a pair of FPGAs handling a variety of duties. The primary FPGA appears to be the Altera Cyclone V FPGA, with the secondary Altera Cyclone 10
However they're impossible to get as you can tell from their website here. So since I can't get the real thing, I thought "let's try one of these emulators". I have to say, I have been really impressed with the RG 300. For software based emulation on a portable, less powerful platform, it has been a mostly positive experience.
RG 300 Appearance
The RG 300, or retro-gaming 300, looks something like the Gameboy of my youth if you didn't look at it very hard.
It costs a fraction of the Analogue Pocket, with the Pocket coming in at an intimidating $199 and the RG 300 squeaking in at $50. I purchased mine from Retromini and have absolutely nothing exciting to say about the process. The shipping was fast, everything showed up in good condition and it worked as expected with a few exceptions we'll get into later.
The buttons are excellent quality, with a very satisfying click when you press down on them. The shoulder buttons on the back are the best of all of them, with a feeling very similar to a mouse button click. This is actually due to them using the same switches as a gaming mouse, but I wish more games took advantage of these rear switches. The front button are good, with a great feeling D pad. The only complains I have about controls are the weird coloring and font choice for the X Y A B buttons.
For some reason they remind me of Xbox 360 buttons, which isn't really a bad thing but it is unusual. They're also kind of loud buttons, which doesn't seem to bother anyone in my household. Other than the buttons on the front you have a power slide button on the left side, a volume button on the right side and a headphone port on the bottom. The two small buttons in the middle control the brightness of the screen with the top one, and emulator configuration options with the bottom.
RG 300 Screens
I got the 3.0 inch IPS display with tempered glass and I'm in love with it. Games look crystal-clear, I haven't had any scratches even carrying it my coat pocket with other junk in there. The resolution is 960*480 which is plenty big for the games I'm going to play. You have control over brightness with the top small button in the middle of the front and I find it plenty bright even at 25% for normal gaming.
Internals
The RG 300 runs RetroFW, an open source firmware that seems to power all of these sorts of devices. In the portable emulator world if you have more CPU, you tend to run Android and one of the many emulators available for that. If you don't, which definitely includes the RG 300 with its JZ4760B chipset clocking in at a screaming 528Mhz with 2 cores, you run RetroFW. I had never heard of this chipset before now but it is an interesting piece of technology.
Despite its clock speed the JZ4760B is a formidable chip for not a lot of money. The CPU core is the XBurst processor engine along with a VPU and support for a variety of flash memory.
In terms of running RetroFW, its very fast. The device boots up almost immediately but unfortunately doesn't keep state. So if you are in the middle of playing a game, then flip the switch to turn it off and then turn it back on later, you aren't going to be back where you where. This is probably the worst part of the RG 300 experience, which is state management.
Classic game consoles are famous for "hit the power button and start playing". The RG 300 does have this experience when the device goes to sleep, which is what happens if you leave the device running and walk away from it. By default I believe it goes into "suspend mode" after 10 minutes of idle, but this is configurable in the settings. However when you hit the power toggle, you are basically exiting out of everything and when you return, you are back on the home screen. It's annoying.
While my version of RetroFW was pretty recent, I wasn't on the latest version of the firmware. Thankfully flashing the RetroFW was pretty simple. If you remove the battery cover on the back, you'll see a MicoSD card which contains the firmware and everything else.
I took this SD card out and taped it to the back of the battery cover. Generally I've had bad experiences with no-name MicroSD cards and I'd prefer to keep the original factory one untouched in cased I caused serious problems. The RG 300 actually has 2 SD card slots, one in the side and one behind the battery. I ended up going with a 16 GB behind the battery with the RetroFW firmware and the emulators, reserving an 8 GB in the side for content. However you can do whatever you want.
Flashing the new version of the firmware is quite easy.
Take the card out from behind the battery (the battery just pops out), and either store it somewhere safe or at least copy the contents to a folder.
Find out which RG 300 you have. There is a "Dim Screen", a "Bright Screen" and an IPS screen. If you purchased from my link above, you have the IPS screen and if you are considering buying one today in 2021, you should only be considering the IPS screen.
Assuming the MicroSD card you are going to use is still attached to your computer, download Etcher. Follow the steps to flash your MicroSD card with the new firmware.
You still need to download emulators. Once the card has been flashed you'll see it get mounted on your computer. You'll see a variety of directories here. Download the emulators you want from this list, put them in a top-level directory on the SD card (like data or opk) and then put the SD Card into your RG 300 and boot it up. If you scroll up to the top there are specific instructions to get the system to see the emulator depending on what kind of emulator you have downloaded.
Wait, this is too technical for me.
Don't stress, you don't need to do any of this to start playing. The RG 300 has everything you need already installed, so if this isn't for you just boot it up and start to play. I'll leave it up to other websites to tell you where to find software but there are a variety of nice open-source games on the platform you can play right away with no copyright concerns.
RetroFW Performance on the RG300
For this sort of thing you really need a video and unfortunately I'm not really interested in making one. I found this one excellent though.
RG 300 Battery Life
In my experience I get about 5 hours of battery life, but there is something really strange about the RG 300 battery. On it is printed BP-5L:
The BP-5L is a type of battery, but it isn't this battery. I have no idea why it has this printed on it. If you need a replacement battery, the kind of battery you want to buy is a BL-5B. Here is a bunch of eBay listings for them here. I don't know why it has the wrong label on it, but at least you know now.
Charging is done through the USB-C port on the bottom. I was surprised to see USB-C on a $50 device and the cord that comes in the box works well for charging and transferring data. You can play while you charge, but if you end up using the USB-C to transfer content (for instance, if you don't have a second MicroSD card) and charging, you'll end up having to select what you want the connection to do every time you boot up.
Conclusion
The RG 300 is an amazing device to hold you over until Analogue makes more of the Pocket, if they ever do. I was very surprised at how well put together this device is, expecting something that felt a lot more cheap at this price point. Comparing games between my Gameboy Advance SP and this, I felt the RG 300 was virtually identical as far as my eyes could tell.
It has become my most used device and one that I've really started to look forward to enjoying on the train or bus. It is so good, I'm not sure I'm going to buy an Analogue Pocket anymore, which is surprising to me considering my level of enthusiasm. Strongly recommend picking one up, especially at the $50 price point.
FAQ
How do you get cheats onto the system for Gameboy Advance games?
This is surprisingly confusing, but I'll walk you through how to do it. So first not all the Gameboy Advance emulators support cheat codes. You want to ensure you have the gpSP emulator installed. When it is installed, you will get at the top level of your SD card when you plug it in a directory called .gpsp.
This is not where your games go and a lot of instructions online tell you to place the cheat files with your games. This doesn't work. What you want to do is: make a file with the EXACT SAME NAME as your game, ending in a .cht extension. Then, take the file and put it into this .gpsp directory. Now because this is a . directory, it will be hidden by default from Mac and Linux users. For Mac hold down: cmd + shift + [.] (that is just the period sign) to see the hidden holder. Put the files here and you are good to go.
In my testing it does not, presumably from lack of USB PD negotiation capabilities on the chipset. So weirdly you need to use a USB-A -> USB-C like what comes in the box. I don't know why they bothered to include the USB-C port if it doesn't negotiate power from USB-C chargers, but just be aware you can't take this thing on a trip if you don't have a USB-A charger somewhere.
