There is a Humble Bundle of interest to game developers running now, the Make Games, Play Games by Raspberry Pi bundle. The heart of this bundle are three e-books on the topic of retro game development, as well as one e-book on the topic of building your own FPS in Unity. Additionally the bundle consists of several issues in PDF format of Wireframe and Custom PC magazines.

It should be noted that you can already download PDF versions of the Wireframe magazine here. It is one of the only magazines out there that covers the programming side of game development so it is definetly worth a look, especially considering the free price tag. You can learn more about the rest of this bundle in the video below.

The bundle is organised into tiers, and if you buy a higher dollar value tiers, you get all of the tiers below it as well. As with all Humble Bundles, you decide how your money is allocated, between the Publisher, Humble, charity and if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS by purchasing using this link.

EDIT: It seems that two of the books are also available for free download on the Raspberry Pi site, Build your own FPS and Code the Classics Volume 1 are both available here. That makes this bundle mostly about supporting the Raspberry Pi group it would seem.

© Nintendo

Eager to see some more footage and screens of Super Mario 3D All-Stars before the big release next week? Well, Nintendo’s Super Mario 35th Japanese Twitter account has got you covered.

Since the collection’s announcement last week, it’s been posting clips and screenshots of each game. There’s footage of boss battles, controller layouts, a bit more of the menus, and plenty of memorable moments. Enjoy!

Super Mario 64 (Nintendo 64)

Super Mario Sunshine (Nintendo GameCube)

Super Mario Galaxy (Nintendo Wii)

If you would like to see even more, why not head over to the official game site. Do any of the clips or screenshots above bring back memories for you? What game will you be playing in this collection first when it arrives on 18th September? Tell us below.

© Nintendo

Ahead of the Super Mario All-Stars release later this week, Nintendo has uploaded a new video demonstrating how exactly the new touchscreen controls work in Super Mario Galaxy when using a Switch in handheld mode or playing on a Switch Lite.

By the looks of it, firing and collecting star bits is now easier than ever. See for yourself below:

Touchscreen controls replace the television-only pointer and motion controls (as shown in the video above).

Of course, if you would rather not rely on motion controls to perform certain actions (like spinning Mario), you can always resort to good old-fashioned button controls. For more footage of 3D All-Stars, check out our video and screenshot round-up.

Will you be making use of touchscreen controls in Super Mario Galaxy on the Switch? Tell us down below.

New images of GrayShift’s GrayKey have surfaced via an FCC filing, giving a close look at the iPhone unlocking device in use by law enforcement officials to gain access to secured iPhones.

The LEDs and Lightning cables at the front of the GrayKey unit

An FCC teardown of the GrayKey

Snapshots are an interesting feature of Btrfs. A snapshot is a copy of a subvolume. Taking a snapshot is immediate. However, taking a snapshot is not like performing a rsync or a cp, and a snapshot doesn’t occupy space as soon as it is created.

Editors note: From the BTRFS Wiki – A snapshot is simply a subvolume that shares its data (and metadata) with some other subvolume, using Btrfs’s COW capabilities.

Occupied space will increase alongside the data changes in the original subvolume or in the snapshot itself, if it is writeable. Added/modified files, and deleted files in the subvolume still reside in the snapshots. This is a convenient way to perform backups.

Using snapshots for backups

A snapshot resides on the same disk where the subvolume is located. You can browse it like a regular directory and recover a copy of a file as it was when the snapshot was performed. By the way, a snapshot on the same disk of the snapshotted subvolume is not an ideal backup strategy: if the hard disk broke, snapshots will be lost as well. An interesting feature of snapshots is the ability to send them to another location. The snapshot can be sent to an external hard drive or to a remote system via SSH (the destination filesystems need to be formatted as Btrfs as well). To do this, the commands btrfs send and btrfs receive are used.

Taking a snapshot

In order to use the send and the receive commands, it is important to create the snapshot as read-only, and snapshots are writeable by default.

The following command will take a snapshot of the /home subvolume. Note the -r flag for readonly.

Instead of day1, the snapshot name can be the current date, like home-$(date +%Y%m%d). Snapshots look like regular subdirectories. You can place them wherever you like. The directory /.snapshots could be a good choice to keep them neat and to avoid confusion.

Editors note: Snapshots will not take recursive snapshots of themselves. If you create a snapshot of a subvolume, every subvolume or snapshot that the subvolume contains is mapped to an empty directory of the same name inside the snapshot.

Backup using btrfs send

In this example the destination Btrfs volume in the USB drive is mounted as /run/media/user/mydisk/bk . The command to send the snapshot to the destination is:

This is called initial bootstrapping, and it corresponds to a full backup. This task will take some time, depending on the size of the /home directory. Obviously, subsequent incremental sends will take a shorter time.

Incremental backup

Another useful feature of snapshots is the ability to perform the send task in an incremental way. Let’s take another snapshot.

In order to perform the send task incrementally, you need to specify the previous snapshot as a base and this snapshot has to exist in the source and in the destination. Please note the -p option.

And again (the day after):

Cleanup

Once the operation is complete, you can keep the snapshot. But if you perform these operations on a daily basis, you could end up with a lot of them. This could lead to confusion and potentially a lot of used space on your disks. So it is a good advice to delete some snapshots if you think you don’t need them anymore.

Keep in mind that in order to perform an incremental send you need at least the last snapshot. This snapshot must be present in the source and in the destination.

Note: the day 3 snapshot was preserved in the source and in the destination. In this way, tomorrow (day 4), you can perform a new incremental btrfs send.

As some final advice, if the USB drive has a bunch of space, you could consider maintaining multiple snapshots in the destination, while in the source disk you would keep only the last one.

The Nintendo Switch is home to many fine kart racing games, including Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled and Team Sonic Racing. On the other side of the coin, we have Race With Ryan, Hello Kitty Kruisers and the truly atrocious Garfield Kart Furious Racing.

Just when we thought our best Nintendo Switch Kart Racing games list would never need updating again, another little racer throws its hat into the ring. Perhaps you had a red plastic Bobby Car to scoot around your driveway when you were a kid? Well, soon you’ll be able to relive the fun of your days as a toddler with BIG-Bobby-Car – The Big Race which will be speeding on to the Switch on 24th September for $29.99.

Here are a few details from the official PR:

Whiz across a world full of adventures in your BIG-Bobby-Car. Meet other BIG-Bobby-Cars, complete tricky missions and discover hidden treasures until the day comes when you win the annual Big Race and whoop it up on the winners podium as new champion.

– Experience the first game using the classic BIG-Bobby-Car and the new BIG-Bobby-Car models NEO and NEXT.
– Explore an open world game involving a wide variety of tasks.
– Complete over 40 missions with lots of challenges in the course of a story.
– Drive races against other cars in the BIG-Bobby-Car world and become the champion at the Big Race.
– Use the Character Editor to design your own BIG-Bobby-Car.
– All dialogs are spoken completely in English.

With Big Bobby’s open world and 40 missions, it seems that this one may not be just a simple kart racer. How do you think this one will turn out? Let us know with a comment below.

@mariomaster96

I see the appeal of getting it psyical but I managed to get about 25% off digital so I went with that

I bought 2 online voutures for £84 then used my 1126 gold coins to get 11.26 off maked my 2 online voutures cost £72.74

I then used 1 vouture to pre-order all stars 3D and the other 3D world

Concidering both gave sell for £50 each on the E-Shop for £100 total I saved £27.26 in total

This make way more sence to me than to buy up the game psyically