tech and other interesting stuff
Okay, day-and-a-bit. First impressions! I’ve been coding up a dice roller for a friend’s in-development RPG, and I decided on a whim to give TypeScript a try. Here’s some early impressions of the language — both TS and JS — coming from a mainly python background. Interfaces My very first thought was “what the heck […]
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Not a guide A while back I installed Foundry VTT, the web-based tabletop system developed by Atropos (It’s great, check it out). I ended up writing a small module for it, for converting walls to drawings (ie lines) so that a GM doesn’t have to duplicate effort if he’s making up a quick map on-the-fly. […]
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Pick a team for me I’ve been known to stream on Twitch, and one of the things I do is a wee informal monthly ‘competition’ to give subscribers something to root for and cheer on. For November’s outing I wanted to assign everyone a team, which is simple enough for me to do using random.org […]
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Ads-B-Gone I’ve been getting some quite obnoxious ads on my phone of late. In the past, I used Pi-hole, which blocks ads on the network level via DNS. By combining this with OpenVPN I had ad-blocking on my OnePlus 3. Things have moved on since then; the machine – a laptop ‘server’ – serving Pi-hole […]
Continue ReadingI set up a local Gitea server for some ‘local’ repositories- things like my accounts (in hledger format!) which I wouldn’t want on a server not under my own control. I considered doing this in Docker as that is a supported install method and I’ve enjoyed using Docker; but Gitea ties together a few services […]
Continue ReadingBlocks in blocks in blocks I recently installed Stackable’s “Ultimate Gutenberg Blocks” plugin for WordPress as I wanted a block that could be expanded for my series of OCR posts. I created one, an ‘expand’ block in a container which I made a reusable block. However, doing so gave the error: “This block has encountered […]
Continue ReadingLet me snapshot tl;dr: This can happen if you use a storage mechanism that doesn’t support snapshots (see here for more information). However, it seems it can *also* happen if you use external mountpoints. I ran into the issue when trying out a script that backs up proxmox to a borg repository. I checked that […]
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A TV needs a remote We’ve been putting together an HTPC using a Dell Wyse 3040 thin client PC. The OS, Arch Linux, has been installed along with media applications Kodi and Chromium (to give us Netflix). We also installed Openbox to provide a window manager. Now we need to do a bit of polishing […]
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Make it work more gracefully We’ve been transforming a Dell Wyse 3040 thin client PC into an HTPC using Arch Linux. Last time in Part 2, we got hardware acceleration working so that Kodi and Netflix would play smoothly. Now we want to add a layer of user-friendliness. Switching Media Players In part 2 we […]
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Now make it do stuff In our quest for an HTPC, we previously talked about installing Arch Linux on the Wyse 3040 back in Part 1. Now that we have a functional system that we can boot, we can proceed with making it actually play media. Hardware Video Acceleration First, it’s worthwhile enabling hardware acceleration […]
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