probes

In an attempt to torture my chair shaped husk of a body, I somehow ran almost 2500km this year. Mostly to see what would happen, but also to take part in the Royal Parks Half Marathon in London.

Round two of escapism this year. This is a post for myself with various information as a conclusion to my recent fixation into designing an efficient and compact factorio megabase.

In a brief bout of escapism from the world and responsibilities, I booted up Baldur’s Gate 2 with my brother. It’s an amazing game, once you have figured out how to roll your character.

For today’s installment; rather than telling you about the game, let’s talk about the maths behind rolling a 2e character for BG2, and then running simulations with weird X-based linux tools.

As part of my work life in the past year, a chunk of my day-to-day life has consisted of maintaining a prometheus installation on top of a sizable kubernetes cluster. My original feeling was “this is not that bad with kube-prometheus-stack”, but this sentiment has worsened somewhat with the realisation that more and more customizations and pieces were needed for large scale use. Half a year later (and 6+ charts deep), I thought I’d collect my thoughts on the ecosystem - from an operational perspective - with a rough architecture overview post.

After almost 4 years of running D&D almost every week, my big campaign concluded recently. This week marked our retrospective, and the release of several relics of the campaign. One in particular was the campaign repo - previously described as my foaming campaign brain. This is a brief post about the setup, and discovered pros/cons associated with it.

First KubeCon in a while I haven’t done anything for (didn’t even buy an ticket). This post is largely for myself, but thought I’d put some thoughts here public. All talks referenced were recently published on the CNCF youtube channel, and the posts here are really just my notes (make of them what you will).

After a quarter year of extensive improvements to kube, it’s time to take a birds-eye view of what we got, and showcase some of the recent improvements. After all, it’s been about 40 kube releases, one major version of tokio, one extremely prolific new contributor, and one kubecon talk since my (very outdated) last blog post.

In 2018, we introduced the explosive Cube of Force into our home campaign. We really did not expect it to cause us/me that much grief at the time, but despite long canonicalisation meetings, our interpretation was not even internally consistent.

At the time we dealt with this by nerfing Cube down into the ground gradually rolling out alternatives, but it’s time we dug into the concept of D&D antimagic properly.

After 2 years of running a D&D campaign almost every week, my note taking setup reached several breaking points. If you’re using OneNote or another online managed system for tracking notes/cities/npcs/pcs/events, but know how to use programmers tools like git and code; boy are there a world of advantages available to you.

This is a story of my original note talking setup, a comparison between newer technologies, and how I am back to writing markdown in a folder.

Despite having been a lazy Cinnamon customer since the Linux Mint days, recently some interesting benchmarks started surfacing about input lag in various Window Mangagers, and this made me want to experiment a little.

This is a log of stuff I needed to tweak to get LXDE working well.