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#blaugust2024 — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #blaugust2024, aggregated by home.social.

  1. I’ve had an Adafruit Macropad for a little over 3 years, and while I was working from home at the start of that period it was permanently on, connected to my MacBook Pro on my desktop, with a variety of shortcuts configured for driving different apps that I used day-to-day. My configuration is on GitHub.

    More recently, I have not been using it nearly as much.

    Last weekend for our Makeroni meetup, I pulled it out of my kit bag and started to tinker some more. I have a variety of additional Qwiic / StemmaQT controls and sensors that I wanted to play with, so I updated to the most recent stable build of CircuitPython and started to have a look at them.

    I also noticed that it is a nice size to act as a companion device to the MNT Pocket Reform…

    MNT Pocket Reform with the Macropad to one sideMacropad with a slider control attached

    I noticed a problem – there was some burn-in on the OLED display where it had been mostly always-on in the past (lesson learned, to manage the screen output more carefully!) – but fortunately, Adafruit have done a lovely job of making that easy to replace. I also think it might be nice to have that screen wedged up at a slight angle to aid readability.

    OLED display showing ghostingRibbon connector for the display on the rear of the MacropadReplacement OLED

    I have a notion that I can 3D print a case to more-or-less match the look of my Hyper Purple laptop. I don’t have an identical colour of filament, but I do have a range of options. I also ordered a bunch of different knobs for the potentiometer, and some alternate keycaps, so that I can make the look a bit more consistent as well.

    A selection of filament colour optionsA close (?) matchSome rotation knob options and keycaps

    I don’t have a final case design yet (and I need to spend some time properly learning FreeCAD and/or Fusion360, really), and I also haven’t finished modifying the macros code to match what I’m using on Debian on the Pocket Reform, but this is just some work-in-progress.

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    https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/08/30/keypad-hacking/

    #Blaugust2024 #100DaysToOffload #3dPrinting #adafruit #circuitpython #hardware #keypad #macropad #maker #mntPocketReform #pocketreform #rp2040 #Technology

  2. There was a Nintendo Direct recently that I’ve failed to watch. It’s the second in a row, but I usually get the news the day after. I was on Facebook and saw a post about something-something, Trails in the Sky remake, very short trailer. I couldn’t believe it. I googled it and found an IGN article. Not entirely sure, I went to my source and newfound home, the fediverse, and they confirmed it and sent me the trailer. I’ve been on forums and other groups and it was a constant discussion between Trails fans, about when the game would be ported to consoles, since the license is owned by another company. 

    So there really is going to be a remake, not only a port, and as the vibrant colors can attest, it will be gorgeous and most likely easier to navigate on the menus and environment. However, it wasn’t only that. The game will be 3D and I was extremely happy for reasons I wrote about previously. When I asked the Falcom gods for a remake, I wasn’t really thinking about changing the perspective altogether, instead making volumes, patterns, textures and colors a bit easier to read. A better map, camera movements and overall readability of the interface. In my text I wrote that my experience with the game was plagued by nasty physical symptoms. The first time I played the game and panned the camera I got nausea with the only result being a more visceral reaction that didn’t seem to go away. I just wanted to see the story between Estelle and Joshua but I couldn’t bring myself to endure any more of it. With Trails of Cold Steel I experienced the opposite and found the game easier to read overall. Also I could navigate better in 3D. My reaction to Trails in the Sky is something I’m not proud of even though I couldn’t control it.

    I asked my wife if she remembered the game that made me sick and showed her the video of the remake. “See? Now we can play from Estelle’s perspective.” I said. I then showed her how the game looked before. She pointed to one of the screenshots from a Google search of the original. “Ah, but that… that is something I’m familiar with! I like that.” I asked if she prefered a 2.5D isometric perspective, if she could navigate well in the environment and she said yes. I instantly recalled Triangle Strategy, one of my favorite strategy games, and how beautiful it looked in that same perspective. I showed her the remake with a third-person view. “How do you think you’d play from this perspective? You can look everywhere and also up.” And her answer was very telling. “Why would I even want to look up when I can look down and see everything?” An answer worthy of a goddess! 

    I wonder how people will react to this remake compared to how they recognise the first games in the series. In this department, I consider myself a newcomer, because when I was younger I didn’t have access to JRPGs. I jumped from 2D Nintendo games directly to 3D games and then I spent years in the shadows doing university things. I still have mixed feelings about the perspective change, though. This is not a new discussion in JRPG groups, about which perspective people want to play their games in, if they prefer 3D character models or 2D sprites, if what feels more authentic is one or the other, especially when it comes to an original game where the authenticity is already established.

    “Maybe you adapted to Triangle Strategy so well because the game required you to do other things where the perspective wasn’t so important,” my wife added. About this, I don’t know. True, the exploration in Triange Strategy was minimal, but my problem with Sky was the readability of the environment. I couldn’t see and distinguish colors and volumes easily in areas outside the village and interiors – my problem entirely. The top-down perspective is a feature of the original game and a fundamental part of its identity. Why did they decide to change it considering that so many people love games like Octopath Traveller or Star Ocean: The Second Story Remake? My personal preference is always 3D – it’s easier on my eyes for some reason and more immersive. Habit also plays a role. I’m looking forward to seeing more footage of the game and every little upgrade they make. The story is, in fact, the reason I still want to play the game. And Estelle, but that goes without saying.

    Yesterday, we decided to spend a nice and cosy afternoon reading books when the world outside seemed to be overcome by yet another storm. September is almost here and with it comes more rain and beautiful brown, yellow and red leaves paving the footpaths. After finishing Soul Hackers 2 I can say that many games have passed by these hands this year. This blog will be one year old in November and since my Fire Emblem Three Houses rush last year – a game I still love so much – I have been playing games non-stop and also writing about them. With this I want to say that I don’t especially look forward to new games nor do I have the energy to look new things up. It’s nice that the release of Trails in the Sky is still some months ahead of us. Maybe even on a new Switch? We never know!

    https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/2024/08/28/a-matter-of-perspective/

    #adventureGames #blaugust #blaugust2024 #estelle #falcom #gaming #JRPGs #nintendoDirect #nintendoSwitch #perspective #trailsInTheSky #trailsInTheSkyRemake #triangleStrategy #videogames #writing

  3. Erenshor — EverQuest for soloers

    It's not an MMO, it's an MMO simulator where you can handpick the party of your dreams and clear dungeons, kill bosses, and find uber lewtz.

    chasingdings.com/2024/08/28/er

    #Blaugust #Blaugust2024 #EverQuest #MMO #OpenWorldRPG #erenshor

  4. Retro World Expo 2024: Adventure Awaits

    That's another Retro World Expo under our belts, and we got Some Stuff. But I could have spent thousands more...

    chasingdings.com/2024/08/25/re

    #Blaugust #Blaugust2024 #PS2 #Vectrex #AnaloguePocket #crocs #RetroWorldExpo

  5. Retro World Expo 2024: Adventure Awaits

    That's another Retro World Expo under our belts, and we got Some Stuff. But I could have spent thousands more...

    chasingdings.com/2024/08/25/re

    #Blaugust #Blaugust2024 #PS2 #Vectrex #AnaloguePocket #crocs #RetroWorldExpo

  6. Retro World Expo 2024: Adventure Awaits

    That's another Retro World Expo under our belts, and we got Some Stuff. But I could have spent thousands more...

    chasingdings.com/2024/08/25/re

    #Blaugust #Blaugust2024 #PS2 #Vectrex #AnaloguePocket #crocs #RetroWorldExpo

  7. Retro World Expo 2024: Adventure Awaits

    That's another Retro World Expo under our belts, and we got Some Stuff. But I could have spent thousands more...

    chasingdings.com/2024/08/25/re

    #Blaugust #Blaugust2024 #PS2 #Vectrex #AnaloguePocket #crocs #RetroWorldExpo

  8. I had hoped – and really wanted – to be at Wuthering Bytes / Open Source Hardware Camp this weekend, but didn’t get that sorted out because of Reasons.

    So, I spent today doing various other things instead.

    • I’ve been invited to a couple of events that are arranged using Gathio recently. Gathio has support for ActivityPub federation (there’s an ActivityStreams type for an Event, so this is all another piece of how the fediverse can be used to follow and participate in a broad range of activities). I noticed that there’s a new documentation site for Gathio, but certain links and messages still point to the project’s now-discontinued wiki, so I sent a pull request to fix those.
    • I’ve been playing a bit with Picotron, a fantasy virtual workstation from the folks that also make the PICO-8 virtual retro gaming system. I’ll probably write a bit more deeply on that sometime soon (I hope / if I get around to it).
    • Our elderly neighbour asked me to go in to help with some issues with her email. It turned out that Microsoft has completely turned off the old DeltaSync service that her mail client had been set up with (the clue was a 404 error which was part of the otherwise incomprehensible message from her computer), so I reconfigured things to avoid going near Outlook / Live Mail – there was absolutely no way she would have been able to work any of that out. Really, I would like to refresh her machine with a nice clean and fast Linux distribution, but she’s older and very used to how things currently work, so I tried to keep the changes to a minimum.
    • I learned that CloudHiker is a thing. Many rabbit holes to investigate.
    • I tried out a few different Wayland compositors on the Pocket Reform. wlmaker is interesting – old-style WindowMaker but on Wayland (although I don’t think it supports rotation yet, which is a deal-breaker for now). I also tried hyprland, but couldn’t get it to display anything – the debug log checked out but the display was black. I’m not too bothered as I’m aware of certain issues with that project. The author of cpufetch has a patch ready that adds support for the CPU module that the Pocket Reform uses, I tested that today as well. I spotted a couple of config improvements that we can make in the default Pocket Reform image, so I’ll aim to submit merge requests on those. I posted some wallpapers to the community forum.
    • I quickly made a Fediwall to aggregate conversations about #OSHCamp, since I was missing out!
    • The great folks at WeDistribute have made an Events hub for Fediverse (and adjacent) events, which is excellent. I spotted there’s an ATProto talk in London on Tuesday, and I intend to get along to that. They also posted an interesting piece on Flohmarkt, a marketplace instance with Fediverse compatibility. So much interesting development lately.
    • Caught up-to-date on The Repair Shop.

    Tomorrow: a Makeroni meetup in Wimbledon.

    (Bank Holiday) Monday: Hampton Court Food Festival.

    Like it? Share it -

    https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/08/24/todays-notes/

    #Blaugust2024 #100DaysToOffload #activitypub #activitystreams #atproto #debian #fediverse #fediwall #gathio #Linux #London #OSHCamp #pico8 #picotron #pocketReform #retro #techSupport #Technology #wayland

  9. Pot Plants. In a fit of ill conceived enthusiasm, I decided to repot my two indoor plants, Burke and Hare. Why is nothing ever easy?
    containsmoderateperil.com/blog #blaugust2024 #gardening #potplants

  10. Could this be the end of Palworld?

    For me, I mean. Could this be the end of Palworld -- for me. Betteridge's law of headlines may apply.

    chasingdings.com/2024/08/16/co

    #Blaugust #Blaugust2024 #OpenWorldRPG #Palworld #raiding

  11. One of my freelance roles at the moment is as Developer Relations lead on the Mastodon project. It is a project and platform I’m really passionate about – I use it every day, it is Open Source and based on an open standard, and I strongly feel that federated platforms like this are the key to enabling everyone to own their own content, networks, and experiences beyond the direct reach of commercial interests.

    At this stage in its history, Mastodon would I think count as an established and mature OSS project. It has been around since 2016, there are over 10,000 running instances / servers with the software, and over a million regular active users of the platform (plus, it interoperates with a much wider set of other platforms in the Fediverse, and carries posts and content from them as well). There are a number of large repositories that make up the GitHub organisation. There’s a – in my opinion – healthy and diverse set of third party apps that plug in to the network.

    One of the things that some folks would say that the project has not always been great at, is communicating with the broader developer community. My own observation is that this is a large and widely-deployed codebase, and at a certain scale, stability and reliability become paramount, and it can be less straightforward to accept pull requests for new features (over prioritising security reports, for example). It is a small team supporting this project, largely underfunded1 if you look at the need to maintain the code, and to pay at least some of the folks involved to work on things full-time so that they can get by day-to-day, and that the core functionality gets the attention it deserves. When you’re coding, you may not have time to do other things like writing documentation, discussing roadmaps, and answering general questions – that’s partly where I come in, but even then, I still need to get help from the core developers to understand some of the questions…

    I started working part-time with the core Mastodon team last year, with the goal to improve the experience for developers building on the platform, and also to bring my experience in working with diverse OSS projects and communities to support the Mastodon core team. As an example, last year I overhauled the existing list of known third party API libraries on the documentation site, and also updated the third party client apps page. Towards the start of this year, we started to make a few choices to improve the cadence and – I hope – quality of our external conversations further: we brought the whole team to meet the community at FOSDEM for the first time, for instance, which was a big step for the project.

    Visit us at #FOSDEM, building H, level 1! You can say hi to our team or tell us what you’d like to see in Mastodon next. Mugs, t-shirts, enamel pins, and even free stickers available! #Merchtodon

    — Mastodon (@Mastodon) 2024-02-03T08:56:41.576Z

    Eugen and I also had the opportunity to meet with a few folks working on related Fediverse projects, as well as some Mastodon contributors and instance owners, during a whirlwind visit to the Bay Area back in May.

    In the last 4 months, Renaud (Mastodon’s CTO) and I have been collaborating on an engineering blog series called Trunk & Tidbits. We both strongly believe that explaining what we are working on is an important element in building greater engagement and community around the project. I chose the title for the series as (what I thought was) a clever play on words, but maybe you need to be old enough to remember when source control systems like CVS used “trunk” as in tree trunk as terminology, that we now tend to call “main” in the world of Git! The name is supposed to point to the blog series content being about what we have worked on and merged into the trunk of the code, and some “tidbits” or bits and pieces of other news from around the developer community – plus, of course, our mascot The Mastodon has a trunk of its own… 🦣 😄

    Here are links to the April, May, and June posts, if you missed them and want to catch up. We post retrospectively, looking back at progress each month.

    One thing to note from these past editions is that I also posted a completely rewritten and overhauled Contributing guide in the past couple of months (mentioned in Trunk & Tidbits); this lives at the organisation-level in our GitHub setup, and is intended as the main starting point if you want to contribute to the code.

    Today, we published the July edition of Trunk & Tidbits. tl;dr we’re a bit behind where we had hoped to be towards releasing the next version of Mastodon, v4.3 – but we are really close to getting the beta out, and the “delay”2 is because of some feedback and performance improvements identified in early testing on our own instances, so we’re hoping that when the beta is released, things should be in pretty good shape.

    I’m hoping that with more regular communications via the blog; interactions with the community via the Fediverse itself and at events (I’ll once again be at Fediforum in September, for example); one-to-one conversations; and a willingness to engage in more discussions where time and resources allow – we can help folks to feel more informed about what we’re working on. It is still a small core team, and it is a busy time as the Fediverse grows… we need to keep things running, stable, and reliable… and there are always going to be features and changes that we cannot get to, or requests we cannot support at short notice… but I can assure you that it is a team effort, we discuss what’s possible, and that, I believe, we’re moving things forward3.

    That’s all a personal perspective on what I’ve found, in working with the Mastodon project and team. Let me know if you have feedback on the Trunk & Tidbits series, as I’d love to keep improving these posts, and learning from the folks that read them.

    1. I am also pretty happy with the fact that the project has made a conscious decision to not go down a road of accepting capital investment, and remains a not-for-profit funded by donations. YMMV, this is a personal opinion. ↩︎
    2. Note “delay” against an undated release schedule; the release will ship when it is ready to ship. ↩︎
    3. A footnoted mea culpa / things I personally wish were better if I had more time on the project / there was more scope for them more quickly! I’d prefer it if there was a machine-parseable API specification, and that more Fediverse formats / standards / protocols might be supported in future, and that the developer documentation was even more complete and nicer and better etc etc.. Hopefully, we’ll get nearer to some of those in the future, as time and resources allow. ↩︎

    Like it? Share it -

    https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/08/13/the-trunk-line/

    #Blaugust2024 #100DaysToOffload #activitypub #Coding #community #developerRelations #developers #devrel #fediform #fediverse #mastodon #openSource #oss #projectManagement #trunkTidbits

  12. Morning Folks! Last night I got far enough with my Deadeye to swap over to the Widowhail/Quiver combo I had sitting in my stash and so far... it feels phenomenal. Not sure if it will fall apart when I hit maps but is definitely an interesting ride and soon I will be firing eight arrows at a time.

    Elemental Hit Widowhail
    aggronaut.com/2024/08/08/eleme

    #ARPG #PathOfExile #Deadeye #ElementalHitOfTheSpectrum #MMO #MMORPG #VideoGames #Games #Gaming #Blaugust2024

  13. When I poked around with Postmarks (a federated bookmarking service) last year, I briefly mentioned another federated server, Shuttlecraft… but I never followed up on that.

    Shuttlecraft is a single-user ActivityPub-compatible application that can run on a platform like Glitch – in fact, it’s more-or-less a single-click deployment to fork and install on Glitch.

    I’ve written about being all-in on the Fediverse and I generally try a lot of different things out. I created a Shuttlecraft instance for myself around the same time I set up Postmarks last year – both run on Glitch, both are somewhat experimental / in-progress and unfinished. The fact is that I use my Postmarks instance all the time for logging links of interest, but Shuttlecraft has really just been sitting there without very much interaction. That’s mostly deliberate, it’s a playground more than anything else, and it can be handy for playing with interactions with other ActivityPub servers.

    However – yesterday I thought I’d take a quick look at it, only to discover that my Glitch app was down.

    After doing some digging in the console and logs, I found that Node was complaining about being unable to load a module. That was surprising to me, as I hadn’t changed anything there for a long while. It turned out that what was actually happening was that the container’s disk allocation had run out, and the log message itself was spurious.

    To be fair, the Shuttlecraft README is very clear that a) it’s an unsupported side-project from the author Ben Brown, and b) …

    all data is written as PLAIN TEXT FILES to the disk.

    Right now, the app builds an IN-MEMORY INDEX of EVERY SINGLE POST. This will work for several thousand posts, but … maybe not for 10,000s of posts. I’m not sure how far it will go. I have ideas about being able to shard the index into multiple files and page through it, etc. But.

    It took a bit of very messy and imperfect cleanup inside hidden directories in the Glitch container, but for now, I have my small instance back up again. Realistically, it is probably not worth following / I don’t look at it much / it will fall over again, before much longer – but it’s also a fun thing to tinker with, and the code is quick to tweak in the Glitch editor.

    In the past few months, quite a few things have changed in the ecosystem – for example, I’m now on Threads, and my account is federated out from there. Shuttlecraft is missing something in its ability to play nicely with that, which is a bit sad… maybe I’ll have to have a look into it at some stage.

    I’ll have to look at some more Fediverse-compatible apps soon, hopefully more resilient ones! 🙂 Fediforum is coming up next month, and that’s usually a great place to learn about what developers are working on across the ActivityPub ecosystem.

    https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/08/07/recovering-my-shuttlecraft/

    #Blaugust2024 #100DaysToOffload #activitypub #Coding #fediverse #glitch #postmarks #selfHosting #singleUser

  14. When I poked around with Postmarks (a federated bookmarking service) last year, I briefly mentioned another federated server, Shuttlecraft… but I never followed up on that.

    Shuttlecraft is a single-user ActivityPub-compatible application that can run on a platform like Glitch – in fact, it’s more-or-less a single-click deployment to fork and install on Glitch.

    I’ve written about being all-in on the Fediverse and I generally try a lot of different things out. I created a Shuttlecraft instance for myself around the same time I set up Postmarks last year – both run on Glitch, both are somewhat experimental / in-progress and unfinished. The fact is that I use my Postmarks instance all the time for logging links of interest, but Shuttlecraft has really just been sitting there without very much interaction. That’s mostly deliberate, it’s a playground more than anything else, and it can be handy for playing with interactions with other ActivityPub servers.

    However – yesterday I thought I’d take a quick look at it, only to discover that my Glitch app was down.

    After doing some digging in the console and logs, I found that Node was complaining about being unable to load a module. That was surprising to me, as I hadn’t changed anything there for a long while. It turned out that what was actually happening was that the container’s disk allocation had run out, and the log message itself was spurious.

    To be fair, the Shuttlecraft README is very clear that a) it’s an unsupported side-project from the author Ben Brown, and b) …

    all data is written as PLAIN TEXT FILES to the disk.

    Right now, the app builds an IN-MEMORY INDEX of EVERY SINGLE POST. This will work for several thousand posts, but … maybe not for 10,000s of posts. I’m not sure how far it will go. I have ideas about being able to shard the index into multiple files and page through it, etc. But.

    It took a bit of very messy and imperfect cleanup inside hidden directories in the Glitch container, but for now, I have my small instance back up again. Realistically, it is probably not worth following / I don’t look at it much / it will fall over again, before much longer – but it’s also a fun thing to tinker with, and the code is quick to tweak in the Glitch editor.

    In the past few months, quite a few things have changed in the ecosystem – for example, I’m now on Threads, and my account is federated out from there. Shuttlecraft is missing something in its ability to play nicely with that, which is a bit sad… maybe I’ll have to have a look into it at some stage.

    I’ll have to look at some more Fediverse-compatible apps soon, hopefully more resilient ones! 🙂 Fediforum is coming up next month, and that’s usually a great place to learn about what developers are working on across the ActivityPub ecosystem.

    Like it? Share it -

    https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/08/07/recovering-my-shuttlecraft/

    #Blaugust2024 #100DaysToOffload #activitypub #Coding #fediverse #glitch #postmarks #selfHosting #singleUser

  15. When I poked around with Postmarks (a federated bookmarking service) last year, I briefly mentioned another federated server, Shuttlecraft… but I never followed up on that.

    Shuttlecraft is a single-user ActivityPub-compatible application that can run on a platform like Glitch – in fact, it’s more-or-less a single-click deployment to fork and install on Glitch.

    I’ve written about being all-in on the Fediverse and I generally try a lot of different things out. I created a Shuttlecraft instance for myself around the same time I set up Postmarks last year – both run on Glitch, both are somewhat experimental / in-progress and unfinished. The fact is that I use my Postmarks instance all the time for logging links of interest, but Shuttlecraft has really just been sitting there without very much interaction. That’s mostly deliberate, it’s a playground more than anything else, and it can be handy for playing with interactions with other ActivityPub servers.

    However – yesterday I thought I’d take a quick look at it, only to discover that my Glitch app was down.

    After doing some digging in the console and logs, I found that Node was complaining about being unable to load a module. That was surprising to me, as I hadn’t changed anything there for a long while. It turned out that what was actually happening was that the container’s disk allocation had run out, and the log message itself was spurious.

    To be fair, the Shuttlecraft README is very clear that a) it’s an unsupported side-project from the author Ben Brown, and b) …

    all data is written as PLAIN TEXT FILES to the disk.

    Right now, the app builds an IN-MEMORY INDEX of EVERY SINGLE POST. This will work for several thousand posts, but … maybe not for 10,000s of posts. I’m not sure how far it will go. I have ideas about being able to shard the index into multiple files and page through it, etc. But.

    It took a bit of very messy and imperfect cleanup inside hidden directories in the Glitch container, but for now, I have my small instance back up again. Realistically, it is probably not worth following / I don’t look at it much / it will fall over again, before much longer – but it’s also a fun thing to tinker with, and the code is quick to tweak in the Glitch editor.

    In the past few months, quite a few things have changed in the ecosystem – for example, I’m now on Threads, and my account is federated out from there. Shuttlecraft is missing something in its ability to play nicely with that, which is a bit sad… maybe I’ll have to have a look into it at some stage.

    I’ll have to look at some more Fediverse-compatible apps soon, hopefully more resilient ones! 🙂 Fediforum is coming up next month, and that’s usually a great place to learn about what developers are working on across the ActivityPub ecosystem.

    Like it? Share it -

    https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/08/07/recovering-my-shuttlecraft/

    #Blaugust2024 #100DaysToOffload #activitypub #Coding #fediverse #glitch #postmarks #selfHosting #singleUser