Eddy Luten

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Hello Again, Macbook

1 minute read

Hello Again

Well, that didn’t take too long.

If you’ve been following along, you know that I’ve been trying to use Linux for my local development purposes on an Intel NUC (as well as a Lenovo laptop). I have to say, I still love the NUC and am going to find another use for it somehow, I’m just not sure what yet. However, Linux was somewhat of a disaster for me.

I like to think that I really gave desktop Linux a fighting chance. I’ve been using it for all my development since October of 2016 in one flavor or another. I used elementaryOS until around February when I got fed up with its quirks and switched to Ubuntu. Well, I tried. It was an unending battle with drivers, external displays, wiped USB drives, failing installers, and this:

Thankfully, I have almost all of my code in private GitHub repositories, but I did lose some prototypes. I’m not sure if I shouldn’t have relied on Ubuntu’s Trash mechanism working correctly or if it should just work out of the box, but I don’t really care anymore at this point.

So, even though no major Mac changes were announced at WWDC a few days before, I bit the bullet and pulled the trigger on a new 13” 2017 MacBook, which arrived on my doorstep yesterday.

So far, I don’t like its lack of non-USB C ports, the touchbar is a bit awkward to use, and the price is just plain wrong ($2,300 for a 13”, 3.3GHz i5, 16GB of RAM). However, I do like its light weight, the retina screen, the huge touchpad, its battery life, and the changes to macOS since El Capitan.

Overall, not too bad.

I may do a long term follow up to see if it will last as long as its 2012 15” predecessor. Until then, I’m just happy that I can move files to the trash and potentially restore them if I really want.

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How I Track Tasks and Take Notes

4 minute read

A bunch of notebooks

I’ve been keeping track of my notes and daily tasks using a single method for over a decade, and it works pretty well for me. Someone close to me asked me how I keep track of everything without losing track, so I figured I’d outline it here. The system is easy to use and relatively loose but with enough structure to be consistent.

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Foundry VTT on DigitalOcean with SSL and PM2

9 minute read

Foundry Virtual Tabletop Screenshot

I absolutely LOVE Foundry Virtual Tabletop (FoundryVTT). It is by far the best $50 I’ve spent on my tabletop role-playing hobby in years. I can gush about the software on and on, and perhaps I will in a future post. This post, however, focuses on something a bit more practical.

For years, I’ve hosted my instance on AWS, but with the change to their public IP address pricing, it doesn’t make sense to stay with them since DigitalOcean offers a beefier solution at a lower monthly cost.

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Creating and Publishing a Bluesky Feed

9 minute read

Bluesky terminal feed output

I was recently invited to join Bluesky, a new social media platform. This was mostly motivated by the nightmare that Twitter has become over the past year or so. One of Bluesky’s nice features is the encouragement from the official team to build supplementary software. One way to do it is to build a custom feed. So, I set out to do just that: I built a feed that serves all posts related to TTRPGs on Bluesky. Here’s how I went about publishing mine on a DigitalOcean droplet using PM2, Nginx, and Let’s Encrypt.

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