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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Scaling Issues on Linux Workaround

less than 1 minute read

Steam Scaling

If you’re on Linux and received the latest Steam patch that makes your UI scaling look overly large, here’s a quick workaround until Valve fixes the application (and given that you have a Steam desktop shortcut).

Open up the Steam desktop launcher shortcut (~/Desktop/steam.desktop) in your favorite text editor and find the line that starts with Exec=. You’ll want to change it to the following:

Exec=/usr/bin/steam -forcedesktopscaling 1.0%U

You can change the scaling factor to something other than 1.0, but that’s the value that worked for me without breaking the entire UI. The only downside is that you’ll have to launch Steam from this desktop shortcut until Valve fixes this.

MkDocs Categories Plugin Update

less than 1 minute read

pypi

The latest version, v0.4.0, of the mkdocs-categories-plugin is now available here or by running pip install mkdocs-categories-plugin. This new version fixes the sorting of categories containing numbers. This release is a minor quality-of-life update, but I can’t believe I didn’t notice this behavior before!

v0.3.0 v0.4.0
Before the patch After the patch

AI and Creativity

2 minute read

Calliope

After using ChatGPT for a few months, I’m developing a sour taste for the whole generative AI thing. It’s not because it’s not good at what it does. Most of the time, it’s incredibly proficient. I’ve mainly used ChatGPT to bounce ideas off and to give me suggestions – riffing on concepts. It’s an excellent tool for those tasks, usually generating a decent output. It’s not because of that. I’m beginning to dislike generative AI because it makes you feel like you’ve had anything to do with the creative process.

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OpenGL in C# on Linux using Visual Studio Code

1 minute read

I’ve been out of the .NET loop for a very long time. I would never have thought that it was so easy to get a .NET project up and running on Linux. But, I guess a decade of embracing Open Source at Microsoft changes things. Here are the steps I took to get an OpenGL window up and running on Ubuntu using .NET Core, VSCode, and OpenTK.

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MkDocs Plugins Updates

less than 1 minute read

The latest version, v0.6.0, of the mkdocs-alias-plugin is now available here or by running pip install mkdocs-alias-plugin. This new version adds the ability to use anchors within aliases, e.g.: [[my-alias#my anchor]] would link to something like my-page.md#my anchor.

Also updated is the mkdocs-categories-plugin, version 0.3.0 is available here or by running pip install mkdocs-categories-plugin. This version adds support for subcategories, allowing you to create structured category hierarchies.

A Conversation with Bard

16 minute read

A sober conversation about AI and jobs with Google’s brand new chat AI, Bard, turns into a bit of a mess at the end. I have some experience using ChatGPT but only got access to Bard today. I thought I’d record this to perhaps compare to interactions in the future.

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Intel Arc A770: One Month In

3 minute read

The Intel Arc A700 Box

In building a PC mostly as a workstation, my choice of a GPU came as more of a secondary choice. My thought process was: sure, I’ll play some games every once in a while, but really, this is my work machine. It needs to do workstation stuff and not much more.

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mkdocs-alias-plugin 0.5.0 Release

less than 1 minute read

The latest version, v0.5.0, of the mkdocs-alias-plugin is now available here. This new version adds the ability to use the use_relative_link config flag, which causes the plugin to generate relative links to the aliased document rather than absolute ones. This flag is useful for those who host their wikis in subdirectories.

mkdocs-alias-plugin is an MkDocs plugin allowing links to your pages using a custom alias such as [[my-alias]] or [[my-alias|My Title]].

Call Me By Your Name Review

3 minute read

Call me By Your Name Book Cover

Warning: spoilers

When I was about ten pages into Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman, I thought this would be a book I couldn’t finish. The book’s narrator is its main character, a seventeen year old boy named Elio who lives with his parents in Italy. He is intelligent, shy, studious, and has a raging hormone-driven desire for Oliver, a twenty-four-year-old American houseguest of his parents. But Elio is a brat and seems to sabotage himself with every step along the way.

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The Drawing of the Three Review

1 minute read

The Drawing of the Three Book Cover

Note: This is a spoiler-free reflection.

Ever since I heard of the Dark Tower series, I’ve wanted to dig into it. I was practically raised on Stephen King novels but never felt ready to immerse myself in this series. Too daunting of a task. When I read The Gunslinger back in October of 2013, I liked it, but not enough to hook me. Ten years later, I decided to give the second book a shot, and things changed.

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Welp

less than 1 minute read

This weekend I took the time to find all of my ancient blog posts from various now-defunct blogs and stick them here. Finally, all of my failed projects are collected in one place!

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