I’ve been writing Microfictions lately and am hoping to write some longer pieces as I go forward, but I also want a way to collect them all in a print format, as well as make them available online for viewing. At the moment I have no plans for a published book, although doing a free ebook would be cool. But just having somewhere that they can be shared and a form they can be printed in (for myself) is my main goal.
I’ve been working with my partner Nikki recently to build her a small website she can use as a knowledge base for all her witch-y stuff. This includes tarot, herbalism, naturism, etc. She couldn’t find a decent CMS that met all the features that she wanted, or at least one that wouldn’t be a pain in the arse to get working. By the end of her searches she had settled on just making her own static pages in HTML and CSS when I suggested Hugo.
You can play my first attempt at a Strawberry Jam entry here
At the end of January I decided to enter Strawberry Jam 4, a game jam that lasts the month of February with one theme: the game should be horny in some way.
I did some brainstorming and came down to three potential ideas I wanted to explore that involved both cool technical challenges and story/writing challenges. The three ideas I narrowed it down to, in increasing order of complexity were:
Search engines have always interested me a bit and I’ve wondered how to set them up. They consist of a few simple parts:
crawler, scraper, query engine, and ranking system. I decided to set myself a simple project to build one that could scrape a domain and store content for all the pages. This post will be focused on the crawler/scraper aspect of it.
Scrape A Page Initially, all we want to do is download a single page and scrape the text from it.
I’ve been wanting to do a tank-based game for some time and thought it would be the perfect excuse to muck around in Unity again. One of the things I wanted though is the ability to control the tank using two separate throttles like an old M113 Armoured Personnel Carrier. This would give a more unique way of controlling a tank that would require some extra thinking. The concept is that the left throttle controls power to the left tracks, while the right throttle controls power to the right tracks.
Preamble Back in 2016 I had the idea for a silly joke cryptocurrency for my maniacal panther pal Snowy. I wanted to fork Bitcoin and then modify it so that all coins created would go to a single wallet controlled by Snowy and any transactions would result in the currency going to Snowy’s wallet as well. In essence: all money would be Snowy’s, as it should be.
I left that in my ideas folder for about 3 years but finally decided to re-investigate the concept.
Preamble A long time ago I built a Twitter bot which allowed you to play a text adventure game by tweeting commands at it and receiving personalised responses. I’ve always been interested in doing more with this project, but there’s been two major holdups:
I’ve lacked personal writing inspiration (and found no interested writers) to help with content for the game. The original code is an absolute mess. Eventually during a skint section of my life I had to get rid of the virtual machine that runs the bot and it’s remained dormant and inactive for years.
Having played around a bit with Gopher lately I decided to take the next step and try and create something more meaningful then test directories and dummy text files. My ultimate goal was to have this personal blog available via Gopher as well and I’m pretty confident that I achieved it. You can visit gopher://gopher.judges119.me and you’ll be able to browse my personal, dev, and ops blogs via the Gopher protocol.
For a few years now I’ve had a small project in mind. I wanted to make a game where you’re on a host computer and need to work out the story by navigating around the filesystem and using Linux applications. Finally this year I started experimenting with a story and came up with the first tiny and short demo for Outpost 73. You can play it in it’s current form via a web browser.
Recently I needed to get to grips with the Laravel PHP framework for a personal project and thought a small tutorial on getting started with the Homestead development environment would be good to help beginners.
Prerequisites You’ll need the following:
macOS or Linux Latest version of Oracle’s VirtualBox Latest version of Vagrant from Hashicorp (optional) Latest version of Composer Installing Homestead Start by installing the Homestead Vagrant box on your machine by running the following command from a shell prompt: