weblog.masukomi.org

Debugging Our Ambulance

tl; dr: two developers use standard debugging techniques to fix electrical problems in their ambulance.

Setting The Stage

We had to drop our car off at the dealership last night. In order to avoid walking home in the dark, on roads without sidewalks, in 27°F (-2.7°C) - or just the last two shortly after dawn, we needed to drive the 🚑 Ambulance. Unlike most years, I actually remembered that it had a block heater¹ and had turned it on at the beginning of winter.

Overview

This document discusses a new¹ form of managing initiative order for Tabletop Role Playing Games without math. It is, like so many game things, a combination of a number of existing ideas.

Overview

This post uses a recent Tabletop Role Playing Game (TTRPG) as a concrete example of the problems that still remain within our community. When it comes to including women, it seems that there are many things that “shouldn’t need to be said” but apparently still do. This post will say most of them.

The Remarkable 2 e-ink notebook

Summary

If you are the type of person who already takes a lot of handwritten notes in notebooks you’ll probably love it. Everyone else should probably skip it.

tl;dr:

Meta and Google are existential threats to the continued existence of Mastodon (and friends).

An existential threat is a threat to a people’s existence or survival. - The Brittanica Dictionary (editorial)

The best way to guarantee the death of the things we love about Mastodon (and friends) is to allow Meta or Google to gain a toehold in the Fediverse.

It took me a while to figure out the correct collection of magical incantations required to make RuboCop run in a GitHub workflow, but ONLY on the files that were changed within the PR. This is a useful configuration if you have a codebase that has not yet been modified to satisfy all your “Cops”. I’ve also included a version of the same file that you can use when you’re ready to have RuboCop run on all non-excluded files.

Apple distributes their “Add to Wallet” images as SVGs which is great, but if you want to add it to an email or anything else that has issues with SVG files you’re going to need a PNG (to maintain transparency around the rounded corners). Unfortunately there are a LOT of these images needed to support the various languages.

Converting these to PNGs is not as easy as you’d hope.

Overview

A Guide To Rounding Corners and Edges in Tinkercad.

Alternately, how I spent way too much time modeling a dice tray.

Rounding corners in Tinkercad is way more trouble than it ought to be. It’s not actually hard, it’s just really time consuming and requires a lot of steps. Once you wrap your head around the general approach you’ll be able to round anything.

High Level Summary

The Kinesis Advantage 360 Pro feels great. The ergonomics are better than the Advantage 2. The Bluetooth is buggy. The on/off switches are terrible. The mechanism for resetting it is worse than terrible. I’m still irked that the wrist wrests weren’t included at that price, and I suspect the Mo Ergo Glove80 is going to be an equal, or even better choice.

Preface

A recent episode of the Internet Office Hours: Role-Playing Games podcast was discussing the question of Skill Checks in Tabletop Role Playing Games (TTRPGs) and if they were actually needed. In designing my game I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I thought I’d share my perspective.