NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Not again.

Another ogre–it busted all up in my house and blasted all of my things. As a little backstory, this is probably the 6th or 7th time that this has happened on this server in the last 2 weeks. The Ogre is part of the Mo’ Creatures mod, which is otherwise pretty awesome. I am not a big fan of the ogres.

Oh, it isn’t that they are very tough to kill or that some of them shoot fire or anything like that.
Simply, for some reason they will spawn nearby my house, smash the walls, and destroy everything that I have accumulated in my chests.

This particular time wouldn’t have been so bad to start with, except that I was also being persued by an ultra rare werewolf and a rare spider.
(this means they have powers/magic and usually drop extra things).

So once the ogre busted down my walls, these two guys poured in and killed me with extreme predjudice. Over, and over, and over as I kept respawning. All while the ogre smashed my things in the chests…

Still, that also was not too terrible, except that I had just been on a killing spree at night– got like 5 ogres and 3 werewolfs (golden swords kill them in like 3 hits), and i had a ton of iron and things from my mine in those chests.

Also, not terrible I can deal with that….but then after I’d patched up my rubble hut with some dirt and sand I was just waiting for dawn to come (because my bed was also destroyed), and I was hanging out in the dirt walls.

Then out of nowhere some OTHER ultrarare werewolf who was throwing those exploding fireballs started shooting my mud hut.
Did I mention that I was behind a wall (of dirt)?

He was blasting through pretty quick so i ran up a ladder to my second level, but he kept blasting.
The wood and bamboo of my upper levels caught fire, and I only had a couple of sandstone blocks in my inventory which I used to block myself in as well as I could, but that didn’t work because i only had 8 blocks and the house was burning around me.

All the while he continued hurling those balls…from DOWNSTAIRS where he couldn’t even see me (still).

At this point, while the house was just burning down around me and all that was going on…I just rage quit. The first time this has ever happened with minecraft.

The ogre-ing was not happening again today.

…I will rebuild. With some other material that does not attract Ogres.

As was announced not too long ago, Google Reader is going away, but luckily there are many alternatives. There are even many free & open source alternatives for RSS readers–and I think this number will greatly increase now. In my opinion, the Goog closing down this project will spur innovation in an otherwise stale segment–and I think partially because of that, and partially because of the exodus, some people will discover some open source software that they love.

And that is always a good thing. … (Obligatory link to stallman singing the software freedom song.)

Anyway, I heard/saw many recommendations for Tiny Tiny RSS (tt-rss), and decided to give it a go on my newly setup VPS. Installation went pretty smoothly because I already had most of the dependencies installed for status.net. I’m using mariadb instead of mysql, but it’s a drop-in replacement.

Overall, I love it and so far I do not miss google reader at all. I’ve already stopped using it, and have fully been using tt-rss running on my own server (which has the added benefit of allowing me to own/control my data).

There are a couple of things that bug me, but it is kind of foolish to complain too much about an open source project–you can always make changes or create your own project.

• It is written in PHP. PHP used to be amazing, but now it’s just a bloated language that is everywhere.
• It requires mysql db! It seems this could be done without the db (Given I haven’t really thought about or looked into it).

Either way, many other solutions are out there and some are very different. Some are closed source.
The main thing is, we can still get our RSS feeds without the goog.

and even better with some FREEDOM.

I found this interesting, even though this is kind of an old video, by Evan Prodromou from fosdem back in 2010. Especially interesting is the DB structure, I’ve also found pure normalized tables to be very slow– even though that is what they teach you in school.

Also, PHP. It used to be awesome, and “the thing”, but that’s now being more replaced with javascript and stuff that works much better–which is certainly a good thing. I’ve very excited to see what happens with pump.io.

I’ve been using NearlyFreeSpeech.net for nearly 3 years now for my webhosting needs. This has worked out very well–the hosting is reasonably priced (cheap), and is based on what is actually used. In my case this is very little, and amounted to a few bucks a month. The best part for me, anyway, is that the domain pricing is very good – I think I’m paying around $9 a year for my TLDs.

And then…I started playing Minecraft again. I had a spare computer in my house (mentioned in my last post), and as it wasn’t going anywhere I set it up as a minecraft server. This worked fairly well, but then I wanted to start loading it up with stuff, naturally, and my uplink speeds from the evil TWC are not great (On a side note, TWC says their customers have no interest in a cheaper faster service more akin to Google Fiber 0o ).

And then, a friend told me about this deal on slickdeals.net. At $40/yr, that was very tempting. I calculated out my usage at NearlyFreeSpeech, and it was around $35/yr for the hosting by itself. So I decided to go for it and try it out.

I’ve got quite a few computers and parts and things that I have acrued that I no longer need, and as such they are just taking up space. Space that my wife is wanting me to free up.

I hate throwing away technology when it works perfectly (or maybe with just a little work), but recycling also doesn’t make much sense to me as long as someone else could make use of the things. And I don’t care too much for getting any money for these things at this point, so I have this offer:

Whatever anyone offers for these items will be accepted as long as it at least covers shipping (and maybe enough for a coffee mug, since there isn’t one in the EFF store). But also with the caveat that if any money is left over after shipping (and maybe mug) it will go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In this process, I can accomplish a few things:

• clear up some space by getting rid of some “junk”
• give money to charity
• maybe get a new FOSS-related coffee mug
• provide someone else with some usable hardware

Sounds like a win/win.

Now, for the stuff!

testy test test test

website is under construction, testing for a move from Jekyll to Octopress.

Apparently we survived the supposed end of the world with little ado. Life goes on, and all of the crazy along with it. So, I’ve basically forgotten that I have a blog…again. Then again, I also thing blogs are rapidly going out of fashion in a big way–social media is the new “in” thing, though usually that limits your character count and formatting and other such things. Blogs will still have some niche of space, if only for longer and more thought out replies or for more intense write-ups.

It is getting very close to Christmas, and I’ve spend the last few days being pretty sick. Luckily I’m starting to feel a little better.

Now that I’m actually writing on this again (mainly because I’m a little bored, getting exhausted from being sick, and just plain love to type on my Das keyboard) I don’t know if I’ll keep this blog thing like this. Jekyll is neat in practice, but seems like a lot of work.
These days, I just want things to work, I don’t want to have to fool around with fixing every bleeding thing every time I turn around. I want my Linux desktop to just run (which is why I now run Linux Mint Debian), just like I want my car to run every day. I want my website to be the same way, with as little interference from me as possible, I just want to add content whenever the mood strikes me. Which obviously is pretty rarely.

I do like typing posts in nano (or vim), and the static content is awesome. But then I have to generate it locally, and upload with scp and all that… just kind of a hassle. Not really, but it seems that way to me right now.

I recently got a Raspberry Pi, and I installed their default Raspbian distro on it…which I was greatly disappointed with. It just didn’t operate very smoothly. I mean, of course it did good for such a small and cheap device, but I didn’t like it. I then tried out Raspbmc, which is absolutely fantastic. It is very smooth, and it plays all of these files I have. Except for the MPEG2 stuff, which you have to spend like $3 on a license for the capability to use hardware decoding, but still, not too bad. I use the Yatse remote on my android phone, and it’s a blast in 1080p on my TV. Actually, I had full-blown XBMC installed on an older PC of mine–dual core AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ with 8GB DDR2. I had just put a $50 video card in this thing, and it worked decently. The raspberry pi works at LEAST as well as this PC, and probably better. Definitely more reliably. That video card was a waste!

That’s about all that’s going on with me lately. Work, work, sickly, gearing up for christmas. At least I’m done with work until after the new year. It’s a much needed break, that’s for sure.

Until next time.

I just realized that I haven’t posted anything on here in a few months. Time really flies by too quickly.

First off, since my last post I bought a beaglebone and set it up using Arch Linux ARM. I then installed the basic stuff (openssh, mysql, php, etc) as well as StatusNet microblogging software. SN is federated social networking/micro-blogging software, which allows users to run their own nodes which can then be connected together rather seamlessly. If one node goes down, the rest of the network is still up–hence the federation. This beaglebone I setup to run my own uBlog node at micro.jrobb.org, and it ran fine for a while.

Recently, though, I have begun to have issues, and now it is not working properly at all. Since having these issues I have gone back to using identi.ca, which is what I would say is the main node. I’ll have to fix up my beaglebone.

Alternatively, my cousin gave me an older Dell XPS400 desktop–she said to back up the stuff on it and then I can have the PC. I may set this thing up as a server now, though it will definitely use quite a bit more power than the beaglebone would (it is a PentiumD and the beaglebone is ARM ). It’s got a lot more RAM and would be a little speedier, certainly, though!

In other news, my family just got back from the beach–we went down for about a week. It was a nice time, not too hot at all, but still warm.

That’s all that I can think of at the moment. I’m sure something else will come along…I’ve been thinking of getting a new PC (desktop or laptop…leaning towards laptop). So that may be interesting.

I had a couple of laptops laying around that I was not really using– Most of my computing these days is on my phone, tablet, or desktop. The one is an older model Toshiba Satellite A205, and the other was an Acer AspireOne netbook (in really good shape).
So I went over to cashforlaptops.com (not linked on purpose), and got a quote of $262 for the both of them. Which is a pretty high estimate, but most reviews that I’ve read say they come back with a lower value after evaluation.

They send me the empty boxes with foam (which took about 2 weeks to arrive), and I mailed off my items.
Before I sent them, I installed ubuntu and encrypted the drive to wipe anything that I had on there off, verified that everything was working. Then packed them up. Another 1.5-2 weeks later, I get a call from some odd number, when I answer it’s just some automated girl’s voice asking about a survey– “do you love us? press 1” etc. It was just a couple of questions, never saying what the survey was for. This happened 2 or 3 times over a couple of days. I realized it was them and sent them an email (replied to the one that they had sent me saying my products had been looked over). I got another call and the guy said the Acer was scratched up etc etc, and offered $53. Now, Amazon has a trade-in program which offered $50 so this was ok, though if I sold it myself on ebay I was confident of around $80. Also, I meant to haggle with the guy but a lot was going on at the time, working, etc so I just said “that’s fine” and he went to the next one.

Same deal with the Toshiba: scratches (this one actually did have some scratching), loose power connector, etc. Not sure how much of that is true, but then he said there was no power to the screen and it would not power on, and that they would give me $5. Whoa, wait a minute. So I told him that it was working fine when I put it in the heavily padded box, and to send it back so I could figure out what they had broken. He kind of sounded irritated and then said he could “assure me” it was nothing they had done, and they would re-evaluate. A few days later I get another call-back and he repeated the same condition with it still not working, and he bumped the money to $10. ooh. I bitched him out for a while saying it was working fine, and no way I was taking less than $60 for this laptop otherwise he could just ship it back. He got off the phone pretty quickly, and then I received my laptop in the mail ~2 weeks later.

Aaand, I just now plugged it up and booted it–the first time I tried it the screen actually didn’t turn on. I turned it off and back on, and it booted normally.

So, my take on this is that cashforlaptops.com (or their other sites) are a bunch of incompetant liars running a profitable bait-and-switch. They will offer a high “quote” and then offer a very low amount for consumers’ products.

In sumary: I will never use this service again, and I advise you not too either–unless you plan on haggling pretty hard to get a decent/fair amount of money. Definitely you can make more money selling things yourself on ebay (and it might be faster, also).

I had found out about Jekyll a year or two ago, but for some reason I had never implemented it. I think I had originally asked @bkuhn about his website, and he pointed me towards Jekyll.

So now, I’ve actually gotten started using it, and I love it.
It’s not perfect, but pretty close. No database, just simple static html. The downsides being that there is no commenting system, and I will have to implement some kind of tag cloud. Neither of these are hard to do, the comments I can just use any public service (such as identi.ca), and there are several plugins for tags. Oh, and I’ll have to see about rss, too, but I imagine that’s not a big deal either.

I can run ‘jekyll –server’ on my computer at home, and run a test to see how everything is generated. Then it’s just a simple rsync to bring my webserver up to date. Very cool.

I do still need to write a script to go and convert all of the older blog posts, and I will do that when I have some free time.

That’s about it for now.