November 2020
Checking my images it seems this month I didn’t have anything remarkable from the outside so… I just wanted to share that this month I have given myself some very nice meals and I improved the Katsu Curry recipe quite a bit. I’m not good at cooking by any means, but the relax you get from listening to music while cooking some healthy food is pretty good.
Projects
I made a simple script to parse and expose the Nintendo Switch game list in JSON including the encrypted title ID field that is used on the screenshots on the system. The JSON list is generated every day from the Switchbrew wiki and exposed via Github pages.
The main problem here is that not every game is present on Switchbrew, so I’m unsure how to automate this without asking people to pull request missing games or doing that myself (for the ones missing). I need to check if the same title ID filed that is required to get the proper encrypted field is present on the eShop’s API. If that’s the case it would be possible to get the list for all games easily.
Related to the one above, an application to fetch and sort all screenshots found from several providers and games. Currently working for Steam, Nintendo Switch and some games on several operating systems. I’m starting to like this golang thing. :D
I’ve been making slow progress with the admin interface. I’m trying to keep it as simple as possible: a way to check which channels and plugins there are available and an option to enable plugins with channels allowing a JSON configuration to be used with them, since the same plugin on a different channel would require a different output. I hope to have something useful on December if my time allows.
I’ve also spent some time playing with:
- My Raspberries: Playing with different OSs, booting from USB, setting up Home Assistant properly, …
- Firewalla: Setting up my network devices, assigning IPs and understanding it’s inner workflows a bit. I’ve also setup Pi-Hole inside it as main DNS server replacing the one they use.
- Alpine Linux: On the Pis and containers to understand the difference with other OSs.
- Arch Linux: I’m currently starting from scratch my Dell XPS 13 using Arch Linux base, and while it’s more work than a Next, next, next, finish install I’m enjoying it quite a lot since the result you get is a minimal install.
I’m working on blog posts for the Arch Linux installation, Alpine on Raspberry and self-hosting my smart devices using Home Assistant so the blog have more content than the monthly updates. Another mini-posts for the tools I self-host myself will
Infra side it seems that my docker services via an VPS as door from the internet through an SDN to my home server keep achieving 100% uptime from some months now, only going down if I test something on a dev service.
Problem is that even if it works, the containerized setup with two load balancers, SDN and so on seems both complex from my use case and useful if something goes wrong.
I’m considering either moving to a simpler approach (non-containerized) or go all-in containerd and use something like k3s to orchestrate the server at home. I would have an excuse to add some Pis and clusterize everything properly.
I still don’t know the path I’m going to take with this.
Books
The Magicians’ Guild (Trudi Canavan)
Ongoing. I try to read a chapter a day if time or focus allows. I’m actually enjoying the story so far, even if reading anything magic related after Mistborn seems dull.
TVShows and Movies
Star Wars: The empire strikes back
Star Wars Marathon continues!
Slowly and steady our joker when we don’t know what to put on TV over meals.
It’s back! This is why I look forward to Fridays now.
I discovered this randomly because the trailer poped up on my Netflix feed. The premise seemed interesting and James Spader is such a great actor… Not sure how I managed to convince the Player 2 to watch this but it seems she’s enjoying it too. Kinda different from what we usually watch together, but welcome nevertheless.
Games
I completed all the achievements a while ago, but the author decided to add more… so I just fire this up from time to time to try and maintain Forager on my Steam Perfect Games list.
Oh my, this again? It seems so. Some friends wanted to get on the blocky train again. I have been out of Minecraft for a good while (years!) and it seems interesting to come back after all this time. There are some new things to explore and since I didn’t really “finish” the game back in the day… let’s see how this goes.
Spoiler alert: We spent more time constructing stuff rather than progressing through the game.
From Sokpop, the creators of Simmiland. A simple village builder game that seems minimalistic and fun in the same way their other games are. I don’t play this often since a play session can last a while (as it happened with Simmiland) but let’s see if I manage to get every achievement.
The legend of Zelda: Age of Calamity
The Nintendo game for this month, already going strong on my Switch. I wasn’t really sure if I would enjoy a musou game even if it was Nintendo related, but so far is looking really good. I didn’t though that cutting through hordes of bokoblins would be so satisfactory and fun! I’m still not sure if the lore is “canon” or if it truly precedes Breath of the Wild as it seems to happen on a parallel timeline created by a time traveler, but I’m eager to know how it ends, even if the finale is the same as the sequel.
Magic: The gathering (physical)
This refers to the physical version of the game. We bought a starter kit and play against each other from time to time. It’s new for both of us so this is an interesting learning curve to share.
Articles
- What is this Gemini thing anyway, and why am I excited about it?
- Raspberry Pi 400: Teardown and Review
- (podcast) Self-Hosted Show
- Why Arcades Are Still Thriving In Japan
- Your computer isn’t yours
- We can do better than DuckDuckGo
- No, “Open Source” does not mean “Includes Free Support”
- random(7)
- Even faster bash startup
- (Spanish) La Revolución Mandaloriana que va a cambiar el cine
- Booting from a vinyl record
- When too much concurrency slows you down (golang)
- TIL: eBPF is awesome
- SQLite as a document database
- Blogging vs. blog setups