In a recent experimental 2D gamedev project, I wanted to play around with drawing a bunch of game entities purely algorithmically rather than creating sprites for each of them. One important technique I ended up using was Signed Distance Fields (SDFs). In this post, I’ll go over the most basic implementation (we’ll draw a circle!) and explain how and why it works.
In December of 2023, due to carpal tunnel, I switched from my Happy Hacking Keyboard setup to a Kinesis Advantage 360. It’s been two years and change, and I haven’t looked back. Well, kind of.
The latest version, v0.10.0, of the mkdocs-alias-plugin is now available here. This new version adds the ability to use aliases in Markdown footnotes, a great way to keep links short and organized.
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]].
In a New Year’s resolution-driven attempt to un-Microsoft-ify my life, I’m moving all of my repositories over from GitHub (owned by Microsoft) to sourcehut (owned by some dude). This blog was the first repo to make the switch and was previously hosted via GitHub Pages, and now uses sourcehut pages instead. Here’s the config I created to make the CI-driven deployment work:
This year I read a surprising (to me) amount of books: 21 according to my notes, 6 more than last year. Here they are, listed chronologically in reading order. I’ll also list my favorite reads towards the end of the post.
I’ve been putting my work online in various formats for almost 20 years now. For most of that time, I’ve used extremely permissive licenses such as the MIT License to distribute my work in an attempt to promote usage and adoption. Now that I’m quite a bit older and experienced (you may say curmudgeony), let me tell you why I’m changing my tune and am adopting a Copyleft approach.
In the past decade or so, I’ve noticed a widespread adoption of the MIT license, even by those who in the past opposed Open Source Software as a concept. Why the swing and why so extreme? You’d think that those companies would slowly adopt Open Source rather than going all-in all at once. What’s going on?
I’ve been keeping track of my notes and daily tasks using a single method for over a decade, and it works pretty well for me. Someone close to me asked me how I keep track of everything without losing track, so I figured I’d outline it here. The system is easy to use and relatively loose but with enough structure to be consistent.
A few updates for those folks who use any of my MkDocs plugins follow below.
I absolutely LOVE Foundry Virtual Tabletop (FoundryVTT). It is by far the best $50 I’ve spent on my tabletop role-playing hobby in years. I can gush about the software on and on, and perhaps I will in a future post. This post, however, focuses on something a bit more practical.
For years, I’ve hosted my instance on AWS, but with the change to their public IP address pricing, it doesn’t make sense to stay with them since DigitalOcean offers a beefier solution at a lower monthly cost.
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.