I recently switched to Fedora Silverblue for my development machine. I want to document approximately how I do this (and why it’s awesome!).
Fedora Silverblue This article is not an introduction to Fedora Silverblue, but a short summary is well-placed: Fedora Silverblue is an immutable operating system that upgrades atomically. Effectively, the root filesystem is mounted read-only, with the exception of /var, /home, and /etc. The system is upgraded by mounting a new read-only snapshot as the root filesystem.
I have recently been working on a conversion document that adapts Dungeons & Dragons’ Eberron campaign setting to the Savage Worlds system. I’m not a game designer and I’m not a particularly prolific writer, so this was a bit of a challenge for me. One of the most challenging things to pull off was converting the races. Through writing the document, I think I developed a deeper understanding for the racism inherent to fantasy fiction.
I like to read GNU/Linux hobbyist forums from time to time. Partially to keep up with all the changes that are constantly happening within the lovely world of Free Software, but mostly because I’m just very excited about GNU/Linux. It is quite possibly the world’s biggest international collaborative effort, and that’s just mind-bogglingly cool—the idea that people from all over the world come together to make this amazing tool for everyone to freely use.
Spoilers Game of Thrones.
I have been watching Game of Thrones with great interest the past few weeks. It has very strongly highlighted a struggle that has been gripping my mind for a while now: That between elitists and laypeople. And I find myself in a strange in-between.
For those not in the know, the latest season of Game of Thrones is a bit controversial to say the least. If you skip past the internet vitriol, you’ll find a lot of people disliking the season for legitimate reasons: The battle tactics don’t make any sense, characters miraculously survive after the camera cuts away, time and distance stopped being an issue in a setting that used to take it slow, and there’s a weird, forced conflict that would go away entirely if these two characters that are already in love would simply marry.
This is my late submission for transgender day of visibility. It comes almost a week late, but I suppose I’ll use this proverb that is popular among the trans community to justify myself:
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
Or: The best time to post about transgender day of visibility was 31st of March. The second best time is 5th of April.
So there’s a thought I’ve been having lately. The idea that some people identify as neither male nor female has become more mainstream over the past few years. And I assume like a lot of people, I’ve struggled with giving those people a place within my own concept and experience of gender. So I’d taken the accepting-but-condescending view of “yeah whatever, do what makes you happy, I just don’t understand it”.
Not long ago, I created an NPC for my level 3 D&D party to encounter. The NPC is a little kitty in a basement beneath an abandoned tower full of magical treasures. As soon as the party began to take any items from the basement, the cat turned on them, swiping its little claws at the ankles of the daring adventurers. Two floating weapons assaulted the party together with the cat to prevent the party from stealing anything.
We will meet at three o’ clock GMT, the first of May. [sic]
This is a subject on which I am extremely pigheaded. Often, when I am planning an online meeting with people who live in other timezones, they wish to choose a time and date using the GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) timezone. And often, that causes misunderstandings. The cause behind the misunderstanding is normally daylight saving time (henceforth called summer time).
I have been working on En Pyssant for a while, a Free Software chess engine written in Python. The engine part of the program is not (yet) complete, but the rules of chess are wholly implemented. My primary goal in writing this engine is to use everything and the kitchen sink to learn new things: Maybe the program does not need a full testing and benchmarking suite, but I have implemented it anyway.
This weekend, I attended CopyCamp in Warsaw. I arrived in a hurry and on a whim, because I was substituting for someone who could not attend last-minute.
Erik Da Silva and I together held a talk on the FSFE’s latest campaign, «Public Money, Public Code». It is a campaign that postulates that software used or created by public institutions ought become Free Software and available to the public that paid for it.