It all started with an email from my Proxmox box, saying that the boot partition was out of space…
Every homelab has that one little annoyance that slowly drives you up the wall. For me, it was CIFS shares occasionally dropping off the radar. Sometimes it’s the network hiccuping, sometimes it’s the file server rebooting, and sometimes it’s just gremlins.
Sometimes a project doesn’t need to be a sprawling framework or a months-long refactor. Sometimes it’s just about taking something you love and making it more fun to play with.
This weekend, I built a browser-based version of the solo roll-and-build game Hall of the Dwarven King by Robin Gibson. The idea was simple: keep the heart of the original paper sheet, but drop the pencil-and-bookkeeping overhead.
Memory is weird. This morning, as I emerged from a vivid dream about my first encounter with what we might call the "proto-internet," I found myself marveling at how some memories fade within minutes while others resurface with stunning clarity decades later. The dream transported me back to the summer of 1989, when my mother had just begun her undergraduate studies at the University of Southern Mississippi, and I was about to stumble upon a connection that would change my life.
This was my response to this post on Reddit.
"A game, really?"
"Yes. Any game. You win, you go back...you lose...well..."
How does one respond to that? Better yet, how does one respond to Death? Not death, as in the end of life. Death as in the (un)living embodiment of the hereafter.
When upgrading the firmware on your PopcornHour A-100 Network Media Tank, you might end up with a hung machine before any operations take place. You'll know this has happened because your TV screen will go black as soon as you start the process. If this happens to you, there's a simple solution.
Ghost Rider has long been one of my favorite comic books, so imagine my surprise and joy to see this in my feed reader this morning...
The artist is doing a month of Marvel characters done in the style of The Simpsons. I'm glad he's doing some of the more obscure Marvel characters.
So I've been using the awesome SwissCenter media streaming server with my PopcornHour A-100 for a while now. Over the weekend, Windows XP decided it didn't want to run on my file server any longer (yeah, I know... :) ). In it's place I installed Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron". After migrating my SwissCenter settings over to the new Linux install, everything worked, except SwissCenter no longer showed up on the Sources page on the A-100.
Being a freelance web developer, there are many times where I'm moving domains for clients (or more recently, myself), and need to know when the DNS entries change to point at the new version of a site. I could just keep submitting an nslookup request manually, but that requires me to stop whatever it is I'm doing, switch to my terminal app, and execute the command.
After losing two hard drives in rapid succession, I figured it was time to start giving some serious thought to my backup plan. I have been rsyncing my documents, pictures, and active projects folders to my local Debian server for a while now so neither drive loss was that critical, but it drove home the fact that while I like to think my systems are bulletproof, there's no such thing.
