I’ve been having on-and-off issues with my right hand for over a year now. There is no way we could ever know how this could happen, especially with such a healthy daily schedule like:
Wake up and scroll my phone one-handed. Go to work for eight hours using a mouse intensely for GIS work. Go home and play click-heavy video games for four hours. Go to bed and scroll my phone one-handed.
Last month I posted about being absolutely stoked with my new monitor setup and the remaining monitor that couldn’t be connected to my PC finally has a purpose. For a while now I’ve wanted a cool monitor just displaying a constant feed of information, but without the aesthetics of modern dashboards. To be honest I really wanted something that had that an old-school terminal effect and now it’s finally starting to come together.
I’ve talked before about making personal computing more personal and did this in a fun way with my Saitek Flight Switch Panel [1, 2] and have being enjoying it greatly. There’s been another part to this too.
Since last year I’ve been hunting through local verge/bulk rubbish collections for old monitors and found four to add to my setup. A week ago I finished my collection and set up all the cables and adaptors and now my desk looks like the following:
About a month ago I got my switch panel controlling my PC. In short, I use a Logitech/Saitek PZ55 Flight Switch Panel connected to a Raspberry Pi that reads USB HID input from the panel and sends PSExec commands to my gaming PC.
It’s honestly been a lot of fun to use over the past month and it was so weird going back to the office and using a computer that didn’t have a bunch of physical switches you could toggle to control.
I purchased a Logitech/Saitek PZ55 Flight Switch Panel recently and set it up so I could control my computer:
Your browser does not support the video tag. It can now do the following:
Start my gaming PC via Wake-On-Lan. Open Task Manager. Open explorer.exe. Start Firefox, Discord, Steam, Spotify, Blender. Start my favourite game. Start a Chrome session with Special Business™ tabs already open. Switch Controller The switch is connected to a Raspberry Pi 4B which runs a Python script as a SystemD service.
For about a year and a half now I’ve been running “my own” mail server on my sole trader business domain using Mail-in-a-Box on a cheap VPS, slowly migrating more accounts and subscriptions to it. I originally started doing this after thinking about my 2021 ICT goals, focusing on ownership of my own email data.
While there have been privacy issues about email providers before, such as Google using your emails to personalise ad content until 2017, another factor is the risk of losing all your email data if the hosting company decides to cancel your account without any reason.
TL;DR: Every SSH Key on Tumblr.
IF MY DEMANDS ARE NOT MET I WILL GENERATE AND PUBLISH AN SSH KEY EVERY 3 HOURS, SLOWLY REDUCING THE ENTROPY OF THE AVAILABLE SSH KEYSPACE AND REVEALING EVERYONE'S PRIVATE KEYS.
— Comrade Snowy (@EmperorSnowy) May 15, 2021 .twitter-tweet { margin: auto; } The above tweet, from my panther friend, struck a chord with me. So working with them I decided to throw together a quick bot that would generate and publish SSH keys on a regular basis.
First on Gopher, then in LaTeX, it started becoming apparent that I have a predilection towards short, one-shot Choose Your Own Adventure-style stories on strange mediums. So in that vein, I decided to make another one, but this time played via a phone call made to a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) number attached to a virtual PBX.
To do this, I firstly needed a VoIP number. Thankfully my ISP (iiNet) provides a free VoIP number to NBN customers, so that was covered.
Not long after I completed the Gopher Maze that I’ve written about previously, my friend @shmouflon and I embarked on another Gopher project; writing a Choose Your Own Adventure-style short story told through Gopher directory pages.
We completed the project later in the year during August and were content to have ridden that wave of creativity for a while. However we were struck by an idea: what if we could use other oft-forgotten or much-maligned technology to create something new from this?
I’ve been wanting to do a tank-based game for some time and thought it would be the perfect excuse to muck around in Unity again. One of the things I wanted though is the ability to control the tank using two separate throttles like an old M113 Armoured Personnel Carrier. This would give a more unique way of controlling a tank that would require some extra thinking. The concept is that the left throttle controls power to the left tracks, while the right throttle controls power to the right tracks.