Spacerobots:

Shadowrun: Anarchy

Sun, 02 Oct 2016 07:19:20 -0500

Shadowrun: Anarchy is a new release for Catalyst Labs taking the battlescarred Shadowrun universe and slicing away intricate, arcane, and generally fiddly bits like a street samurai on amphetamine.

I haven’t read through the entire book yet, but I wanted to give some initial feedback. Here are some thoughts:

Novel: I love the concept. Shadowrun has classicly been very rules heavy. From a beginner point of view, it is difficult system to approach, lots of fiddly bits. Anarchy brings out a new, fresh approach to the Shadowrun world that could very well be a permanent fixture of a gamer’s repertoire.
Gorgeous: This isn’t just some fan-made Fate version of Shadowrun. It looks and reads like the same high level craftsmanship of a standard Shadowrun product.
System: Shadowrun: Anarchy is very much a hybrid between the existing Shadowrun, D6-count-hits system, and the relatively new Cue system wherein the focus shifts away from simulationism to a more narrativist approach using Cues, or phrases describing your character. It keeps many of the Shadowrun elements like stats and skills but eschews some of the remaining bits with some hand-waving “Shadow Amps”. Shadow Amps encompass everything from casting spells to cyberware and bioware. Never fear, the fistfuls of dice are still there, just enhanced with some flexibility to narrate a fun story.

Hopefully I will have a longer review once I get completely through the book!

In the meantime, go grab the PDF and give it a look yourself.

I’m very excited by this new approach to Shadowrun!

Karate and Coding

Thu, 11 Jun 2015 12:51:49 -0500

Karate and Coding

brew install macvim with breakindent patch

Thu, 12 Feb 2015 07:13:58 -0600

    brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ntmoe/homebrew-alt/master/macvim.rb --with-lua

Quiver: The Programmer's Notebook

Sun, 11 May 2014 21:19:54 -0500

Quiver: The Programmer's Notebook:

Quiver: the programmer’s notebook.

rbenv install ruby 2.0.0-p195 on Mac OS X 10.8 with openssl installed via brew (works for me)

Sun, 19 May 2013 04:44:49 -0500

irbrc failing to load in rails console

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:10:28 -0500

If your irbrc doesn’t get loaded when you fire up a Rails console it’s because your irbrc is invalid. Run ruby ~/.irbrc and see what is failing.

Pen Pal

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 08:32:24 -0500

Me: Hey Mira, I had an idea. Do you want to have a pen pal?
Mira: What's a pen pal?
Me: It's someone who you write letters in the mail and get mail back from them to read.
Mira: Nah, I don't want a pen pal.
Me: Why not?
Mira: I don't want to write a letter, we can just call them.

Why Ruby

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 06:21:58 -0500

Why Ruby:

This.

Ruby isn’t cool any more. Yeah, you heard me. It’s not cool to write Ruby code any more. All the cool people moved on to slinging Scala and Node.js years ago. Our project isn’t cool, it’s just a bunch of boring old Ruby code. Personally, I’m thrilled that Ruby is now mature enough that the community no longer needs to bother with the pretense of being the coolest kid on the block. That means the rest of us who just like to Get Shit Done can roll up our sleeves and focus on the mission of building stuff with our peers rather than frantically running around trying to suss out the next shiny thing.

Even more geeky

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 09:05:00 -0600

This makes me inexpressibly happy. RT @jackbern23: The Greek god of plagiarism is Poseidon, as he has the power to Ctrl-C.
— Jessica Banks (@ProfBanks) February 8, 2013

Or, even more geeky: The Greek god of interruption.

Letterpress words with a Q but no U

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 06:09:40 -0600

As of late I’m addicted to Letterpress (http://www.atebits.com/letterpress/) and I was curious to see a list of words with a Q but no U.

Thankfully my iphone is jailbroken so I can dig around. It turns out the Letterpess app stores its dictionary words in a series of files like aa.txt, ab.txt, ac.txt, etc. I grepped those files for “q”, excluding U’s. Here is that list:

Letterpress playable words with a Q but no U

faqir
faqirs
fiqh
fiqhs
inqilab
inqilabs
mbaqanga
mbaqangas
niqab
niqabs
qabala
qabalah
qabalahs
qabalas
qabalism
qabalisms
qabalist
qabalistic
qabalists
qadi
qadis
qaid
qaids
qaimaqam
qaimaqams
qalamdan
qalamdans
qanat
qanats
qasida
qasidas
qat
qats
qawwal
qawwali
qawwalis
qawwals
qi
qibla
qiblas
qigong
qigongs
qin
qindar
qindarka
qindars
qins
qintar
qintarka
qintars
qis
qoph
qophs
qorma
qormas
qwerties
qwerty
qwertys
sheqalim
sheqel
sheqels
talaq
talaqs
tranq
tranqs
tsaddiq
tsaddiqim
tsaddiqs
tzaddiq
tzaddiqim
tzaddiqs
waqf
waqfs
yaqona
yaqonas

http://askubuntu.com/questions/66934/passenger-mod-rails-cant-find-libopenssl-ruby

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 07:01:25 -0500

http://askubuntu.com/questions/66934/passenger-mod-rails-cant-find-libopenssl-ruby:

This was really helpful today as I am setting up a new server for an old Ruby 1.8.7 / Rails 2.3 app.

'sup dude

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 08:36:31 -0500

Drop this script into your $PATH and start using Sublime Text 2’s projects more easily. (I also globally .gitignore the project files since I like to keep them in the project directories)

  matt@zo ~/Projects/SecretProject > sup 
  Opening Sublime Text 2 with project SecretProject

  #!/usr/bin/env ruby
  # Usage: sup 
  #   Starts Sublime Text 2, opening the directory's project file if it exists,
  #   otherwise, it creates it for you.
  name = %x/basename `pwd`/.strip
  puts "Opening Sublime Text 2 with project #{name}"
  if File.exists?("#{name}.sublime-project")
    %x/subl --project #{name}.sublime-project/
  else
    file = File.open("#{name}.sublime-project", 'w')
    file << %|{ "folders": [ { "path": "#{`pwd`.strip}" } ] }|
    file.close
    %x/subl --project #{name}.sublime-project/
  end

Shell magic: Using Regex in Mac OS X find

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 11:03:20 -0500

Quick tip:

You can use extended regular expressions in your find parameters by using -E. The example command below will find all files that end in “.rb” and begin with the letter “p”.

  # Find all .rb files that begin with the letter 'p'
  find -E . -iregex ".*/p([0-9]|[A-Z]|_|-)*\.rb"

Mac Desktop Tool Chain: 2012-09-03

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 09:26:43 -0500

My desktop app tool chain for 2012-09-03. Not all the apps running are mentioned, only the ones I am using at this time. I have a few things like CoBook that are still in a “testing” phase.

Dock

Menu Bar

Menu Bar (Expanded)

Running but hidden or not seen

Vid2gif

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 09:20:51 -0500

Super simple ruby (mostly bash/shell) script to convert a video to an animated gif

    #!/usr/bin/env ruby
    # Super simple video to gif conversion script
    # Requirements: ffmpeg, imagemagick (available via brew)
    # Depending on your own requirements, 
    #   you may want to resize down the resulting gif like so:
    #     convert -resize %50 filename.gif smaller.gif
    if ARGV[0].nil?
      puts "usage: vid2gif <filename>"
    else
      %x/ffmpeg -i #{ARGV[0]} -r 10 output%05d.png/
      %x/convert output*.png #{ARGV[0]}.gif/
      %x/rm output*.png/
    end

I saved this as “vid2gif”

Sublime Text: see the current syntax scope under the cursor

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 08:37:01 -0500

Sublime Tip for Theming:

See the current syntax scope under the cursor by issuing ctrl+shift+p

Or try and use ScopeHunter (available in Package Control)

A Sublime Tip

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 12:34:00 -0500

Here’s a Sublime Text 2 tip:

If you are changing your ST2 User Preferences.sublime-settings file, you may find yourself changing a theme by commenting out the original value and pasting in a new row. Something like this


    {
      //...clipped
        //"theme": "Phoenix Dark.sublime-theme", // Keep this one, I like it too
        "theme": "Soda Dark.sublime-theme",
      //...clipped
    }

If you change your color scheme from the menu later, the preferences file is rewritten and your comments will go away. Instead of potentially losing info, you can just change your JSON variables to something unused like this (Note the underscore appended to the key name):

    {
      //...clipped
      "theme_": "Phoenix Dark.sublime-theme",
      "theme": "Soda Dark.sublime-theme",
      //...clipped
    }

That way your old theme/setting will stick around a little longer.

Amazon Kindle Highlights API

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 09:24:29 -0500

Okay, so Amazon doesn’t provide an API for Kindle ebook highlights, yet. They may never. But they do offer web access to them. So, until they release an API for them, I have written a simple script that can be used to grab your kindle highlights and save them locally. If you aren’t comfortable in a terminal, this may not be the best solution for you. But really it’s easy so you should give it a try.

To install the library you need Ruby and Rubygems (Which you most likely have already if you are using a Mac). In a Terminal, type:

gem install kindle

Then, to grab your highlights, run the command kindle like below:

kindle 
# Will prompt you for your Amazon login info
# Don't worry, the login info isn't saved anywhere

This will return a simple list, one highlight entry per line of all your highlights across all your kindle e-books:

• kindle
Enter your username:  matt@kizmeta.com
Enter your password (This is not stored):  **************
Getting your kindle highlights...
refectory.
evening
fallow.
stertorous,
habitues
Actually, the best image to capture what a monk is can be found in the words of the Russian author Dostoyevsky, who remarks in The Brothers Karamazov that a true monk is nothing more than what everyone ought to be.
As a prelude, keep in mind several general principles: never use your dog's name during a correction, never call a dog to you to discipline her, and never use an object of any kind to discipline your dog.
Pay no attention to the dog for half an hour after disciplining.
No Christmas decorations, either. (Of course, vampires don’t observe holidays, except for Halloween. It’s the ancient festival of Samhain dressed up in trappings that the vamps find delightful. So Halloween’s a great favorite, and it’s celebrated worldwide in the vamp community.)

If you want to see the book associated with the highlight you’ll have to wait for another version or use the library yourself in an IRB session. This usage fits my style of highlighting, which mainly includes highlighting individual words I want to add to my vocabulary.

View the source at http://github.com/lodestone/kindle.

Today I Learned: Ruby EOC

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 14:37:00 -0500

Ruby EOC

    # Using <<`EOC` in the manner lets you run a longer script from within Ruby easily.
    print <<`EOC`
      echo "This one is for the nice people in the world"
      echo "This one is too"
      echo "This one is for mom"
    EOC

Did you know you can include larger shell scripts from within ruby with the syntax above? I didn’t and know I do. Now you do too.

Walter Zorn: Standing on the shoulders of giants

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 09:15:24 -0500

From Headline News:

http://www.useragentman.com/blog/2012/08/26/a-developer-i-admire-walter-zorn/

I wasn’t aware of Walter Zorn’s passing. I was so sad to hear of Walter Zorn’s death. His libraries allowed me to do some truly amazing things in a browser before CSS3 and HTML5. Without his drag-and-drop library, my first Ruby on Rails site the online scrapbooking ScrapEase.com (now defunct) would never have gotten off the ground. His DnD library was amazingly cross-browser and extremely performant despite the number of elements on the page. I built an online scrapbooking site without Flash and some really interesting drag-n-drop CMS experiments. Without his work, it would have been too hard for me to get my feet wet in modern web development.

Rest in Peace, Walter.