Long story short, I was feeling defeated. I wanted to build something, anything, to prove to myself I can. The Project I call it Orter for two reasons: It’s retro in reverse It’s short for “ought to”, and you ought to retro It’s missing some quality of life features; but, hey, this is an MVP! My hope is, those familiar with a retrospective can just start using it, but there is a getting started guide to explain most features.

DevContainers are great! SSH, also great! Together they’re magic… until they’re not.

How to use git inside a container with ssh authentication and ssh commit signing.

The previous post is a fun and non-rigorous dive into automating the deployment of a Godot project to Itch.io from GitHub and GitLab. The obvious follow up question is: What about Gitea? But I have a homelab Everyone does… stop bragging. You can also deploy to Itch.io from a homelab. GitLab can be fired up in a container, and it’s great! I took some time to check out Gitea as a light weight alternative, and I have to admit it has started to win me over.

I’d like to acknowledging a preference for GitLab over GitHub. Obviously GitHub is the popular choice, but I have a soft spot for the underdog… especially the open source optionally self-hosted underdog. My evidence is anecdotal, but Github Actions is a gentle learning curve compared to GitLab’s CI. It could be because I learned GitLab first and had new concepts to wrap the ol brain round. The option to use other people’s reusable elements in GitHub is sweet.

Why? No one Reads Blogs I don’t know, I don’t even average 1 post a year. Let me have my fun. What changed? I switched to Hugo on GitLab. Wordpress feels like overkill and it mysteriously stopped working. The hard part was ensuring redirects to old projects worked. Okay “projects” is ambitious, “project” is correct. The only one that matters is the link from xkcd 1190 to geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190. I made some minor changes to the original project so it can be served from GitHub pages.

I use GNUCash for my personal finances because I don’t trust services that require me to give up my financial institution’s username and password. Not only does this feel wrong, it might be a terms of service violation. Either way, it seems like a security kerfuffle waiting to happen, so keep track of my finances locally. Yes it’s a lot more work, but I really feel like I have more control over what I want to see and a better understanding of what it means.

Long ago, back in my bachelor days, I had built some 8-bit NES sprites out of Lego and hung them on the wall. Recently, my wife asked me, “What happened to those?” and “Why did you never hang them up here?” She doesn’t realize it, but she just gave me permission to nerd out for the next few weekends. This weekend I pulled out the old Legos and learned more than I expected.

I decided to dive into Phaser 3 and Tiled with my next game project. I was looking to make a room change similar to Link to the Past (the SNES Zelda). The implementation is simple and the result was pleasing so I wanted to share. Playable demo! I’ve used Tiled a little in the past but this is the first excuse I’ve really had to dive in to it. If you’re not familiar with Tiled, there are a million ways to learn more.

A short post about a game I made about a year ago for a class at the University of North Texas, CSCE 4210: Game Programming 1. I took the class because I heard the professor, Dr. Ian Parberry, was good at teaching game design and was an interesting fellow (I heard right on both counts). I cannot claim all credit for this game because I worked with a partner. He was awesome and the only reason I don’t mention him by name is because I didn’t tell him I uploaded this and no longer have his contact info.

I was reading all the tax law news so I updated my tax slider from 2015. 2018 Tax Slider I used this Forbes article to get the new tax bracket info. I’m not a fan of Forbes, they have too many advertisements. I used this article because it had what the 2018 tax brackets would have been if there was no law passed. It was fun, and gave me something to do.