So, this is going to be one of any number of posts out on the web about setting up a dev environment on Linux, but it’ll be good for me as reference in the future. This is going to cover setting up Ubuntu 19.10 on a ThinkPad X1C (7g), dual-boot with Windows 10, with both OSes fully encrypted at the partition level (full-disk encryption is technically impossible since we’re splitting the disk for Windows and Linux).
In the application I work on most of the time, we pass a lot of data from Rails
to the React frontend by writing constants to the window object in the
browser. Testing this can be a bit of a pain though.
I’m in the process of moving from OS X to Ubuntu (via WSL2) for all of my
development work, and ran into an odd behavior with a zsh function I use all
the time to diff my current work against the master branch, that it turns out,
is caused by the case-sensitivity of the Linux filesystem (unless I’ve
misunderstood things).
Every now and then I need to build up some complex hash/JSON data in Ruby to feed over to a JS frontend. I tend to work slowly and iteratively as I push the nesting deeper, which helps me find mistakes before it gets too complicated… but sometimes that doesn’t work.
The Windows Subsystem for Linux is great (so far). I like having a full Linux distro right here on a Windows machine. Pretty often though, I need to copy text from my shell into my clipboard (say, to add an SSH key to Github). It’s not immediately clear how you should do that from WSL.
Carozzo Ronah, aka Iron Mask
On Tuesday, 10 September, I went to see Gundam F91 with my best (Freedom Fighter) Gunboy Thom, who is one of the hosts of Mobile Suit Breakdown, and Allie, another regular guest on the pod. After the movie we went back to the studio and recorded our thoughts on the movie. In general, we really liked it (at least, we thought it was a masterpiece in comparison to the clusterf*** that was Gundam NT), but in the course of our conversation we stumbled across the monstrousness of the movie’s main villain, and how his being a ‘cyber newtype’ is used to emphasize that.
About a month ago I sort of went off on Twitter about how different RPG dice systems lend themselves to different story territories, and then got into a real good conversation about it with Devin Preston. Devin is I think the only other person I know of involved in the TRPG scene with a background in Lecoq theatre (which is where the term ‘territory’ comes from). I’ve been thinking about this since, and I wanted to expand and refine the idea some more. Let’s go!
An early Okawara concept painting of the Zaku in front of the Gundam’s head
I’m currently rewatching Mobile Suit Gundam, following along with Mobile Suit Breakdown’s ongoing journey through the series providing historical and cultural context and background. At some point in my rewatch, it occurred to me: both MSG and Battlestar Galactica both came out in 1979, and have an incredibly iconic villain robot with a glowing red, single sweeping eye. The mono-eye.
I had a thought the other day that I ended up putting onto twitter. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my depression and where it leads me, and one thing that I’ve noticed is that I start thinking about getting tattoos when I’m starting to wonder what things would be like if I weren’t alive anymore. (I’m not thinking about killing myself right now–no one needs to worry about that).
In the last year-ish since I switched to exclusively using Vim and Tmux for my dev environment instead of GUI apps like Sublime, I’ve noticed that I’ve developed a very bad habit of almost never rebooting my machine. The reason is that my usual Tmux/Vim setup involves several Tmux windows with several panes in specific configurations for running Vim, the Rails console, the Rails server, a search engine server, Webpack… a lot. And it’s a pain in the butt to set up manually every time.
