Grumpy Gamer

My linux Laptop (Dell XPS 13) arrives today. I tried to order it from Dell, but ended up canceling the order twice. Every time I order something from a on-line store not named Amazon I’m repeatably shocked at how bad it is. I eventually canceled both incorrect orders and just bought the same laptop from Amazon for the same price and it took 2 days to arrive, not the 9-15 days directly from Del. There is a reason Amazon is eating everyones lunch.

Enough ranting about Dell. On a lot of levels, Amazon is also a crappy company in that they don’t pay taxes, screw over Seattle, refuse employee attempts to unionize, etc, etc, etc. But they do know how to ship stuff and run a website. If I had 140 billion dollars I’d sure as hell be super nice to my employees.

I digress again…

Anyway, my Linux laptop arrives today… wait it’s not actually a Linux laptop, it’s a Windows laptop because Dell doesn’t make a Linux laptop with a 512GB SSD, so I had to buy a Windows one and will install Linux as soon as it arrives.

My goal is to see how far I can get developing my new game on directly on Linux and not the Mac (I haven’t developed on Windows in years). Can I ditch the Mac and go 100% Linux?

For working on the “game”, this shouldn’t be a problem once the engine runs on Linux. The few custom tools I use (Wimpy, for example) and all built from the same code the engine is, so once it’s working under Linux, they should compile as well.

The real issue is going to be developing the “engine”, which I spend most of my day doing. Writing C/C++ code in a nice text editor and compiling it isn’t really the issue. It’s mostly that I’ve gotten very used to the visual debugging found in Xcode and Visual Studio.

It seems that Linux IDEs are really behind in this. Once I get started I’ll explore it deeper and I hope I’m wrong.

I’ve been a full-time Mac user for 20 years but Apple seems to get more and more paranoid and authoritarian as time goes buy. I would love to move to Linux, but I don’t know if I can without making a lot of productivity sacrifices.

I’m going to install Ubuntu Budgie going solely on the fact that I like the looks. I’ve resigned myself to installing Linux several times before I find something I like.

We’ll see… I have my finger crossed.

It really boggles my mind when people refuse to wear a mask*. These same people don’t refused to wear pants because it violates their freedom of express or first amendment rights.

These are the same idiots that gave us Trump. And yes, they are idiots.

I do like that masks have become a fashion statement for some. When I’m out and about, I’m always on the lookout for great and creative masks.

*Legitimate medical reason aside, but I have yet to hear of one put forth by an actual doctor.

The view out my window.

via Laughing Squid

…it just got a little shittier

They used to be a great counter culture site and now they are just a shopping channel. I’m sure it makes them a lot of money, but they have lost all respect and authority in my eyes. They have joined the ranks of sell-outs. I’m sure they all drive BMWs.

Does anyone know a good tool that can convert a dynamic website into a static website?

The Thimbleweed Park blog was built using PHP and a MongoDB database and it’s quite complex. The website won’t ever change and I like to turn it into a static site so I can host the files somewhere else and can shut down the server.

Ideally it would be a tool that you just point at the url and it scrapes the site, producing a bunch of .html files.

Does such a thing exist?

Given everything going on the America right now, I don’t feel like a celebratory post about a game. So I’ll do a factual one: Delores is now on GOG.

If I hear one more person say “this is not who we are” I’ll scream. This may not be who we want to be, but it is exactly who we are.

The Thimbleweed Park Forums seem to be down (or at least inconsistently down). I moved the DNS to a new server and it seems to have broken them. Top people are working on it.