Blackmoor Vituperative

I find this interesting. Go has been on my short list of “next things to play with” for a little while, but I am adding Rust above it.

A recent post on the AWS Open Source blog announced that AWS “is investing in the sustainability of Rust, a language we believe should be used to build sustainable and secure solutions.”

It was written by the chair of the Rust foundation (and leader of AWS’s Rust team) with a Principal Engineer at AWS, and reminds us that Rust “combines the performance and resource efficiency of systems programming languages like C with the memory safety of languages like Java.”

But there’s another reason they’re promoting Rust:

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/22/02/20/0143226/is-it-more-energy-efficient-to-program-in-rust

Fun with voice recognition…

I asked Google to play “Hello, it’s me” by Todd Rundgren, on YouTube, on my downstairs speakers. It played some weird song I had never heard before, but I liked it. Then it played another song I had never heard before, and I liked that one, too. The third one, too! (I have linked to that one below. I have since learned that it was a huge hit everywhere other than the USA.)

That was the first song I looked up as it was playing. After that, I just let it play for a while. Then I noticed there was a theme. Five or six sings songs in a row (at least) seemed to be about robots in a children’s amusement park, and they all seemed kind of sinister…

We’re not so scary if you see us in the daylight
You’ll be so happy just as long as you survive the night

“Survive The Night” — “Five Nights At Freddy’s”

I looked up a few of those songs, and they are all from a game called “Friday Night At Freddies”. I’ve heard of the game, but I’ve never played it or heard any of the songs from it. From what I have heard so far, it has a killer soundtrack.

I think passwords are the “rotary telephones” of this century. They will have to go away, as soon as someone (probably in Europe, for various reasons) invents something better and then it gets adopted by several large companies and/or countries. But until then… long passwords, 2FA, and trying to get out-of-date security policies to be updated (obsolete policies such as requiring passwords to “expire”, which DECADES of security research have demonstrated make passwords less secure).

If you run into an error in Windows that a file name is too long, here is how to fix it (read the whole article before you do anything).

https://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/how-to-fix-filename-is-too-long-issue-in-windows/

Winaero has a step-by-step tutorial on how to revert Firefox (more or less) to its pre-Proton user interface. I am giving it a try. I have been using Chrome as my default browser for the past day, and I like it better than Protonic Firefox, but not as much as pre-Protonic Firefox.

If you are annoyed that you download images in Firefox and they save as “*.webp”, install this addon.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dont-accept-webp/

If Firefox has updated and now your tabs are huge and you can’ t tell which tab is open by looking at them, you can switch it back. Type “about:config” in the address bar, search for “proton“, and change the “true” values to “false“.

Fun fact! Anyone can place a copyright claim on any YouTube video you post. You can, of course, dispute that claim. Who resolves that dispute? The person who made the claim. And when they decide against you, and for themselves, YouTube will then punish you for disputing the claim.

If that seems ridiculous to you, it’s because it is.

Here is a formula for rounding a number to a specified number of significant digits.

=if(A1=0,0,round(10^(floor(B1-LOG(abs(A1))))*A1)/(10^(FLOOR(B1-log(abs(A1))))))

In this formula, A1 is the cell with the number, and B1 is the cell with the number of significant digits.

Current version of Karelia map, for my maybe-I-will-maybe-I-won’t D&D game. I like the overall look, but I am bumping into limitations in Inkarnate (which is what I used to draw this). namely, there is no way to group objects into, say, “Labels”, or “Rivers”, and change the size, colour, font, etc. in a simple way. Photoshop can do that fairly easily (no great surprise), so I am thinking about doing the landmasses in Inkarnate (which is easy to do with its built-in textures and POI icons) and then doing the rivers and labels in Photoshop.

Alternately, I am playing with the idea of loading this map into Campaign Cartographer (from ProFantasy), and re-drawing it in that program. Campaign Cartographer is a much more powerful mapping program than Inkarnate, and can do everything (or nearly everything) I would like to do in Photoshop. I have owned Campaign Cartographer for literally decades, and have subscribed to their monthly “Cartographer’s Annual” since 2007, but I have never taken the dive into learning it. It has a steep learning curve.

On the other other hand, I am wondering if perhaps I have gone down a rabbit hole on this whole map thing. Maybe I should just declare it “good enough”, and move on to planning the actual game. Maybe.