BLENDER 2.8 HAS REACHED LIGHT SPEED!

With the release of Blender 2.8 I figured it was time to dive back in and see what all the hype was about. I immediately noticed a much cleaner, and much improved user interface. The software really feels like it’s reached the modern generation, huge kuddos to the development team! Due to all the changes, and my time away from Blender I needed a little help relearning the fundamentals. This was where the official Blender channel blew me away.

LORD OF THE RINGS CARD GAME TRACKER

Lately, I’ve been playing a bit of The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game by Fantasy Flight . The game is seriously fun and quite strategic. Like most strategy games, there is a lot of token and phase tracking, something I thought could be easier with a simple web application! Introducing LotR TCG Tracker !

DIGITAL TABLE TOP BOX

After seeing a lot of people in the community building either digital tables or boxes I decided to give it a shoot. A couple of 1x6 and hardware from the local bulk store, and an affordable Insignia 32-inch 720p HD Smart LED TV from Amazon.

INSPIRATION FOR A GUILDMASTERS' GUIDE TO RAVNICA CAMPAIGN

After picking up D&D Dungeons & Dragons - Guildmasters’ Guide to Ravnica I quickly realized how easy it would be to use Magic Inspiration for the Ravnica setting. This application’s source code can be found on my Github.

USING MAGIC THE GATHERING ART FOR D&D IDEAS

Recently I’ve spent a bit time reading some of Dragon+ Magazine articles, one particularly grabbed my attention. Using Magic Cards as D&D Items presents a very interesting way to craft items, using Magic the Gathering cards, one can gain inspiration for their next +1 Dagger, or even an Elven Stronghold. I think the reason I so quickly latched on to this idea was because Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons are two of my favorite games, plus I really dig the Ixala art work, I mean who hasn’t fantasized about riding a dinosaur to work.

PYTHON PANDAS AND D&D MONSTERS

As you may be aware the Dungeon Brawl application I’ve been working on defines monsters in YaML format (check out the data/monsters directory) . I thought it would be interesting to load this data in to Pandas and do a bit of data analysis. Loading Data While in the Dungeon Brawl repository I started up an ipython shell, then import a couple libraries: In [1]: import yaml In [2]: import glob In [3]: import pandas Next I need to find each of my monster’s YaML documents, these files reside in the data directory.

RASPBERRY PI WEATHER STATION

Well it’s been a little over two week and the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B weather station has held up; figured now would be a good time to go a little deeper into the setup. Telegraf has been solid in ingesting my JSON documents periodically, lets have a look at it’s SensorTag configuration:

cat /etc/telegraf/telegraf.d/sensor_tag.conf [[inputs.exec]] command = "cat /sensor_tag.json" data_format = "json" name_suffix = "_sensor_tag" interval = "60s" This telegraf configuration inserts the output of /sensor_tag.

GRAFANA 5.X RUNNING ON RASPBERRY PI

Got around to upgrading my Raspberry Pi 3 Model B weather station with a newer version of Grafana, the Debian packages for ARM are hosted on Grafana’s download page under ARMv7 . Moving from a 2.x word to a 5.x has been impressive, most notably the drag, drop, and resize functionality. I’m still using InfluxDB and Telegraf to store and populate my time data points. Latest Raspbian’s (stretch) comes with Influx 1.

FILE NOT FOUND!

I’ve seen it before, a customer deletes a file and then needs it restored. Normally a challenging request, but under special circumstances a process may have the file opened. While showing my son some fun and exciting Linux security scenarios, I recalled all those times I was able to recover data from the /proc (in memory) filesystem. In order to visualize this scenario I threw together a small Dockerfile and had him poke around:

DUNGEON BRAWL

In order to re-familiarize myself with MongoDB I decided to write a little web application utilizing it as a backend datastore. Dungeon Brawl is a Python Flask app that runs inside Docker with the help of docker-compose. Using this application a Dungeon Master can easily track all things combat for their Dungeons and Dragons group. Grab the source code from Github , or check out a demo .