Sometimes I play minecraft. Sometimes I play a lot of minecraft and sometimes I just stop playing for months. Lately when I do play, I’ve bene playing with a slightly modified version of Tekkit and running my own server. I have a VPS that I probably under use, so I decided to run the server there for when I do play with my friends.

My VPS is not very powerful, and running a Minecraft server when I stop playing for months is a huge waste of resources. I sought a way to automatically bring the server up when I wanted to play and shut it down when I wasn’t playing for a while.

I wear my tinfoil hat proudly. I block ads, and JavaScript, and tracking cookies. I use HTTPS everywhere, I encrypt all my hard drives, I used randomly generated passwords, and I would encrypt all my emails if anyone else bothered to use GPG. I even run my own mail server, and have been considering running my own CalDAV and CardDAV server ...

But lately, I’ve been thinking maybe I should allow some ads and tracking, and let Google or Apple manage some of my data.

I’m converting my blog and website to Frog/Scribble.

This is my first post.

I like it better than Octopress. I get Racket and Scribble for templating, Markdown or Scribble support for blogging and pages, and I don’t need Ruby. The conversion process was dead simple, given that Octopress posts were already in Markdown.

FASTR is a bill to ensure all publically funded research is open access. I urge you all to contact your congresspeople and demand they support this bill.

I finally switched my blog from WordPress. Despite my aversion to ruby, I went with Octopress. It’s a little easier to work with and has a slightly nicer default infrastructure.

I have a Windows partition on my machine, because sometimes there are things wine can’t handle, and sometimes I need more performance than VirtualBox can handle.

So recently I’ve been getting all my games to run under linux. As part of this process, I’m learning all about my ATI drivers, because graphics drivers are universally terrible. However, under linux, you can tinker more freely to make them (slightly) less terrible.

I like minecraft, a lot, on occassion. But it needs a few tweaks for me to really get into it. I’m going to document them now:

So I use Vim as my primary editor. Unfortunately, some applications I require (e.g. Proof General) run only on the Emacs operation system, which comes with a terrible editor. Thankfully, I’ve found a pretty decent port of Vim to Emacs, called (appropriately) Evil.

A while back, I got really sick of sometimes accidentally rm-ing a file. I thought “Woe is me, if only I had a command that, instead, hid the file away from me, in a place I knew of but didn’t really thing about, so I could recover it if I wanted it.”.