New Year New Site

Long time no post⌗

I’ve scrapped the old Wordpress site because it was too bloated and I was getting paranoid that someone would eventually find an unpatched vulnerability and I’d lose everything also I really didn’t get enough traffic to warrant the stupid adverts. With the web becoming more and more siloed I didn’t want to help by adding to googles tracking shenanigans. So I’m using Hugo to build a static HTML site, the only down side is that to have comments I’m using Disqus but we’ll have to see if that’s worth it.

I make Games… sometimes⌗

After taking so long to finish up Monotris last year I started working on a long term project I was calling MazeFodder I only managed to keep it up until the end of July. My mistake was that I didn’t start with the basics and over complicated things and lost interest, don’t get me wrong I still think there’s a germ of a game in there I got burned out trying to work on juice too soon in the development.

Life is short, what are you doing with it?⌗

In January this year my dad died and I got to thinking about what I want to do with the rest of my life. I still want to make games and and faff with the internet, but I keep putting things off and wasting time watching YouTube, so I’m trying to organize myself by setting goals and working out ways towards achieving them.

The web is dead, long live the Internet⌗

For sometime now, I’ve had an interest in cyber security and privacy on-line. With the realities of how the tech giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon harvest all the data they can get a hold of about people on-line so they can package it up and sell it to the highest bidder. I’m thinking more and more that I don’t want that for me and my data, but it’s hard to stay in contact with people and still preserve you’re digital self, to control what is known about you. Given that one of my goals is to get back into writing an on-line journal like I had in the mid-90s this might seem contradictory, but I’m the author I get to decide what I share.

With that in mind I don’t see any point in playing in other peoples sandpits any longer. I’ve deleted my facebook account because my sister wouldn’t stop trying to send me messages on it no mater how often I told her I don’t check it and with all the “fun” going on at the bird site I left in favour of Mastodon. The one service I’m having the hardest time dropping is probably the worst offender, Google, I’ve had a gmail account since 2009 and I’ve had my domain email through Google Apps since 2012. e-mail is the one thing I’m not confident on hosting myself, so for the time being that’ll have to stay.

I’ve been hosting my own small home lab of servers for a few years now and I’d like to use them to substitute for the services I get from the bigger companies. I already have a VPN tunnel set up so I can access my own servers when I’m away from home so there’s no problem on that score. I just need to migrate to alternatives to things like Dropbox and maybe if I can back-up my DVD collection I wouldn’t need my netflix subscription… just a thought.