I knew I couldn’t stay away from the automation bug for much longer. So I spent a good day or so familiarising myself with Hugo’s Templating and how Data Templates work. With a bit of trial error and a lot of squinting at syntax errors, I’ve managed to come up with a fairly good system.
Firstly, I extended the syntax in the params section of the config.yaml. You can now eschew the max and now keys and instead provide a file:
Earlier this year, I started to track progress for my painting challenge. It’s been going well and I’ve a lot of fun tracking the numbers and seeing them go up. One thing I was keen on though, was to improve the update process. Updating the markdown page for the challenge and calculating the percentage progress by hand, is hardly difficult or time-consuming, but anyone who’s read my blog will know that I like automating things.
Ten more join the fray Back in 2019 at Christmas, I got the Hail Caesar starter set, called “Roman Invasion of Britain” from my wife. It sat around for a while as I tried to get through the mountain of ASOIAF miniatures that I stil had to paint, but after I finished the Cthulhu boardgame, it was time to turn my attention to the Romans. After reading the contents list more carefully and taking a look at the sprues, I realized that there were 40 Romans in the box and 80 Britons!
It’s (well-past) the end of January and I’ve managed to make an unbelievable amount of proress on this year’s painting challenge. I managed to paint a good 35% of my yearly target. At this rate, I’ll be done by the end of March, which would be quite the accomplishment given my usual painting speed.
The Roman part of the boxset is now complete. I had 20 remaining Romans as well as the Scorpio + crew.
This series hasn’t received a lot of updates over the past couple of years while I’ve been slowly making my way through the Cthulhu - Death May Die box. It took me almost a year and a half to actually paint them all1 but, I finilly finished the last mini: Cthulhu itself. Take a look.
He's always looking at you You can find pictures of all the investigators, cultists, minor monsters and bosses on my Instagram page2.
This Christmas brought a brand new 8Gb Raspberry Pi 41. I was very excited, the processing power and memory are insane for such a tiny single-board computer! I dind’t just want to turn it into any other raspberry pi server2. I wanted to do something special. Then I came across a YouTube video3 that gave me the winning idea: Turn my Raspberry Pi into a Virtual Machine host!
I’ve linked the video above, so you can watch it for yourself.
Backup a sec A while back I wrote a post about restic, which is a great backup solution for incremental, encrypted backups. I played around with it for a bit, created an Ansible playbook to install it on my machines and made it simple to use by only having to add an entry to a file. Since then I’ve not used it again1. Like most backup solutions, it just sort of sat there and didn’t do much.
When I started writing this blog, I had put aside a spare Raspberry Pi as kind of “dev” server. A place I could freely install stuff, test out code and run my Ansible playbooks. The main reason to keep this separate from the server which runs all my services was because there was limited disk space on the server1.
One of the biggest challenges was to keep my version of hugo up-to-date and to remember not to publish my blog entries with the draft switch enabled2.
Voila, regiment number two fighting for the Starks. These guys were a lot quicker to paints than the first one, mainly because I already had a finished color scheme to rely on. It was also much quicker to paint the white wolves on their shields and tunics. Originally I would use a Ceramite White basecoat and then White Scar on top. This always turned out to a lumpy texture, something I’ve since learned is due to the pigment being Titanium Oxide, which is tends to clump.
Elizabeth, Ian, Fatima, Ahmed, Morgan The last batch of the ten investigators that come in the Cthulhu: Day May Die board game are finally done! You might have seen them posted on my Instagram, which always gets updates first when it comes to minis.
They now join the first five for a complete set of investigators. Now the work starts on the cultists and then the various monsters.