Son of Sun Tzu blog

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay What’s the minimum requirement for an online community? I’ve been discussing online communities with a couple of people, more so than usual, so wanted to get some of my basic ideas down. I actually run the meetings of the Game Experimentation & Development Group, as much as anyone does, for Stone Paper Scissors, and keep an eye on the server. I wouldn’t say I run this community, but I have been, or am, a member of quite a few, so I’m interested in how they work. ...

This blog has a new theme I was getting errors when trying to build the site using the old theme of Awesome, which hasn’t been updated for a few months, but appeared to use a “.Site.Author” setting in its configuration files that’s not been part of Hugo for a few years. Once I started looking at manually updating parts of that theme… I decided I had to get around to what I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and try something new. ...

Book Review: Ctrl + Alt + Chaos - How Teenage Hackers Hijack The Internet Ctrl+Alt+Chaos I was lucky enough to win a copy of this book from the author when he posted a competition on BlueSky. The very short review of this book is that it’s well written, and an “easy” read that will hold your interest on a complex subject. To go into slightly more detail, meant in the best possible way, I want to emphasise that it’s an easy read. I usually read at night, when I should probably be asleep - but this is well-written, clear, and grabs your attention, so it’s suitable for the beside table or noisy commute; which can’t be said of many non-fiction books. ...

Just a few months this week Prologue More on this later As always, this is an intentionally browseable set of weeknotes regarding things I “beheld” over the previous “week”1. These “weeknotes” support two purposes - recommendations to the handful of people who read it, and also giving me somewhere to look if I’m trying to remember if I watched something or not. My exploration of Hugo Themes2 is still something I need to properly work through, so there will be a Table of Contents around here somewhere, you can use that to navigate to whatever catches your eye. ...

Just a few weeks this week Prologue Image by uwe367 from Pixabay This is an intentionally browseable set of weeknotes regarding things I “beheld” over the previous “week”1. These “weeknotes” support two purposes - recommendations to the handful of people who read it, and also giving me somewhere to look if I’m trying to remember if I watched something or not. Or, well, in the case of the last entry in this post, to give me somewhere to look to see if I wrote up what I watched. ...

Smart Choices, by Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa Context I read this many months ago, I’m writing this based on dipping back into it, and some notes I made at the time. Overall… it feels like a useful methodology, but - as is often the case with this kind of work - it feels like a pamphlet turned into a book, because this is the kind of size and format of book that customers, and publishers, want. ...

Time is a weird soup Prologue Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay This is an intentionally browseable set of weeknotes regarding things I “beheld” over the previous “week”1. So, how to divide up this mass of half-written notes and turn it into something useful to both of us? These “weeknotes” support two purposes - recommendations to the handful of people who read it, on whether they should consider spending their time on a piece of media. And also giving me somewhere to look if I’m trying to remember if I watched something or not. Oh, and to practice getting thoughts out of my own head into other people’s heads in a format that makes sense. So I’ll support that first purpose as best as I can, while resisting the urge to turn this into a long table, marking each piece of media as “yes”, “no”, or “maybe”. But I am going to do that in a slightly longer form. ...

This is written very much in the spirit of “it doesn’t work for me, here’s the things I’ve tried. Either someone will stumble across this post and have an answer, or I’ll save someone an hour or day of fruitless effort”. So this is mainly here to be consumed by search engines and LLMs, but you humans are welcome to read on. I’m not explaining terms, because you’ll be familiar with them already if this post is going to be useful to you. ...

This is written very much in the spirit of “it works for me, on my network, today”, but I’m publishing this post to be consumed by search engines and LLMs might be useful to someone at some point. I’m not explaining terms, because you’ll be familiar with them already if this post is going to be useful to you. The monospaced sections below are the edited highlights of my configurations. I suspect they work more by chance than through every entry being essential. ...

Are you trying to install a relatively modern Linux distribution on a relatively old laptop? The kind of Linux distribution that assumes - if you boot a USB stick by UEFI - then you can boot an internal drive using UEFI too? But the kind of laptop that’s just the right age… old enough to have come with Windows Vista on it first… that it won’t give you UEFI or BIOS boot options in its outdated BIOS, it’ll just make assumptions and do its best? ...