This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their week.

If you have any plans, goals, accomplishments, or even failures, whether they be personal or work related, I'd love to hear about them. This is a place for casual discussion about your week, past, present, and future.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this week?

I had a problem uploading a profile photo to Meetup today and so contacted support:

I can't upload a profile photo so am unable to join a number of groups. The photo just fails to upload and have tried a number of different sizes (from 400x400 to over 2000 x 1000) and formats - jpg and png. Something seems to be failing!

I got a fairly quick reply:

What problem do you see when you try to upload a photo? Are you seeing any error messages?

The first thing to check when uploading a photo is the size and format of the image.

Images should be .jpg, .gif, or .png format.
The file size limit is 10MB. (If your file size is already below 10MB, try reducing the size further.)

If your image meets these specifications, send the photo to me as an attachment and I'll take a look. I'll also need the link to the page where you're having trouble uploading the photo.

So I sent the image I was trying to photograph (a photo of me with a camera wearing my Refused tshirt) and received this reply:

Profile photos can't have text in them at all (even words written on clothing). It's one of the most common reasons you might have trouble uploading a profile photo. If your photo has any text or lettering, try uploading a different photo.

If that still doesn't work, the next things to check when uploading a photo are the size and format of the image.

Images should be .jpg, .gif, or .png format.

The file size limit is 10MB. (If your file size is already below 10MB, try reducing the size further.)

If your image meets those technical specifications and is free of text, send the photo to me as an attachment and I'll take a look. It's also helpful if you can send the link to the page where you're having trouble uploading the photo.

What? "Profile photos can't have text in them at all (even words written on clothing)"

I pixelated the word "Refused" from the photo and sure enough after uploading the edited photo, it uploaded.

Confused, I sent a reply:

I've pixelated out the text on my tshirt and that seemed to resolve it. It seems to be strange policy? Any reason for this?

And got this bizarre explanation:

To keep our design consistent across all devices, rich text formatting, embedded images, and embedded videos are not supported.

I've replied back to see if the support person can explain what they mean.

For at least a year I'd been rather disappointed with Fortnite. It kept appealing to the lowest common denominator and the game that I fell in love with in the end of season 2 (which is almost two years ago) kept changing for the worse. It became less of a Battle Royale game and more of a playground where you never knew what you were gonna get. It kept getting worse through the seasons and I played it less and less. So during season 9 I was only barely hanging on - and once season 10 launched with even more proverbial bullshit, I finally decided to uninstall the game. That was in the beginning of August and I never looked back for a second - I was done with it!

With Chapter 2 however (season 11), it's back to basics. The many weapons have been trimmed and there are only very few left - and none of the crazy ones. It's simpler and easier to navigate, and all the vehicles and movement mechanics have also been scrapped almost entirely. There are no more hover boards, ATVs, golf carts, airplanes, jump pads, rifts, etc. There's a harmless boat, and that's it! So when I saw the trailer for this new version of Fortnite, I reinstalled the game immediately. I've played 9 games now and this is the version I fell in love with - if not better! It's so good in its simplicity. The mechanics with building and whatnot have stayed the same, but the gameplay itself is much improved. It went from chaotic and action-packed to feeling more like a survival game. And the aesthetic of the new map is also just beautiful.

I'm no game reviewer but I thought that this overhaul of a pretty massive game is worth talking about!

Edit: not to mention the marketing stunt they pulled before launching this new version of the game was insanely clever. It made headlines all over the world, they even talked about it on the evening news here in little ol' Denmark!

UPDATE: Be on the lookout for Timasomo Post #0 on Friday, October 25!

November, the month of NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month, is coming up. I was thinking we could run a parallel event, though slightly more open in scope.

My idea is to use November here as a "Make Something Month" with pretty much wide open parameters. Write a novel, write poetry, paint landscapes, craft pottery, create delicious recipes, homebrew, code a game, contribute to open source software, do something clever with a Raspberry Pi. Whatever it is you're interested in doing creatively, go for it! I envision something quite self-directed, with the challenge being meeting the parameters you set for yourself rather than any external criteria we come up with. It also doesn't have to be limited to a single project, so maybe you want to tackle a weekly or even daily challenge.

My current vision for how this will work:

I'll post weekly recurring posts (or see if Deimos can schedule them), starting one week before November begins (for planning), continuing through the month with check-ins and feedback and support, and ending with a final showcase post in December where everyone can share their creative works with everyone else.

If this is something that you'd like to participate in, please let me know! Also, if anyone has any ideas for how to run it, please share.

This is sort of a "backlog post" but for real-life: take care of something small that, for whatever reason, you've left unaddressed for too long.

Maybe it's something that keeps ending up on your to-do list but never gets resolved. Maybe your desk is cluttered. Maybe you haven't vacuumed your carpet in a while. Maybe your fridge could use a cleanout. It doesn't have to be cleaning themed, but that's what's coming to mind for me right now, so you can probably guess what mine will be.

Whatever it is, take a few minutes to resolve the issue, then tell us about it here.

• What was the issue?
• Why do you think it kept getting put off?
• How do you feel now that it's done?

Hi all,

I'm looking for some advice regarding how to set up a basic CI regression / testing suite. This isn't my full time job, but a side project my group at work wants to spin up to... shall we say, give us a more real time monitoring of functionality and performance regressions coming out of the underlying software stack development (long story).

As none of us are particularly automation experts, I was looking for some advice from my fellow Tilderinos. Please forgive me if any of the below is obvious and/or silly.

A few basic requirements I had in mind:

1. Can handle different execution environments: essentially different versions of the software stack, both in docker form and (eventually) via lmod or some other module file approach (e.g., TCL), and sensible handling of a node list.

2. Related to one, supports using the products of builds as execution environments. Ideally we'd like to have a build step compile the stack and install it to a NFS from which we can load it as a module.

3. Simple to add tests. Again, this isn't our full time job -- we mostly want to add a quick bash script / makefile / source code or the like to the tests when we run into an issue and forgot about it.

4. Related. We should be able to store the entire thing as a git repo. I have seen this to some extent with Travis, but my experience with Jenkins was... sub-par (is there a history? Changelog? Any way at all of backing up the test config?).

5. Some sort of post-processing capabilities. At a glance we need to be able to see the top line performance numbers for 20-30 apps over the different build environment. Bonus points if there's a graph showing performance vs build version or the like, but honestly a CSV log file is good enough.

6. Whatever CI software we get has to be able to run this locally. Lots of these are internal only numbers / codes. FOSS prefered.

7. A webui for scheduling runs / visualizing results would be nice, but again this could be a bash script and none of us would bat an eye.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!