What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

I did it! I finally made and posted my first text game to an interactive fiction competition on itch. In the process of making it I ended up making all kinds of scripts and tools (including a visual studio code extension) to make the development process easier. All in all, it was a blast and I'm kinda excited to make another one.

I'm slowly moving some of my projects from plain-old "bare" git repositories on my server machine, cloned over SSH, to a personal Forgejo instance I spent a couple of hours spinning up and configuring. Most of the projects will stay private / hidden, but there are one or two which I might host publicly, and for these I've been looking into and debating different permissive licenses- and diving into the complexities of the git rebase functionality.

I've somewhat got a handle on how to interactively rebase an entire project from the root commit, rewording and squashing commits, as well as flattening certain files so that the state looks consistent through the project history*. Another clean-up step which took me some time to figure out was the claiming of all commits in a project history (re-authoring) without resetting the authored / committed dates.

*This allows me to retroactively license code which has yet to be published- I know retroactive re-licensing is a touchy subject, but for code which is entirely written by me, and not-yet publicly accessible, it feels reasonable, and it will hopefully reduce confusion re:licensing of specific tags / versions, etc.

Two interesting things I stumbled on this week:

It's possible to know filesize of files as they are deleted via bpftrace: trace_unlinks_size.bt

 $inode = args.dentry->d_inode;
 $size_bytes = (uint64)$inode->i_size;

My CPU was maxing out due to too many parallel processes which was causing realtime/low-latency processes like audio playback to stutter. I've experienced this problem before but I didn't think to pause processes to reduce the number of active parallel processes; ie. $ unparallel ffmpeg

(I should probably just run these background processes in a systemd slice with a CPUQuota (cgroup) but this is working fine for now...)

I'm working on getting a (relatively) robust backup system going for my important files. My current backup system is, well, shit. I have my main drives, a NAS drive in my PC that I manually copy/paste things into whenever I feel like it, and a 15GB Google Drive for photos and important documents.

On my computer I'm running Linux and a shameful Windows installation, both of which I want to reinstall (Windows to get a better supported version, Linux because in classic Linux user fashion I am dissatisfied with the way I made my partitions last time). Before going through with it I'd like to have everything even slightly important backed up - A broad survey of my entire PC shows that ignoring things like applications, games, and legally acquired TV/films (I can always legally acquire them again in the future), I only really have ~300GB of stuff. Which is, well, kinda trivial to back up honestly. I've bought some cloud storage that I'm going to configure regular automatic backups onto, and now I'm looking at getting a home server of some kind for further redundancy.

A few weekly threads ago I was discussing building a fancy home server, unfortunately that's fallen back into the "things I pretend I'm going to do but will never do" category of ideas, mostly because of choice paralysis and the fact that RAM just got stupid expensive all of the sudden. Maybe when Black Friday rolls around it'll give me the push I need. Until then, I might just buy a Raspberry Pi, stick a NAS drive on it, and use it as a very basic easy option.