#160

Oct 10, 2021

Work

This week we got another couple of big bits of the integration work done, or near to it:

That’s… kind of it. Unless something unforeseen comes up when we start testing user migration, all that’s left to go is to prepare all the production configuration, so we can switch over when it’s go time.

Books

This week I read:

Gaming

This week I ran a session zero for my new Traveller campaign, where we talked about the sort of game we want to run, and then got through character creation. No deaths in character creation this time, but my players have already thrown me a bit of a curveball: two of them got ships as benefits. So I’ll need to figure out how to handle that.

I’m planning to run this campaign as much more of an episodic sandbox style game than I’m used to, so I’m looking forward to things taking off. It’ll be a bit linear in the beginning, as I present them with a series of adventures and missions to help embed them into the game world but, once they start making NPC connections and learning about things going on elsewhere, I hope to be able to turn them loose and make the campaign more-or-less entirely player-driven.

Miscellaneous

This week I discovered that you can get systemd to create a FIFO for the stdin (or -out, or -err) for a service, which is handy for things like a Minecraft server where being able to send text directly to the running process is useful (and, indeed, necessary some times).

You just need to define a socket service, like this minecraft-stdin.socket:

[Unit]
Description=stdin for Minecraft Server

[Socket]
ListenFIFO=%t/minecraft.stdin
Service=minecraft.service

And attach it to your unit file, like this minecraft.service:

[Unit]
After=network.target
Description=Minecraft Server Service

[Service]
Sockets=minecraft-stdin.socket
StandardInput=socket

(...boring other service definition stuff here...)