Monday, March 9, 2015

Map - Temple of the Wanderers


I am fooling around with various temple ideas for a D&D campaign.


This is The Temple of Wanderers. It is a simple mud brick and thatch construction. It is dedicated to the sky. The central dais is for the sun and Mercury. The upper left dais is for Mars, while the right is for Venus. The lower two are Jupiter on the left and then Saturn. Mars and Jupiter are surrounded by red wooden posts and handrails, while the other two daises have yellowish trappings.
The rectangular structure has four stone columns and descends 6 feet into the ground. This space is dedicated to the Moon.

Updated with scanned maps.

click to enlarge
click to enlarge

Monday, February 16, 2015

February 2015 Wordpress Tips

In Wordpress, entering commands for terminal is easy. Obviously you can simply type the words "sudo apt-get..." and hope that everyone removes the quote marks, but there is actually a better way: the code command.
This results in text that looks like this:
this space intentionally left blank
It looks very polished and is ready to paste into the terminal.
On another note, Wordpress will not accept Wordpress code inside the code markup, so I used a screen shot of the example. However, there is a non-intuitive way to show code markup. To use the code tag, you need to be in "text" mode. If you switch from text to visual, the markup code will fail to render correctly.
<code><div>This is an example of incorrectly entered code markup text.</div><code>
Note that the font also did not change.
<code><div>This is an example of correctly entered code markup text.</div><code>
Did you see what I did there?

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Terminal Refresh - Chromebook Users and Terminal

Years ago, I wrote a terminal cheat sheet over on pretendertothepower.com I think it is time for an update.
One command that I misunderstood from the beginning was sudo. This concept troubled me as there is a root account, which is sort of analogous to being an admin on Windows. Windows is bad news, because the admin account is so handy, or worse, required to do many standard things. This is not the case in all the various forms of Linux. xPud is a notable exception as you are always logged in as root.
By way of example, in Windows, the Admin account will not allow you to delete critical files from your system. At least, not without a lot of effort. Linux will happily allow the root user to delete ANYTHING!
Linux Rule One: If you don't know what outcome you need, root is NOT the tool for you.
On the other hand, you can gain temporary access to elevated privileges with the sudo command. This is actually the correct method for gaining privileges. Let's say you want to install some software, and you intend for all users to access it. The sudo command allows a user to gain privileges using their own password, not the root account password. The process creates a log of what is done in /var/log/auth.log; if mistakes are made, you can easily figure out what and when it was done.
In this example of sudo, we are going to install gedit. But we need to get ready for it.
sudo apt-get update
This command will tell your system to go and check what versions you have against what versions are available on the servers. It installs nothing. This is very important, because your linux computer has a local list of software available and it could be out of date. Update, update, Update!
The command for installing is:
sudo apt-get install gedit
Linux is made up of packages of software, in discrete chunks to make it more useable. The command apt-get install will put these packages on your system and make them useable.
You can go ahead and try to run both commands without the sudo. It will throw a nasty looking error.
Ok. Now we have gedit installed. We can open gedit without the sudo command. Type
gedit
As you can see, gedit is a very basic editor. We are going to use our elevated privileges and use gedit to do something a normal user cannot do. I am using a Chromebook with Crouton and I would like my Linux system to default to the $HOME/Downloads directory.
Let's fix this. Type sudo gedit .config/user-dirs.dirs to open the protected .config file.
What is not shown is all the activity in the terminal. At this point, since terminal opened gedit with elevated privileges, you should not close the terminal window.
Go ahead and change the text $Home/Desktop to $Home/Downloads.
I changed them all, but obviously you don't need to do that. Click save. You should see some activities in the terminal window.
Tomorrow we will look at using sudo for other purposes.

Sunday, January 4, 2015

GoDaddy and WordPress Error - The Problem, The Work-a-round and The Fix

Friday evening, I was hit by series of errors from WordPress.
When uploading images, I was confronted by these error messages:
“Unable to create directory wp-content/uploads/2015/01. Is its parent directory writable by the server?”
“The uploaded file could not be moved to wp-content/uploads/2015/01″
Obviously, my permissions were off, but I couldn't figure out where.
The quick and dirty work around was to log into GoDaddy's file management tool and create files and upload images via the tool. Back in WordPress, I needed to select a previously existing image and edit the code to match the files and directories I created in the previous step.
That is not optimal.
The correct answer is to correct the permissions on the server via the file management tool. I made several attempts, but it didn't seem to work:
After calling GoDaddy, I found where I was going wrong.
First and always, log out of WordPress. Second, the items Web Visible and Web Writable need to be ticked on the WordPress upload folder. The directory location is: /wp-content/uploads/. You likely don't have permission to edit the webroot directory, and you shouldn't give that much permission that high up.
In the image above they are not checked, because the Inherit tick disables those options. Untick it.
The other two become active. You can see the problem right away, the folder isn't Web Writable. Tick it.
Yesterday morning, I was not really happy with GoDaddy as the first tech via chat had the correct basic idea but didn't realize that "Inherit" tick disabled my visible/writable ticks. He added insult to injury by telling me he was having my permissions reset. He did not seem to know if this would fix the problem or enable my ability to fix the problem. His "solution" would take 30 minutes to four hours.
Obviously, nothing happened and I called support. These guys are much better. The next agent walked me through the exact same troubleshooting as before, this time informing me that the Inherit boxed disabled the other options. I was on hold longer than it took to fix the problem.
I am general happy with GoDaddy, but the tech I chatted with really didn't know what he was doing. He also didn't actually "reset my permissions" after promising. He also created a bunch of duplicate folders on my peice of their server and didn't delete them. I guess that is easily fixed, but I am annoyed.
The phone tech did every thing I needed, first time but I shouldn't have experienced this problem in the first place. I can't really fault the techs as someone else flipped the wrong switch on me and it certainly wasn't either of them.
At the end of the day, I can't really suggest chat as a support option. 

Monday, December 22, 2014

Maps – The Stave Church

Last week, I did a quick drawing of a Norse-themed building. 

Today, for the winter solstice, I knocked out a floor plan for a fantasy-themed stave church. When sketching this church, I imagined that the parishioners are followers of a river goddess and that the church is very old. 


From the exterior, this church would appear to be several stories high, but the interior shows a largely, airy nave. The church is orientated to the north and is a mirror of a river to the west of the church. Most rivers do not flow north, so this one is special. 

Half Baked Idea - The Demon Core

In my last post, I mentioned a device called the demon core. I know what it looks like, I know that it seethes with power. It is wildly dangerous. 
Aside from that, I know nothing. There was a real device called the demon core. It was 3.5 inch, subcritical mass of plutonium used for testing. In this capacity, it killed two scientists.

Nasty stuff. I may have to revisit this item and flesh it out for use in my campaign.