The site now has a new theme! It's called Sandstone and is based off a Bootswatch theme for Bootstrap of the same name - find it here. I like it quite a bit - and have chosen it to be a bit less dark themed.

There's lots of small little changes that I've made to the theme, and the site as a whole.

WEBSITE CHANGES

• Footer now has a new badge, and copyright message
• Homepage now loads the latest 3 blog posts instead of the WHOLE blog and limiting the display to 3 times (efficiency, yay!)
• The site's back end is a mess and needs to be updated, but the front-end is starting to look pretty nice! :)
• The main menu is now nicer, with correctly rendered highlighted glowing text to indicate where you are
• There's now a user account system! You can sign up, and... not really do anything yet, haha!
• New monthly playlist on the right hand side from Spotify, this is now a configuration option in the back end for me
• Page header backgrounds are now dynamic and change based on the time of day you're visiting the site!

Background Wallpapers

The dynamic background wallpapers are actually available and locally hosted - you can find them here:

• Dawn (5am to 8am)
• Morning (8am to 11am)
• Noon (11am to 3pm)
• Afternoon (3pm to 6pm)
• Evening (6pm to 8pm)
• Night (8pm to 11:30pm)
• Midnight (11:30pm to 2am)
• Twilight (2am to 5am)

There's a lot of changes to work through and process; if you notice any issues, feel free to leave a comment and let me know! You can actually do that, now :)

FUTURE PLANS

• Create a personal Minecraft Server
• Create a personal Factorio Server
• Implement some unique Minecraft Server features, such as player inventory conversion

So currently my various projects (including this very blog) are organised via a combination of Visual Studio Team Services, and Bitbucket deployments. Really, the only major problem is - this costs me money, something to the tune of about $50 a month. Doesn't sound like much, but why pay for something when I could put in a little bit of effort, and create my own personal self-hosted service that remains within my own control?

Data sovereignty isn't usually something that worries me too much, but with recent direction in the way things go (GDPR, etc) - it stands to reason that I should probably pay greater attention to my own privacy.

So the question is - what replaces what from FOSS to Paid services?

• Git Repo storage - this is fairly easy, I can replace it with GOGS - which I have indeed used before
• Ticket tracking - again, handled by GOGS
• Automated CI/CD - this is both easy, yet harder. I can build pipelines using Jenkins

Overall, that essentially covers what I need.

Here goes nothing.

Previously one of the projects I mentioned in my last blog post was Project Stronghold - where I build basically something akin to a games room/home office. I quite enjoy retrogaming - and a good deal of modern gaming (on consoles or PC, or in VR) as well.

I just thought I'd post here to present an inspiring picture of how I'd like to attach most of the controllers in this situation:

Obviously, the cabinetry in my own home is not like this - with different shelving and configurations to consider. But I'd like some form of storing these controllers in the room I intend to utilise, for the next few years.