The goal of this post is to act as a sort of documentation for myself of the things I have setup on it and where possible the reasoning for it.

Mac System Settings

• Apple ID: Sign in
• Keyboard: key repeat = fast, delay until repeat = short
• Trackpad: 3/4 tracking speed, tap to click, click = light, natural scroll = off
• Finder: Show Library, show hidden files, show path to dir

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

• Dock: Hide and show dock, increase size, remove most default apps, align on left of screen.

• Set background to Steins Gate Background I’ve been using this background since at least 2013 and probably before. If anyone has a higher quality copy of this image please send it on.

Programming

• homebrew

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

# add brew to default shell path
echo >> /Users/scottomalley/.zprofile
echo 'eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"' >> /Users/scottomalley/.zprofile
eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"

• Install iTerm2

brew install --cask iterm2

Set global hotkey CMD + §, Set theme: Solarized Dark.

Set LS Colors export LSCOLORS=gxfxbEaEBxxEhEhBaDaCaD,

Install oh-my-zsh,

Install and configure Powerleve10k

• Install fnm

brew install --cask fnm
# Add the config to `.zshrc`
eval "$(fnm env --use-on-cd --shell zsh)"

• Install git

brew install --cask git
git config --global init.defaultBranch main
git config --global user.name "scottomalley"
git config --global user.email <email redacted>

• IDEs I’ve been trying zex recently, with the reliable VSCode as a backup.

brew install --cask zed
brew install --cask visual-studio-code

Utilities

brew install --cask alfred
brew install --cask bettertouchtool

Chat and Gaming

brew install --cask signal
brew install --cask steam
brew install --cask telegram
brew install --cask discord

This is where I’m leaving it for now. I’ll come back to this and add additional details as I make more changes.

Here is a summary of the steps I followed to migrate a blog from Gatsby to Hugo:

Initial setup

My sites code lives in github and I host on netlify. My domains DNS is handed off to netlify’s DNS servers and I’m pretty happy with how it’s worked the past few years so I don’t feel like changing this.

My first step is to install Hugo. I split my dev between Mac OS and Windows. On Mac I used brew to install Hugo, On windows I used winget

Mac: brew install hugo

Windows: winget install Hugo.Hugo.Extended

Once installed I used the following to scafold out my site.

hugo new site new.omalley.dev --format toml

I initially used JSON as my config lanugage of choice but swapped to TOML as it allowed for easier multi-line strings and less typing to make changes.

Theme setup

I have to admit after spending hours trying to theme gatsby the hugo submodule approach to themes was a breath of fresh air. I’ve chosed the very popular Papermod theme as it has most of the features I want and looks close enough to my original theme that it shouldn’t be so jaring for anyone coming to the site.

In the site directory run:

git submodule add --depth=1 https://github.com/adityatelange/hugo-PaperMod.git themes/PaperMod git submodule update --init --recursive

and then update your hugo.toml

theme = "PaperMod"

Netlify Integration

I really love Netlify for it’s ease of use. It’s been my go to providor for spinning up new sites or small projects. I only had to add a few things to a netlify.toml file to get the branch deploys working as expected. Other than that it worked OOTB

[context.deploy-preview]
command = "hugo --gc --minify --baseURL ${DEPLOY_PRIME_URL}"

Content Migration

Thankfully this was reletively simple. Both Hugo and Gatsby use markdown for their posts and the headers are similar enough that I could just copy paste the content. I did have to play with the URL generator to map the original URLs so that they’ll still work. Additioanlly I had to make a breaking change to where the old images are stored and linked. Rather than being in the static/images folder they now live alongside their posts.

Observability

In order to get some additional info as to who may or may not be viewing my site I looked for some “free” analytics. I could have continued to use Google Analytics, but I wanted to see what was available that could be more privacy focused. I settled on PostHog as I’ve heard good things and they were relatively easy to integrate by dropping in a script tag.

I created a new folder in my hugo site called layouts/partials and added a new file called extend_head.html. This allows me to drop in the PostHog script to the site without having to manually edit the theme.

Wrapping Up

With that the migration is complete. I’m happy with the results and I hope you are too. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to reach out.

Error: Cannot find module 'xpc-connection'
Require stack:
- /Users/scottomalley/Projects/Nordic-Thingy52-Nodejs/node_modules/noble-device/node_modules/noble/lib/mac/highsierra.js
- /Users/scottomalley/Projects/Nordic-Thingy52-Nodejs/node_modules/noble-device/node_modules/noble/lib/mac/bindings.js
- /Users/scottomalley/Projects/Nordic-Thingy52-Nodejs/node_modules/noble-device/node_modules/noble/lib/resolve-bindings.js

Thankfully a few fine folks came together to create @abandonware and have forked and updated noble, and a quick hack of replacing the existing noble reference with the @abandonware one on the surface seems to resolve my problem, but I don’t think this is a particularly elegant solution.

Replacing a dependency of a dependency

Digging into the Thingys Node library we can see that it’s not actually relying directly on Noble. Instead it uses a small wrapper made by the same author called noble-device. Meaning I can’t just replace the noble dependency the way I’d done in my quick fix previously.

$ npm list --depth 1
thingy52@1.0.4
└─┬ noble-device@1.4.1
 └── noble@1.9.1

npm overrides

npm version 8.3 was released in December 2021 and while it’s a minor release it did include a very useful feature “overrides”. npm overrides as the name describes lets you replace a dependency in your tree. Previously the only way to do nested dependency control was to fork and fix it yourself, so this is a welcome change that brings npm inline with similar features in yarn and pnpm Looking at our dependency tree above, if we were to go the forking route we’d have to fork noble-device to update its version of noble and either fork thingy52 or get a PR opened to the base repo to use our forked version. But with overrides we can add the following to our package.json

"overrides": {
   "noble-device": {
       "noble": "npm:@abandonware/noble@1.9.2-15"
   }
}

which will instruct npm to install our override in place of the original dependency.

$ npm list --depth 1
thingy52@1.0.4
└─┬ noble-device@1.4.1
 └── noble@npm:@abandonware/noble@1.9.2-15

There are a number of ways you can customise which dependency is replaced and in what situation. You can also be more targeted by specifying only to replace in certain situations. Below we only replace foo if bar is version 2.0.0

"overrides": {
   "bar@2.0.0": {
     "foo": "1.0.0"
   }
 }

You can also use it to standardise across your project. The below override will make foo always be v1.0.0 regardless of what any dependency requests.

{
 "overrides": {
   "foo": "1.0.0"
 }
}

Additionally it’s important to note that the overrides only take effect in the top level project. This means if I was to PR the change to the Thingy library, it would only work if I was running the Thingy library itself. To have it take effect in my own project I need to specify it there.

With the override in place if we run our original example from the Thingy reference library it will successfully execute and start looking for the Thingy

node ./examples/environment.js
Reading Thingy environment sensors!

With that solved I’m able to continue with my temp tracking project for the fridge!

Hopefully this helps anyone who is looking to fix broken dependencies!

What kind of app do I want to make?

At a high level the app will allow a DM to prepare the inventory of the different mercantile establishments based on the published source material.

Most campaigns in DnD will have the players eventually visit a market or some other type of store within their setting. The DMs guide usually will state that the store will sell anything from the Equipment Section of the Players Handbook under X value in GP.

This isn’t particularly useful as the list in the PHB is very long and isn’t sortable (being paper for the physical books and just a table in digital form).

What do I want the app to do

Let’s write a user story… kindaW

As a DM:

• I should have a way to filter the PHB equipment list to specify the min/max GP value of items that are available in a store.
• I should be able to provide a link to players to view a non editable and printable final list
• I should have the ability to modify the pricing of items based on a multiplier, e.g. equipment list < 50GP * 10
• I should be able to filter by equipment type (Weapons could be at a blacksmith, magic components at an apothecary)
• I should be able to filter by source book, there are many items in the new adventures that may need to be included.

Optional non user story extras

• Lightning fast however possible, should load really really really fast. Additionally dev experience should be fast too! This is optional for now but I really like the idea of trying to optimize a webapp as much as possible.

• The printed list should look like a player handout similar to https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/

• Expand the tool to include rolls on the trinkets table.

How do I make it

This is an easy enough choice for me, I want the resulting lists to be sharable via a link and I’m a full-stack engineer. I’ll make it a react app bootstrap’d by create-react-app. I’ll probably eject it at some stage and may look at using something other than webpack as the bundler.

Where will it live?

I’ve been using Netlify for the better part of a year and see no reason to stop. Their free tier has everything I need.

I think I have enough to start putting together a skeleton app. Once I start writing some code I’ll have a better idea of what takes priority.

The prep

The one-shot I ran is called the Wolves of Welton. It’s a free module from Winghorn press for DnD 5e. In addition I read nearly all the Encounter of the Week posts on dndbeyond.com to get ideas of how things could be fit in should my players go off the rails.

As we were playing online over discord I elected to use Roll20 to give my players a virtual tabletop to better see encounters and interact with NPCs. For the maps I mainly got assets off Reddit and Pinterest linked to the Wolves of Welton

For character sheets I used dndbeyond.com in conjunction with the Beyond20 browser extension to allow my players to roll from their character sheets into Roll20 directly which saved a lot of setup hassle.

The game

The game was pretty standard, I’d originally budgeted 3-4 hours to complete the one-shot, But in total it took closer to 5. Additionally I had planned for 4-5 players in the game, but ended up with only 2 on the day. This was mostly due to me not setting a date and time for the game when I asked people to play and having to deal with a 9 hour difference in time zones for some players.

Some other thoughts

While reading the different encounters I noticed there’s a recurring theme to reference the equipment list in order to generate the inventory for stores in game. It was the only thing I didn’t find a tool for specifically which I found weird. There really should be an app for that.

My D&D game has moved online with our DM opting to stream a copy of Fantasy Grounds via Discord and have each of us speak our actions though a group voice chat. This has worked pretty well for the most part, save for a few of our members only having access to phones currently which can make viewing the stream difficult. With my Nexus 9 gathering dust for a few years now I figured it was an opertune time to try repurpose it for one thing, watching streams on Discord.

The Nexus 9 was a premium tablet in 2014, a 9 inch display powered by a 64bit NVIDIA tegra K1 dual-core processor at 2.3GHz and 2GB of DDR3 memory. Subsiquent android updates and the addtion of full disk encryption caused the tablet to lag and become pretty unusable.

The objective for this project is install a stripped down version of Android (SlimROM), remove full disk encryption and install the Discord app on the tablet.

Installing a custom recovery

By default you can’t install a custom version android easily, we need to remove a few barriers first. The first being a custom recovery tool which will allow us to flash the new image.

A breif search of reddit and XDA Developers indicated that the custom recovery I’d used in the past (clockwork recovery) was no longer being actively developed and I should use a project called TWRP instead. Their website was quite informative and most importantly had support for the Nexus 9. The link above details the steps required to install, but I will sumerise below.

• Downloaded the latest version of TWRP for the Nexus 9
• Downloaded a standalone version of Androids platform tools.
• Place the TWRP image in the same folder as your platform tools.
• Enabled USB debugging

  On your device, go into Settings -> About and find the Build Number and tap on it 7 times to enable developer settings. Press back and go into Developer Options and enable USB debugging.

• Open a terminal and use adb to reboot to the bootloader adb reboot bootloader
• Use fastboot to flash the image fastboot flash recovery twrp.img
• Then use the on screen commands to reboot to recovery, this should allow you to boot TWRP.

Installing the custom rom

Next we’re going to install the custom rom. For this we need to downloaded Slimrom for the Nexus 9 and a copy of the open source google apps. I’ve elected to go with pico as it’s the smallest available to get the play store working.

• In TWRP, go to Wipe -> Format Data, this will remove the encryption on the data partition.
• Go to Advanced Wipe and wipe all partitions
• In a terminal on your computer use adb to transfer over the slimrom and gapps images.
  • ./adb push slimrom.zip /sdcard
  • ./adb push gapps.zip /sdcard
• In TWRP flash slimrom and then gapps
• Restart the tablet and it should now boot into slimrom.