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I’ve been on a Warhammer 40k bend over the last few months, and today I’d like to talk about the Ciaphas Cain novel series I’ve just finished. WARNING: Very mild spoilers for the Ciaphas Cain series ahead. For those of you who don’t know the Warhammer 40k setting: It’s an utterly dystopian future of eternal war, originally developed as the background for a tabletop wargame. Humanity has spread throughout much of the galaxy under the rule of the superhuman emperor leading superhuman armies on a massive crusade. After a civil war, said emperor is bound to the Golden Throne after having been mortally wounded. It’s somewhat keeping him alive. After he was bound to the throne, he became the God-Emperor and a religion around worshiping him grew up throughout the empire. A myriad of foes, both demons from the Warp and alien races beset the massive empire in what’s basically one big war of attrition. The empire is propped up by the fanatical religion around the God-Emperor and all the in-setting alternatives being no better at all. ...

A few months ago, I wrote about my CI setup for my Smokeweb project, and how I had to take a few workarounds to make it work. And recently, Woodpecker release v3.16.0 fixed a couple of the issues I had. 🎉 If you recall, my main issue was that I couldn’t use Woodpecker’s Service feature. That was due to the fact that I’m using a Ceph RBD StorageClass to provide the pipeline volumes. And those are RWO by nature, meaning they can only be mounted on a single node of my k8s cluster. This, ultimately, meant that if the service for running my test Postgres instance got scheduled on a different node than all of the pipeline steps, there would be a deadlock. The steps won’t be able to start because the pipeline volume is already mounted on the node the Service is running on. ...

This journey is a bit special. I’m off to visiting a friend near Hamburg, in the north of Germany. As I live in the south of Germany, this means an overall distance of around 700 km. The best train connection I could find with only one switchover has me sitting in an ICE for about 6.5 h, with a regional train to get to/from my final destination. The special thing about this journey is that I broke with one of my principles: Never have fewer than 20 minutes for switching trains. In this trip, it’s only 8 minutes. Which is probably going to be fine on the return journey. But on the journey there, it might get rather tricky, considering that that 8 minute switchover happens after a 6.5 h journey over about 700 km. ...

Time for another game review, this time the classical RPG Rogue Trader. IMPORTANT: This review will contain some mild spoilers for the beginning of the story. Rogue Trader is a classical RPG set in the Warhammer 40k universe. It has all of the classical elements of an RPG, from a multi-character party, over round-based combat straight to the fact that there’s a lot of dialogue to read. I played the game on Linux on my Radeon RX 580 without any issue. ...

This is the second post in my series on the YaCy distributed, self-hosted search engine. The main topic this time is getting pages into the search index via crawling. In contrast to search engines like Google, Bing or Kagi, the content of the search index in YaCy is driven by its users. YaCy has an integrated web crawler to crawl pages and add them to the search index. It can be invoked in one of three ways: ...