• ValhallaRift.com and its side-projects

    A domain name that I once owned… letting it expire years ago, but got it back summer of 2020. I have two little side projects on this domain… and yes, both revolve around Rift MMORPG. Despite Rift MMORPG’s population being in shambles ten years onward (server stats show no more than 500 people online at any given time in North America as of late 2020), the game still has a nice tight-knit community. I really do wish Gamigo would take the time to revitalize Rift; otherwise, it’s time is coming for it to be set off to the pasture. Anyhow, here’s the two domains… https://events.valhallarift.com https://maps.valhallarift.com Events The events subdomain lists all active zone events on North America and European server cluster. They are broken down into the event name, what server

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  • PrancingTurtle.com

    Prancing Turtle…. no, it’s not what you think it is! PrancingTurtle.com is a DPS / HPS ePeen site for Rift MMORPG raiders. I took up the project from a user known as Hewi in October 2020 and spent a good month editing code, optimizing, and migrating statics to AWS s3. Additionally, I have been optimizing the code on the site so that it loads a smidge faster. I’m hosting the site on my DSL after all, so every bit counts! The code is (for the most part) in C#, there are web assets that are the obvious outlier to the C# bits… but for the most part, the site feels quite easy to code in. Guess that’s due to my previous history with PHP, Java, and JavaScript knowledge. 🙂 With that being

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  • Choosing the right forum software? Is a forum needed?

    Every community has a core somewhere, and it all depends where it would be most ideal. Many will choose a forum or discussion board, others will Use social media mediums, and some may use Discord or some other sort of real-time services as its core community hub. All comes down to the following… Will your game need a repository of historical information that can be easily indexed by search engines? Will your game need a central place for the viewing of news, patch notes/changelogs, and other important details? Does the community lack a common-place that serves as a central hub? Do you want to achieve (hopefully) a centralized community? If the answer was yes to two or more of those items, you’re likely going to need a forum ala discussion board. Now

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  • Volunteer/Paid Moderators For Forums/Discussion Boards – What’s better?

    Let’s take a look at something that all community managers have to do at least once in their career… finding suitable, stable, and above all else, supportive users for your game company and/or game title(s) – on a volunteer basis to be a moderator of your community. Most of the time, finding the right folks for the task is rather tedious, as their posting habits and history may preempt them from even being considered in the first place. This is even more apparent when you have a mature community.

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  • Updated Guide: Weewx, Nginx, Belchertown, MQTT/WS

    This is an updated and streamlined guide for the installation of Weewx 4.x, with the Belchertown 1.1 GUI, Nginx, the MQTT/WebSockets extension, mosquitto, and Let’s Encrypt, because well – WebSockets require SSL… on a new Debian 10 installation. The old guide can be found here – which is a mess and shouldn’t be used. Things to keep in mind… Fresh Debian 10 server installation – only thing installed apart from the default packages: SSH Server. Using Nginx, MySQL (MariaDB) for the general heave-ho’ing of data. No need for PHP or FPM here! Note: MySQL in my instance is on a remote machine. This is to minimize read/writes to the Virtual Machine disk. Once Weewx is installed and fully configured, and you want to use MySQL/MariaDB for your database operations… head over to

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  • Product Review: Amcrest IP5M-T1179EW-28MM

    It’s not often I get the chance to review a product, much less a CCTV item! Today, I am reviewing the Amcrest 5MP UltraHD eyeball camera, or IP5M-T1179EW-28MM as the model code.

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  • Involving the community in newsletters / Email Blasts

    Community involvement is key in growth for new prospective customers and no less, customer retention. Especially more so with keeping the wider community in the loop with smaller-scale community events. As always, not everyone will subscribe to an email/newsletter, but it will provide an incentive for users to subscribe! Fast forward many months, or years down the road, not only do you have a subscriber base that can be quite large, you will likely retain a rather high percentage of users, new and old, that will still read the newsletter. Such will be extremely beneficial on upselling current customers’ new DLC/Digital Content when large content updates are released. When I assisted with the Elite Dangerous newsletter content, on a week to week basis for the better part of two years, I pieced

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  • Dumping all frames from a video file with VideoLAN

    There are so many guides on the internet, and unfortunately, not a single one of them satiated my desire for what I wanted to do! So below is a nice one-liner to, you guessed it, dump just about every frame from a video, with VideoLAN via the PowerShell/command prompt. The TLDR: Go to where you have VideoLAN installed, for me it is C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC Ensure you have a dump/output folder created – probably best to have it in the same location that the video file is sourced at. For me, it is aptly named output in the Documents folder. Modify the command above to whatever you see fit for the output directory. The command arguments used above explained: –video-filter=scene – Forces VLC to use the Scene module. –scene-format=png – If you want

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  • CenturyLink & IPV6 with pfSense 2.4+

    Over the years, IPv6 has been on the up and up in terms of implementation and usage. pfSense has had native IPv6 support since the 2.x series, unfortunately, CenturyLink’s IPv6 implementation has been riddled with ‘fun road bumps’ along the way – be it downtime, slowness, among other fun routing issues observed. CenturyLink (as of early 2020) still does not provide static IPv6 allocations to Fiber or DSL customers – it still remains as DHCP (of sorts). Before you continue onward with this article, please keep in mind the following… Your DSL Modem is in ‘bridge mode’ and NOT ‘routing mode’. Your pfSense install is 2.4.x or newer. You are aware of the CenturyLink region that you’re in. As some regions do not require the VLAN 201 tag on WAN port! I’ll

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