Been away from this for a minute.
Minor update on the RPi4 cluster, a few months ago I eventually gave up trying to wrangle Microk8s and switched to k3s, another lightweight Kubernetes distribution. So far, it has been far more effortless to maintain. To be honest, I’m still not sure I’m sold on Ubuntu’s whole “snapd” system, (which is how they want you to install Microk8s), but that’s a whole other debate that I’m not fully knowledgeable enough to get into.
Moving on, I’ve been playing around with the idea of trying to fork the source code of Litecoin or something to create my own blockchain and cryptocurrency to use among my friends. I don’t intend for it to be something that has actual value, but more of something for us to jokingly “tip” each other with, in sort of a “Whose Line Is It Anyway” manner, aka “The rules are made up and the points don’t matter!”. Mainly, I think it’ll just be an interesting thing to play around with. On that note, I have also been lightly playing around with Solidity and Ethereum smart contract writing. No clue what I’ll do with any of it, or even if I will, but it’s fascinating to learn about.
Another thing I’ve been playing with is a decentralized server platform called Urbit. They call it an “overlay OS”; you’re still running it as a piece of software on top of a *nix system, but it is its own OS running on what I understand to be a sort of VM that runs a functional programming language developed specifically for this project, called “Hoon”. I’m still learning the language, (and boy is there a learning curve, coming from imperative and OOP-based languages), but the whole project is wild to read about. It has its own p2p networking system built on IDs hosted on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s currently not exactly all that user-friendly to get up and running for the first time, especially since you have to buy your Urbit ID with ETH cryptocurrency, but if you do get online with it, feel free to shoot me a message, my Urbit ID is ~hathec-pilsyx. It’s an odd name, but the ID names on that system are syllabic representations of your actual ID number. Something like that anyway.
Hopefully next time I get the urge to write, I’ll have some substantive progress made on my own projects, be it cosplay, software, or otherwise. If not… Well, see ya’ll in 3 months.