The Expanding Frontier

Creating Sci-fi RPG Resources

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State of the Frontier – Aug 2019

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Okay. This month has been a bit of a roller coaster (and that’s not counting the fact that I got to actually ride roller coasters this month 🙂 ).

Looking Back

As promised, I got out the regular Detailed Frontier timeline post and a post on the module campaign. I also created the sector map based on the region of space from my book Discovery as I had mentioned I wanted to do which highlighted the notation for the third dimension in the maps.

Speaking of the printer. I printed this model by Jay Thruman. It’s about 2″ tall. Bonus points if you recognize the ship.

The post that I wasn’t anticipating was my review of the AnyCubic Photon 3D printer. That one came about as a bit of serendipity. I was at the university library (where I used to work) printing out my poster for the meeting that I went to in Australia at the beginning of the month and they had added an SLA resin printer to the host of other 3D printers. We got talking about it and after seeing some of the prints they were doing, I kind of got excited to maybe get one myself. So I started looking and found that there were some entry level ones for just $300. And then I went on my trip. When I got back, I decided that for $300, I had to take the plunge so I ordered it and have been playing with it all month so I thought I’d write up a review for anyone else that might want to get one to make miniatures with. I mean if creating miniature for game play doesn’t count as creating RPG resources, I don’t know what does. 🙂

The 3D printer was the fun part of the roller coaster that was August. The down side was “off camera” so to speak. Somehow, my web hosting service got hacked and all my websites that were hosted there had malicious code injected into them. So I had to get that all rebuilt and back on-line. It didn’t affect this site as this one is on my home server but it did take the Frontier Explorer site off-line for about a week while I got it all cleaned up. The hack that let the malicious users in was on the webhost side, not my sites since they damaged several different (unrelated and unlinked) sites exactly the same way like they had access to account file system, not the web file system. As I’m writing this, I still don’t have one of the sites back up yet but that should be done in a day or two (probably by the time this posts). It’s my old blog that I haven’t written on since 2013 so I have a perfect backup. It’s just so old, I don’t think it works on the newer infrastructure at the web host so I’m temporarily reinstating it on my home server until I can get it upgraded.

I’ve also been putting some work in on my Star Frontiers novel. I’ve only added about 2200 words this month (and 2800 last month) but I’ve gotten some more organizational stuff done on the manuscript and done some light editing. It’s only about 3000 words shy of being the same size as my Discovery novel and I’m only about 1/4 of the way through the plot. So I’ve got a way to go.

I also posted an opportunity to purchase printed versions of the Extended Frontier Map. The preorders on that are still open and will be until Sept 4th. At which point I’ll be getting the order for the maps placed and get them printed and shipped out.

Looking Forward

September is likely to be a slow month as far as posting goes as I’m going to be doing a bunch of stuff behind the scenes that will probably not translate into posts. I’ll try to get a post out every week but they might be kind of small. There will definitely be the Timeline post as always, and I’ll do one more on the module based campaign, probably covering the Warriors of White Light and Dramune Run modules. Beyond that I can’t really say what will come up.

Behind the scenes I will be continuing to work on my books. I also am probably going to actually start getting Death at Rosegard put together properly.

But the big thing that will probably be taking up my time is an upgrade to my home server and moving websites around. The computer that is running my home server (an old laptop that was 2x faster and more memory that the previous server) is having issues and constantly throwing errors. It doesn’t seem to affect the running of the sites, but it is a cause for worry. Partially I think it is just over-heating and I need to clean it and maybe reapply some thermal paste or replace a fan to get better airflow. That server hosts this site, starfrontiers.info, starfrontiers.us, and starfrontiersman.com, and my old programmingspace.net site (once I get it moved back). So if you see a short interruption on those sites, it’s because I’m working on the server.

That’s just maintenance. I’m planning on actually building a new server with modern hardware (instead of 5 year old hardware) to run the server on. On the hardware side, the amount of memory will be the same but the memory speed will more than double and the CPU will go from 4 cores to 8 with each core being about 60% faster than the older ones so there should be a definite performance increase. I’ll probably also use the computer to do some development on as well but it will primarily be my server. In addition to the hardware upgrade, I’ll be working on upgrading the software infrastructure as well.

I’ll also probably star migrating my sites on the shared webhost back to my home server. I originally moved them off to get increased bandwidth and stability from my now 10 year old server and slower internet connection. But since then I’ve upgraded my internet and with the server upgrade, I will have plenty of processing power and bandwidth so that it make sense to move them back in house where I have a bit more control. Once the migration is done, I’ll be looking to make upgrades to the sites themselves but that a project for several months down the road.

I’m still itching to do another Technical Manual so that project might start this month depending on how the infrastructure work goes. We’ll just have to see.

Your Thoughts

As always, let me know if there are any particular things you like to see me address more here on the blog.

And thank you to all of you reading my blog and especially those supporting me on Patreon. It’s your support that makes things like the server upgrade possible.

planning
August 31, 2019 Tom

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