I’ve been hearing about Podman for a while now - at Red Hat Summit and at various local Red Hat presentations. I’ve seen the slides where the RHEL presenter (it’s always the same guy, but I’m terrible with names - after a bit of research, I think it’s Dan Walsh) asks you to pledge to call them container images, not Docker images, etc. But up until now, even though I’m a huge Red Hat fan, I’ve continued to use Docker as my container engine because I am just running a few containers for myself. I don’t even use a one-machine Docker Swarm. I use docker-compose. And that’s just not something that Podman is ever going to officially support. This makes sense because Red Hat is thinking enterprise. And in the enterprise there are two scenarios: 1) Orchestration - vanilla Kubernetes, OpenShift, etc - and 2) are devs running docker run (or podman run) to test the images before putting them into the orchestrator. I’m an anti-pattern, even if I’m not the only one doing things this way.

When I tried to upgrade the laptop a couple days ahead of the Tuesday release date, assuming that the sources were as good as gold at that point, the upgrade process complained about the Kdevelop Python plugin and didn’t want to proceed. I figured if this persisted past Tuesday I would just use it as an opportunity to try out PyCharm Community Edition. But once Tuesday came around I was able to upgrade to Fedora 31 with nary a problem. So that was probably the smoothest upgrade I’ve had since Fedora Core 1.

Back when Fedora 30 came out, I updated my laptop, but I left my main computer and the HTPC on Fedora 29. The former because I was busy with something at the time and didn’t want the disruption of an upgrade; the latter because the family depends on it for entertainment. However, with Fedora 31 coming out next Tuesday, the support window of Fedora 29 is over. The HTPC didn’t give any issues when I started the upgrade (at of this time it’s still running the upgrade), but my main computer did. This time it complaint about ripright and whois-mkpasswd.

Just in time for Halloween I discovered the Dracula set of dark themes.They’ve got themes for nearly every code editor and shell/console program you can think of. Here’s Yakuake with the Dracula Konsole theme:

Yakuake with Dracula theme

And here’s Kate with the Dracula theme:

Kate with Dracula theme

I like the color scheme, but the font’s a bit small, so I might make a variant theme with a slightly larger font size.

My journey through 2D game development using the Unity engine continued with our third project: a clone of Brick Breaker or Arkanoid. In case you’ve never seen it before, this is Arkanoid:

Arkanoid

It’s got a pretty important legacy, Breakout, the version that Atari created, was an important stepping stone for the two Steves of Apple (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak).

So it makes sense that this would be one of the games we would use on our learning journey. This is what my first level looks like:

When I wrote about checking out KDevelop, I mentioned that it was due to a blog post by the Kate developers about how to evolve Kate going forward. Last night I came across a new article in the same vein in which they looked at potential git GUIs to use from within Kate. In my KDevelop post, I mentioned that I use QGit, but it can look a bit small in the screenshot of my 3 monitor desktop. So this is my typical QGit setup:

I’ve been playing video games since I was somewhere around 5 or 6 years old and got a Nintendo Entertainment System for my birthday from one of my aunts. I also inherited a Tandy computer from my dad when I was younger. We had a bunch of edutainment games - like this Sesame Street game (that unfortunately a quick search on Google Images does not turn up) where you had to suck the Tweedles (bugs from Ernie’s flower box) to solve math problems. I also, and I’ve mentioned this before in several places on the net, learned to program from a book on BASIC and made myself a bunch of simple games, including Madlibs clones.

• Chicken Chilaquiles
• Fried Tofu with Cabbage Salad
• Dave’s Fish Tacos
• Easy Weeknight Chicken Tacos
• Great Grilled Pizza
• Pecan-Crusted Fish
• Fluffiest Pull-Apart Rolls

Lots of Mexican food and a some other neat, ambitious dishes in August. The by this point the chicken chilaquiles were one of the oldest chicken dishes on my To-Make list. I just never happened to have the ingredients around and I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a hit or a flop. Finally, I decided to do it! I went overly ambitious and made my own corn tortillas, which I then toasted in the oven to create chips which I then put into the chilaquilas. It was quite delicious. On the other hand I was not a fan of “Dave’s Fish Tacos” from the Weber Charcoal Grilling book. But, redemption came in the form of Easy Weeknight Chicken Tacos, one of the newest additions to my To-Make list from America’s Test Kitchen’s Cook it in your Dutch Oven. It had a good blend of citrus and Mexican flavors. I’d definitely like to make it again.

I finally made bacon from scratch for the first time, so that deserves its own gallery:

One of the things that had been stopping me was the fact that Costco only sold pork bellies already sliced for Korean dishes. Then, the weekend I was going to ask them if I could buy a full pork belly, they had one there. They said customers had been asking for it so they were going to start selling some whole. It was a pretty neat experience making my own bacon. I can see why it’s so expensive - it involves a lot of waiting and a lot of labor.