Hi, I’m Benedikt

This game has been sitting on my wishlist for a good while now. Just a few days ago I rolled credits on it after having spent 70-80 hours on it and figured it was a good opportunity to write about the experience. I came to this game after having played a couple JRPGs and Chronotrigger-inspired games like “Sea of Stars” (see here) and “Chained Echoes”. I enjoyed both for different reasons but I never finished Chronotrigger itself. I’m not overly picky when it comes to story but I do recognize and appreciate when it’s well-written. In fact, a captivating story is a major part of what I want in a game. That said, I also like a good presentation. The graphics don’t need to be photorealistic but good graphics go a long way towards selling me on a game. At the end of the day, it’s a whole package. Gameplay, story, character development, graphics, mechanics, voice acting and so much more. There’s a lot that goes into a game and creating one cohesive, well-made product out of it all is incredibly challenging. So let’s see what we have here. ...

EDIT: I totally forgot stuff so I had to edit it in! I was prompted to write this down by a blost from Matt in which he lists all the things he subscribes to and I figured I’d do the same. So here goes: Proton Unlimited - 191.76 €/24 months Managed Nextcloud - 5.11 €/month Hetzner VPS - 3.79 €/month IONOS VPS - 1 €/month Late Night Linux Podcast - 11.90 €/month This domain - $4.09 (3.51 €)/year Aaaaand that’s it, really. I didn’t count things other household members subscribe to, something like another 1 €/month for email or ~5 €/year for a library membership but that’s about the extent of it. Also, I didn’t count things like insurance for obvious reasons. ...

Monitoring Cleanup Has it been a week already? Time never stands still, does it? Anyhoo, I ended my last post being unsure about how exactly to do monitoring. Who watches the Watchmen? I decided to go ahead and implement something I’ve thought about previously. I installed uptime-kuma and ntfy on both my VPS and my server so they can keep tabs on each other. An Observability Mexican Standoff, if you will. Works pretty well so far, the only weakness is that none of this monitoring will do anything, if Tailscale networking is down or has issues because all of the routing between services is done that way. For this purpose I added a monitor that constantly pings 100.100.100.100 which would be routed through the Tailscale net, if it is present and functional. If it isn’t the ping will fail. Good enough for now. ...

What’s Up? I have been self-hosting stuff for years now. It started with Nextcloud once upon a time but by now there are a whole bunch of really useful services that run on my personal server. Said server runs in my house behind a completely normal, run-of-the-mill consumer-grade router with NAT. With this comes the need, or shall we say desire, to access my self-hosted things when I’m not at home. ...

Introduction I discovered my love for Scotland, especially the Highlands, in 2009 when I first visited. Where I come from it’s painfully obvious to even the most casual observer that there’s humans all around. In many places in the Scottish Highlands I felt like the land might have looked just like it does now 1000 years ago. Plus, I’m a sucker for castles so what’s not to love? On a vacation some years back I stayed at several bed and breakfasts and also discovered that I love British breakfast. The cuisine of that country is not exactly renowned or highly regarded in Europe but I still love it. In 2019 I got my hands on a recipe for pancakes which I was served for breakfast and to this day I love making them every so often. ...