Drawing of my Viera Warrior of Light from FINAL FANTASY XIV ONLINE. She has medium-length brown hair tied up in the back (but not visible) and slightly messy bangs. There is a yellow flower tucked to the left, and she is looking at you. In the background is just some generic hills or mountains, backed on a sunset.

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Drawing of a grocery list with the words Linux and Review and KDE written.

I typically write about anytihng involving Linux, KDE, personal thoughts and as of recently reverse engineering.

You can follow this blog using Image RSS. If you liked what you read, you can (anonymously) give as many ❤️’s as you desire at the bottom of the blog post’s page!

  • Kodama Progress Report 2 - Dreams

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    The project survives into another progress report! This one is going to be a short and sweet, partly because I’m torn between a few other projects and because working on Kodama is just not easy.

  • Kawari Progress Report 21 - Refactoring

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    This has been a relatively quiet couple of months, there’s no huge headlining features but instead I focused on improving the foundations of the project!

  • Kodama Progress Report 1 - Noise

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    So here it is, another progress report series 😭 I jest somewhat, but my opinion of whether to actually do this has been swaying back and forth for a few months now.

  • Can I have it without the slop?

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    I’ve been noticing this thing in a few feeds I follow - the “This Week in XYZ” posts that the community puts together for the projects they love. But…

  • Search Reduction - Hexadecimals

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    This is a new mini-series about reducing my reliance on search engines (specifically DuckDuckGo) for doing menial tasks unrelated to searching the web.

  • Kawari Progress Report 20 - Housing

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    I took a “short” two-month break from writing these progress reports, but we never stopped hacking on Kawari 🛠️

  • Stop sending me garbage

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    This isn’t a blog post, it’s a plea.

  • Kawari Progress Report 19 - Friends

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    So this one turned out to be a bit of a large one! More social features were implemented while I continued to work on the things we need for instanced content, and of course - plenty of bugfixes.

  • A better way to play FFXIV 1.x

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    I never played FFXIV 1.0 while it was running (I was like 10 at the time, okay?) but now it’s not even possible to try it! There are existing server emulators out there, but after looking up how to run them I discovered everything has bit-rotten.

  • Astra & Novus Status Update: March 2026

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    This was a surprisingly small time window since the last status report, but there’s quite a bit to get through here.

  • You should know more about microwork

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    Micro-working has been a recent hyper-focus of mine. I found that it’s not well-known, despite there being multi-billion companies and a whole cottage industry built around it.

  • Kawari Progress Report 18 - Sastasha

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    I decided to wait until the end of this weekend to release this report, because I was actively working on lots of big things!

  • Experimenting with creating zones in FFXIV

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    In a previous blog post I was exploring normally inaccessible zones in-game. But how might we go about creating our own?

  • Kawari Progress Report 17 - Strategy

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    It’s the new year! This seems to be another strong month as we implemented multiple features, renewed our focus on instanced content and did more ecosystem work.

  • Stopping Left 4 Dead 2 from crashing on Linux

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    I wanted to play Left 4 Dead 2 recently, but was super frustrated at it crashing in the middle of playing!

  • Astra & Novus Status Update: December 2025

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    Here’s the second (and last) update this year for my various FFXIV projects. It’s also quite timely since I’m cutting new releases this time of year too.

  • Kawari Progress Report 16 - Year's End

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    Happy holidays, happy new year and so on! This progress report includes many treats, including: more game features, framework for instanced content support and three patch updates!

  • Exploring dialogue scripting in FFXIV

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    Have you ever wondered how dialogue scenes work in-game?

  • The problem isn't Unreal

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    Sorry but I need to rant, naturally this was spurred by people spewing nonsense online. I don’t work in the games industry, so if that bothers you then you may want to stop reading.

  • Kawari Progress Report 15 - Parties

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    This is yet another delayed progress report, sorry about that. I was busy traveling and there was a flurry of interesting changes to cover.