Halfway through October and I figured I should pump out an update.

Wine Release Bot

I finally updated WineReleaseBot to use systemd timers instead of just running all the time. This will make the bot much more stable, though it won’t make a major difference in usability. It’s interesting to look back at the original code from April of 2020 and realize I’ve learned so much since then.

When I first made the bot, I already had it ingrained in me to not hardcode the “secret” keys into the code, but figuring out how to store and import the data was interesting. In a way I reinvented the wheel, as I had two plaintext files that I split at a defined character (":"). Same thing with the config file that kept the latest information so that I didn’t have to keep it in RAM the whole time.

Later, when the bot continued to crash, I learned that Github hates being scraped, and prefers the use of their API. This required learning how to use JSON, which then led to a much better auth.cred and settings.conf file structure.

Working on the AACS Updater project helped me learn how to make systemd timer and service files, which was the final piece to get this project to its current state. I don’t think it’s fully complete, but it’s a stable, reliable bot that will run as long as this site is up.

If you’re curious, you can see the output on Twitter and Mastodon.

Writing

I’ve written 4 episodes of a sitcom and am about halfway through a feature film. I’ve submitted the sitcom pilot to a script competition and will hear back in November. I received some good feedback and the item with the lowest score is the characters, which is great, because fleshing out characters to make them feel more alive is pretty easy.

I forgot October is NaNoWriMo, so I should probably get to writing more. I don’t know about 10,000 words, but I’d be content with finishing the feature film by the end of the month.

Site Update

I updated the server this site is running on from Ubuntu 20.04 for 22.04. You shouldn’t notice a difference–and in fact, the upgrade was seemless on my end, too.