Combat Mission and Steel Division: Normandy both provide an orthographic view over a WWII tactical battleground. This review compares various aspects of both games.
Disclaimer: As of the writing of this article, Steel Division is still in Beta.
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/* My FastLED Tips, Tricks and Traps
By: Andrew Tuline
Date: July, 2015
These notes are best viewed with an IDE such as Sublime Text. This is NOT a functional program, but a series of notes about using FastLED.
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That would be my large collection of Advanced Squad Leader Modules. Feel free to email me at atuline@gmail.com for additional questions/offers.
I’m located just outside Vancouver, BC and you’re welcome to come over and have a look. Be prepared to hear ‘no thanks’ if you’re going to put in a lowball offer in order to get a ‘deal’.
Another challenge is that a lot of modules have been punched and are in the common containers, so putting them back with their original box is next to impossible.
Oh, and did you see Maps 42 and 43? Yep, those are originals.
This is a compendium, so far of the lantern festivals in Vancouver. Others will be added as I attend them.
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We’ve all made a LOT of mistakes when using FastLED, and thought I’d pass along some of the things encountered over the years.
Q. Where’s the documentation?
A. FastLED Documentation is located at:
As you get older, it takes a bit of time to get back up to speed on things. In this case, I hadn’t been programming the Arduino with the FastLED display library for a few months and I started to get back into it. When I last left, I’d standardized and documented my wiring colours, pinouts and to use either the Arduino Nano or the Pro Micro. So far so good, as it was all nicely laid out for me.
I had a spare Nano kicking around, so I attached it to my USB port, started up the Arduino 1.6.3 IDE and loaded a basic FastLED program. The Nano was recognized as a Com port in the IDE (so I didn’t have clone FTDI issues to contend with), checked the code and started to program it. Despite several attempts, the code never did upload so I put the Nano aside.
Next, I got out a previously used Pro Micro and I immediately encountered driver issues with it. Remembering that I had to use Leonardo drivers, I fiddled around for half an hour with drivers, but never did get it recognized correctly. Let’s toss that aside as well.
Finally, I opened up a brand new Pro Micro, installed it, and saw that it was immediately recognized. At that point, I threw out the Nano and the first Pro Micro (I’m not very sentimental). I then programmed it up, and . . . nothing happened. I re-checked the wiring and the code a couple of times, and again, no LED’s. I then added some debug code for the serial monitor and saw that the Pro Micro was indeed being programmed correctly. I then triple checked the wiring and saw that I’d soldered part of the insulation to the data pin and had no connection. After the insulation was removed and the connection re-soldered, I tried again, but alas, no lights. Things weren’t going well today.
I checked the wiring thoroughly and saw (barely) that the data wire was also sliced halfway down its length, so I cut the wiring below the slice and then soldered that to the Pro Micro. At long last, the LED’s came on as expected and I’m now back (tentatively) in the FastLED environment.
Moral of the story: Check everything. Several times.
I have spent rar too much time this past week reviewing and updating the backup procedures on my development workstation. In the past, I was:
The challenges I faced:
Hardware changes made:
Functionality to test:
Software tested:
A Realization
It slowly dawned on me that when performing occasional full backups with Syncback, what I really wanted to do was to perform file synchronization. In this case, I didn’t want incrementals or the ability to restore an old version. I just wanted a source and destination synchronization of my media directories. It also turns out that dedicated backup software such as Acronis or Cloudberry don’t really support that functionality. So, let’s look at each of the packages I tried.
Syncback
There are several versions of this product, and Syncback free has allowed me to backup across SMB shares without any problems in the past.
It does not support block level backups, which I felt were important with the number of Virtual Machines I’m using.
In order to Synchronize to the CentOS server via the more secure SFTP, I needed to purchase Syncback Pro (and not SE).
Being about same price, the block level support of Syncovery put it ahead of Syncback Pro.
Syncovery
This product costs about the same as Syncback Pro, but does support block level backups, as well as file/directory synchronization.
I ended up buying a copy of this to use strictly for synchronization with the new media server. Maybe I’ll use it for full backups down the road once it gains my trust. I’m not there yet.
Acronis Backup/Recovery
I already own this product, so I spent time determining if I wanted to continue using it or replace it with an alternate. After significant testing, I decided to update it and use it for backups. One of the main reasons was that using the catalog for file recovery was easier to use than the alternatives.
Acronis True Image
This package had great reviews, however the simplistic interface was not for me. I ditched it early on.
Cloudberry
This product performs backups to various local and Cloud services and worked very well. I have a client that uses it and it’s a good product. In order for me to purchase Cloudberry, Acronis Backup/Recovery had to fail in some significant fashion and the only weakness I could see with Acronis (other than the fact that it’s huge), was that the version of Acronis I own does not support Cloud Services. Fortunately for me, that was not a requirement and as a result, Cloudberry was off the table.
Current Status
Acronis now performs custom daily/weekly backups of drive C and drive D to drive Z as well as to the CentOS server via SFTP. One of the advantages of the custom configuration is that I can tell it to purge old backups when the destination drive gets full. At 4TB, that should take a while.
Syncovery synchronizes the Photo, Music and Video directories to the CentOS server via SFTP for use by the Plex media server. It also does so at a MUCH faster clip with the new gigabit switch.
Oh, and I’m also running Crashplan as a backup of last resort. When it comes to backups, you can never have too many.
I’ve implemented web sites of varying types, including:
With the exception of the static sites, these ALL run in databases and invariably they ALL need to be backed up, files and databases included.
Many web site administrators will either rely on their web host provider to perform these backups and/or implement a backup plug-in for their CMS of choice.
The advantage of webhost provider based backups is that it’s a complicated matter that you don’t have to worry about. The drawback for the webhost provider based backups is that backup and recovery for YOUR site is now out of your hands. Let’s hope your webhost provider has got it right. Otherwise, you may not have a site to recover. In addition, if your site gets hacked, you could have a real difficult time finding where the bad code is, and I’ll cover this later.
The advantage of plug-ins is that, depending on the plug-in, you can get a LOT of functionality, such as file/database backup and recovery, site migrations and much more. The disadvantage is that the site needs to be RUNNING in order to use it.
For the past few years, I’ve been logging into my sites via ‘ssh’ and have been performing file/database backups to a remote host. I’ve been performing daily as well as weekly backups and have kept about 3 months worth of backups for these sites. The advantage is that I can go back several months to restore a site and have used this to compare recent and old site files to find a site hack. In addition, it doesn’t matter WHICH CMS I’m using or even if it’s running. As long as I can ssh into the site and dump the files and database, I’m good to go. The disadvantage is that each backup is a FULL backup and these can consume considerable disk space.
Really, what I need is a decent backup utility that:
In the Linux world, Bacula is very popular, however I’ve chosen an application called rsnapshot. This uses perl scrips and the rsync command to create a repository of backups and I’ve been able to configure it to access multiple sites and databases and to backup much more data than I otherwise would have been able to with FULL daily/weekly backups.
The FastLED community is on Google+.
Before asking the community for support, please remember that they need detailed information in order to help. Depending on the issue (and there have been far too many), here’s some important details to include:
The instructions in this article do not work with Ubuntu and its’ variants, such as Debian or Mint, as they use apt-get instead of yum. Read on if you’re a CentOS or related user.
When I first started using CentOS 7, I often selected the advanced packages during the graphical installation process, such as ‘Web Server’ or ‘GNOME Desktop’. The problem, was that I wanted to create a LAMP server with Samba, Git and phpMyAdmin for web development and none of the options seemed to fit. As a result, I eventually chose a minimal install and manually downloaded individual packages with the CentOS/RedHat specific ‘yum’ command.
I’m happy with how that went and have thoroughly documented this with my ‘A CentOS Web Development Environment’. In the meantime, I wanted to delve a little further into the ‘yum’ command to find out a bit more about the available packages.
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