Josh's Brain Blogs

Project in Detail: Caves of Narshe 25th Anniversary Logo

Submitted by Josh on Thu, 08/04/2022 - 09:39
As I've now done for the last fifteen years, I've recently completed another alteration of the logo for my long-running website, Caves of Narshe, to celebrate the site's 25th anniversary. This one, while not altering the form nearly as much as the prior change for the 20th, takes the basic format of the current logo and does something very different with it to stand out from the site's long history. A Change of Direction While the site has not visually changed significantly overall in the last ten years, the site logo had taken some significant turns. When the overall site design was last...

Shifting a Legacy Site to a CDN, Part 2

Submitted by Josh on Thu, 02/03/2022 - 09:22

In the first half of my CDN blog , I talked a little about why I wanted to move my biggest website to leverage cloud delivery of content, and the broad strokes of how I planned to get started. This second half details more of the specifics of how I technically achieved the early days of that transition.

An Actual, Factual CDN This is the part that needs some Amazon. Once you have your Amazon Web Services...

Shifting a Legacy Site to a CDN, Part 1

Submitted by Josh on Wed, 02/02/2022 - 18:11

In my day job, we've been steadily moving into the cloud for a while now for all the same reasons everyone else does: it gives us less to maintain ourselves in terms of hardware, it allows us to distribute worldwide more efficiently, it saves us money in the long run, and so on. At home, though, it's a different story, though most of the goals are similar. So now that I have some working knowledge of using Amazon Web Services to create a content delivery network (more commonly known as CDN), I decided it was time to apply it to my largest and oldest hobby site too.

Why CDN? The...

A Quick Infrared Photography Primer

Submitted by Josh on Wed, 09/01/2021 - 13:00

This is a quick cross-post of a short article written for my photography website, explaining false-color infrared photo production.

The term "infrared" when applied to photography might make one think of the type of "thermal vision" or "night vision" popularized by movies, but the reality is somehow both more and less dramatic. In the world of art photography, an infrared photograph differentiates itself from typical digital or...

Sorry, Another Home Improvement Project

Submitted by Josh on Fri, 07/24/2020 - 08:39
Okay, fine, I’ll do another DIY post, because COVID has me doing more and more of them - like pretty much everyone these days, I guess. I spend way more time in my office at home than I probably should, even before literally everyone started doing the same thing. It is essentially a workspace and I guess almost a “man cave,” though I absolutely loathe that term, insomuch as the office also houses most of my collectibles and dorky things I’ve accumulated over the years. One of those collections is my batch of soccer scarves, which have been collected over the last decade from various matches I...

Making a Basic DIY Fountain

Submitted by Josh on Sat, 06/13/2020 - 17:38
alvies.org is not going to become a DIY blog. Because, really, who would read it? Fewer people than read the content I put out now, for sure. But, with all of us spending so much more time at home over the last couple months, we’ve all needed an outlet, and I’ve been tinkering with things at home. In this case, I pulled out a bush from my front landscaping that had been dying since we bought the place and was left with a big open area. I’d never had a water feature at any home I’ve owned, so I decided this was the time. Fountains are expensive, and I am cheap. So I decided that I wanted to...

Automated Renaming and Reformatting for Photoshop CC

Submitted by Josh on Sun, 04/05/2020 - 16:24

It's been ages since I've written a blog post, mainly because I haven't done enough that's been public enough to talk about (and what I have done isn't as interesting as I'd like!). Today, though, I've got another small code snippet of something I just finished to make my life a little bit easier.

I've alluded to in the past, I'm sure, that my day job involves a lot of legacy and mission-critical code, and with...

Hack Together a Home Server

Submitted by Josh on Tue, 10/09/2018 - 11:42

Wow, it's been ages since I wrote anything up for this blog. So, here's a quick one from a hardware project I'm wrapping up for my home; for many years, I've run a desktop machine that has in the loosest terms been a "server" for my own needs. It's usually been whatever is handed down when I build a new PC for photo editing and/or gaming, so it's a pretty low-spec machine running some variant of...

The Gamers' Midlife Crisis

Submitted by Josh on Thu, 04/19/2018 - 11:29

I was catching up on my magazine reading the other day - yeah, I actually read physical magazines because I'm old and I get distracted reading them on screens - and I came across this article in the latest Wired .

I've never been much for watching vlogs like this, but the guy's "character," "NES...

Telecommuting: the Advice is Now

Submitted by Josh on Tue, 01/09/2018 - 20:38

As a followup to my last post , I'm going to assume that based on my previous thoughts you've now gone to your management team and advocated successfully for some work-from-home days in your life. More likely, of course, is that you're fortunate enough to be in a corporate environment where remote work is already embraced, whether that's for just some days during the week or month, or all of them. However you got to this point, though, this is where I come back in to impart my advice for working remotely in a...

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