Discord server/online gaming convention

I am in the middle of setting up a Discord server for online gaming and chat. This is not intended to replace Twitter, as that's a happily thriving community that I'm not interested in superseding or competing with (I am not an idiot).

However, it's going to contain at least the following:

• Chat area for wargames, board games and RPGs
• A business area where small companies can both advertise and chat to customers (I will probably require you to prove to me you're a gaming related business before you get to represent as such, and obviously I will require things to be kept civil and positive :D).
• The games area - a channel where you can arrange an online game, and a support channel where you can ask technical questions about doing so
• A channel with a dice-roller bot (never know when THAT'll come in handy!)
• Voice chat. I'm not setting up any channels as yet, but I have plans: they will if nothing else be useful to allow voice chat while playing wargames via (say) Tabletop Simulator

The server invite link will be up later today or tomorrow, once I have things locked down and bots created to my satisfaction. 

Another I hate computers day....

Well, actually yesterday. I hate it when my hobby streak for the day turns out to be IT.

Sorting out a mailshot to the club, which should have gone out by the forum's newsletter mechanism... which decided that it would de-queue 5 emails from its outgoing queue to the local mail server and then toss the rest down a black hole. 

Grr.

Eventually got a list of members active enough to be eligible to vote out of our treasurer, dug each one's email out of the forum database, and sent them by hand. But not my idea of fun at all :D

Slightly happier with computers....

Yesterday I continued the IT bit of the Compendium, which involved double-checking exactly what fonts are in use throughout the document, and building a small folder containing them all on Dropbox (since there are two or three other devices I sometimes open the file on that I know don't have them on :) - yes, this house has far too many Apple devices).

Annoyingly, somewhere there are two bits of text using Helvetica and Times, which are either spaces or so small as to be invisible: sadly, while Pages gives me the tool to replace them, it doesn't tell me where they are first, and removing Helvetica causes loads of floating tables to shift around!

Grrr.

Now, if this cat would kindly shift off my lap, I could actually get on and do something else...

I hate computers....

Absolutely my least favourite
dialog ever.

Ok. Just to give you an insight into the work process on the Compendium, I'm using Apple's iCloud to share the master Apple Pages file between several machines, specifically my work laptop, my studio iMac, the older MacBook I'm using right now (while watching The Great British Bake-Off :D) and my iPad.

At least in theory, these all have the same fonts installed on them, so when the file gets opened on a different machine, I don't get Pages little ''This document may look different' dialog.

Except that somewhere, one of my machines somehow has "Segoe UI" installed rather than "SegoeUI"... which as far as I can tell are identical fonts apart from a space in the name. And if I'm in a hurry and miss the warning dialog, the font (which is the main font for all the body text) gets replaced with Helvetica and completely b****ers up the text formatting and diagram and table layouts. Especially if I then save it and fail to notice for several versions.

I've finally been bitten by this once too often. Guess what I've been doing this evening :D

More yak-shaving....

From Wiktionary:

yak shaving (uncountable)

1. Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.

   I was doing a bit of yak shaving this morning, and it looks like it might have paid off

Today's yak shaving involved upgrading my big iMac to macOS Catalina, as it can be done in the background, and allows me to make sure various essential bits of software don't break before I update my work laptop.

Of course, they do. Specifically, the time I was due to spend on podcast editing today went on getting a 64-bit Catalina-compatible version of Audacity working. :D

On the good side, I did also satisfy myself Wonderdraft still worked, and created a couple of assets for drawing top-down battlefield etc maps, specifically some Ordnance Survey style slope hatching.

Hereward Wargames Show

It's time to ramp up the show publicity and other stuff, which means my hobby activity this evening has consisted of figuring out which of my Macs has a working, unexpired and up to date version of OmniGraffle that I can use to edit our floor plans (answer, none of them, so that took a while (and money) to fix) and then figuring out why the site's connections to FB and Twitter weren't working (answer, hazy, but relinking, poking and swearing fixed it :D)

So. that's me for the day - watch out for trader and game updates and more stuff over the ensuring weeks.  And don't forget, the show is on Sunday September 1st - all details on the site.