Mixed Signals

Straight-forward gaming

Have you ever tried documenting a Lego model you've invented? I've tried to track how I constructed My Own Creation (or "MOC", in the lingo of Internet brick builders) using graph paper, but getting the angles right can be really hard. Lacking freehand illustration skills, I recently decided to use...

I love Lego. Sadly, I've moved far away (in the physical sense) from the Lego collection of my youth, and shipping a closet full of classic Lego sets all the way around the world is an expensive proposal. Recently I discovered Goxel, a shockingly easy 3D modeling application that makes no conceit...

One of the classic UNIX commands, developed way back in 1974 by Ken Thompson, is the Global Regular Expression Print (grep) command. It's so ubiquitous in computing that it's frequently used as a verb (\"grepping through a file\") and, depending on just how geeky your audience is, it fits nicely i...

Learning is hard work, and nobody likes work. That means no matter how easy it is to learn Bash, the language of the Linux terminal, it still might feel like work to you.

Unless, of course, you learn through gaming.

You wouldn't think there would be many games out there to teach you how to use...

As you learned in the previous article What is Git? and how to use it, Git is a version control system, meaning that its primary job is to keep track of the many different versions of a file. This means that when you make an ill-advised edit to a file, you can roll back to a previous good version...

If you're a geek online (and I have it on good authority that you are), then you may have come across sites like Github or Gitlab, and you may know them as places where programmers store their code. If you're particularly adventurous, you may have even downloaded an open source application from suc...

HTML and CSS are wonderful tools, and examples of how technology can be both powerful and yet easy to learn. To this day, if you go to a well-structured website and look at their code, you can teach yourself the basics of web design without investing a single penny. That's exactly what open source...

It's fun to use magick in a game like D&D, and it's arguably even more fun to use it in a techno-centric cyberpunk world like Starfinder or Shadowrun, but in the real world anything that looks like magick can be pretty frustrating. That's because magick is something no one can ever hope to understa...