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Rethinking Monster Challenge: Why Challenge Rating Falls Short and How Calculated Systems Can Transform Your Game

Dungeons & Dragons™ introduced Challenge Rating (CR) as a tool to help game masters gauge whether a monster would provide an appropriate challenge for their party. In theory, matching CR to party level should create balanced, engaging encounters. In practice, however, the system suffers from fundamental flaws that leave many DMs frustrated with wildly unpredictable encounter difficulty. The CR value is often assigned capriciously and inaccurately, based on theoretical assumptions that rarely match actual play, and frequently goes unrevised when rules changes significantly alter a monster's effectiveness. Decades ago, White Dwarf magazine proposed an alternative: Monster Marks, a mathematical system for calculating encounter difficulty based on concrete mechanical factors. While the original formula predates modern D&D editions, its underlying principles can be updated and adapted to provide game masters with the precision tool they need to craft encounters that hit their in...
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Automate Your Morning: Building a Weather-Based Clothing Recommendation in Huginn

Introduction In the previous post we set up Huginn in Docker, giving you your own self-hosted automation platform. Now it’s time to do something fun with it! In this guide, we’ll walk through creating a Huginn Scenario that checks the daily weather forecast and tells you what to wear when heading outside.  Scenarios are containers of agents, and have properties that we will make use of in future posts. This scenario will: Use a weather API to get your local forecast Analyze temperature and conditions Recommend clothing (e.g., "wear a jacket" or "shorts are fine today") Send you the advice by email or another notification agent Let’s get started! Step 1: Create a New Scenario In Huginn, a Scenario is a collection of agents that work together. After logging into your Huginn dashboard: Click Scenarios on the top nav bar Click New Scenario Choose an appropriate icon, such as the cloud Name it something like Weather Outfit Advisor (Optional) Add ...
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How to Install Huginn with Docker: A Step-by-Step Guide for Tinkerers Introduction   If you're the kind of Linux user who loves automation, self-hosting, and experimenting with new tools, Huginn might be your next favorite project. Think of it as your own personal version of IFTTT, but completely under your control. With Huginn, you can create agents that monitor websites, send notifications, scrape data, and even automate workflows. In this guide, we'll walk through deploying Huginn using Docker Compose. It's a fairly straightforward setup, but we’ll dive into the details to make sure everything runs smoothly. By the end, you'll have a fully functional Huginn instance ready for automation magic. What is Huginn?   Huginn is an open-source system for building agents that perform automated tasks online. These agents can do things like: Monitor websites for changes Send email or chat notifications Scrape web pages Interact with APIs Automate workflows with condition...
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Good bye, Symantec

Symantec anti-virus has just told me that the tool I have downloaded is suspect, and has deleted the file for me, so that I am a safe and happy drone on the Internet. The message was: " WS.Reputation.1 is a detection for files that have a low reputation score based on analyzing data from Symantec’s community of users and therefore are likely to be security risks. Detections of this type are based on Symantec’s reputation-based security technology. Because this detection is based on a reputation score, it does not represent a specific class of threat like adware or spyware, but instead applies to all threat categories. " So, if not enough people use a special purpose tool for a small industry, that file downloaded from the company must be bad and is automatically deleted to protect me. Good-bye Symantec anti-virus. And your solution, Symantec, of: " WHITE-LISTING Software developers who want to accelerate the reputation building process for their new software applicat...
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Net Neutrality

Discussing “Net Neutrality” is like discussing “Gasoline Neutrality for your car. Ford motor company does not have an exclusive deal with British Petroleum so that you have to buy BP gasoline to get optimum fuel efficiency. In much the same way, net neutrality is a given when what you are purchasing is bandwidth, not connection to specific services. The neutrality of the Internet needs to be maintained in the same way that long distance providers are not allowed to be partial to any specific local carrier. If Comcast or AT&T is allowed to select who you are going to get access to at full speed, what is to stop them from extorting money from Google or any large content provider to allow unfettered access? The Internet is a utility in this modern day and age, and must be treated as such and legislated in the same vein.
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what is Net Neutrality anyway?

Net Neutrality is really a misnomer; it’s not just about neutrality. Calling Common Carrier requirements for Internet providers “Net Neutrality” is like calling your car gasoline neutral. If Ford or General Motors made an exclusive deal with Exxon-Mobile so that their vehicles only got the rated gas mileage using that brand of gasoline, and all others would produce sub-par results, there would be no question about legislating against that. So why then are the carriers allowed to try to hold content providers hostage over bandwidth and performance? When I purchase Internet access through my ISP, I am buying bandwidth to the net at large, not to the companies that have cooperative agreements with my provider. I expect that the content provider may throttle requests and responses to mitigate issues such as being slashdoted and having unusually large amounts of traffic at an unpredictable moment, but that is in their business model not in the business of the Internet Provider who has so...
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Thankful for the Internet

This time Google found the hint I was looking for. I use SciTe to edit when I am working on Python projects. But on the brand new machine running Vista it was coughing up the "No module named ..." error. A couple of Google searches later, I actually found this blog that had the answer to editing the Windows path and XPATH variables to find Python. One would think that the Windows installer for Python would have done that already, but apparently not. *sigh* And now back to my regularly scheduled programming projects.
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