Muirrum's Ramblings

Sometimes I post about things, but not always

• 2020-05-25 De-Googling Part One

  Series:

  • degoogle

  Taking a look at my use of Google and their… not-great history of privacy, I’ve been spending my spare time over the past few years working on, if it’s not possible to completely get off their platform, then at least minimize my use of it.

• 2020-05-18 My Eagle Trail

  Categories:

  • scouting

  Series:

  • me

  Over the past 12 years, I’ve been involved in the Boy Scouts of America. I’ve gone from a Tiger in elementary school to an Eagle Scout in High School. I’ve poured thousands of hours in both volunteering and camping, both as part of the main BSA program and the OA, and I’ve gone to the largest Scouting event in the world, the World Scout Jamboree. As I’ve now reached the pinnacle of the Scouts BSA program, I figured it would be a good idea to reflect on what brought me here, and where to go.

• 2020-05-18 Status Update: May 2020

  Categories:

  • projects

  Series:

  • status

  I figured I’d take a leaf out of other people’s books and start doing monthly status updates (if I remember to do them). For the first month, I’ll be talking about Campmaster Constantine, Discord Scout Council, and this site.

• 2020-05-02 Online Scouting

  Categories:

  • scouting
  During this pandemic and state of quarantine, many activities are moving online. This includes everything from schools, to work, to Scouting. I am not new to the world of online Scouting, having volunteered at the 2019 Jamboree on the Internet with ScoutLink, and being a member of the largest Discord Scouting community, Discord Scout Troop since April of last year. Through each of these, I’ve made friends from around the world, and learned more about other cultures than I ever would’ve otherwise.

• 2020-04-29 Announcing Campmaster Constantine

  Categories:

  • project
  Overview I’ve been on Discord for five years now, and I’ve been developing bots for it since at least 2016. In that time I’ve really had two major bot projects, namely the OtmasBot and Kronos. Both of those were implemented in Node.JS, and they both had their respective problems. The OtmasBot was a mess, and sometimes the token even got leaked into git as well. Kronos was different. Kronos had a decent command framework (run through discord.

• 2020-01-08 Scouts and D&D

  Categories:

  • scouting
  Mechanics It’s hard to play a game like Dungeons and Dragons at camp. Camp gets wet, and so do character sheets. Camp gets muddy and dirty, so do miniatures and game mats. Most importantly, younger Scouts aren’t always as keen on writing everything down and moving miniatures around as older, more experienced players. What my troop has done for these problems is remove a lot of the complexity surrounding the game.

• 2019-10-15 FIRST Robotics

  Honestly, this post has been a long time coming. I’ve been involved with FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) since I was in 4th grade almost nine years ago, and I can honestly say that my life has changed for the better. I was part of my district’s first ever robotics team, competing at our first events, and winning our first awards. That experience was absolutely amazing, and now, working on an FRC team with robots and coding that 4th-grade me could only begin to imagine is even better.

• 2019-09-20 New Site

  Categories:

  • introduction

  Tags:

  • me

  Series:

  • me
  Well now. Here we are again. This must be what, the fourth fresh site I’ve started? They’ve all eventually gone to the mists of time. For a time I was using Postleaf on my Raspberry Pi as a blog, but that didn’t go well. I’ll probably move over my post about the World Scout Jamboree to this site as well, so that post may appear before this one chronologically. The goal for this incarnation is long-term stability.

• 2019-08-04 24th World Scout Jamboree

  Categories:

  • scouting
  This July, I had the wonderful opportunity to be a part of the Boy Scouts of America’s 24th World Scout Jamboree contingent. For two weeks, I camped out with 50,000 other scouts, scouters, and staff from more than 160 countries. It was a wonderful experience, and I thought I’d kick off the new blog by writing about it. I don’t have many pictures, which will hopefully not set a trend for the rest of the travel posts here.