Blue Dot Blog

Started job statistics site today. After that I can finally start making some profiles/people.

Did a grand timeline for the major events going back to the start of NURO in 2043. I needed a timeline for bigger infrastructure development to accurately plan out when certain job roles are going to be introduced to Terra Nordica.

Profiles took many more hours than expected. But its done now!

Finished info page about Kasei Valles. Started adding jobs and profiles, which is very complicated since there are going to be 100s of additions here in the furture so the foundation needs to be strong.

Spent the evening looking for the perfect location for Terra Nordica on Mars. Eventually settled for Kasei Valles. Made a section with info about it. Also intalled Space Engine to explore the surroundings and JMARS 5 to find good real photos.

Had trouble with the search engine on Rocky. Took a while to fix!

More tinkering with the news section.

Today I added a news section to the blog. Spent hours tweaking the styling of the page and getting the logic right so that it becomes easy to add new articles in the future.

Added smaller fixes to the backend. Persistent volume for Grafana so I don't lose my dashboards when the server reboots. Also lowered the CPU usage of cadvisor from 6% to 3%.

Got the new harddrive for Rocky (the server, named after the creature from the movie) and installed it today. Took a while to get everything back online. Specially the mail system and sitemap generation. Some files were not on Github, so had to recreate then. A lot of networking tinkering as well, that never seems to go smootly. But it always works out in the end.

Spend the whole day working on modelling Svalbard Training Facility in Blender.

After 10 hours I am feeling quite done. I'm still very new to this and this is as for as I can go from this view without adding weather. Lastly I put the rendered image into GPT to generate a more realsitic version.

The graphics card (an Nvidia RTX 4790) is really mad at me for my new Blender hobby!

Made an About page to try and explain what this whole Terra Nordica project is about and get my thoughts in order.

Finally the sites skeleton feels finished enough to start adding real content. I will start by making the Svalbard Simulation Training Facility.

Finished polishing the search engine and made myself a quick guide for adding searchwords etc.

Added mobile mode to the header for better usability. Took a bit of tinkering to get the dropdown menu open, close and scroll like i wanted.

Made a favicon using Favicon out of my logo design, and added it to the browser tab. Also changed metadata (title for the tab) for each page.

Made a Site Map to help me navigate the site. Will keep it up for visitors too. Not super fancy, but works well enough quick overview.

Also, last hour I made a new logo with Terra Nordica title. I'm very pleased. Added it to the footer and the mobile version of the header.

Made a search engine. Went way faster than expected. I need to be careful moving forward to keep the tags and query expansions organized though. Connecting the DB was pretty straight forward and fun. The UI actually took longer, which i was not expecting. There was a lot of details that could be added, like shortcuts CTRL+K, CMD+K (depending on the users OS), keyboard up/down, added a esc button and on and on.

The rest of the day I did minor changes and fixes to the UI.

Blue Dot Blog initialized as a technical project log.

Another year of this project is starting. Hopefully the skills built up in Blender, web design, system architecture will start to actually show this year. The v.1 Utopia blender model is still in need of a few more hours of work to look good enough for presentation. Soon I can start adding the massive amount of info about the project here. I just need to finilize the site infrastructure first. Everything on the site is made by me, except for the character models. I don't have time to learn the skills to make good humanoid models, so for those I will use generative AI tools.

Yesterday I ordered a new SSD drive for Rocky (the host server) after the old one crashed. This will arrive next week and the site can get back online again.

Downloaded Inkscape, a vector graphics editor, to help with logo and icon design. Never used it before. Made my first logo and put on the page.