partially­disassembled

Engineering blog from Studio Drydock.

Tips for running headless Unity from a script

First published 31 October 2019

This post follows on from Headless automation in Unity. This time we're looking at how to run a Unity automation or build task from a script, rather than manually. This is a step along the way to using Unity with continuous integration.

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Managing memory usage of .NET Core on AWS t2.micro

First published 21 October 2019

Over the last few months I've had issues with my server (an AWS free-tier EC2 t2.micro) going completely unresponsive, even to SSH, and needing a restart. This server gets almost zero usage (it's just a staging server for a single developer), so the common Internet wisdom of “just upgrade the instance type” didn't seem applicable. This post summarises how I tracked down the root cause and implemented a possible fix.

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Headless automation in Unity

First published 08 October 2019

Updated Oct 31 2019: The next post is up: Tips for running headless Unity from a script

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Stuck MIDI keys through USB interface

First published 29 August 2019

I have a Roland RD-150 keyboard from my younger days of playing in a wedding band, and I thought it might be fun to plug into my PC a play with some synthesizers. MIDI-to-USB converters go for as low as $5, so I bought one off eBay, plugged it in and installed the Reaper trial and ... it was terrible.

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Adding more fields to Filebeat

First published 14 May 2019

In the previous post I wrote up my setup of Filebeat and AWS Elasticsearch to monitor Apache logs. This time I add a couple of custom fields extracted from the log and ingested into Elasticsearch, suitable for monitoring in Kibana.

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Filebeat and AWS Elasticsearch

First published 12 May 2019

Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (or ELK) are standard tools for aggregating and monitoring server logs. This post details the steps I took to integrate Filebeat (the Elasticsearch log scraper) with an AWS-managed Elasticsearch instance operating within the AWS free tier.

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Deploying iOS Builds Locally

First published 26 January 2019

If you’re building iPhone and iPad apps, you’ll want a convenient way to deploy builds to your own devices for testing and quick feedback. There are quite a few ways of going about this:

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MacOS Mojave and VNC

First published 18 January 2019

Using VNC to connect to MacOS Mojave from Windows is problematic due to problems with the login screen not responding after first use. None of the suggestions in the linked discussion worked for me, instead I set up a shortcut to remotely kill the login window before attempting VNC connection.

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DNS64/NAT64 Raspberry Pi WiFi

First published 14 April 2017

A Raspberry Pi is set up as an IPv6-only wireless hotspot supporting DNS64/NAT64 for accessing the IPv4 Internet.  This is ideal for testing iOS apps for Apple’s IPv6 compliance.

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