A note so that if anyone ever haves this same bit of weirdness, hopefully they might stumble across this. I had a heck of a time searching for this…

So, I have Wireguard set up on my home server along with various services that are designed to only be accessible locally.

If I want to use my home connection/Wireguard from my phone (iOS), this is easy enough to deal with:

Everything works just fine.

However, I found that this connection was sometimes not working, especially if I was on a cellular connection or switching connections. The connection would just hang until I either switched to the full tunnel or turned it off entirely (and made it home).

I tried all manner of switching around the Allowed IPs, adding 10. ranges (for the Wireguard IPs), other private ranges, leaving off specific IPs, all of it.

But what did it take in the end?

Note the difference?

I had to tunnel the DNS.

I believe that this is an iOS specific security behavior–I have public DNS addresses that resolve to a private IP range. It works fine for me and won’t work for anyone else–they’ll go to whatever their local private network is. But iOS (rightfully) thinks that might be a security hole and wouldn’t let the DNS resolve for me–unless I also tunnelled the DNS server (for now I’m using 1.1.1.1 for that; I’m hoping to self host that as well some day).

So if you have: an on-demand wireguard tunnel on iOS with a limited Allowed IPs range and a custom DNS set up, you may just need to tunnel the DNS.

Oy that was a fun one.

But it’s been working absolutely fine for a month now, so all is well. Onward!

And here it is, a month and a half later:

We did it!

This time, I had a quick save game in order to crank through a train in 90 minutes (that was actually closer than the 8 hour run, believe it or not) and then it’s time for the long hall. I have two achievements left to achieve:

• Mass production 3 - produce 20M green chips (I had ~13M before this run)
• Lazy bastard - win the game with no more than 111 hand crafts

It’s … actually not that hard, just long. There are guides out there for what your 111 hand crafts can be. With recipe changes, you only need 103. Then you can turn off hand crafting permission (/permissions is allowed) and… just do everything by hand. You don’t even need biters on.

All together, it took about 28 hours to set up my rocket for Lazy Bastard… but I wanted that one to be last.

It may have taken another 30 hours to complete the remaining 7 million circuits…

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Factorio is an absolutely delightful game. Recently though, I’ve been taking a look at my Steam Achievements for it and realized… I’m not that far off.

So I decided to take a chance on a few runs to finish things off.

For this first run, I was going for:

• Raining bullets - don’t build any laser turrets
• Steam all the way - don’t build any solar panels
• No time for chitchat - beat the game in 15 hours
• There is no spoon - beat the game in 8 hours

You can’t turn biters off all the way (for any of these), but you can turn them down enough that it won’t be a problem. 8 hours is… tight enough, so that’s what I did.

I did also crank up resources, but other than that, it’s a standard vanilla game.

And away we go!

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Been a bit. I … did not realize just how much a bit though. 10 hours? I must have left it running at some point… really I must have. 😄

In any case, the big change this time has been a massive extension of the main bus (about double) along with initial implementation of a gigantic rail network.

Table of Contents

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You thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you? Well, yeah. It took a while, but I’m still here!

The main reason that it took so long is… I got sick of spaghetti. I like building like that, but for something the scale of what I’m attempting, it just doesn’t work.

Enter: the main bus:

Or as a rendered view with mapshot (I was planning to include that, but the output is a few hundred MB. Perhaps in another post).

Off we go to the east. As I mentioned in the first post, there are no biters on Nauvis, so I’m safe to do whatever is needed until I get off world.

Table of Contents

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Factorio is an absolute masterpiece of a game. It’s perfect for a brian like main that loves to build things up, solve problems, and make things work. Perhaps too perfect. To date, I’ve put almost 2000 hours into the game over a number of runs, getting more complicated each time. Most recently, I’ve started a heavily modded run based around Space Exploration (adds planets!), Krastorio2 (designed to work with SE, think of it as Factorio++), LTN (automatic trains), Rampant (better enemies, although disabled on Nauvis), and the entire Brevven suite of a half dozen additional materials. If you’d like a full list of mods, I’ve included one at the end of this post.

It should be fun. 😄

I figured this time around, I should actually post my progress. Probably not straight up videos, although that’s a possibility at some point, but rather screenshots and perhaps a few short clips. If you’re interested, take a look, drop me a line. I’d love to chat about it. If not, just skip over it. This is as much for me (supplemental memory go!) as anything. 😄

It’s it just so much fun to watch?

Onward!

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As I’ve mentioned a couple of times recently^{1 2}, I have set a handful of different things on my local machines to make remote development a bit easier. This time around, I have two more to add to that list:

• Setting up a local SOCKS proxy with SSH
• Setting up a local TOR proxy for testing / more anonymous browsing
• Configuring your browser to use these proxies for some/all traffic

In both cases, I have these running on an always-on server that I use for various projects just like this. It could just as easily be set up to run on a Raspberry Pi or on your local machine.

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A long time ago¹, in a galaxy far, far away², I moved my blog from WordPress to a custom written static blog generator in Racket. And for a while, all was well.

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The eagle-eyed among you¹ may have noticed something a bit different since last night:

That’s right, I’m finally using HTTPS!

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I use a MacBook at work. It’s nice, since it’s Unix’y enough that I can work in the terminal yet works much better out of the box than Linux. On the downside, the keyboard is less than great for carpal tunnel syndrome. So instead, I’ve been using a Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard. Then though, you have the difference between Control/Windows/Alt keys and Control/Option/Command.

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