Welcome to the first article in my new blog, Tales from @Lantis.
This is going to be a bit of a meta post talking about the what it is and why it exists, so if you're here for content and don't care much for my story, feel free to jump back to the index page and check out the next post (which hopefully I've written by the time you are reading this!). If you're still reading, lets dive into the questions.
Who are you?
My name is Michael, I use the handle Lantis online. I'm an Electrical Engineer from New South Wales, Australia.
I have a passion for Open source software which was founded not long after discovering Gargoyle back when it was still v1.6.0. I have no formal coding or development training, but I've been hacking at it long enough to have an idea these days. My first contribution to Gargoyle was back in 2015 with a series of woeful commits to try and fix some startup race conditions with the minidlna plugin. This was my first ever contribution to an open source project, a single character typo preventing a proper restart of the service. To be able to fix this for myself and ultimately having it accepted into the codebase was quite rewarding. This was the beginning of a long running foray into developing for Gargoyle and something I continue to this day. I'm not the founder (that would be Eric), and I suppose I'm not even officially the lead developer, but I do like to think of myself as a pseudo-lead developer for the project these days.
I am also (perhaps not surprisingly) into gaming. It's not something I anticipate writing a lot about as a topic here, however to appease curiosity and the obvious question: Dota 2, Rocket League, Counter-Strike:Source (Go/CS2 are alright but you can't beat the classics). A handful of others get a run but these are the ones with the most time sunk into them by far (too much in the case of Dota). I'm going through an emulator phase at the moment and reliving my childhood N64 games (all of which I own legitimately...).
Last but not least, I've got an automotive obsession. I like to modify cars and enjoy the process of pulling things apart and putting them back together (see: Engineer). The process of tinkering is common across all of my hobbies to some extent, it's what I'm good at and what I enjoy. The car community is a mixed bag these days and has a lot of bad attention. When I first started into this hobby I met some awesome like minded people and to this day still have good friends through cars.
Why are you starting a blog?
Over the past few weeks, although it does seem to be somewhat resolved now, the Gargoyle forum (and website in general) was experiencing 502 Bad Gateway errors for large parts of the day. I spend a lot of time trying to help people with problems on these forums and I also use them to post my Unofficial Beta Builds for the public to use. I'm not sure what caused these issues, I suspect web crawler or LLM scraper overload, but I quickly realised that without this site I did not have a platform to share these builds easily. I tossed around the thoughts of starting a blog in the past and this was enough motivation to do so.
By the time I had this platform ready to go, the issue is somewhat resolved... for now. I had sunk enough time and effort into it that you wouldn't just abandon it, so here we are.
What is going to be in it?
This is going to evolve over time however the following topics are guaranteed:
- Gargoyle Router Project
- OpenWrt
- Web Development
- MbedTLS-CLU
I have a few thoughts on potential upcoming articles floating around. I'd like to do one about how I developed this blog (as true to my tinkering tendencies, I wrote my own platform). Along with this topic I would like to talk about Laravel as my PHP framework of choice.
I'd also like to talk more in depth about MbedTLS-CLU which is a small project I put together to solve a specific Gargoyle problem. I think it has more potential if I can spend some more time on fleshing it out.
A topic I'd like to cover in the near future is nftables, specifically the process of writing a custom expression. I have been meaning to do this for years and I learned a lot which I'd like to share.
How often are you going to post?
When I feel like it or I have something to share. I don't have a set schedule in mind, however several times a year is my benchmark for success for now.
Why do I care?
The short answer: you probably don't.
However if you're looking for:
- The latest Unofficial Beta Builds for Gargoyle
- My other projects
- Some other random content that I feel like writing about
- A mildly interesting read
Then this might be the place for you.
Why "Tales from @Lantis"?
When I have to tell people my email address in person, I frequently hear the following phrase:
Oh, like Atlantis?
No, that's not really what I was going for. The @ symbol separates the username and the domain name components of my email address. It wasn't a clever attempt at referencing Plato's lost city, it was simply strict adherence to RFC5322 (waiting on someone to correct me on the RFC...) trying to utilise my online handle.
That being said, Tales from @Lantis is kind of catchy and a nice play on words, so perhaps I should give all of the random receptionists who have said this to me over the years more credit.
Every good blog has a logo, what's yours?
I'm not a graphical designer, in fact anyone who has ever used a GUI made by me has probably cursed me out loud or wondered why the work experience guy was put in charge of UX again. The plain styling of this site is a testament to my abilities, or lack thereof.
I have put together something simple that represents what is likely to be the main topics I cover here (Gargoyle firmware builds). This might change over time, but here is v1.0.
