Looked at the Mongoose Traveller 1E collection, it's clear they were trying to maintain a similar aesthetic to Classic Traveller with the book covers and the black and white interiors.
And the switch back to 2D6 mechanics also harkens back to the Classic Traveller era.
How do the two games compare? What's better about one vs the other?
I kind of see the appeal of playing an older edition of a game. It's 'done.' No new supplements will come out to mess with your world.
But sometimes a new edition comes out and it just doesn't click with you.
I'd like to hear people's stories of why they stuck with an older version of a game after trying a newer version.
I ordered a ton of "mouse wrist rests" try out with my Ploopy Adept and here is what I settled on:
Kensington ErgoSoft Wrist Rest
It's just the tiniest bit too high. But it has a very grippy bottom so it doens't move around.
This one, at least for me, is the perfect height. But it does not have a grippy bottom. It's textured, so it's not perfectly smooth and will move around on me. I'm pretty sure I can just glue some kind of grippy material on the bottom, but that will probably raise the hight to that of the Kensington. So, for now, I'll stick with the Kensington.
Now that I did the BTU upgrade, I have a blue Ploopy adept topcase I don't need. If anyone wants it, it's yours for the cost of shipping.
VIAL is a GUI-based QMK configuration tool similar to VIA, but it exposes a few more QMK options.
One is tap dance.
With Tap Dance you can assign multiple options to one button. You can do 4 different assignments:
On the lower right button, I now have a right click when I tap the button. But if I hold the button down, then I can drag scroll with the ball.
Thank you to @Outrageous_Sort_8984 for compiling Vial for the Adept and posting it in a comment here for me to use.
I'll leave it to him to make a post with a link, so he can get some karma for his hard work.
I've been shopping around various cloud storage providers for a while. I'd used Google Drive in the past and then moved to Dropbox. But if I am going to store files on someone else's computer, I want my data to be end-to-end encrypted.
Since I am on a Mac, and use an iPad and Android tablet, I needed a solution that supported File Provider for MacOS, File Provider on iPadOS, and Android DocumentProvider/SAF.
I first landed on Tresorit. But I ran into an annoying bug, where all the directories on MacOS had a date of December 31, 1969 7:00 PM. When I contacted Tresorit, they told me that's a MacOS bug and not a Tresorit bug. After a number of exchanges with me complaining neither Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive has this error, they finally admitted it is something they can fix on their end, but it's low priority.
So, my next path was to try Cryptomator. Worked reasonably well. But the Android app doesn't do SAF, so I have to load the app, copy the files local and then I can access them from other apps. And I learned this AFTER I paid $20 for the Android app.
Onward I go, and settle on Proton Drive. It does it all. I'm so happy I pay for a year up front of cloud storage. 2 months into using it, I notice that I don't see my Proton Drive any more in the iPad Files app. I post something on their subreddit and they tell me they moved the client to use their new SDK, and they "temporarily" dropped support for File Provider on iOS. So, now I need to launch the Proton app, copy files locally, and then I can access them from other apps.
First they say that they dropped the feature because "very few people used it." From the comments other left on the thread, clearly a lot of people used it. So, then they say this is Apple's fault, because the File Provider API doesn't give them enough memory to work with. Pointing out that the previous version has no issues working with File Provider kinda went on deaf ears. So, I asked for a refund, since I paid for a whole year up front. And they told me since I was past the 30-day refund window, I was not getting a refund.
At that point I gave up. If I self-hosted my data, then I didn't need E2EE. I set up Nextcloud AIO in docker, configured borg backup to backup the entire thing, and then setup a systemd timer and service to copy the backup to Backblaze B2 for offsite storage.
I'm looking at the Traveller Wiki. It looks like Mongoose published a bunch of books as "LBBs." But these books seem to have "full size" books with the same name.
Are the LBBs just smaller size versions of these books, or are they unique in some way?
I got a pretty big collection of Mongoose Traveller 1E PDFs, and some books and I want to try to "complete the collection" in physical and PDF form.
Is there a complete checklist of everything that was published as physical and eBook?
I recently updated my Adept to use Rexroth BTUs and I don't want to go back to static or roller bearings.
I like the Adept, but the whole hold a mouse button down to scroll is a hit or miss experience for me. What I really want is to hold down both bottom buttons to scroll and you just can't do that. At least not with the QMK/VIA firmware it ships with.
So, I was wondering if anyone has hacked a scroll wheel or twist to scroll on this thing?
I added another script to the repo. For those of you who want to combine your Characters and Campaigns book into one PDF, I added another script that does:
Same GitHUb repo. Script is combine_books.py. All it's logic assumes you have the latest and greatest versions of the PDFs. In theory it should work with older copies of the PDFs, but I have no way to test that.
I noticed the two books reference each other all over the place, so I thought, why not combine the two together into one PDF? That way all hyperlinks would work. And 2 PDFs aren't any thicker than one PDF.
Please test and let me know if you find any issues.
After The Great Trackball Journey of 2020™, I learned I do not like thumb balls. I only like finger balls.
But way I use the ball is with the tips of my fingers. So, any button above the ball are kind of awkward to use. That led to massive problems with my L-Trac and the scroll dial on the top of the trackball.
I've seen other people use a finger ball with their palm or the very bottom of their fingers, so they have easier access to the top buttons.
I'm curious how other people use their finger trackballs: tips of the finger, palm, or middle/bottom of fingers.
I couldn't leave well enough alone, and I Clauded up a script that should, in theory, be able to hyperlink any GURPS PDF, not just the 4E Basic Set Revised. I tested it on High Tech and Space, and it seemed to work. I could only spot-check so many links.
The new script is called hyperlink_pdf_universal.py and is at the same location on GitHub:
https://github.com/plazman30/gurps_4e_revised_hyperlink
I included a batch processing option with recursion, so it can bulk process a directory full of PDFs, including ones that are in subdirectories.
You still need to set up Python. It is still a command-line tool. So, you need to get a little nerdy to do this.
I would like to make this something simple you just double-click on with a full GUI. But with the state of computer operating systems these days, it would cost me hundreds of dollars to buy developer licenses and get my code signed to avoid everyone seeing nasty security pop-ups. Just not in the budget for a little side project.
Again, if you find a link that doesn't work or links incorrectly, please open a GitHub issue and I will try to fix it.
I've played around with Bloom and Forklift and have currently settled on Q-Space Pro. But I'd love to see a proper app comparison of everything that's out there.
Well, as done as it can be without mass testing.
It's up on GitHub here:
https://github.com/plazman30/gurps_4e_revised_hyperlink
The script requires python 3 and the pymupdf python plugin. You should be able to install python and then use pip to install pymupdf.
There are three scripts:
hyperlink_pdf.py - This will rip through the PDF and add hyperlinks to any page number references.
hyperlink_pdf_v2_chapters.py - This will rip through the PDF and add hyperlinks to any page number AND chapter references.
crop_to_center.py - This will crop and center each page in the PDF so you don't get that odd page shift because there is an inner and outer margin.
I still need to write up documentation for people less technically literate than myself. But if you know how to install python and add a module, please try it out.
Including the table of contents and the index in the back, there are over 5000 links in this PDF. It's impossible for me to test all of them. So, if you find one that's broken, please submit an issue on GitHub and I'll work on fixing it.
And a reminder. I did all of this using Anthropic's Claude. If you're morally opposed to LLMs, please do not use this script. It solves a problem for me. I hope it can solve a problem for you too.
So, I found a bunch of edge cases the process and script missed.
The original workflow was to run a script that Claude created to hyperlink the entire PDF file. Then I would go in and cleanup a bunch of stuff. I would remove all links to page numbers references to other books. I would some errors it made in the Index.
Then I would run a script that would export the location of all the links into a JSON file and then import them back into a clean copy of the SJG PDF.
That worked well, but had some significant manual efforts. Not a ton. Probably 100 edge-case links that needed manual cleanup.
So, I fired up Claude Code and worked on it catching the edge cases and fixing them so I didn't have to. 90 minutes into the process, Claude's script was able to catch all the links and fix them.
At that point, I had a hmm… moment. So, I asked the LLM if it could generate a script. knowing all it knows now to manipulate the PDF directly without needing to use a JSON lookup file. And sure enough, it coughed up a script for me which I spot checked against the PDF, and it seems to work as expected.
The advantages here are:
I was hoping to post this tonight, but the night got away from me working on this. We'll see what I can come up with tomorrow.
The only thing the script doesn't hyperlink is references to other chapter. Some parts of the book say "See Chapter 2." I'm wondering if it's worth the trouble to add that.
I was finally able to find Rexroth BTUs with a sane shipping price in the US and ordered 3 of them.
I have quite the large collection of role-playing game PDFs. Curse you bundle of holding for making things so convenient and affordable. I also like to read these things on the tablet. Being a pretty big IT geek, I own an iPhone, an iPad, a laptop, a desktop computer, and an android tablet. For the longest time I’ve been trying to find an e-book reader that will allow me to sync my RPG PDFs across all these devices. My over engineered world involved the MacIntosh, operating system, Linux, iOS, iPadOS, and android.
I recently discovered an app called READEST, it runs on all those operating systems and will sync, PDFs epubs, and even comic book files across all those devices. It remembers last read position across all devices, and will even let you mark up your PDF and sync that across also.
To sync, you can either subscribe to their sync service, or sync using your own cloud provider. To sync you need to buy the app, which is a one-time $10 purchase across all devices. If you want to use their cloud storage to sink, you obviously need to subscribe.
Now, no matter what device I’m on, I can get at my RPG PDF collection. The app is in perfect, but it solves a problem for me. Just thought I would share in case anybody else was in a similar predicament and needing a similar solution.
Too many links to post since it’s available in so many different operating systems. I will let you do an Internet search to find it.
Hope this helps somebody
This is going to get nerdy, so bear with me.
I've spent the last 2 days adding hyperlinks to the GURPS 4E Revised PDF so that all the page number references are now hyperlinks that will take you to that page in the PDF.
Full disclosure – I did this with the help of the Claude LLM. There were close to **THREE THOUSAND** page references, so doing it by hand was not a job I could undertake. But it's something I wanted. I did some by hand, and spent a lot of time cleaning up what the LLM did for me until I got to a point where I think 100% of the hyperlinks work properly now.
A hyperlinked PDF is something I woule love to share with the community, but the PDF is obviously copyrighted, so I can't just put it up somewhere without violating US copyright law and impacting SJG bottom line.
But luckily, PDF is well known format and you can manipulate them using scripts. So, with the help of Claude, I found a way to make this a DIY project.
I spent a lot of time manually cleaning up page references that pointed to another book, and fixing page references the LLM chose not to hyperlink for some reason.
I have a JSON lookup table that lists all the pages that need hyperlinks and the text that needs to get hyperlink. Sometimes the lookup text will just be (p. 22) and sometimes the text will contain a word or two prior to the page number if the same page number is mentioned more than once on the page. So the lookup table may have see Animal Empathy (P. xxx) I spent a lot of time manually cleaning up page references that pointed to another book, and fixing page references the LLM chose not to hyperlink for some reason. As far as I can tell, the JSON is complete and it doesn't contain enough text to be a copyright violation.
The JSON completely skips the Table of Contents (since it's already hyperlinked) and it completely skips the top of Page 1 (Unification), since that talks about how the book got organized, and it's reference to page numbers is not relavent to the rules.
So, using an LLM generated script, the JSON file and your legally obtained PDF from Steve Jackson Games, you can use the script to hyperlink it.
So my question is, is there interest in this script to make your legal PDF hyperlinked, or am I going to get a bunch of "take your AI slop and go elsewhere" messages? I don't want to share this if it's just going to lead a constant stream of negative Karma and negative comments.
The script tells me there are 2,847 page references in the book, not including the table of contents. If SJG had hyperlinked this by hand in Adobe InDesign that would have been a massive amount of work.
Some notes about the script:
So, let me know if you're interested in seeing this thing.
In a post made just a few minutes ago, I complained about how the PDF has an "inner" and "outer" margin and how this was triggering some kind of OCD in me that I did not know I had.
So, I took matters into my own hands.
PDF is an open standard now, well documented with lots of tools to allow you to manipulate it.
So, I was able to vibe code a solution to center the text on all the pages and use a few other tools to make some changes to the PDF.
Step 1: I created a script a while ago that converts all CMYK images to RGB in a PDF. Since I'm viewing this on a tablet and not printing it out, the tablet can only display RGB anyway. And the conversion makes the images "pop" a little more.
Step 2: I loaded up my copy of PDF Squeezer and applied "Light Compression" to the PDF to reduce the size down.
Step 3: Ran the PDF through my vibe-coded python script to crop the edge off of each page to center the text.
Step 4: Loaded the PDF the script generated into PDF Expert, my PDF editor of choice. I resized all the pages to US Letter Size. This left a small grap on the right and left side. The pages all became a little taller, so everything got slightly bigger. That's a plus in my eyes.
Step 5: Renumbered the pages. PDF have their own page numbering system that obviously has the page number start with the cover. Well, that can mess with your world when you tell your PDF reader to go to Page 23 and it takes you to page 19 or 20, because the page numbers in the PDF don't match up with the printed page numbers. PDF Expert (and most competent PDF editors) will let you renumber the PDF page numbers. Now the cover is labeled "Cover," the introductory pages are numbers i, ii, iii, etc, and Page 1 is actually page 1.
I saved the whole thing, and now I have a PDF I am happy with. Here are some screenshots from Apple Preview showing the difference:
Original PDF:
"Fixed" PDF:
I don't mean to sh** on publishers. But PDFs should be more than just File→Export→PDF in 2026. They should include a hyperlinked table of contents. And when there is a reference to another page in the same book, it should be a link to that page.
I do a lot of "massaging" PDFs of RPG rulebooks I buy. To SJG credit, they at least fill out the PDF metadata, so when I import them into my PDF reader, I get the book name and not the filename as the book. Most publishers don't even go that far.
