I subscribe to various RSS feeds using Nextcloud News. It makes them easily accessible on my phone whilst ensuring that things will be marked read if I instead read the feed on my desktop (that's not to say that it's perfect, though: as I've written previously, I also use fediver … | Continue reading
It's not uncommon to have to remove a laptop's keyboard in order to perform other work on it. The Thinkpad x280 is actually a little different in that respect, because it only generally needs removing for replacement or because the motherboard needs removing for some reason. Desp … | Continue reading
I know that I'm far from alone in not particularly liking Slack, nor am I likely to be the first to observe that it seems to be particularly bloated case-study in poor UI/UX design. But, whether I like it or not, Slack is something that I have to use quite regularly, annoyances a … | Continue reading
Recently, I unexpectedly received some money - not a huge amount, but something that I wanted spent on something tangible and fun (rather that setting it aside or spending it on day-to-day expenses) After some (though probably not enough) thought, I decided to spend it on a hot t … | Continue reading
For (almost) all the years that I've had a personal website, I've not had a comments section. The reasons behind this changed with time, though at one point I had moderation duties elsewhere and didn't really fancy also dealing with that on my own site. But, comments are not with … | Continue reading
On February 12th, we took in a (nearly) 5 year old Border Collie in need of a new home. Unfortunately, the home that Bonnie came to us from wasn't looking after her needs very well: despite there always being someone home, she had been spending most of her day shut in either a 4' … | Continue reading
I've never been a huge fan of tapping posts out on a mobile screen, but there definitely are times when I feel a real need to get something out of my head and onto (virtual) paper. Last year, I switched to using Obsidian to keep notes and draft posts. On desktop, the move was eas … | Continue reading
In December 2023, I added support for webmentions to my site. As part of the setup process, I also configured a backfeed of mentions from external sources such as Github, Mastodon and Twitter - the idea being that if you comment on my content on social media, it'd show up as a co … | Continue reading
I'm a fairly prolific note-taker and have been, in both my personal and professional lives, for years. I manage my notes with Obsidian (in fact, even this post was drafted in it) putting its Daily Notes Plugin into use to manage my to-do list. At the start of each day, the rollov … | Continue reading
When we first had solar installed, I really didn't envisage it leading to us switching to using electricity for heating over winter - after all, the sun doesn't shine very much, heaters are pretty energy hungry and mains gas was quite a bit cheaper than mains electricity. However … | Continue reading
The sofa in our living room, is actually only part of a sofa: it's the long side of a corner sofa. When we originally bought the sofa, it was the perfect size and shape for our living room. Unfortunately, our landlord later did what landlords do and decided to switch letting agen … | Continue reading
I occassionally find that I want to cast a browser tab from my laptop - usually to put a chart onto a display so that I can periodically glance at it. However, my laptop runs a fairly strict set of firewall rules - after all, it's a portable device and, on occasion, will connect … | Continue reading
Over the past 9 months or so, I've written fairly extensively about how we've tried to improve the savings that our Pylontech US2000C solar battery is able to yield. Using the battery to shave pricing peaks relies on schedules to control when the battery kicks in, ensuring that i … | Continue reading
Our dishwasher is about as simple as it's possible for an appliance to be: it's got a wheel to select a program and a push button that you hit to start the cycle. I'm not actually sure how many years it's been in use (it came with the house), but it's still going strong and does … | Continue reading
Over the course of the year I've published various posts looking at the performance of our solar install, so as 2023 has now rolled over into 2024, it seemed worth posting a summary of performance across that year. The system was installed at the end of May so we've not had a ful … | Continue reading
A couple of years ago, I made a polished concrete table to use on our decking. A family member really liked it, so has (quite regularly) reminded me that they'd like one if I was ever in the mood to create another. This year, I decided that it'd make a good christmas present and … | Continue reading
Although primarily used for revision control of source code, git repos are also often used to store a wide array of other things. For example, I use it for notes, a wiki, my website and even an audit-able means to share my public keys. When troubleshooting, having a revision log … | Continue reading
If you ask anybody that runs a small Mastodon server, you're quite likely to hear that media storage can be a bit of a pain. Although there are various tootctl incantations that are used to help free up space (I've included mine further down), as the fediverse grows so do a serve … | Continue reading
It's not something I've ever been particularly motivated to do before, but I recently found cause to turn one of my blog posts into an ebook. A couple of years ago, I moved my site over to using Nikola and, since then, all my posts have been written using Markdown (often being dr … | Continue reading
Amazon has been our retailer of first-resort for years: ordering on Amazon is quick, convenient and (on average) tends to have lower prices. Even our TV was originally bought via Amazon Prime. Over the course of that time, there's inevitably been the odd issue with ordered items, … | Continue reading
When I last wrote about our Solar Battery Savings, we had just moved onto a battery charge schedule which involved two daily grid-charges. The underlying idea being that this should help to unlock additional savings by shaving both the morning and evening price peaks. Aside from … | Continue reading
Bay windows give the perception of adding quite a bit of space to a room. In a bedroom, they allow furniture to sit a bit further back than it otherwise could, leaving more space for the occupants to stumble about in. We've got a small unit sat in the bay, with the bed placed aga … | Continue reading
There are a number of blogs and serials that I really enjoy reading and (where available), I've tended to subscribe to their RSS feeds using Nextcloud News. What I've noticed though, is that, amongst everything else I do on my phone, the new article notifications do tend to get l … | Continue reading
My Razer headset has a built in microphone which started to fail recently: people started to note that they couldn't really hear me (a particular highlight being "We're having a hard time understanding you because your voice is so feeble"). Whilst it's possible to replace the hea … | Continue reading
It's that time of year again: the clocks have changed and the evenings are getting colder and darker. Each year, when the heating first starts to kick in, I take a little bit of time to review whether there's anything that we can do better this year than last. For the last few ye … | Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, I realised I'd made a horrendous reporting mistake which negatively skewed our view of solar battery performance whenever the battery was charged from the grid. Aside from there being a bit of egg on my face, this also meant that I needed to re-assess vario … | Continue reading
I recently needed to set up a new Grafana instance. Previously I've run Grafana using Docker, but this time, I decided to run it in my K8S cluster instead. There was no particular reason for choosing to run it in Kubernetes other than that I had the cluster sat there, with spare … | Continue reading
I've been looking for ways to improve our (somewhat dire) solar battery savings ever since I calculated the daily savings that we were achieving. One of the approaches that I identified and tried was scheduling grid charging in order to increase the level of use that the battery … | Continue reading
As part of my quest to drive up the savings that our solar battery is able to generate, I recently adjusted schedules to allow for a small overnight charge. This was done in order to try and ensure the battery had a charge so that it could shave the morning pricing peak. It's... … | Continue reading
Last month, I analysed the performance of our solar install and found that, whilst our Solar battery was generating daily savings, it would very likely never save enough to offset its purchase cost. There were a number of factors involved, but one of the bigger ones was the batte … | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I was fetching health data from Zepp's API in order write data collected by my Amazfit Bip3 Pro Smartwatch into InfluxDB. It hadn't originally been my intention to interact with Zepp's API, my first choice had been to pair the watch with Gadgetb … | Continue reading
Less than a week ago, I set up a system to automatically announce new blog posts on Threads, however, it is no longer active. Despite my account having only posted about 4 times (with only one of those being an automatic post by the script above), it got suspended because they fe … | Continue reading
Recently, whilst working on implementing automatic posting into BlueSky I ran into an issue with link-preview cards not being displayed. Posts are submitted into BlueSky using ATProtocol, which place the onus on the sender to generate and provide preview card functionality, so th … | Continue reading
At the beginning of this year, I wrote about how I was starting to play around with automating syndication of my content into various social networks in order to better pursue the approach known as POSSE. That earlier post provides quite a long explanation of why I prefer to writ … | Continue reading
I've done a fair bit of playing around with my Watchy since I bought it a couple of months back and, generally, I really like it. Unfortunately, as cool as it is, it's proven just a little too limited for what I need: if nothing else, it turns out that I really need my watch to b … | Continue reading
For some slightly obscure reasons I've recently found myself looking at the Bitfi hardware wallet and some of the claims the company make, particularly in relation to whether or not it's actually possible to extract secrets from the device.The company's claims are pretty absolute … | Continue reading