I’m unlikely to get a graduation ceremony like last time (on account of social distancing and whatnot), but I get a certificate to acknowledge my most-recent qualification.
Year: 2020
Dan Q found GC3MFPY Dogfort v Catfort – Sailor Dog
This checkin to GC3MFPY Dogfort v Catfort - Sailor Dog reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Well, it’s been a long while since I saw an intact Dogfort vs. Catfort!
After dropping the kids off at their respective summer camp activities for the day, my car advised me that, owing to traffic, I ought to consider taking the B4044 most of the way home rather than the usual A-roads. Sure, I thought… that takes me through Farmoor where I think there might be caches I haven’t found! I parked not at the nearby car park but in a layby in Filchampstead to enjoy a walk along the nearby footpath first.
Coordinates were spot on and cache was easy to spot despite camouflage. Re-hid slightly deeper. TFTC!
Bodley and the Bookworms – Scan and Deliver
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
You know that strange moment when you see your old coworkers on YouTube doing a cover of an Adam and the Ants song? No: just me?
Still good to see the Bodleian put a fun spin on promoting their lockdown-friendly reader services. For some reason they’ve marked this video “not embeddable” (?) in their YouTube settings, so I’ve “fixed” the copy above for you.
Dan’s Office (360° Panoramic)
This week, some colleagues at Automattic and I are sharing pictures of our workspaces. So I made a 360° panoramic with interactive “info points” (apologies for work-specific jargon). Would you like to see it?
Syncthing
This last month or so, my digital life has been dramatically improved by Syncthing. So much so that I want to tell you about it.
I started using it last month. Basically, what it does is keeps a pair of directories on remote systems “in sync” with one another. So far, it’s like your favourite cloud storage service, albeit self-hosted and much-more customisable. But it’s got a handful of killer features that make it nothing short of a dream to work with:
- The unique identifier for a computer can be derived from its public key. Encryption comes free as part of the verification of a computer’s identity.
- You can share any number of folders with any number of other computers, point-to-point or via an intermediate proxy, and it “just works”.
- It’s super transparent: you can always see what it’s up to, you can tweak the configuration to match your priorities, and it’s open source so you can look at the engine if you like.
Here are some of the ways I’m using it:
Keeping my phone camera synced to my PC
I’ve tried a lot of different solutions for this over the years. Back in the way-back-when, like everybody else in those dark times, I used to plug my phone in using a cable to copy pictures off and sort them. Since then, I’ve tried cloud solutions from Google, Amazon, and Flickr and never found any that really “worked” for me. Their web interfaces and apps tend to be equally terrible for organising or downloading files, and I’m rarely able to simply drag-and-drop images from them into a blog post like I can from Explorer/Finder/etc.
At first, I set this up as a one-way sync, “pushing” photos and videos from my phone to my desktop PC whenever I was on an unmetered WiFi network. But then I switched it to a two-way sync, enabling me to more-easily tidy up my phone of old photos too, by just dragging them from the folder that’s synced with my phone to my regular picture storage.
Centralising my backups
Now I’ve got a fancy NAS device with tonnes of storage, it makes sense to use it as a central point for backups to run fom. Instead of having many separate backup processes running on different computers, I can just have each of them sync to the NAS, and the NAS can back everything up. Computers don’t need to be “on” at a particular time because the NAS runs all the time, so backups can use the Internet connection when it’s quietest. And in the event of a hardware failure, there’s an up-to-date on-site backup in the first instance: the cloud backup’s only needed in the event of accidental data deletion (which could be sync’ed already, of course!). Plus, integrating the sync with ownCloud running on the NAS gives easy access to my files wherever in the world I am without having to fire up a VPN or otherwise remote-in to my house.
Plus: because Syncthing can share a folder between any number of devices, the same sharing mechanism that puts my phone’s photos onto my main desktop can simultaneously be pushing them to the NAS, providing redundant connections. And it was a doddle to set up.
Maintaining my media centre’s screensaver
Since the NAS, running Jellyfin, took on most of the media management jobs previously shared between desktop computers and the media centre computer, the household media centre’s had less to do. But one thing that it does, and that gets neglected, is showing a screensaver of family photos (when it’s not being used for anything else). Historically, we’ve maintained the photos in that collection via a shared network folder, but then you’ve got credential management and firewall issues to deal with, not to mention different file naming conventions by different people (and their devices).
But simply sharing the screensaver’s photo folder with the computer of anybody who wants to contribute photos means that it’s as easy as copying the picture to a particular place. It works on whatever device they care to (computer, tablet, mobile) on any operating system, and it’s quick and seamless. I’m just using it myself, for now, but I’ll be offering it to the rest of the family soon. It’s a trivial use-case, but once you’ve got it installed it just makes sense.
In short: this month, I’m in love with Syncthing. And maybe you should be, too.
Dan Q performed maintenance for GC86MTH Yarnton Lane
This checkin to GC86MTH Yarnton Lane reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Replaced logbook.
7 things we know about the nun reading ‘Boys’ Life’ in ‘Airplane!’
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It’s one of the best visual gags in a movie filled with them.
In the classic 1980 comedy Airplane!, two passengers are seen reading magazines. First, we see a nun reading Boys’ Life. Moments later, there’s a boy reading Nuns’ Life.
The scene is over in seconds, but the memory of this joke lives on. That’s especially true for those of us who have been reading Boys’ Life since we were kids.
Here are seven things you might not know about this bit of visual humor.
…
Of the many things I love, here are two of them:
- The Airplane series of movies.
- People who, like me, get carried away researching something trivial and accidentally become an expert in a miniscule field.
This fantastic piece takes a deep dive into a tiny scene in Airplane. What issue of Boys’ Life was the nun reading? What page was she looking at? What actual magazine was the boy reading within the Nuns’ Life cover? These and more questions you never thought about before are answered!
WHAT THE BEC?! (#01)
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Just another vlog update from comedian Bec Hill. Oh no, wait… this website is now T-Shirt Famous! (for a very loose definition of “famous”, I guess.) For a closer look, see Instagram.
This isn’t the silliest way I’ve put my web address on something, of course. A little over 17 years ago there was the time I wrote my web address along the central reservation of a road in West Wales using sugar cubes, for example. But it’s certainly the silliest recent way.
Anyway: this t-shirt ain’t the Million Dollar Homepage. It’s much cooler than that. Plus the money’s all going to Water Aid. (If you haven’t claimed a square yourself, you still can!)
On Bec Hill related news, did you see that she did a third “when you listen to music when you’re hungry” video? You should go watch that too. It’s avocado-licious.
Lindsey Stirling/Johnny Rzeznik String Session
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One of the last “normal” things I got to do before the world went full lockdown was to attend a Goo Goo Dolls concert with Ruth, and so to see two musicians I enjoy team up to perform a song and share some words of hope and encouragement for a better future beyond these troubled times… feels fitting and inspiring.
Also awesome to see that Stirling’s perhaps as much a fan of Live in Buffalo as I am.
Fun diversion: I never know how to answer the question “what kind of music do you like?”, because I increasingly (and somewhat deliberately) find that I enjoy a wider and wider diversity of different genres and styles. But perhaps the right answer might be: “I like music that makes me feel the way I feel when I hear Cuz You’re Gone recorded from the Goo Goo Dolls’ concert in Buffalo on 4 July 2004, specifically the bit between 4 minutes 10 seconds and 4 minutes 33 seconds into the song, right at the end of the extended bridge. It’s full of anticipatory energy and building to a wild crescendo that seems to mirror the defiance of both the band and the crowd in the face of the torrential rain that repeatedly almost brought an end to the concert. Music that makes me feel like that bit; that’s the kind of music I like. Does that help?”
Dan Q performed maintenance for GC8W7QW Forgotten Bridge
This checkin to GC8W7QW Forgotten Bridge reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Quick maintenance check in while out on a walk with the 3y/o. All is well. Left the incumbent travel tag for the next ‘cacher!
Santander to Accept Homemade Deeds Poll
For most of the last decade, one of my side projects has been FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, a website that helps British adults to change their name for free and without a solicitor. Here’s a little known fact: as a British citizen, you have the right to be known by virtually any name you like, and for most people the simplest way to change it is to write out a deed poll: basically a one-person contract on which you promise that you’re serious about adopting your new name and you’re not committing fraud or anything.
Over that time, I’ve helped thousands of people to change their names. I don’t know exactly how many because I don’t keep any logs, but I’ve always gotten plenty of email from people about the project. Contact spiked in 2013 after the Guardian ran an article about it, but I still correspond with two or three people in a typical week.
These people have lots of questions that come up time and time again, and if I had more free time I’d maintain an FAQ of them or something. In any case, a common one is people asking for advice when their high street bank, almost invariably either Nationwide or Santander, disputes the legitimacy of a “home made” deed poll and refuses to accept it.
When such people contact me, I advise them of a number of solutions and workarounds. Going to a different branch can work (training at these high street banks is internally inconsistent, I guess?). Getting your government-issued identity documents sorted and then threatening to move your account elsewhere can sometimes work. For applicants willing to spend a little money, paying a solicitor a couple of quid to be one of your witnesses can work. I often don’t hear back from people who email me about these banks: maybe they find success by one of these routes, or maybe they give up and go down one an unnecessarily-expensive avenue.
But one thing I always put on the table is the possibility of fighting. I provide a playbook of strategies to try to demonstrate to their troublemaking bank that the bank is in the wrong, along with all of the appropriate legal citations. Recent years put a new tool in the box: the GDPR/DPA2018, which contains clauses prohibiting companies from knowingly retaining incorrect personal data about an individual. I’ve been itching for a chance to use these new weapons… and over this last month, I finally had the opportunity.
I was recently contacted by a student (who, as you might expect, has more free time than they do spare money!) who was having trouble with Santander refusing to accept their deed poll. They were willing to go all-out to prove their bank wrong. So I gave them the toolbox and they worked through it and… Santander caved!
Not only have Santander accepted that they were wrong in the case of this student, but they’ve also committed to retraining their staff. Oh, and they’ve paid compensation to the student who emailed me.
Even from my position on the sidelines, I couldn’t help but cheer at this news, and not just because I’ll hopefully have fewer queries to deal with.
The Perfect Art Heist: Hack the Money, Leave the Painting
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Thieves didn’t even bother with a London art gallery’s Constable landscape—and they still walked away with $3 million.
This comic is perhaps the best way to enjoy this news story, which describes the theft of £2.4 million during an unusual… let’s call it an “art heist”… in 2018. It has many the characteristics of the kind of heist you’re thinking about: the bad guys got the money, and nobody gets to see the art. But there’s a twist: the criminals never came anywhere near the painting.
This theft was committed entirely in cyberspace: the victim was tricked into wiring the money to pay for the painting into the wrong account. The art buyer claims that he made the payment in good faith, though, and that he’s not culpable because it was the seller’s email that must have been hacked. Until it’s resolved, the painting’s not on display, so not only do the criminals have the cash, the painting isn’t on display.
Anyway; go read the comic if you haven’t already.
My 1:1 with the Queen
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Americans often ask what our relationship is with the Queen. I thought I’d upload my most recent 1:1 so you could see how the regular yearly 1:1 progress chats go.
As a Brit who does software engineering alongside a team from all over the rest of the world… I wish I’d thought of making this video first.
Rebuilding a Windows box with Chocolatey
Computers Don’t Like Moving House
As always seems to happen when I move house, a piece of computer hardware broke for me during my recent house move. It’s always exactly one piece of hardware, like it’s a symbolic recognition by the universe that being lugged around, rattling around and butting up against one another, is not the natural state of desktop computers. Nor is it a comfortable journey for the hoarder-variety of geek nervously sitting in front of them, tentatively turning their overloaded vehicle around each and every corner. UserFriendly said it right in this comic from 2003.
This time around, it was one of the hard drives in Renegade, my primary Windows-running desktop, that failed. (At least I didn’t break myself, this time.)
Fortunately, it failed semi-gracefully: the S.M.A.R.T. alarm went off about a week before it actually started causing real problems, giving me at least a little time to prepare, and – better yet – the drive was part of a four-drive RAID 10 hot-swappable array, which means that every single byte of data on that drive was already duplicated to a second drive.
Incidentally, this configuration may have indirectly contributed to its death: before I built Fox, our new household NAS, I used Renegade for many of the same purposes, but WD Blues are not really a “server grade” hard drive and this one and its siblings will have seen more and heavier use than they might have expected over the last few years. (Fox, you’ll be glad to hear, uses much better-rated drives for her arrays.)
So no data was lost, but my array was degraded. I could have simply repaired it and carried on by adding a replacement similarly-sized hard drive, but my needs have changed now that Fox is on the scene, so instead I decided to downgrade to a simpler two-disk RAID 1 array for important data and an “at-risk” unmirrored drive for other data. This retains the performance of the previous array at the expense of a reduction in redundancy (compared to, say, a three-disk RAID 5 array which would have retained redundancy at the expense of performance). As I said: my needs have changed.
Fixing Things… Fast!
In any case, the change in needs (plus the fact that nobody wants watch an array rebuild in a different configuration on a drive with system software installed!) justified a reformat-and-reinstall, which leads to the point of this article: how I optimised my reformat-and-reinstall using Chocolatey.
Chocolatey is a package manager for Windows: think like apt for Debian-like *nices (you know I do!) or Homebrew for MacOS. For previous Windows system rebuilds I’ve enjoyed the simplicity of Ninite, which will build you a one-click installer for your choice of many of your favourite tools, so you can get up-and-running faster. But Chocolatey’s package database is much more expansive and includes bonus switches for specifying particular versions of applications, so it’s a clear winner in my mind.
So I made up a Windows installation pendrive and added to it a “script” of things to do to get Renegade back into full working order. You can read the full script here, but the essence of it was:
- Reconfigure the RAID array, reformat, reinstall Windows, and create an account.
- Install things I routinely use that aren’t available on Chocolatey (I’d pre-copied these onto the pendrive for laziness): Synergy, Beamgun, Backblaze, ManyCam, Office 365, ProtonMail Bridge, and PureVPN.
- Install Chocolatey by running:
Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1')) - Install everything else (links provided in case you’re interested in what I “run”!) by running:
choco install -y Firefox -y --params "/l:en-GB /RemoveDistributionDir"
choco install virtualbox -y --params "/NoDesktopShortcut /ExtensionPack" --version 6.0.22
choco install -y 7zip audacity autohotkey beaker curl discord everything f.lux fiddler foobar2000 foxitreader garmin-basecamp gimp git github-desktop glasswire goggalaxy googlechrome handbrake heidisql inkscape keepassxc krita mountain-duck nmap nodejs notepadplusplus obs-studio owncloud-client paint.net powertoys putty ruby sharpkeys slack steam sublimetext3 telegram teracopy thunderbird vagrant vlc whatsapp wireshark wiztree zoom - Configuration (e.g. set up my unusual keyboard mappings, register software, set up remote connections and backups, etc.).
By scripting virtually all of the above I was able to rearrange hard drives in and then completely reimage a (complex) working Windows machine with well under an hour of downtime; I can thoroughly recommend Chocolatey next time you have to set up a new Windows PC (or just to expand what’s installed on your existing one). There’s a GUI if you’re not a fan of the command line, of course.
Simply Paul found GC88ZY9 The Devil’s Quoits
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{FTF} at 1.55am.
Full log to follow shortly.
344 miles & safely home at 3am.
Long ol’ day!Update now I’m awake.
I spotted this cache while on a little down-time in south Wales, where I’d gone to help my editor move out of his office. I was considering my caching options (this was before I realised it’d be 11pm before I went, not 5pm) when I spotted this outside Oxford. Well, my route would take me from Swindon to Aylesbury via the area, so it was perfect. I then spotted the lack of logs, and the published date and the dye was cast!Spool forward, past overpriced petrol and a total lack of food since 8am bar a discounted Service Station ToffeeCrisp, and I pull up at the southern car parking spot. I leave the car somewhat nervously (partly because if security pop by, I’ve got a hell of a story about what it’s full to the gunnels with. Full to the point I had to open the sunroof blind to get the final box in!) at 1.35am and had done the necessary (while filming some non-spoiler time-lapse footage for a future GIFF movie project) 20 mins later. I’d walked the full circuit to odd noises coming from the pond and waypointed the outlier to give me a reference. 44m, if you’re wondering, at a bearing of none-of-your-business degrees.
After collecting my camera up I remembered to also mark the notice board on my phone (important!) to give me my clock-face orientation, as I couldn’t easily see it in relation to the outlier in the dark. A few stars out, but they didn’t help much.
On the drive home I saw 5 foxes, including a rare pair sighting. I also had a deer with small antlers run in front of the car (not across the road, along it, zig-zagging) for ages on a very minor road with ample exits it could have taken but chose not to. Eventually I lowered a window and shouted, “Oi, Bambi. I shot your mum!” and that seemed to do it. It vanished into the bushes as I got along side of him.
Anyway, an atmospheric time of ‘day’ to visit GZ and I’ll have to come back in daylight as I’d no idea this was here and really enjoyed the experience. Weird and a bit spooky though it was.
TN:LN:Virt-TFTVC! A FP for the experience and the answers have been sent by Messenger. Thank you Dan Q! I’ll add a pic shortly…SP
Cache Safely > Avoid Groups > Don’t Chase FTFs (generally)
I created a new geocache lately, a virtual cache under the Geocaching.com Virtual Rewards 2.0 scheme. Logging it requires visiting the site of the Devil’s Quoits, a prehistoric monument (well, by this point it’s mostly a replica) which, following my recent house move, is conveniently close by. This is the first finders’ log against the new cache, and it’s pretty epic: Simply Paul, who from the sound of things didn’t expect to be passing by quite so late-on, visited the GZ at almost 2am, but that didn’t stop him from stomping around and counting stones in the dark. Cleverly, he waypointed the outlier stone that forms part of the virtual challenge so that he didn’t need to sight it from the centre of the henge, which is probably for the best because I can only assume that he wouldn’t have been able to see it once inside the circle anyway!