Month: April 2026
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Man, I have missed having a battlestation to work at these last few months. It's nice to sit at one again, even if it's only a 'chicory battlestation'.
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Two laptops sit nestled between two large monitors, with a desktop computer on the floor below and a teleprompter/webcam on an arm above, in a brightly-sunlit garden office.
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The "regular" house's Internet connection finally switched-off last night, so I zipped around this morning and moved my NAS across to the Chicory House.
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Dan, a white man with a ponytail and a goatee beard, carries a large black cube-shaped computer down a staircase.
This was a challenging selfie to take. Unfortunately, Gigaclear haven't yet managed to fulfil their promise to reassign our static IP address to our new line, so this was swiftly followed by some DNS reconfiguration, sigh!
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Molly guard in reverse
In his Unsung blog, Marcin Wichary's shared the concept of a 'reverse molly guard', which is awesome. I didn't actually know the originating term 'molly guard' until I saw it, though, although I've definitely seen (and implemented) then before. Hey: d'ya wanna hear about a molly guard I added to Three Rings the other year?
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The Dungeon of Dark Patterns
The latest episode of webcomic Mini Fantasy Theater - The Dungeon of Dark Patterns - is just excellent.
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WSL9x
Hailey Somerville's managed to get something akin to WSL working on Windows 95. Who'd have even thought such a thing was possible?
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BBC News RSS... with full-size thumbnails!
A user of my Improved BBC News Feeds reached out to suggest that I upgrade the resolution of the thumbnail images. Turns out this was a quick win: my noodles hadn't even cooled before I finished.
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My "commute" since moving to the Chicory House isn't much longer than it is at our regular home, but it does involve going outside. Want to see?
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Reply to: I Wish I Could Talk to My Dad
Inspired by a mate whose dad recently died, Kev Quirk shared his own experience of his father's death, and a particular ritual of his reminded me of one of my own.
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There was a dartboard here, once. 🎯👻
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Two lines of holes cover a portion of a light green wall, with a rectangular gap between them, under a protruding screw, where perhaps a tray shelf was once mounted.
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What breaks when one of your developers leaves?
On Friday, I said goodbye to a colleague as she left us after most of a decade with the company. Then this morning, all hell broke loose on some production servers.
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DataDog graph marked to show a co-worker's departure on Friday evening being immediately followed by a flurry of errors which then stopped for the weekend before coming back in force on Monday morning.
It turns out that the API key that connected our application to our feature flag management platform was associated with her account, and hadn't shown up in the exit audit.
Let this be your reminder to go check where, if anywhere, your applications are using person-specific keys where they should be using generic ones!
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Found GCBN167 Ivy Believe It's Up There!
This afternoon I'm acting as backup driver for my partner Ruth, who's walking the length of the Thames Path by (very gradual) instalments. A delightful tree climb soon gave me this great cache container!
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Did not find GC3KQK2 RRR10
A little sad to DNF this cache which is probably just well-hidden, but I've only got limited time to hunt as I'm the backup driver for this segment of a walk down the entire length of the Thames Path.
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Finding the right Bottom Hole paper
Terence Eden takes us on a rabbithole of trying to work out what actual newspaper formed the basis of the newspaper prop in an episode of Bottom, and it makes an amusing ride-along.
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I took the dog out for a walk from the Chicory House yesterday. At one point, we found ourselves on a familiar-looking footpath: I couldn't place exactly why I'd been there before. Geocaching, possibly: I couldn't see any on the map but perhaps they'd been since archived?
Fortunately, I maintain a personal tracklog of virtually everywhere I've been in the last decade or two, so I was able to run a quick query and discover that I'd walked out here on a geohashing expedition in 2024.
Personal location tracking continues to be awesome. Being able to both forwards-search ("where was I on this date?") and reverse-search ("when was I last within this area?") unlocks a wealth of aides mémoire that are otherwise hard to come by.
It's hard to sell people on the idea, probably because it's a slow-burner - you need lots of data before it starts to pay off! - but I still recommend it.
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FlipFlop Solitaire's Deck-Generation Secret
I enjoy a mobile game called FlipFlop Solitaire, which provides a few thousand pre-seeded decks that are guaranteed "winnable". This blew my mind for a little while - how can you be sure that these shuffles are all winnable? But then I worked out a way to achieve exactly that result... by thinking in reverse!