Kind: Articles
Traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body.
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BBC News RSS... with the sport?
Somebody commented on my blog to say they liked my "BBC News... Without The Crap" script, but still wanted sports news in their RSS feed. Luckily, I know just the person for the job: me!
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Trump's Strategy
I've worked out what convicted felon Donald Trump's endgame strategy is! And I can explain it... through the medium of a comic in the art style of Sid Meier's Civilization!
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Can AI retroactively fix WordPress tags?
My blog's tagging is a mess. With posts going back 27 years, an inconsistent taxonomy, and changes in focus, that's pretty-much inevitable. Perhaps an AI can help: reading through old under-tagged posts and suggesting tags that could be added? Let's try it...
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Sabbatical Lesson #1: Boundaries
My three-month work sabbatical has taught me a lot, perhaps too much to digest in a single blog post, so here's the first lesson: especially in a life-friendly distributed workplace, it's important to set boundaries to make your work/life-balance function properly.
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We'll Prescribe You A Cat by Syou Ishida
I just finished reading We'll Prescribe You A Cat, and while I enjoyed the stories within, I felt like the overarching plot that bound them lacked a satisfying payoff.
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Small-World Serendipity
We travelled 7,000km across the ocean only to find, by complete coincidence, that the Caribbean’s biggest cymruphile is the captain of a boat we chartered when we fancied a morning of reef-snorkelling and turtle-spotting.
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James Acaster's Classic Scrapes
James Acaster's Classic Scrapes - which I received during our Christmas Eve book exchange - was an enjoyable, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, series of anecdotes with thematic links connecting them. It's perhaps not for everybody, but it was a great gift for me!
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Entitled by Kate Manne
Entitled is a bleak and sometimes uncomfortable pop-sci dive into the issue of male entitlement. Covering a variety of different areas in which our patriarchal society somehow continues to disenfranchise women in particular and injure everybody by proxy, it provides neither a 'quick fix' nor even an optimistic outlook for the future, but it provides valuable focus areas for the continued fight for a better future.
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Endless SSH Tarpit on Debian
Given that I already routinely run my SSH servers on unusual ports, I'm surprised it took me until today before I discovered Endlessh, an SSH tarpit you can install on the conventional port to waste the time of anybody attempting a brute-force attack. Here's how I set it up on a Debian 12 server.
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My Ball
One of my dog's favourite games is 'My Ball', in which my role is to want the toy that she is guarding. It's all about the motivation, you see! Which is like some of the games I used to play with our eldest, when she was a toddler, I realise.
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Moving Three Rings' Servers
Yesterday I achieved one of my primary sabbatical goals and moved Three Rings' primary servers to a new datacentre and a new architecture. But while the visible part happened yesterday, the whole thing's been months in the making and builds upon the effort of an entire team of dedicated volunteers.
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Building another secret cabinet
When I was ten, I'd have killed to have a secret compartment hidden in my bedroom bookshelves. And once she'd seen the one I built for my own room, earlier this year, my ten-year-old predictably wanted one of her own, too. Luckily I had the spare parts and, now, the experience to make her one. Awesome.
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International Volunteer Day
It's International Volunteer Day, and thanks to being on sabbatical I got to spend most of the day volunteering with Three Rings. I liveblogged everything I got up to in a series of notes to try to shine a light on what volunteering (in a developer/devops role) with Three Rings can look like; this post is a summary of all that liveblogging, plus a few extra thoughts.
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Babies and Baubles
Each year, we encourage our two children to each select exactly one new bauble to add to our tree. The result is a decoration that's a celebration of the changing tastes and interests of our two kinds: a mismatched, discordant, crazy mixture of colours and shapes, but in which each and every item is its own story.
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99 Days of Blogging
I've blogged a total of 219 posts spanning 99 consecutive days of blogging, a personal best by a long stretch.