Notes – Dan Q

6-12 Months

The insurance loss adjusters came around this morning, accompanied by damage assessors and electricians and whatnot.

The process continues to feel painfully slow. We’re still one to two weeks from confirmation that the insurance company will accept liability and be ready to start paying for, y’know, the immediate concerns like where we’re going to live.

“How long should we plan on renting another house to live in?” I asked, warily.

“Six to twelve months?” guessed the loss adjusters.

Erk! 😭

Note #28280

While cleaning up/assessing damage following our house flood, I finally found a lost digital stylus I’ve been looking for for a couple of months.

Unfortunately it’s been sat under the water line so I don’t know yet if it survived. But it’s FOUND, at least!

(Look at me, finding ways to stay positive!)

Normal life

I want normal life back now, please.

I appreciate that it’s only 40-ish hours since my house flooded and we had to move out. But with all the stress and activity that’s necessarily followed, it feels like it’s been so much longer.

Unrelated note: why has the person in the room above me at this hotel been using a pogo stick since around 05:30?

Flood

My house is under water.

Well, fuck.

RIP James Van Der Beek

James van der Beek died this week of bowel cancer; he was only a couple of years older than I am. I guess I’m at that point of my life where unexpectedly-early celebrity deaths might start being “around my age”.

I’m neither young nor angsty enough to enjoy a re-watch of Dawson’s Creek, but I especially loved him in Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23 so maybe I’ll re-watch that.

Syncthing on Unraid: repairing malformed database disk image

Mostly as a note to myself, but here’s what to do if you’re running linuxserver/syncthing via Docker on Unraid and it keeps saying:

ERR Database error when getting previous version (error="getkv: database disk image is malformed (11)" log.pkg=syncthing)

The problem is that Syncthing’s index has been corrupted. I was able to fix it by getting a shell into the relevant Docker container and moving the index: Syncthing detected it as absent and re-created it, re-indexing everything. Here’s what I did:

docker exec -it syncthing bash mv /config/index-v2 /config/index-v2-BROKEN

Everything fixed itself immediately and the Docker logs showed the reindex underway.

Methuselah

My partner and her husband (my metamour) have a tradition that every 5th wedding anniversary they get the “next size up” of champagne bottle.

This meant that on yesterday, when we celebrated their 15th, we needed to get through a Methuselah: a massive 6 litre bottle equivalent to nine standard bottles of champagne (rightmost in the attached picture).

It’s times like these you’re glad of friends you can call on to help you drink such a monster!

Dan Q on itch.io

I’ve had my itch.io account for about six years; I think I first created it to buy a copy of We Are But Worms: A One Word RPG. I’ve since made several purchases, donations, reviews, and comments, but never really used my account as a “creator”.

I changed that today when I realised that there was nothing to stop me re-publishing games like DNDle and Axe Feather 2021 via my itch.io profile as well as on their current homes (and on GitHub, I suppose). For some folks, itch.io’s discovery features might be the best way for them to discover worthwhile content weird stuff like this.

I might republish some other “things” I’ve made on itch.io too. It’s not like there haven’t been lots of them over the years!

Daily Mail RSS that doesn’t suck

Off the back of my project to un-suckify BBC News’ RSS feeds (https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev) by removing non-news content and duplicate items, I received an email this week (addressing me by the wrong name, I might add) from somebody who asked if I could do the same… for the Daily Mail.

I’m so very tempted to provide an empty RSS feed and say “there you go; that’s an RSS feed of the Daily Mail but with the crap bits removed”.

Turns out my distaste for the Daily Mail is greater than my love of clean RSS.

Sky potholes

Amusing announcement from the captain of my plane out of Tenerife South this afternoon. In place of the usual recommendation to keep your seatbelt fastened while seated in case of turbulence, he advised that there was a “risk of potholes”.

I’m sure the analogy makes sense to the Brits aboard, but I hope it translated well for the Spanish speakers on this plane!

Hollandaise Sauce

If I’m on holiday and a hotel offers me eggs benedict for breakfast, I’ll almost always order it. But I’d never make it at home.

I tell myself that this is because hollandaise sauce is notoriously easy to mess up. That I don’t want to go through the learning process only to make something inferior to what I eat as a holiday treat.

But maybe it’s just that my brain wants to keep eggs benedict as a signifier that I’m on holiday. That I can unplug from the world, stop thinking about work, and enjoy a leisurely breakfast with some creamy eggs and a long black coffee.

Maybe eggs benedict just has to remain “holiday food”, for me.

Airborne RSS

RSS readers rock. Having a single place you connect for a low-bandwidth bundle of everything you might want to read means it doesn’t matter how slow the WiFi is on your aeroplane, you can get all the text content in one tap.

(I’m using Capy Reader to connect to FreshRSS, by the way.)

Time to catch up on some news, blogs, etc.!

Bagel Holes

Our kid doesn’t like bagel holes. She’ll eat the rest of the bagel, but not the hole.

At least, that’s the only explanation I can think of for finding things like this most mornings.

Discourse

I like it when the Internet says “yes, and”.
I like it when the Internet says “yes, but”.
I even like it when the Internet says “no, because”.

I’m not so keen when the Internet says “well, actually”,
(Probably because it reminds me of what
a shit I was in some not-yet-forgotten time.)

But I don’t like when the Internet rallies a brigade
To pick apart a character flaw I have, but hate,
Or to attack something I’m not, and expect me to defend.

So perhaps next time, start with “yes, and”, “yes, but”,
Or even “no, because”… or just say nothing, and
Remember what it means to connect with a human.

Mocking SharePoint

Highlight of my workday was debugging an issue that turned out to be nothing like what the reporter had diagnosed.

The report suggested that our system was having problems parsing URLs with colons in the pathname, suggesting perhaps an encoding issue. It wasn’t until I took a deep dive into the logs that I realised that this was a secondary characteristic of many URLs found in customers’ SharePoint installations. And many of those URLs get redirected. And SharePoint often uses relative URLs when it sends redirections. And it turned out that our systems’ redirect handler… wasn’t correctly handling relative URLs.

It all turned into a hundred line automated test to mock SharePoint and demonstrate the problem… followed by a tiny two-line fix to the actual code. And probably the most-satisfying part of my workday!