Something’s gone wrong on the Jellyfin server I use to manage my household’s film library, resulting in some unexpectedly-funny repetition…
Kind: Notes
Note #28940
Pub lunch by the river in the Spring sunshine. ☀️
Black Belt
It’s been a long journey for our 9-year-old over the last four years, but today he is – going many others, mostly older and larger than him! – finally trying out for his recommended black belt in taekwondo. 🥋 🤞
Chicory Battlestation
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’.
Moving the Internet
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.
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!
Ghost of a dartboard
There was a dartboard here, once. 🎯👻
What breaks?
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.
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!
Personal Location Tracking FTW
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.
Flossed
Today, for the first time ever, I reached the end of a roll if dental floss without first losing or giving up on it.
Chicory House, Real Coffee, Flooded Keyboard
As if I hadn’t suffered enough “flood damage” this year, I started my first workday since rebuilding my home office setup – hour the first time in months! – in our rental… by pouring a cup of coffee into my keyboard. 😱
Chicory, Coffee, and Code
Now that we’ve finished our move into the Chicory House, I have for the first time in over two months been able to set up my preferred coding environment… with a proper monitor on a proper desk with a proper office chair. Bliss!
Good morning, Goldfinch
A goldfinch came to my bedroom window to say hi, this morning. Good morning, Goldfinch!
Unpacked Kitchen
Today’s mission in what we’re calling the Chicory House – our home while our actual house gets repaired – was to unpack the kitchen. I think it’s looking pretty good!
Next weekend’s mission will be to set myself up a workspace that isn’t the conservatory dining table. 😬
100 Days to Offload × 7
I remain a huge fan of Kev Quirk‘s “100 Days To Offload” blogging challenge. And today… I just completed it for the seventh time!
Kev announced that he completed it again today, too. He uses a different metric to me – he counts “posts over a twelve month period”, while I use a slightly more-restrictive subset of that: “posts in a calendar year”, because it was easy for me to make a table out of in my blog stats.
| Year | Posts | Success? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 |
221
(64 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | Barely made it this year (ignoring reposts, of which I did lots), with my 21 December article about a little-known (and under-supported) way to inject CSS using HTTP headers, which I later used to make a web page for which View Souce showed nothing. |
| 2021 |
190
(57 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | A cycle to a nearby geocache was the checkin that made the 100th post of this year, on 27 August. |
| 2022 |
168
(55 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | My efforts to check up on one of my own geocaches on 7 September scored the qualifying spot. |
| 2023 |
165
(86 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | My blogging ramped up again this year, and on 24 August I shared a motivational poster with a funny twist, plus a pun at the intersection between my sexuality and my preferred mode of transport. |
| 2024 | 436 | 🏆 Yes | Writing at full-tilt, my hundredth post came when I found a geocache near Regents Canal, but pedants who disregard reposts and checkins might instead count my excitement at the Ladybird Web browser as the record-breaker. This year also saw me write my 5,000th post on this blog! Wowza! |
| 2025 | 458 | 🏆 Yes | |
| 2026 | 252 | 🏆 Yes |
* Pedants might claim this year was not a success for the reasons described above. Make your own mind up.
After some discussion, Kev agreed that the earliest year I could claim for was 2020.
Personally, I feel like each of the hundred posts should occur on different days too. This is relevant to me, because sometimes I post multiple times in a day… but it’s 100 days to offload, not 100 posts to offload, right?
Therefore, by my own restrictions… the soonest I could achieve the goal in a year would be the 100th day of the year. Right?
Which is today.
Which I just did. 🎉
I started the year knowing that I’d be trying to do this “speedrun”. What I didn’t realise was how hard it would be.
The disruption of getting flooded out of our home in February and the many weeks since of short-term accommodation (of varying quality) has made just living a vaguely normal life very difficult this year (although I’ll admit that it’s also given a topic to write about time and again!).
Anyway: that feels like a win. My fastest ever – the fastest possible, under my ruleset – #100DaysToOffload achievement unlocked.
I wonder what I’ll do next.
(Max props once again to Kev for inventing the challenge.)
The Lost Art of the Amusing WiFi Hotspot Name
Long ago, you could move to a new area, scan for local WiFi networks, and fully expect to see a wonderful diversity of different network names. Some named for their locations, sure, but others named for people, or fandoms, or just “fun” ones.
Has this art form died? Most residential SSIDs nowadays seem to just be the default one that comes with the basic router supplied by the ISP. Most commercial ones are just the name of the business. Sometimes you’ll spot a phone configured for tethering but even that’s usually just “Alice’s iPhone” or similar.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a “Chicken Crossed the Road to Steal Our Wifi” or a “Russian Hackers” or a “Routy McRouterface” or a “All Your Bandwidth Belong to Us” (okay, that last one’s a bit dated). Has the art form died?