✍️ Written by: Dmitry Glukhovsky Genre: Sci-fi/fantasy Published: 09 June 2011 Pages: 464 🧐 My rating: ★★★☆☆ / 3 stars The year is 2033. The world has been reduced to rubble. Humanity is nearly extinct. The half-destroyed cities have become uninhabitable through … | Continue reading
✍️ Written by: Dmitry Glukhovsky 🏷 Genre: Sci-fi/fantasy 🗓 Published: 09 June 2011 📄 Pages: 464 🧐 My rating: ★★★☆☆ / 3 stars The year is 2033. The world has been reduced to rubble. Humanity is nearly extinct. The half-destroyed cities have become … | Continue reading
The next step in developing our smallholding is to get some chickens. The coop is built and we picked up our 6 little feathered friends recently. My wife has wanted chickens for as long as I can remember, but we’ve never had the space to do it; when we moved here, we said that ch … | Continue reading
Since the last post, I’ve had a lot of interest in the mailing list idea, so I’ve set one up. Just a quick post to let you all know that I’ve setup a mailing list for the weight loss thing. Since my last post, there’s been a lot of interest from people to join in. If you’re inter … | Continue reading
So many people have reached out with messages of support following my “Fat Boy” post. I’m thinking maybe we should start a little mailing list? Since I wrote the Fat Boy at 40 post a few days ago, so many people have reached out to offer their stories, advice and support. It’s be … | Continue reading
I recently turned 39 and I’m vowing to NOT be a fat boy by the time I turn 40. As of this morning (29 Aug 2023) I weigh 110.9kg (244lbs) and I’m 190cm (6’ 3”) tall. According to the NHS’ BMI calculator, this gives me a BMI of 30.7. In other words, I’m obese, people. The NHS recom … | Continue reading
I decided to mow the larger of our 2 fields yesterday, but our plucky little mower couldn’t handle it. Our 2.5 acre homestead is split into 3 main sections; the “home” section, which contains our house, the gardens and outbuildings. Then we have fields 1 and 2. Here’s an arial sh … | Continue reading
✍️ Written by: Brandon Sanderson 🏷 Genre: Sci-fi / fantasy 🗓 Published: 17 Nov 2020 📄 Pages: 1,232 🧐 My rating: ★★★★☆ / 4 stars After forming a coalition of human resistance against the enemy invasion, Dalinar Kholin and his Knights Radiant have … | Continue reading
As co-admin of one of the largest tech instances on the Fediverse, it’s ironic that I struggle with social platforms so much. After posting my yearning to bring back forums, Basil asked a very astute question over on Mastodon: Screenshot curtesy of Mastopoet Basil is right; I do … | Continue reading
Social media is fucking us all up. I’d love to go back to the days of forums, where there was no popularity contests, or “influencers”. I’ve been ruminating about my use of social media a lot recently and to be honest, I’m still not that happy with it. I’ve taken a step back and … | Continue reading
I love my Crocs. I have 3 pairs, and in this post I’m going to convince you that they’re the best shoes on earth. Yes yes yes, I’ve heard it all before “the holes in Crocs are where your dignity leaks out.” But the fact is, they’re really bloody comfortable, and good for your fee … | Continue reading
There’s some automation on this site that posts to various places, all via RSS. Here’s how it works… There are a number of ways to subscribe to this blog you can do it via RSS, email or on social media (Mastodon, Micro.blog or Bluesky). I’ve always been of the thinking that a rea … | Continue reading
I’d love to replace my iPhone with a dumb phone, but I don’t think it would ever work in reality. I was recently perusing Youtube (as I sometimes do) and I came across a video about the Punkt MP02, which is effectively a dumb phone that supports Signal. As a Signal user myself, t … | Continue reading
Even though it’s currently summer, we’re already preparing ourselves for the long Welsh winter ahead. Even though it’s the middle of summer, we had 2 tonnes of fire wood delivered yesterday. We’re obviously not using our fire at the moment, but when it comes to the long, harsh We … | Continue reading
We now have 4 cows grazing in one of our fields, and it’s brilliant. We have a couple of fields on our 2.5 acre smallholding, but one of the fields is too steep for me to mow on my Husqvarna 4x4 mower, so it’s grown pretty long with all the sun and rain we’ve had recently. I got … | Continue reading
I’ve been staring at a blank box for a little bit now, trying to work out what to write. This has never happened to me before. I think I know why… I do enjoy the process of writing. I fire up my text editor of choice, Typora and away I go. Most of the time I have a topic in my gr … | Continue reading
Yesterday was the Apple 2023 WWDC conference. There were some big announcements, here’s my thoughts… I caught up on the Apple event last night, and for the most part, I thought it was all a bit meh. If you want to see the whole event, you can check it out here, but if you already … | Continue reading
I was nearly scammed while selling a car on AutoTrader. Here’s how the whole thing went… Owning cars is a pain in the arse; they’re money pits and I hate dealing with them. My wife and I need a car each, so the problem is compounded by running 2 cars in the household. Anyway, a f … | Continue reading
✍️ Written by: Brandon Sanderson 🏷 Genre: Sci-fi / fantasy 🗓 Published: 04 March 2014 📄 Pages: 1088 🧐 My rating: ★★★★★ / 5 stars Expected by his enemies to die the miserable death of a military slave, Kaladin survived to be given command of the r … | Continue reading
Colored vs. underlined links by Jatan Mehta Jatan talks about why you should have underlined links to make things discoverable and accessible for your readers. Read Post → I’ve talked about this myself in the past and I wholeheartedly agree with Jatan on this. While perusing th … | Continue reading
Following my last post, I’ve made some changes to the way in which I consume social media. I was feeling a bit shitty about social media. Honestly, I wasn’t getting a lot from it, so I decided to make some changes to the way I do things. In my last post on the topic I said: I don … | Continue reading
Most online services cost “a coffee per month” which seems like a great deal, but it soon mounts up. I’m sure you’ve all heard the sales pitch…ACME Corp. releases their latest digital wares to the world, and on their site it says something like… For the cost of just a coffee per … | Continue reading
I’ve had my Remarkable 2 for a couple months now, so I think it’s about time I shared some thoughts on it. I’ve been aware of the Remarkable devices for a couple years now - back when I was shopping for a new tablet and decided to go for an iPad Air with an Apple Pencil. I take a … | Continue reading
I’ve felt a bit…meh about social media recently so wanted to jot down some thoughts about it all. I’ve recently written about Micro.blog, having my own self-hosted microblog, and having a backup on the Fediverse. If it’s not clear by all my pissing about in that space, I’m not to … | Continue reading
I’ve been exploring Blot lately. It’s great, so I’ve decided to move this site over to it from Jekyll. I recently wrote about whether my current setup was good enough and whether I should move over to Blot for my blogging platform. Now, I really enjoy playing with new tools like … | Continue reading
✍️ Written by: Brandon Sanderson Genre: Sci-fi / Fantasy Published: 24 May 2011 Pages: 1,280 🧐 My rating: ★★★★★ / 5 stars The Voidbringers came against man ten thousand times. To help them cope, the Almighty gave men powerful suits of armor and mystical wea … | Continue reading
I’m going down a platform rabbit hole (again!) and I don’t know what to do… A few days ago I wrote about how I’d spun up a self-hosted Microblog in favour of using the Micro.blog service. Since then – just a few days later, might I add – I decided to flip back to Micro.blog. Micr … | Continue reading
I’ve been struggling with Micro.blog’s offering for a little while, so I decided to build my own microblog. Think back a few weeks, dear reader, where I spoke about having a backup account on the Fediverse. In that post I talked about how I’d decided to go with Micro.blog (even t … | Continue reading
✍️ Written by: Steve Cole Genre: Kids Sci-Fi Published: 2005 - 2013 Pages: Usually around 120 pages 🧐 My rating: ★★★★★ / 5 stars Astrosaurs is set in an alternate timeline where the dinosaurs survived the extinction 65 million years ago by escaping into spa … | Continue reading
I’ve decided to re-join Twitter. I miss an awful lot about it and I might leave Mastodon too. Yes, you read that right. I’ve decided to re-join Twitter. There’s a lot of stuff I miss from the social network - the community, the threads, the hot takes. the fun. I feel like Mastodo … | Continue reading
I won't buy a YubiKey by Garrit Franke In this interesting post, Garrit talks about why he wouldn't buy a YubiKey and I get where he's coming from. Read Post → I own 3 YubiKeys that I have for personal use. There’s one that I keep connected to the USB hub on the desk in my … | Continue reading
I have been thinking about having a backup account on the Fediverse, but I’m struggling with which service to use. We’ve been having some challenges over on Fosstodon recently. Between availability issues thanks to large influxes of users, technology problems and DDoS attacks, it … | Continue reading
Should content on a personal site be edited, or should it be a snapshot in time? Here’s my thoughts… So I read this post by Manu Moreale yesterday, where he was talking about retrospectively editing posts, and why he thinks it’s a bad idea: I dislike the concept of editing old … | Continue reading
This is a list of design mistakes that I think too many blogs make. I’ve made some of them myself over years, so I’m speaking from experience here… What a click-bait title, right? Honestly, I couldn’t think of a better one, so please don’t judge me too harshly. This is just an op … | Continue reading
✍️ Written by: Tamsyn Muir Genre: Sci-Fi / Fantasy Published: 14 July 2020 Pages: 496 🧐 My rating: ★★★☆☆ / 3 stars Brought up by unfriendly, ossifying nuns, ancient retainers, and countless skeletons, Gideon is ready to abandon a life of servitude and an af … | Continue reading
I have added a way for you to subscribe to this blog via email. A while ago, back in 2021 in fact, I maintained a newsletter. But after some time I realised that newsletters are hard work, so I decided to ditch the whole idea. Since then, a number of people have emailed me asking … | Continue reading
I’ve managed to come up with a static site workflow that I think is as good as WordPress. Here’s the details… Cast your mind back to January 2022, dear reader, when I wrote a post about managing content with Jekyll. Shortly after writing it, I realised it was bloody hard to do, s … | Continue reading
I wanted a way to automate the git add, commit & push commands. Here’s how I did it… Since learning how to use Git, it has become an integral part of my workflow for things like publishing to this site, and updating my various projects, like Simple.css and That Watch Bloke. Howev … | Continue reading
I want to love Micro.Blog, I really do, but it’s just so bloody confusing to use! A couple years ago, almost to the day, ironically, I took Micro.Blog for a spin and my opinion of it back then wasn’t all that positive. But I recently read a post by Jason McFadden about his move f … | Continue reading
✍️ Written by: Patrick Rothfuss Genre: Sci-Fi / Fantasy Published: 30 March 2012 Pages: 1,008 🧐 My rating: ★★★★★ Picking up the tale of Kvothe Kingkiller once again, we follow him into exile, into political intrigue, courtship, adventure, love and magic ... … | Continue reading
I’m going to be having some fun on the Fediverse over the next few days/weeks. If you’re comfortable doing so, please join in, as the more people who take part, the better. What is FediPoll? Well, I have a fair number of followers on Mastodon, around 20,000 last time I checked. S … | Continue reading
Twitter is on fire, but is an algorithm better than a chronological timeline? During my regular perusal of Mastodon I’ve seen a number of people publishing posts like these… I didn’t hear about X in my timeline, that’s a failure on Mastodon’s part. Not having an algorithm lea … | Continue reading
I nearly fell for a run of the mill phish recently. Just goes to show that they can get anyone. Just to give you some context before we get into this, I’m a senior leader at Bank of America, where I work in the information security team. The team I run is in the identity space an … | Continue reading
Ten years ago today, I started this blog. I can’t believe it’s been a decade already! Here’s some stats from the last 10 years, as well as some lessons I’ve learned along the way… When I started drafting up this post, I thought it would be a good idea to have some stats, so I wen … | Continue reading
Here’s how to build a responsive navigation menu using absolutely no JavaScript. So you want to build a navigation menu for your site, but you don’t want to add unnecessary JavaScript, or implement any checkbox hacks, which are bad for accessibility. Then this post may be for you … | Continue reading
Some people prefer home work, others like to be in the office. Here’s my opinions on the whole debate. I was having a virtual chat with Chris Wiegman yesterday about home vs office working, following a post on Mastodon by him: I can’t understand people that want to sit in their … | Continue reading
I’m often asked about integrating a blog with X service, does it really need to though? Yesterday I published a fun little website called Start a F**king Blog. I think the premise is quite obvious, but go give it a read - it’s fun. As I often do with stuff I write online, I poste … | Continue reading
While trying to setup a new Microsoft account for my son, I got stuck in a CAPTCHA loop. It’s annoying AF. It’s Christmas morning (Merry Christmas BTW) and like most parents, my wife and I have been busy setting up (and playing with) various presents for our sons. One of my sons … | Continue reading