Default Apps for 2024

It’s been over a year since I last wrote about what I use, and I’ve been seeing plenty people’s update posts pop up in my feed reader this week, so it’s time to look at my default apps again. There are quite a few changes this year, nothing terribly exciting - I’ve marked these u … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 1 day ago

Next steps with Bluesky - hosting your own data and more on the API

It’s been a while since I wrote about Bluesky. My previous “Hello World” for Bluesky was a quick overview of using the APIs to authenticate and post to Bluesky. It remains a popular post all these months later, and several people have let me know it helped get up and running with … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 1 month ago

How I'm Doing Advent Of Code in 2024

Advent Of Code has been around for ages. It’s one of those things that I’ve always wanted to do, but never managed to get into the groove of. I’d maybe do the first puzzle, maybe even a couple of days, but eventually the time of year would overtake me and it would fall by the way … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 1 month ago

Positive (but Unsatisfactory) Resolutions

Yesterday was stressful, not going to lie. I had a lot of questions about how I’d found myself in the predicament. I was being chased for a debt that wasn’t mine, where I was specifically told someone had talked to a debt agency, given my details, and “passed security validation” … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 2 months ago

Well, F*ck

Picture the scene, Dear Reader; it’s just after 10am, and you take a moment to open the just-delivered mail over the remains of your morning coffee. Among the deliveries of small paint pots for your latest hobby project, is a non-descript envelope marked “private and confidential … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 2 months ago

New Home Screen for iOS 18 Beta

I’ve been playing around with the new ios 18 beta, now it’s available to the public. While I have found it a pretty dull update so far, I particularly wanted to try some some of the new customisation options. I haven’t found a colourful tint that works for me, but I am loving thi … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 5 months ago

Adding the New Mastodon Link Attribution Meta Tag

I just added[1] the new Mastodon/Fediverse link attribution meta tag to this site, partly because I think it’s a neat idea, but also because it took ~2 minutes to do and I’m all for quick wins at the moment. Adding the tag is straightforward, if you’re familiar with HTML. Put the … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 5 months ago

Dragonriding in Jade Forest

I mentioned in the last post I was really enjoying dragonriding in the Pandaria: Remix event that’s going on in World of Warcraft right now. I took a break from the game for a couple of years, so this is my first time trying the new “dynamic flying”, and it is by far my favourite … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 6 months ago

Early Riser

I was planning to write a blog post about getting up early in the near future, but Johnny Decimal went and beat me to it, so that spurred me to write it sooner. For the last four months or so we’ve made a point of waking up at 5am. Prior to that I’d found myself getting up later … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 6 months ago

Brunch at The Craftsman

The Craftsman is a Coffee and Alehouse in Aberdeen. Wanting to visit somewhere outwith the quarter of the city we normally stick to, it’s located just next to the harbour, and in my youth used to be the Schooner Bar - famed for its 7am opening times and being one of the roughest … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 6 months ago

Post Restoration Project - Dealing with WordPress Post-Kinds Data

At the start of the year I restored a lot of old posts to this site from a WordPress backup. While this worked great for posts that had “standard” content, I was missing hundreds of posts and even more metadata that relied on the IndieWeb Post-Kinds plugin for WordPress. In the e … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 6 months ago

Brunch at Second Home

Second Home is a newly-opened café + studio in Aberdeen. My partner visited while I was in London, and was raving about the brownie she’d had ever since, so we decided to make a date of it and go for brunch at the weekend. The food and drink were great, and the atmosphere was ver … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 7 months ago

Creating a Remote Dev Machine with Raspberry Pi and VS Code

I recently came into possession of a Raspberry Pi 5B, and was trying to figure out what to do with it. I came across this article by Jim Bennett on setting up a headless Raspberry Pi 4 as a headless development machine, and it got the cogs turning. My “development environment” on … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 7 months ago

Soaring

I got on a plane for the first time in about 6 years this week, and about 11 years since my first solo trip. Not a huge amount has changed; the local airport is slightly nicer, and its security is less burdensome, but it’s still akin to cramming into an aluminium tube and taking … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 7 months ago

Things I Find Github Copilot Actually Useful For

I’ve been lightly using Github Copilot in a personal capacity for almost a year, and I’m probably going to get to use it on work projects in the near future. I thought I’d take a moment to collect my thoughts on where I’ve found any value in using it, as well as acknowledge some … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 7 months ago

Upgrading Apples

I recently noticed the battery life of my Apple Watch Series 6 had taken a bit of a nosedive. Where once I could comfortably get nearly 2 full days out of a charge, now I’m finding myself having to “top up” regularly - sometimes within the same 24 hour period. Battery Health show … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 8 months ago

Miscellaneous Miscellany

There’s a lot going on, and my brain is a noisy place at the moment, so I thought I’ve got a lot of small updates in one post today, rather than a more focussed single-topic post. Build Time Improvements — I rolled out a change last night that dramatically reduces the amount of t … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 9 months ago

I have a Problem with Build Times

At the moment, this site takes too damn long to build. Recent builds are nearly 20 minutes. The upper limit on the tooling I’m using is 25 minutes. So it’s a problem I need to address. I’ve found myself reluctant to add some bits and bobs to the site recently because they just wo … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 9 months ago

Open Tab Dump: Mobile Edition (2024-03-03)

Second in an irregular series where I dump all the open tabs I have open in Mobile Safari. Visit More Blogs I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind - Josh Collinsworth blog Downloads | Reor Get Safari Tabs Shortcut • Robb Knight rendezvous with cassidoo 100 things y … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 9 months ago

Green Software for Practitioners (LFC131)

Catching up posting about something that happened on on Friday: I completed the free Green Software for Practitioners course by the Linux Foundation. It’s roughly 2 hours of material to get through, so I did it over the course of a couple of lunchtimes. There is a test at the end … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 10 months ago

It's Probably WordPress

I can’t remember when exactly I started doing this, but if I come across a website that doesn’t explicitly advertise an RSS feed, I try appending /feed/ to the domain[1]. For example https://example.com/feed/. A lot of the time - possibly the majority in the last few years - this … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 10 months ago

Generate a Markdown List of Open Safari Tabs with an iOS Shortcut

I mentioned in my last post that I created an iOS Shortcut to automate turning the list of tabs I have open in Safari into a Markdown list. Ryan asked if I could share that shortcut. I was always intending to, so here it is for everyone to make use of: Get Open Tabs as Markdown B … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 10 months ago

Open Tab Dump: Mobile Edition (2024-02-18)

I had a lot of tabs open in Mobile Safari. It was kinda getting a bit overwhelming to have to scroll through them all to find a particular one, or if I already had something I was about to search for open. So I figured I’d save a list of them all somewhere, just in case, and wipe … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 10 months ago

Blogkeeping

A list of the little online jobs I’ve been knocking off my to-do list this week: I moved Mastodon instance I’d been on Mastodon.online for a number of years, but always intended to move off of it at some point - get onto a smaller, less generic server. I took advantage of omg.lol … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 10 months ago

Things I'm Enjoying Lately

I’ve been planning to write a general “stuff I’m enjoying recently” post for a while, and my birthday seemed as good a time as any to do it 🥳 This post is largely media-centric, so there are a lot of YouTube embeds below. I might do some more posts like this on focussed o … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 10 months ago

More Words on Webmentions (and Backfeed)

Webmentions aren’t actually the problem After my earlier post on webmentions, Cam kindly reminded me that the bit I felt uneasy about is actually backfeed. To quote the IndieWeb wiki: Backfeed is the process of syndicating interactions on your POSSE copies back (AKA reverse syndi … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 10 months ago

Some Words on Webmentions

Webmentions are one of those things I like the idea of, but not always the practicalities of - particularly in the extended IndieWeb sense of it. The idea of sending and receiving Likes and other interactions to/from other websites is pretty cool in theory, and helps bring that s … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 10 months ago

Adventures in Containerising a Legacy PHP App for Azure

Context For the last 18 years or so I’ve been looking after a small, bespoke, PHP application for a small local business. It started off as a “hey, can you help someone I know with a problem? There might be something in it for you…” at my then-employer and all these years later i … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 10 months ago

Visiting Websites

I love my RSS reader and the mountain of feeds it lets me read/skim on a daily basis. But some recent discussion gave me pause on how I use RSS, and made me reflect on whether it strips something fundamental from the web: visiting cool websites. Evan wrote about this in November: … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 10 months ago

Adding a Bookmarks Page

I mentioned over on The Underground that one thing I wanted to add to my site, to “do more” with it, was a space to collect bookmarks and fun links I com across. Well, I’ve added a quick and dirty “first draft” of the feature over on the new /bookmarks page. It’s even got its own … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 11 months ago

Generative AI for Blogging: Revisited

About 6 months ago I did an experiment with using generative AI tools to write blog posts. It was part of a wider “understand if this stuff is useful and what its limitations are” exercise I needed to go through for work; it’s a hot topic and I needed to understand it - which inv … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 11 months ago

Sending Webmentions after Deploying to Azure Static Web Apps

I recently switched this site from Netlify to Azure Static Web Apps (SWA). For the most part it just worked - setup the site in the Azure portal, switch the DNS… done. You probably didn’t notice. There were a couple of things which didn’t immediately work because they were set up … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 11 months ago

Doing More With What You Already Have

I’ve just posted the first post on The Underground for the New Year; you’ll need to be subscribed to the RSS feed to read the full thing, but I wanted to share my favourite part of the post here, for posterity: An aside: I hesitate to air the nostalgia reason; a lot of the curren … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 11 months ago

Adding Site Search to Eleventy with

I recently added some new ways to dig through the archives of this site, and chief among them was search. Search is something I’ve wanted to add for ages, and thankfully it was pretty straightforward, thanks to Pagefind and the web component by Zach Leatherman. Installation Inst … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 11 months ago

I Hate iCloud For Windows

Hate is maybe too strong a word, but I can’t think of a better one in the moment. I like to think it’s not often I’ll piss-and-moan about a bit of software (these days), but the iCloud app for Windows is just so, so, so bad I’ve finally lost my patience with it. All I wanted it t … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 11 months ago

New Year, Old Posts

In a case of history repeating itself not once - but three times! - I’ve been working through the process of adding “historical” blog posts to my blog. These are posts I have written on previous iterations of my blog, in this case on several different domains, and stretch back ov … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 11 months ago

Certified: DevOps Institute Site Reliability Engineering Fundamentals

It’s been a very busy week, so I’m only managing to blog about this now, even though it happened last weekend. Last Saturday (9th December) I sat and passed the Foundation-level DevOps Institute certification for Site Reliability Engineering. This was a bit of a spur-of-the-momen … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 1 year ago

So About That Feed Reader-Only Blog Idea

In my last post I included a footnote about a RSS-only blog idea I’d had ages ago and not done anything with: This reminds me of the time I mused about setting up a site that was only an RSS feed. No web pages beyond the bare minimum needed for feed discovery, or maybe a splash t … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 1 year ago

Blogging is where it's at, again

I don’t blog as much as I used to, or post about as wide an array of topics as I used to, but I’ve always believed the blog is the “natural form” of posting on the web: a site of your own, that you control[1] and set your own rules on content and discussion; where you can post wh … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 1 year ago

Default Apps for 2023

I came across this collection of “what apps am I using?” posts via Manton, and thought it would be fun take part. If you want to see what others have posted, Robb Knight is compiling a list. 📨 Mail Client: Apple Mail + web 📮 Mail Server: Fastmail 📝 Notes: … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 1 year ago

How I use Generative AI to help write blog posts

Editor’s Note, 26th January 2024 - This post was part of an experiment in using “generative AI” in my blogging process, and as such is at least in part written by one or more generative AI tools. I am no longer using these tools and felt it important to come back and and apply th … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 1 year ago

Microsoft Role-Based Exams Now (Semi) Open-Book

Microsoft’s “role based” exams can be tough-going. There’s a lot to learn, with a lot of questions where remembering the sometimes subtle nuances between things like different SKUs/pricing plans, or particular flags on a PowerShell command can make all of the difference. A lot of … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 1 year ago

I Rebuilt My Blog and Didn't Write About It

Until now. Sorry, it’s tradition. If someone redesigns/redevelops their blog and doesn’t blog about it, did it even happen? Regular visitors (if there is such a thing) will already know this, but if you follow via RSS you might not know that this site has a new lick of paint CSS. … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 1 year ago

Come on Barbie, let’s go party

Editor’s Note, 26th January 2024 - This post was part of an experiment in using “generative AI” in my blogging process, and as such is at least in part written by one or more generative AI tools. I am no longer using these tools and felt it important to come back and and apply th … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 1 year ago

Azure Static Web Apps are Awesome!

Editor’s Note, 26th January 2024 - This post was part of an experiment in using “generative AI” in my blogging process, and as such is at least in part written by one or more generative AI tools. I am no longer using these tools and felt it important to come back and apply this l … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 1 year ago

Installing Threads on Windows 11

Threads is the new social media app on the block; Facebook Meta’s long-rumoured Twitter-like service. You’ve probably heard of it - only 5 days after launch and it already has 100 million users. There isn’t a web version of Threads yet, much to my chagrin, but if you’re on Window … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 1 year ago

Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert

It feels a little odd to be able to call myself an “expert” in anything, and truth be told, I don’t think I would call myself an expert in Azure DevOps (yet), but that’s the name of the certification, so here we are. So this was the big one. This was the goal I had in mind when I … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 1 year ago

A "Hello World" for bluesky/the AT protocol

Preamble I’ve been using bluesky for the last few days now. I quite like it. It has early-Tumblr-crossed-with-Twitter vibes, with plenty of people using the freedom of a small, semi-closed beta to just be weird online. I finally got around to having a very quick play with the AT … | Continue reading


@chrismcleod.dev | 1 year ago