Dementia

From a purely administrative viewpoint, we lost Mum early last December. The reality is that we’d lost her years before that. Dementia is subtle, but is one of the cruelest diseases I know. Everyone, the sufferer and their families, lose each other by a thousand small cuts. Everyone’s

Self-hosting useful tools

Recently I've started self-hosting some useful software tools. It started by reading Neil Brown's blog, and came into focus when Mozilla announced they were closing down Pocket - not because it was losing money, simply because "the way people use the web has evolved"

Run and count

The other day I needed to run a command a number of times and see how many times it worked, and how many times it failed (as measured by the return code). I could have done this in Python, or various other languages, but for this bash seemed like it

Using restic on Box via rclone

Writing this one as much for myself as anyone else, since I've hit this twice already and had to figure it out both times... I was setting up a backup with restic using a repo on Box (via the awesome rclone tool). The repo would init, but when

Leave it

I realised something this morning. It’s not particularly profound in general, I think, but I want to get it down and out of my head. Since the election Xitter has been determined to show me MAGA posts, for whatever reason. The particular tweet this morning was a video of

Four hundred years

13 Then the Lord said to him, “Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. Genesis 15:13 NIV I was re-reading about Abraham recently and it just hit me

Fixing AirPrint on the LaserJet M15w

Hopefully this will save someone else a few steps when they hit the same problem. We had a thunderstorm a few weeks back, and the power blipped. Stuff came back on but some of it - including the printer - wasn't quite the same afterwards. In particular, the

Making a subset of Font Awesome

Font Awesome is, well, awesome - but there's no getting away from the fact that if you only want a few of the icons then it's not a lightweight package.

Goodbye, Dad.

My father passed away in mid-March. It wasn't expected. He'd not been well, but we were expecting the next thing to be another visit to hospital, not death. When it came time for the funeral, I wasn't able to give a eulogy. In that