Paul Walker

Latest — Jun 25, 2025

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

More issues

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

mbsync, SASL and Gmail

Slightly more esoteric than usual; I'm posting this for my benefit as much as anyone else's! I was just trying to set up mbsync [https://isync.sourceforge.io] to work with Gmail. I'd got most of the config copied from another provider [https://fastmail.

One Small Step...

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If there is anyone following me, you might have noticed that I haven’t really posted anything lately. The reason is simple — there’s been so much going on at home that I haven’t had any brain space to write. There have been days when I could manage

My Apple purchase regrets

I read an interesting article by Mark Ellis [https://markellisreviews.com/the-apple-purchase-i-regret-the-most/] the other day which got me thinking about my biggest Apple purchasing regret. To be clear up-front, I’m very happy with most of their devices, and quite snug in their ecosystem. While they do have their faults