Brain Phrye

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The Yellow Mug

This evening I cleaned up my kitchen. Even seasoned my cast-iron pan with some flax oil I overpaid for today. And I must admit it came out really nice. Yes, I watched about a dozen (two dozen?) YouTube videos on seasoning cast iron pans yesterday evening, what’s your point? Anyway, my clean kitchen. Go me. Feeling rather successful I decided to reward myself with a cup of hot chocolate. Unfortunately that was… not quite so successful. Read more



Review: Girl With All The Gifts

The Zombie genre has been a bit, well, full the past number of years. But there are still some really interesting stories nestled in amongst the survivalist ammosexual fantasy crud this genre has descended into. Happily this is one of them. Reviewing this without giving bits away is hard. So I’ll say first off that I liked the book. It leaves you wondering what you’d do; whether the right decisions had been made. Read more

Some Drabbles and Twabbles

A number of years ago I was introduced to the Escape Pod and Drabblecast podcasts. And when reading up more about them I discovered the Drabblecast forums and the amusing Drabbles (100 word stories) and Twabbles (100 char stories). I even got a few on the show and thought I’d put them here. Note that the drabblecast is for weird stories… Four times they took him. Every time an anal probe. Read more

Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream

One of the neatest bits of my first trip to Denmark wasn’t Legoland amazingly enough. It was a place that did liquid nitrogen ice cream. Istid is this little shop on a residential street in Copenhagen. Happily the street I was staying with a friend on! The setup is simple: on a counter behind glass are four brightly coloured Kitchen-Aid mixers; opposite them is a chalkboard explaining the four flavours of ice cream with toppings they offer. Read more

Retirement Update

An update to my original retirement post. One issue I didn’t really highlight in the original post was debt. Pay it off. Not having debt could be considered a leg in itself. No mortgage, no credit card debt, no student loans, etc. That all needs to be gone once you retire. Private pensions sometimes have an option to borrow from them for various reasons. You should almost never do this. Right now interest rates are low so mortgages will generally give you decent rates, so even using your pension to buy property isn’t a great idea. Read more

Back Home

My mom came home today. As per normal, I got confused about the time and place. While I was generally pretty good at collecting my mom from the airport, I ended up showing up a bit late from time to time. And there was often mixups with alarm clocks or wake up calls that made my on-time pickups a bit miraculous. This time there was a mix-up in getting my mom’s ashes. Read more

Hugo

I had been using Pelican to manage this site, but switched it to Hugo this week. My main reason for this is that I want to learn Go and Hugo is written in Go and uses Go templates in themes and a few other places. After having played with it for a few weeks, I thought I’d share my impressions so far.

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Multiple repos

Quite often I find it useful to push to more than one repo. If a repo is used for system configuration, I might have a central repo github.com but also have it on the servers it’s used to manage. It can also be useful for some code review scenarios.

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Letters of Note

I think I’ve found the last batch of pictures. I’m a little overwhelmed so another scanning session is a while off. However there were other things with the pictures - there were five letters.

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Things to do for starting a php project

So php isn’t the greatest thing ever. Nonetheless its tooling has evolved and that are a number of things you can do to make it less auful. The goal of this is to cover setting of a php project so that you can pull in dependancies and provide an easy way for users to install your software.

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Cups

Been going through my mom’s things. Tax season doesn’t stop for death so I had one last bit of paperwork to find. Mom wasn’t a fan of paperwork so it took a little hunting - found it in the end though.

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Laundry

Finished mom’s laundry. It seems some lasts you do know when they happen.

Fridge repair

Problem: Fridge was making loud buzzing noise.

Solution #1: Ignore it, hope it would go away. I invested 5 days into this solution.

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SRI hashes for CDN js and css files

Subresource Integrity is a nifty idea to use SRI hashes to verify external resources your web app depends on haven’t been compromised. Using content delivery networks (CDNs) for common web resources (javascript and css) makes pages load faster since chances are those things have been loaded by other sites and are cached by the browser. It also means bandwidth gets used better generally which is a good thing. But it does mean you’re trusting the CDN. Read more

More filesystem fun…

So as a followup, the flaw in my plan was that fat32/vfat doesn’t grok users and groups - or their associated permissions. Therefore both cp and tar emit loads of errors when copying to such a filesystem. Which is annoying. Therefore I went the tarfile route. While taring to the device is tempting, I imagined walking someone over the phone on how to extract that and then just got frustrated before even having the conversation. Read more

Disk formatting

I currently need to prime a backup. There’s around 1.5TB of data on a Linux server in the cloud and a client wants regular backups of it to an OS X backup server they use for their media backups. I have a local copy so I thought I’d do the modern version of a stationwagon full of tapes to reduce the bandwidth used. Unfortunately this brings us to filesystem fun. Read more

Turkey leftovers (part 1 of many I suspect)

For holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas I sometimes become overwhelmed with tradition and get turkey. I inevitably curse myself for doing so about 5 minutes into preparing it. Turkey, to me, doesn’t taste good and it’s generally not any fun to cook with as it’s almost always huge - even when you’re lazy like me and just get a crown. This year I decided to stirfry it. Yes, that was a lot of cutting. Read more