31 May 2025
It's been a little while since my last blog post so I'll once again forgo the tech rambling and focus on the life rambling. The most exciting thing that happened was probably that I made a planter out of wood we had lying around. For someone who hasn't done any woodworking since secondary school I am probably more proud than any man should be over a rectangular box with legs.
I also worked with my partner on a very strange issue where her GitHub account couldn't connect to the Visual Studio Code installation. The problem turned out to actually be that Microsoft doesn't package Visual Studio Code as a proper MacOS app installation, but as a sort of portable application. Removing that and installing it through Homebrew instead resolved that issue. The moral of the story is that Homebrew is an absolute necessity on MacOS, I think.
I attended the London Web Standards GAAD event, along with my amazing partner. The talks were interesting and energising, giving me plenty of ideas for how to improve my own website. I was asked why, as a cloud engineer, I found the London Web Standards talks so interesting. I think it's because you have a great group of people committed to both doing things the right way and also being fun and silly. There isn't an awful lot of that in the cloud infrastructure world!
I was also mercifully bullied about not being able to figure out Mastodon. I took some time to figure it out a bit more and have come to a different conclusion: I just don't like it. Searching doesn't seem to really work across instances and it just isn't as nice to use as Bluesky. I know some parts of Bluesky aren't practical to self-host unless you have a spare bare-metal server in your larder but I prefer it, so that's where I am.
We took advantage of the bank holiday weekend to do a little getaway to Yorkshire. With Weird Walk, The Old Stones and a few Google Map searches as our guides we visited The Druid’s Temple, The Devil's Arrows, The National Video Game Museum, Mother Shipton's Cave, Thornborough Henges, and even found time to visit a couple of garden centres and Sheffield Central Library. My collection of library cards grows ever larger.
This week I had a day off to experience The Suffolk Show. It was a very pleasant day out, and any day I can eat a massive bag of pork scratchings and a couple of bags of fudge is a very good day indeed.
I find myself writing this on Saturday, my copy of Worms W.M.D. has arrived in the post (after playing Worms 2 at the National Video Game Museum it gave me an itch and my partner seemed interested) and there are a few projects I'd like to finish so I'll bring this post to a close. I promise at some point I'll talk about actual tech stuff!