I work in InfoSec. I'm also partial to collecting watches and riding motorbikes.
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2024-09-16 19:50:00
✍️ Written by: Dan Brown
🏷 Genre: Thriller
🗓 Published: 31 May 2011
📄 Pages: 396
🧐 My rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2 stars)
When the National Security Agency's invincible code-breaking machine encounters a mysterious code it cannot break, the agency calls in its head cryptographer, Susan Fletcher, a brilliant, beautiful mathematician. What she uncovers sends shock waves through the corridors of power. The NSA is being held hostage - not by guns or bombs, but by a code so complex that if released would cripple U.S. intelligence.
Caught in an accelerating tempest of secrecy and lies, Fletcher battles to save the agency she believes in. Betrayed on all sides, she finds herself fighting not only for her country but for her life, and in the end, for the life of the man she loves...
This book started off so well, but as it progressed it was chock full of cliché crap.
For example, there's 3 women in the story - the main character, Susan, who is "beautiful and brilliant", Midge who is an older lady who is also very attractive and a massive flirt who seemingly spends her time sleeping with her colleagues in the NSA. Finally there's the -- you guessed it -- beautiful prostitute who's name I forgot as she's in the story earlier on.
There were many mentions of the beauty of the women in the book, and even more mentions of sex and sexual fantasies that just added nothing to the story for me.
Toward the end the technical details were laughable too. I won't give anything away in case any of you decide to read this book, but the details of the technical "stuff" in use was laughable.
First and last Dan Brown book, I think.
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2024-09-12 21:25:00
Why do kids think they can get away with the most ridiculous of lies? Sometimes it's funny, but other times I want to strangle them!
So the a couple evenings ago my wife and I were sitting in the kitchen having a chat after dinner, as we often do. We had sent the kids upstairs to start getting ready for bed, which includes:
All very simple. After 15 minutes or so, our youngest came down in his pyjamas and announced that he was ready for bed. The conversation went something like this:
I'm ready for bed!
Yep!
Yesssssssssss. I dried it.
I put them back on.
...............no. 🥺
Little shit. 🤣
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2024-09-07 02:10:00
I was recently speaking to someone in work that I mentor, and she asked me what my measure of success is. This is what I told her...
So we're chatting over a coffee and talking about all manner of things (which I often do in my 1:1's with people - they're not just about work, folks!) Anyway, we got onto the topic of what we deem as being successful.
Her bar for success is extremely high - she jokes that feedback to her should be short and sweet - a simple number out of 10 on how she's doing on any given topic, and anything less than a 9 is a total failure to her.
So she asked me whether I think of myself as successful, and when that became apparent, but I didn't really have an answer for her. You see, success is a totally subjective thing.
I didn't wake up one morning, have a shower and realise "you know what, I'm successful!" It's much more complicated than that, I think.
For example, for some people -- like those who have mental health issues and have to deal with things like depression -- success may be getting out of bed in the morning and having a shower.
For others it might be landing that job at McDonald's so they can help their parents pay the bills. Then at the other end of the spectrum, nothing but being a multi-billionaire is good enough. And even then, it might not be enough.
For others, their measure of success may not be financial at all. Maybe their measure is to convert that camper van and go travelling around the world. Or maybe it's getting onto the property ladder, or passing their driving test.
That woman who works 16 hour days, and earns 250k a year. But she goes home to an empty house, has a microwave meal, then goes to bed. Rinse and repeat.
Woah, 250k is a lot of money. She's so successful, right? She might think so, but I wouldn't say so. That sounds like an incredibly sad life to me.
You see? success is such a personal thing.
For me, success is fluid. In the past I've had financial targets with regards to what salary I want to earn and by which age. But looking back, to me, that's arbitrary and pointless.
A much better gauge of success, for me, is one that's fluid. I tend to ask myself am I successful right now? And that could be in anything. Recently, my successes have revolved around renovating one of the stables for the chickens, and maintaining our vegetable patch.
We managed to be very successful at both (post on that in the future). Therefore I'm a success.
Right now my idea of success is very work focussed, as I recently took a promotion and I want to be successful for my team. It's too soon to say whether I'll be successful in this particular endeavour yet. We'll see.
So, back to the question I was asked - do I consider myself successful?
Well, yeah. Generally. Some days I feel very successful. Others, not so much. But I'd say things are going pretty well for me - I'm happy and I have a what I would consider to be a nice life.
To me that's a success.
What about you? What's your bar for success?
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2024-09-01 21:20:00
Lou talks about the recent loss of his son's much loved dog, Osa. Be warned, you'll need tissues at the ready!
I know this is the second post of the day, but it's another great post that resonated me. Sorry (not sorry).
This post from Lou did bring a tear to my eye, and that's because I'm a dog lover, too. I have 2 dogs, one of which is nearly 12. We know we don't have long left with her, and it's so sad to think about. She was here before all our other pets; before our kids even. She's the OG that transformed my wife and I from a partnership, to a family.
A few years ago a colleague in work lost his pet dog and had to take a few days off to grieve. My boss at the time reacted with a comment along the lines of "It's only a dog, why does he need time off? He needs to grow up...".
Clearly never owned had a pet in her life. How sad.
Pets are a part of the family, and losing one is as bad as losing a member of your family. That's why he needed time off.
I'll leave you with this picture of me and Tia that my wife took on Christmas morning. It had been an early start and I was knackered. So Tia, being the loving affectionate soul that she is, came and cuddled up to me when I was lying on the floor. Needless to say, we both had a little nap together, as we often do. :)
My thoughts are with you and your family, Lou. I'm so sorry for your loss and I hope you're all doing ok.
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2024-09-01 20:45:00
While still in its infancy, there's one feature that Scott would *love* to see on Mastodon - the ability to post locally only.
I read this post on my RSS reader this morning and it resonated with me (and many other Mastodon user too, I bet). It's something that's been requested so many times, but unfortunately, I don't think it will ever happen.
Eugen, the founder of Mastodon, has taken steps in the past to remove the the local timeline from the official Mastodon apps. After a lot of push back, they relented and added it, albeit very hidden. Eugen commented on a Github issue about the topic:
The omission is intentional and I do not intend to add these types of timelines into the app. They might have made sense for early Mastodon in November 2016 when there were less than 20k people total and all from a homogenous demographic but nowadays the signal to noise ratio makes them a liability in almost every aspect. I might write more on the topic on the blog.
But that signal to noise ratio is much less of a problem for smaller instances - Eugen needs to, I think, consider those smaller instances, like500 Social, and not just Mastodon.social. By introducing a feature like posting to the local timeline only, you're allowing for these self-contained pockets of the fediverse to flourish, but they still have the advantage is engaging with the wider fedi if they want to. It's win/win.
Furthermore, this would have the added effect of encouraging more decentralisation of the fediverse, something which I think has the potential to be a real problem in the future.
Thanks for the great post, Scott. I suppose we will just have to live in hope for this (in my opinion) critical feature.
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2024-08-28 15:50:00
✍️ Written by: Brian Lee Durfee
🏷 Genre: Fantasy
🗓 Published: 01 September 2007
📄 Pages: 911
🧐 My rating: ★★★☆☆ (3 stars)
Returning to the kingdom of Gul Kana, Princess Jondralyn has suffered a devastating loss, discovering that not all fortunes are to be assumed, not all scripture to be trusted.
At the same time, her younger sister, Tala, has found faith within herself while facing off against devious villains, who would use her gifts for their own devices.
The Five Isles are caught up in the deadliest conflict it has ever known, and Nail finds himself right at the heart of it all.
For the Five Warrior Angels have been revealed: Gladiator, Assassin, Thief, Princess and Slave, and one by one the weapons they once wielded are being excavated. Deep within the heart of these discoveries, an ancient prophecy is beginning to be fulfilled…
This was a long book, but really enjoyable. Durfee continues to develop the characters and story lines, and within this book, they all start to converge. I've knocked it down a star as I think it's longer than it needs to be; there are entire chapters where not a lot happens, but then again, there are chapters where loads happen, so it evens out, I suppose.
I've already started book 3, but it's frustrating when I start a series of books that isn't finished yet, like The Black Sword series, as when I return years later, I tend to forget what had happened.
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2024-08-27 22:40:00
I recently had the pleasure of being upgraded to Windows 11 in work, and it's utterly shite.
I've been on Windows 11 on my work laptop for a few weeks now, and I'm hating it more and more with every day of use. It ultimately boils down to the 3 issues:
Sometimes it's dark when it should be light, other times it's the reverse. Sometimes it uses the modern icon set, other times it looks like it's straight outta Windows XP.
Sometimes you have to go into settings to find something, other times it's control panel.
Why is control panel still a thing, people?
If it were my personal machine, this alone would be a deal breaker for me. If an open app has a notification in Windows 11, it's nigh on impossible to see the thing. There's almost zero contrast, here, see for yourself:
I've tried all kinds of colour combinations and I just can't get something that can be easily seen. I can't count the amount of notifications I've missed in work because of this stupid fucking colour.
Like, how the hell did that shit pass accessibility testing??
Windows 10 was fine on my work laptop, which is a high performance HP Elitebook with really good specs. But now it feels slow and lethargic.
Boot up seems to take an age to get to a desktop environment that's usable. Now yeah, this is a corporate machine with a shit load of stuff running in the background, but it was fine in Windows 10 a few weeks ago, so the fact remains, Windows 11 isn't as performance at 10, for me.
All in all, Windows 11 is bag of shit. That's it, that's my final thought. I'm glad I run a Mac at home.
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2024-08-19 23:40:00
I saw a post from Will recently about the CLI journalling tool, jrnl. It looked cool, but had some limitations for my needs, so I decided to build my own.
Will and I had a quick chat about jrnl, and my knee-jerk reaction was to give it a try, but when I took a breath and thought about it, I decided that jrnl wasn't for me.
You see, I'm most likely to write a journal entry before bed, either on my phone, or on my iPad. So a CLI tool is no good to me. This got me thinking about if I were to start journalling again, what my needs would be from a tool. Here's the list I came up with:
.txt) files so they're universally availableI've really enjoyed journalling in the past, but it's always been too much of a headache to maintain. Apps like Day One have too much going on, and I don't like the fact I'm sending my journal to a 3rd party. I tried building a Journal with WordPress in the past, but that was too much faff and so it didn't stick.
So with the list above in mind, I started looking for something that would tick most of my requirements. But unfortunately I couldn't find anything.
I've been teaching myself PHP lately, so I figured this could be a fun little project for me to build something that ticks all my boxes. So over the last few days I've been playing around with my text editor, and with a little help from DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT (I got stuck a couple times - like I said, I'm still learning PHP, and Chatty Geeps really helped) I've managed to build something that works for me.
It's 5 PHP files, a tiny bit of JavaScript, and a CSS file (I also import Simple.css). In total, the entire project is around 450KB. So I can dump it onto any web hosting provider that supports PHP, stick a password in front of it, and I'm done.
- Is web based, so I can login and journal from anywhere
- Easily self-hostable (is that even a word?)
✅ - COMPLETE
The webUI is ridiculously simple. It's a single text box (that grows as you type - that's the JS) and a list of entries beneath. Here's what it looks like:
- Has a super simple UI - literally a text box for the entry, and a list of entries
✅ - COMPLETE
I've been able to add Markdown support by making use of Parsedown.
- It would be nice to have Markdown support so I can add some simple formatting
✅ - COMPLETE
Under the hood, a journal entry is just a plaintext file that's rendered within the HTML using PHP. Here's the entire journal entry (filename 2024-08-19-152739.txt):
2024-08-19 15:27:39
Today I made this simple little journal. I think it works quite well. It also supports **markdown**. 😉
- Entries must be text (
.txt) files so they're universally available
✅ - COMPLETE
As you can see from the screenshot above, there's an option to delete the journal entry, and I've also added next/previous links for good measure, which should make browsing the journal easier.
- Having the ability to delete entries would be cool too
✅ - COMPLETE
And with that, that's all my requirement complete. I did consider adding some kind of categorisation mechanism, and I still might. But for now, I think my little journal works really well.
If you're interested in giving it a try, I've dumped a demo online that resets itself every 10 minutes.
If you wanna give Journal a go yourself, you can nab the code from GitHub.
If you have any suggestions for improving Journal please do let me know - like I said, I'm not a professional developer, and I'm still learning PHP, so there's likely a lot of stuff that can be done better.
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2024-08-09 01:30:00
I've decided to end my PenPals experiment. It's been 9 months, and it's been a lot of fun, but it's time for it to end.
I've met lots of great people during this process, but unfortunately personal circumstances mean that I need to start limiting how much I take on in terms of personal projects.
I recently had a promotion in work, and it means I have less free time in my evenings. What time I do have, I obviously want to spend with my family. So something had to give. With that, I'm going to be cleaning things up around here and limiting what I produce.
I'll still write notes and posts regularly, but I think the cadence will likely drop a little. I'm also going to get rid of the "One a month" thing, as it's never really sat well with me, and I don't want to be accountable to other people and feel like I owe them a post. I know those people won't feel that way, but it's how I feel.
TL;DR I'm simplifying things a little. Not much though, just a little.
If you were on the list to be a PenPal in the future, I'm sorry, but I need to claw back some of this limited free time I have.
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2024-08-05 17:40:00
Back in June I wrote about whether I've saved money by switching to an EV. But I charge my car at work quite a lot, so how much does it actually cost to charge my EV For a month?
I ended the previous post by saying:
Next month (July) I'm going to charge the MG only at home to give me a better idea of what it would cost if I didn't have the ability to charge at work. I think that will be an interesting comparison for people who don't have that ability.
So that's what I did. For July 2024, I charged my car solely at home to give me a proper picture of what it costs to run it. July turned out to be a good month to test too, as I did lots of driving - including a run to the airport and back.
It's around a 45 mile (1 hour) drive to the airport and I still had 44% battery left when I got back, and that's after the car had sat there for 3 days too. Range anxiety my arse.
Over the course of July, I charged my car 6 times. I have a smart meter at home, so was able to accurately measure the exact amount of energy (kWh) I consumed per charge. I then converted it to pounds sterling, based on the energy tariff I have at home.
Here's the breakdown of what my charging looked like for July 2024:
| 02 July | 06 July | 08 July | 11 July | 19 July | 26 July | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| kWh | 29.19 | 28.42 | 10.65 | 28.33 | 35.87 | 35.70 |
| Cost | £2.48 | £2.42 | £0.91 | £2.41 | £3.05 | £3.03 |
Total cost: £14.29 (~$18.25)
A few people have asked how much it would have been to charge if I didn't get the cheap EV rate for electricity overnight. Based on the usage above, it would have cost me £41.24 ($52) at full price (24.53 pence/kWh instead of 8.5 pence/kWh).
Considering my Land Rover would cost around £100 (~$128) to fill up, and that would last me 2 weeks if I was lucky, the EV is way cheaper than burning liquidised dinosaurs.
I continue to be really impressed with my EV and have absolutely no regrets buying it.
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2024-07-31 00:00:00
I've had my M1 MacBook Air for 3 years now. It's the most expensive laptop I've ever owned, but was it worth it?
Monday 29th July 2024 marks 3 years of M1 Air ownership, which is also the first Mac device I've ever owned. We all know they're very expensive pieces of kit, and I'm a cheap bastard, so I decided to go for the most basic model - the 8GB M1 Air, which cost me £999.
I'd heard lots of great stuff about the battery life and performance of the M1 Macs when they first came out - 20 hours battery life, the best performance they've ever seen from a laptop etc. etc. But I'd also read comments about the 8GB version being underpowered and not worth the money. So I approached the whole thing with a certain amount of trepidation.
But the performance is still staggeringly good. I press the power button and it's begging me to login after a couple seconds. I've been on the laptop since 07:45 this morning (it's 12:28 as I write this) and I still have 78% of my battery left. That's on 3 year old hardware, I'd like to remind you.
This thing is absofuckinglutely phenomenal. So much so that it's now my only computer. I sold my desktop around 2 years ago and the M1 has been my daily driver for all things ever since. When I'm at my desk, it gets docked to a USB C dock, and I use it just like a desktop. So why would I need a desktop? This thing can do it all.
Question is, will I upgrade? Well, no. Not any time soon anyway. The M1 Air still does everything I need it to extremely well. So why upgrade? Why drop another £1,000 or so on the latest version of the Air? Because it looks a little nicer? Because it comes in blue? Because the chipset is 2 increments better? Nah, I'll stick with this workhorse until it dies.
Speaking of the dead of Macs, I saw this post in the Bear Blog discovery feed recently - if my M1 Air can last 15 years, that would be incredible value for money. Realistically, I don't think it will last that long; I don't even know if Apple would support it for that long.
Right now, 3 years in, I think my M1 Air is good value for money, but if I can get 5 or 6 years out of this thing, that would be fantastic.
I've been questioning my Apple usage recently. I have the M1 Air, an iPad Air and an iPhone 13 Mini. I think when the iPad dies, I won't get another one. It sits next to the bed and is used for reading RSS feeds and some YouTube before I go to bed. I can get that from a cheap Android device, so will probably go that route when it comes to renewal.
As for the phone. I'm really stuck on this one. I couldn't move to a dumb phone, but I think I could move, again, to a cheap Android device. Problem is all the privacy issues that come with Android (yes, I know there are problems with iOS too, but I think they're the lesser of the 2 evils).
I've only had my iPhone for around 18 months, so I'm hoping it's still got another couple years in it at least. If I can get 5 years out of it, then maybe it would be worth going with another entry level iPhone, we'll have to see though.
Anyway, I digress...the M1 Air is a fantastic laptop and I'm so happy I bought it. I can't see myself moving away from the MacBook line any time soon. Especially with all the adverts in Windows 11, and the death by a thousand small issues on Linux. But never say never, right?
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2024-07-29 06:55:00
After launching 500 Social to little fanfare yesterday, Jack Baty and Dave Rogers have been having an interesting conversation about politics in communities, and I wanted to chime in, since it's focussed on 500 Social.
Before we go any further, I love that the back and forth between Jack and Dave on their blog's has been polite and courteous. It's always nice to see people acting like adults online.
Anyway, I digress...
Dave wrote a post about his thoughts on the "no politics rule" on 500 Social, Jack then responded, and Dave replied back.
Go read the posts; they do provide food for thought, but they haven't changed my mind.
I agree with Dave that politics are very important, and should be discussed openly. But my argument is that there are plenty of places for those conversations to take place, and I don't want 500 Social to be one of them. I'd prefer for it to be a place of more light-hearted discussions - not everything needs to be a deep and meaningful discourse about the world's problems. To be fair to Dave, he gets that, saying:
I don't think I'm the kind of person Kev has in mind, and he's entitled to run his instance the way he wishes. I don't wish to impose my views on his goals and objectives.
People on 500 Social can still seek out and discuss political topics with others, I'd just prefer they didn't publish post about them there. But if someone is having a political discussion and a member of 500 Social wants to chime in, who am I to say they can't? Of course they can. Like I said, it's important.
But for me, it's frustrating. When I look at the various "trending" feeds on Mastodon, all I see is Trump, Harris & Biden. Honestly, it's exasperating. Especially given the fact that I'm not American.
Hmmm I'm not sure it is. The oft quoted "everything is political" examples are things like iOS vs Android, Coke vs Pepsi, and Linux vs Windows. Yes, they're divisive topics, and politics plays a small part is people's decisions there. But they're not inherently political.
When I wrote the "no politics" rule, I was specifically talking about "real" politics. You know, governments and shit.
Ultimately, the way I see it is this; if I want to go and read about the latest Trump drama, I'll go visit the Guardian or BBC News. But if I want to go read about what people are up to on a personal level - the thing they've built. The thing(s) they're passionate about. The jokes, the pictures, the memes. I want that space to be Mastodon.
If others disagree, that's totally fine - it's why we have different instances and there's a lot of power in that.
So if you wanna talk about the things you're doing in your life, or the things you're passionate about (that aren't politics or religion), feel free to come and join 500 Social. But if you feel strongly that you want to talk about those topics, maybe a different instance is best.
Thanks to Jack and Dave - I do enjoy conversations like this, and I really like that we're able to share our own ideas on our own blog's. May the open web never die. :-)
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2024-07-28 18:45:00
I've decided to go for it and start that deliberately small online community I was talking about. It's called 500 Social.
I wasn't going to announce it yet, but I imported my follows into the new account and people are starting to notice, so I figured it's probably a good idea for me to announce it.
500 Social is a new deliberately small online community that is limited to a maximum of 500 members. I must stress that 500 is a maximum, not a target.
After thinking about it long and hard, and speaking to a lot of people about it via email and on the Fedi, I decided to just go for it.
It might fail, it might not. I really hope it won't, as it could be a lot of fun.
Here's the TL;DR but you can read more here:
I'm also thinking about creating a lifetime option for a limited time. Somewhere in the region of $100 (~4 years membership) that will give people a lifetime account and a tag on their profile. Still stewing on that one though.
If you're interested in finding out more, or signing up, here's some links:
Don't forget to follow me over there too, as I will be posting on that account regularly. My account is @[email protected].
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2024-07-23 16:20:00
I've been thinking about online communities a lot lately, and had an idea about a new Masto instance, but maybe it wasn't such a good idea?
I've been ruminating on what the perfect online community looks like for months. Does the perfect online community actually exist? What are we currently doing wrong? What do we do well? How can we fix them?
Thinking back to the what I consider was the glory days of Fosstodon; it was when the instance was much smaller. I could peruse the local timeline without being overwhelmed, and along the way, discover a new person or 2 to follow.
They were fun times.
Because of this, I've been thinking about starting a new Mastodon instance that would try to emulate those early days a little bit. It would be:
I've been thinking about this a lot. So much so that back in April, I registered the domain 500.social. After talking with Manu about it recently too, I decided to post the idea to Fosstodon last night:
True to form, the fediverse community stepped up and gave a lot of great feedback. Some of the recurring themes were:
This is all great feedback and I agree with it all. Of the few hundred people who have voted so far, only 10% have said they would actually join. That's fine - 500 people is the maximum, not the target. If it ended up being 50 people, that would be great too.
As for the niche, if I were to choose a niche it would be very loose. More like a guiding principle than anything else. Maybe a general tech niche (but certainly not limited to tech), or possibly around blogging and the IndieWeb.
I think there's a lot of food for thought here, and I need to keep stewing on it. Overall, I don't think it would be too painful to give this thing a try.
I dunno, what do you think?
I wanted to end with a quick note about Fosstodon - this whole idea is totally separate from Fosstodon. I love what Mike and I have built with Fosstodon, but I personally think it's too big. If I do decide to go ahead with this idea, nothing would change with Fosstodon.
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2024-07-18 04:10:00
A parody of the "Wear Sunscreen" thing from the late 90s. This is just fabulous.
I’m gonna keep this brief as you need to click that link above. This post is absolutely brilliant - Sara’s parody is fantastic in its own right, but then Robb and Keenan come along to turn it into a video.
Go there now!
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2024-07-17 16:45:00
I have a love hate relationship with social media. In some respects it's great, but in others it's a nightmare. I'm wondering if I could give up social media entirely...
I've made no secret of the fact that I've struggled with social media in the past and I've taken some steps to try and make my social media experience a little more pleasant. But I dunno, social media is still a bit...shit.
It's full of politics, hot takes, and lots of other stuff that I don't wanna see. But here's the rub; it's also full of interesting posts from people that I do wanna see.
It's a quandary.
I envy people like Manu and Nicolas, who have just fucked social media off all together.
I'd love to be able to do the same, but I think I'd miss it. As much as I hate to admit it, I would miss it. I enjoy the daily interactions I have with cool people on Mastodon.
I don't enjoy having to deal with the troves of dickheads, however. But I think that's par for the course for any space where lots of people congregate. I'm under no illusion that many people would read what I post and think I'm one of those dick heads.
Everyone is a dickhead to someone. :)
Having thought about whether or not I could give up social media, I think it's the wrong question.
Yes, I could give it up. But would I want to give it up? Right now, the answer to that question is "no".
What about you; could/would you give up social media?
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2024-07-07 17:40:00
Back in May I wrote about an evening stroll in the field and leaving the grass to grow. Since then, things have escalated...A LOT.
Ok, quick recap; we last left it with me saying that we were enjoying the paths that I had mowed into our second (and much larger) field. So we were going to leave it like that and maybe plant a wild meadow in the future.
Things have been gong great and the field is looking fantastic. Here's the top end after freshly mowing the paths:
As you can see, at the top the grass isn't all that long, but down at the bottom, it's a different story. The grass is now as tall as I am (6' 2" / 188cm), here's a quick video of me driving around on the mower at the bottom of the field to give you an idea:
This luscious long grass is fantastic, but it'll still need to be maintained - the grass will need to be cut back at the end of the season (especially if we're gonna plant wild flowers), and I wanted to mow some more paths into the field.
It's clear that my plucky little mower is never going to plough its way through that stuff, so I did a lot of research and bought myself a flail mower that I can tow behind the current mower.
I spoke to the company that sold the flail and explained my predicament. They confirmed that a) my mower would tow it (it's 250kg, so I wasn't sure) and that b) it would be able to get through our grass. So, I handed over my credit card and bought the flail. A few days later this monstrosity turned up:
My initial reaction was that this thing is a beast and I was out of my depth. But screw it, I thought, you only live once. So I took it out of the crate, set it all up, and off I went:
The first thing I did was take the flail for a little drive around. I wanted to tow it around some of the steeper parts of the field to make sure my mower could actually tow it.
Everything went great and my little mower didn't let me down. However, as I was putting the flail away in the barn, I noticed that the tow bar wasn't looking right:
Fuck. Was my first response when I saw that the entire tow bracket was bent. The bracket was made of 4mm steel, and I honestly didn't think it would bend.
I assumed this was because the tow bar was too far away from the mower, so I cut the bent piece off, re-drilled the tow bar hole so it sat closer to the mower, therefore reducing the leverage on the bracket. I also drilled and tapped some additional mounting holes, just in case. Physics, yo.
Tow bar v2 looked great:
My new and improved tow bar was fitted and I was confident there would be no more bending. So off I went to use my new flail in anger - there were new paths to cut!
The first pass was obviously long, and I'll need to do numerous passes going shorter every time. All was going well until I returned to the barn and checked the tow bar again.
Double fuck.
This time the bracket had bent where it was bolted to the mower. But hey, at least the bolts survived, so it wasn't a complete waste!
At this point I decided to admit defeat and called a professional...my younger brother, an engineer. The conversation went something like this:
Hold my beer...
A few days later, Jimmy text me to say the new bracket was ready. I met him at our parents house and he produced a ridiculously thick (10mm) bracket. For reference, here's the new one next to the old one:
I think you'll agree that bracket v3 is a lot more substantial than the old bracket.
The new paths needed a second, much lower, pass. This would put a lot more pressure on the bracket since the grass gets more dense the further down you go, plus it had to contend with the mulch from the previous cut.
Bracket v3 was fitted, and off I went to complete the second, much lower, pass on the paths. At no point did the flail snap off the tow bracket, so that was a good sign, but was the bracket bent?
After flailing about for an hour or so in the field, I headed back to the barn to hunt for any damage...
Get in! The bracket had stood up to all that difficult flailing and hadn't even budged. Good job, Jimmy!
Now that I have a fully working flail that I can tow behind the mower, I'm free to manage the land a little better. I no longer need to worry about letting the grass get out of control, because if it does, I'll just flail it. The flail will also be useful for keeping things like brambles in check.
This also means that we now have the equipment to start working on creating our wild flower meadow. So that's what I'm researching at the moment. Exciting times!
I do think that the flail is at the upper limit of what the mower can handle, so I'll probably upgrade to either a proper little tractor that would have no problem towing the flail, or a 4x4 quad bike. We'll see, because, you know, money.
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2024-07-05 15:15:00
In true Keenan fashion this is a long read, but it's *fantastic*. They go into great detail on the trials and tribulations of building a new Eleventy site while possessing very little development experience.
First off, I wanna give massive props to Keenan for getting their site online. Learning HTML, CSS, Eleventy, VSCode AND Git/GitHub all in one hit is no small feat.
Granted, Keenan already had some HTML/CSS knowledge, but even so, that's a long list of shit to learn to get a new site off the ground. Huge respect.
A lot of what Keenan wrote resonated with me from when I was learning Jekyll and Kirby. At the start I was pissing in the wind and pretty much making shit up as I went along -- like Keenan -- with help from the community, those puzzle pieces fell into place eventually, and I now know enough about both platforms to be dangerous. 🎉
Go get a coffee, turn off your emails, and spend 10 minutes reading this one. It's fantastic.
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2024-06-30 16:50:00
I was posting my usual waffle over on Fosstodon yesterday, and someone asked a question about having a personal site vs just using social media. So I naturally decided to write a post on my personal site about it. 🙃
The Fosstodon post was about the new homepage on this site (check it out if you haven't seen it already), and someone replied asking a question:
I am always a little curious as to the point of a personal webpage when you can rely on social media for a presence. What is your primary motivator for investing the time and effort?
Jason Brewster
I quickly replied to Jason, but figured I'd need more than the 500 characters that Mastodon offers, so decided to write a post here about it.
For me it's all about one thing - ownership. If I post something here, it's mine, I own in it in perpetuity. On social media that's not the case. Terms of services can change, platforms can disappear, or things can just go wrong. If I had all my content on a platform I have no control over, and they went poof, I'd be fucked.
Now for me it's a little different as I co-own Fosstodon, so technically speaking I have some control over that platform. But I don't have total control like I do here. Mike is the 50/50 owner with me, and Fosstodon is kept alive by the generosity of our members and their donations.
If those donations went away, Mike and I couldn't afford to run Fosstodon. So you see, although I have more control when it comes to Fosstodon, I'm far from having total control.
The other part of this is having a playground for me to explore stuff in a safe space. I'm not going to start messing about with the CSS on Fosstodon, as that would affect tens of thousands of people. Stability is key there.
Here on the other hand, I can piss around to my hearts content. If I want to change the way something looks, or add a new feature, like my watch wearing log, or my notes page, I can. Equally, if I decide I want to remove them in the future, again, I can. That's not so easy when lots of people rely on a service, and it's impossible if you're the user of a service.
There's lots of advantages of owning a personal site that social media can't contend with. Especially when one's personal site can become their social media space too, which is what I've kinda done here. My notes are automatically syndicated to my social profiles, as is my watch wearing log, thanks to EchoFeed. That's some pretty powerful shit right there.
Here I get to share my thoughts in a place I control. I get to piss around and add/remove new features & eye candy as I see fit. And on top of all that, I get to have a place on the web that's 100% mine that (hopefully) expresses a bit of my personality too. All of that is extremely difficult on a cookie cutter social media profile.
If you're on the fence about starting your own site, jump down, buy a domain and get started. It's totally worth it.
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2024-06-25 17:40:00
✍️ Written by: Brian Lee Durfee
🏷 Genre: Scfi-Fi / Fantasy
🗓 Published: 22 January 2018
📄 Pages: 752
🧐 My rating: ★★★☆☆ (3 stars)
War has come to the Five Isles. A merciless host driven by the Angel Prince, Aeros, has its sights on the unconquered kingdom of Gul Kana.
Its ruling family are fractured. The newly crowned king reigns in paranoid isolation, and his two sisters have troubles of their own. Jondralyn wants to prove her worth as a warrior, while Tala has uncovered a secret that may destroy the entire kingdom.
Hidden at the edge of Gul Kana, however, is Nail. An orphan taken by the enigmatic Shawcroft to a remote whaling village, he is now a young man who may be the salvation of the entire Five Isles…
I enjoyed this one. It was a long book, and it took some time to get going, but once it did, I became invested in the story and the characters.
The various story lines are well written, and although they start to converge by the end of the book, it took too long to do so, in my opinion.
This is a trilogy of books, but the 3rd book has only been released on audiobook and paperback, it seems. With me already working through the Black Sword series, and waiting for the next book to be released, I'm not sure if I want to continue to invest in this series, or wait for the 3rd book to be released.
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