Blogs

Return-to-Office is a topic that has been dividing opinions for years. So I was excited when it came up on the The Curiosity Shop With Brené Brown and Adam Grant1. Brené Brown2 and Adam Grant’s3 conversation covers: organisational psychology, creativity, culture, and mission, the idea of “creative collisions”, and what is really driving leadership decisions on RtO. I can highly recommend the episode. For a more indepth look at the podcast, I have notes here ...

I took the leap and joined my first IndieWeb Homebrew event1 last night. A welcoming group of people, and really well moderated by James2. (I need to figure out how I mention people properly here) IndieWeb’s draw for me is the promise of POSSE3 - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. You are not writing for LinkedIn, facebook, medium, X, etc., you are writing for your own site. Then your writing is also published via these other services, which link back as the original source. The important part being that you always own your work, and when services like google+ (yeah, I’m that old) shut down, you are not scrambling to export your data. ...

I’ve done this many times. But this time I mean it. Really! Over the years I’ve tried blogging on many platforms. Early on I even built my own scripts to convert text into HTML which I pushed to an apache server. I’ve tried Apache Roller and Blogger, and about nine years ago I dipped my toes into IndieWeb, setting up a WithKnown site. Most recently I’ve been posting internally at work using GitLab and Jekyll, This is that, but made public. ...

The Java user group of Switzerland organised a continuous delivery workshop last night, which was run by Oliver Nautsch, with a really nice structure. Oliver has documented the process, with slides in GitHub, so if anyone missed the session, you can run through the exercises in your own time. Before the session we were given instructions describing what we would need to install on our laptops ahead of time. This basically involved cloning a GitHub repository and then using vagrant to start up a Linux virtual machine. ...

For a long time, I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to play around with two factor authentication (2FA) for the root account on my Raspberry Pi’s. This week I’ve finally got around to doing it, and as with so many tasks on the Pi, once you get going it’s pretty straight forward, with the google authenticator. The steps that I want to follow would be: Create a standard user account, from which the sudo commands will be issued. Block ssh access to the root user Enable Google authenticator for sudo commands Setting up sudo access If you have not already created personal accounts on your box, run the adduser command: ...

Over the past few months I’ve been changing out the light in our apartment for some of the plain white Philips Hue lamps. On the whole I’ve been pretty impressed. Using apps like Yonomi I was able to set up a kids bedtime routine, where with the click of a single button, the main lamp in the kids room turns off, the side lamp dims to 1% and the Sonos starts playing lullabies at 15% volume. ...

Since the Google Chromecast was first introduced I’ve loved the device. It just feels like the fight way to control the TV, you use the rich interface on your phone to find what you want to watch and then with the press of a button it’s on your TV. Having only played briefly with Apple TV, and it’s silly little remote control, Chromecast just feels right. There were some issues with the original Chromecast where streaming would occasionally buffer. With Netflix it was fine, but Plex did have quite a few issues, even with the WiFi access point in the same room. Ensuring that the WiFi connection to the Chromecast was not encrypted by Plex did help (as the Chromecast only has limited processing power), but there were still issues. ...

I should start this off by saying I love both my QNAP NAS and the online backup service provided by CrashPlan. When I found that there were packages that could be installed on the NAS which would automatically backup to the cloud it seemed like the perfect solution. At home I make sure all photos get copied to the NAS, then the CrashPlan process does it’s magic and makes sure that they are all backedup. ...

It has taken me a long time to get around to finally setting up the Raspberty Pi’s I received over Christmas. Supprisingly, it was very simple to setup the Pi, once over coming my only real issue. I had some old 4GB SD cards lying around, which I wanted to use. However, it would appear that the official Raspbian download I was working with needed an 8Gb card to install. At this point I sarted looking for an alternative and found minibian, a cutdown version of the Raspbian distribution without the GUI components. ...

Years ago I installed WhatsApp on my phone. When I opened it up for the first time, I was asked if I wanted to upload my entire contact list onto their servers. I was unsure if I should really do this, as the contact data is not mine to give away. There is no way I could choose which of the contacts I wanted to share with WhatsApp, and in the end decided I would rather just delete the application. ...