As you will see, this list is completely unordered, mixing up technical articles with blogs about the web or holidays or random other topics. I am still learning how to write blogs. Much better to be concise than to ramble on. My blogs are slowly improving (I hope!) but I certainly still have a long way to go.
Presenting my slightly bumpy but hopefully watchable video record of my experience on the HT550 in 2023.
Faced with a long winter of working from home, I decided to build my own cabin in the garden. Simply a 2.4m sided cube with a bit sliced off for the roof, this small but functional space has improved both our home life and my work life. Here's the story of my build and lessons learned along the way.
The coronavirus lockdown has made everyone pause. Even though I have worked throughout and had to juggle home schooling for my boys, it has also given me a chance to slow down and reflect. I am always focused on the next project and very guilty of never fully taking stock of where I am. In an attempt to combat this unhealthy habit, I really wanted to dig through my old photos, remember the good times and re-share some of them. There are so many good memories going all the way back to my teenage years. It is a shame to be boxed into only sharing memories that have a recent digital heritage, when there are so many analogue memories in photos and slides.
Allowing readers to add comments to my blogs led me to figure out how to use Fuseki as a backing-store for the comments. Making my site interactive rather than just read-only is exciting step forward.
Running a healthy Gentoo machine requires a little bit of attention every month or so. But happens if you do nothing for a year and then try to upgrade?
Cycling the West Highland Way in a single day, going north from Milngavie to Fort William.
Some routine maintenance after a bike ride around Arran revealed a rather bigger problem than I suspected with my seatpost.
SSL Cheatsheet for Java
Is there anything more annoying than a clicky or skipping rear derailleur? No, I don't think so.
VIM Fireplace - a vim plugin for Clojure development. Getting it working on Git Bash was not easy, but worth it.
Escape the fogginess and uncertainty of a cloud solution and host your own site at home. A recent convergence of technologies has made this obvious solution both simple and desirable.
A guide to using certbot to create a trusted, valid and free certificate for your website.
Notes from working with the Gradle C++ plugin
Handy tips and commands for life on Windows (when you are used to UNIX).
All those once-a-month git commands that I can never remember.
The exec resource from Puppet, the automation framework, is a mysterious beast. My notes on how to make it work for complex multi-exec configurations.
Helping my son to learn piano is one of the most difficult things. My thoughts on why it is so tricky and what might help him (and me!)
Preparations for my first attempt at an MTB mini-adventure covering 180 miles of the Hebridean Way over 3 days. Not so mini actually... that is a major adventure for me!
Sharing my Linux GPS/HRM tracking setup, as it took a bit of effort - as all things do on Linux.
If Scotland calls another Independence Referendum
we must offer a post- Independence currency
that we can deliver. We must learn the right lessons.
The EU referendum is almost here. It is not an easy one, but wanted to share my thoughts on this important decision.
Triki supported feeds from RSS and Atom, now it support feeds from Twitter as well.
triki now supports Activity Streams 2.0 for blogs. Learning about AS2 has opened up the very cool IndieWeb project to me, so there are plenty more options to improve triki's connectedness.
My eldest son has just started coding, something I confess I have mixed feelings about.
An online journey from closed, restricted and commercial social networks monopolies to a new breed of independent personal websites linked by open social networks.
I just added the History feature and support for publication via RSS to triki.
Not many teams use Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). This blog shows how even as developers we can leverage BDD tools to build robust solutions, more quickly and with greater transparency.
Which is a cheaper way to propel an automotive vehicle - domestic electricity or petrol/diesel? Now you can find out.
Introducing triki, an open source semantic web server. Imagine taking your own social media graph from Facebook, your reviews from TripAdvisor, your blogs from blogspot and your photos for Flikr and running your own site where you can still share with friends but also control your own content. Welcome to the triki.
This blog suggests an alternative way of sharing and retrieving content on the web today. It is a response to questions posed in the first blog.
My thoughts on how Web culture has evolved since the 90's and some of the problems we are now facing with social media monopolies. We are giving away our content and control for priviledge of efficient sharing.
I find CSS fiendishly difficult whenever I come back to it I end up having to re-learn stuff. This is my cheat sheet.
A very, very brief introduction Apache Camel.
My thoughts on Cucumber Groovy and Spock BDD tools. Since writing this however I actually prefer Cucumber still but am leaving the blog for now. It is what I thought at the time.
When we release open source software out into the wild it is often difficult to tell if is being used. Much to my surprise, dio is still being used after 15 years.
My ill-fated attempts to get a Logitech Rumblebad working on
Steam. A waste of an afternoon.
Memories of our very cold camping trip to Glen Brittle in
Skye.
My plans to build a silent but powerful machine for playing Steam.
A reminder on how use the git patch command.
When you absolutely positively got to delete every table in
the database.
A tribute a wonderful BBC institution by Lisa Knapp.
Using the Myer Briggs character test to find out what we are really like.
The insanity of endless feedback and appraisals encountered at most corporates.
10 reasons why Guice is better than Spring
