Posts

Never underestimate the power of my human stupidity. So I opened my arch linux laptop to update Arch using pacman. Whilst doing that, I realised that my battery was at a stunning 6%, so I picked up the power cable, and plugged it into my laptop. two seconds later my laptop simply shut-down, mid-way through the mkinitcpio stuff. Why? Well, the eegit writing this blog post hadn’t checked to see if the other end of the power cable was actually plugged into the mains. Doh! Whenever I then started my Dell, it simply sent me to the BIOS screen, like the good BIOS that it is. ...

Well that was quite a break, huh? Sorry, life has been busy recently, and now I have a bit more time & probably more truthfully more inclination to continue with posting to my blog. I’ve been playing around with porkbun as a new Domain registrar, I’ve used name cheap for years, but the good folks at omg.lol pointed me towards porkbun. porkbun.com It’s a typical Domain registrar, people rave about it online, but well in my opinion, it’s, you know, OK. I’m not sure what I imagined porkbun to be, but at least I now have 3 domains with them. In my not so humble opinion; It’s simply a Domain registrar that does Domain registrar things quite well. I like the fact that it has WHOIS privacy on by default, but then so does Namecheap. I probably saved a couple of dollars on the 3 domain names that I bought, using PorkBun rather than Namecheap, and hey every little helps, right? ...

I’ve been thinking about what I can blog about during the whole month of May for WeblogPoMo 24 - it does start tomorrow after all! I think that I’ll mostly be blogging about getting my genealogy blog set-up, along with perhaps my own personal mastodon instance - the two will be related. I really do need to do something with my genealogy blog, which currently is practically non-existent. So, this is a good excuse to do something about it. ...

What’s caught my attention this week - Wk. 17, 2024 👨🏻‍🎨 Andy Carolan’s ko-fi webshop. Does amazing, custom User Avatars; see how cool my funky chilli one is? I’m totally thinking of asking him to do some more for me! At least 3, then I’m going to have some stickers printed. I won’t apologise. 👨🏻‍💻 tinylytics Privacy-focussed web analytics for your websites. Reasonable price, nice company. Allows you to add kudos, country flags of visitors, monitor system uptime, and a hit-counter to your blog. All for $60 /year. Bonus. ...

I’ll be joining WeblogPoMo - May 2024! Now, I haven’t written too much on my blog so far, but I’d like to do more. When I heard about @anniegreens WeblogPoMo, I figured I would go ahead and join in the fun! WeblogPoMo stands for Weblog Post Month, and every day of May I’ll be writing and publishing a blog post. Some of my posts maybe shorter than my usual length, and some maybe longer; I’ll be blogging every day so time maybe limited. You can follow along by subscribing to my blog with RSS, or following me on Mastodon. Blog posts will be auto-posted to Mastodon thanks to @rknightuk’s fantastic EchoFeed app. ...

A lot of subscriptions try to hit the ‘price of a cup of coffee’ price point. So I thought I’d list my monthly subscriptions, and talk about the value that they provide to me. If I pay a dollar amount, then I’ve converted them to GBP, as that is what I actually pay. My Annual & Monthly subscription prices Bear blog hosting: £4/$5 /mo This blog is hosted by bearblog, and I pay them £4/mo to host it. Bargain. Privacy-focussed to boot. I get the blog hosting, I also get to appear on the ‘discovery’ tab when I publish a post, and that brings some visitors to my blog, so I don’t feel exactly like I’m talking into a total void. It also comes with analytics, which on the whole is not bad at all, and it’s privacy focussed to boot. It also allows me to personalise my blog through themes, and I can also configure them how I want. I’m not a big fan of css, but bearblog has my css logically laid-out, so it’s quite easy to amend this to suit my needs. On the whole I’m happy with Bear blog, and I’ll certainly keep using it for the foreseeable future. ...

Have you ever walked into a bookshop, bought a book (or two), and then once home, the books have sat there on your bedside table for a very long time. Unread? The Japanese have a word to describe this 積ん読 (Pronounced: Tsundoku). My immediate thought on hearing this word for the first time - and then understanding what it means - was why on earth don’t we have this word in the English language? ...

I spent $20 last night. I’m just not sure on what, exactly I spent it on - if that makes any kind of sense? Last night, I came across omg.lol, and now before you scoot off and visit the site, I suggest you practise your squinting, or at the very least perhaps put some sunglasses on before you do. The colours on their site are pretty wild, consider yourself warned. So, here’s the link. Are you ready? omg.lol. ...

I, like many, decided a while ago to de-google my life. This post is about my reasons behind doing it, what I have achieved, and just as importantly what haven’t I been able to de-google? The service offering from Google is strong. There’s a bunch of really useful tools - for free - that the average person can use in their daily lives. This could be for example Google Mail, Google Docs, or Google Maps, to name a few. I decided a while ago to stop using as many Google products as possible, because of their privacy policy. Their privacy policy is, it’s fair to say ** checks notes ** not very good! ...

Broad topics covering things that I’d like to better understand: AI and how it’s going to impact search engines Improve my understanding of personal online privacy Try to find a couple of Linux cli projects to learn either basic rust or python coding. I’m open to suggestions! 😊 Better understand Linux containers, and immutable OSs. I plan to write some future blog posts on: A new (to me) rust or python project creating a Linux/mac cli utility that connects to Kagi.com APIs to enable command line web searches. A cool German VPS hosting company, I recently came across, offering pay what you can. A cool Swiss email company that I’ve used for years how I de-googled as much of my life as possible, with some exceptions!