One of the things us evangelical Christians like to do is to take a small passage of scripture and hang an entire praxis on it. This gets us into a bit of trouble sometimes, for example: I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. 1 Tim 2:12 This was (presumably) fine for the specific context Paul was writing to, but applying it as a global practice for all time doesn’t really stand up against the weight of the rest of scripture regarding the place of women in the Kingdom […]

I’ve been meaning to write something about passwords, and password managers for ages. TL;DR Passwords need to be as long as possible, and no fewer than 15 characters. Never re-use the same password on different sites. Always use 2FA where it’s offered. Use a password manager like bitwarden to do all the above! There really is no excuse these days for having poor password hygiene, such as re-using passwords, using easily guessable or crack-able ones, not changing them periodically. A good password manager makes life incredibly easy – I no longer know what most of my passwords are, because bitwarden […]

In my last post, I talked about the important of backing up, and how I do it. The upshot is I use a cloud file provider, which automatically synchronises my data, keeps a file history, and allows delete restore. There are many options here – I settled on Sync.com because it is zero-trust out of the box, is reasonable value, enables file and folder sharing, and generally seems good. In the post before last, I outlined my website setup, which is a Linux box running a collection of Docker containers. Unfortunately Sync.com doesn’t have a Linux client or API yet, […]

On the basis that: The world is facing a severe crisis of environmental degradation and climate change that affects our ability to sustain human civilisation in its present form, The main cause of the crisis is human activity, The crisis is inextricably linked to global injustices, inequality and extinction of many species, The crisis indicates a failure of human beings to follow God’s mandate to care for the world and to seek justice among its peoples, we, the leaders of St Mark’s Church, Harrogate, want to publicly recognise a Climate and Environmental Emergency, and commit ourselves to: Examining our lives […]

You don’t need to work with technology for long before you realise the importance of having a backup strategy. The two main use cases are disaster recovery, and mitigation against accidental deletion or edit. The first is generally more straightforward – you are simply looking to be able to restore all your data in the case of hardware failure, or catastrophic user error. The scenarios are losing or dropping your phone or laptop, hard drive failure, memory stick loss or corruption, cloud provider failure, malware, accidentally deleting an account or formatting a hard drive, and so on. Furthermore, you also […]

Well – it has taken some time (and partially explains the lack of posts), but I think I’ve got my personal websites set up “just so” now. The core engine is still WordPress, which is running headless to provide all the content to the front-end. I use WordPress admin to manage the site, write posts, update pages, and so on. The interaction is via WPGraphQL, which took a bit of effort to get working, but provides a nice standard API to access the details. The front end (www.eutony.net) now runs off nextjs, running on a node server. So the majority […]

I periodically record the instructions for silly games that I came across, usually in the setting of a youth group. This game is called “Empire”. Each player starts off as the “Ruler” of their Empire (which consists of only them at the start), and tries to add other players to their Empire by correctly guessing their secret identities. But if another person else guesses theirs, then they and their entire Empire gets subsumed into that other person’s Empire! The winner is the person who has all the other players in their Empire. It works best with between 8 and 20 […]

Turns out #chatgpt isn’t great at telling jokes… “Give me ten examples of Dad jokes.” What did the dad say when his kids asked him for money? “Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know.” Why was the dad’s belt arrested? For holding up his pants! Why don’t dads ever have any money? Because they always spend it on their kids! How do you know when a dad is about to make a joke? When he starts to twinkle. What do you call a dad who’s always on the phone? A chatterbox! How does a dad make a coffee run? Very […]

So, learnt something today. With nextjs “getInitialProps” will run server-side when the page first loads, but then run client-side on reloads (i.e. if you navigate back to it). This means my website breaks if you go “back” to a search results page, as it tries to hit the headless WordPress back-end – which it can’t. So it errors out, and you get this lovely message: Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information). Solution – put the WordPress call behind an api, and then either always hit that api from “getInitialProps”, or work out […]

I saw a post on Mastodon this morning about the futility of making resolutions for an arbitrary 365 day period. This didn’t sit quite right with me, so I pondered it for a while and realised what my objection is. I don’t really mind the notion that resolutions are futile (back in 2011 I moved away from the idea and language of resolutions), but I don’t agree that the time period is arbitrary. Of course, the 1st January is semi-arbitrary – but today we return to the same relative position in the solar system that we were at 365.25 days […]