Well, 2022 was even worse for us than 2021 – once again as reflected by my social media presence (or lack thereof).

However, one of the habits that has emerged for us as a family is our “Good Things” jar – where each week we take a slip of paper, and write on it all the good things from that week, and put it in the jar. This evening (on New Years’ Eve) we are going to open it and read through all the Good Things which have happened this year together.

So in that spirit, here are some Good Things from 2022:

• I became a STEM ambassador, and did a careers fair at Skipton Girls’ School.
• I became professionally registered, and am now a Chartered Engineer (MBCS).
• I had an article on Wordle published in Overload.
• I joined the committee of the Harrogate School of Theology & Mission.
• I completed Couch to 5k (although I am now back to couch!).
• I got going on Mastodon as @[email protected]
• I migrated my websites to Docker and nginx, and this blog to nextjs.
• I preached some of my best sermons yet, and led worship at the new evening service.

More widely in my family:

• My elder son passed his driving test, did brilliantly at his A-Levels, got grade 8 piano, all but finished his gold DofE, and successfully started at University.
• My younger son finished primary school and successfully started secondary school, got grade 4 drums, and discovered Warhammer.
• My work (JBA Consulting) has been a great place to work, and also hugely supportive when I’ve had to change plans at short notice.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things, but I give thanks for the Good Things and blessings, and continue to hope and pray for a light to shine in the areas that are still dark.

Well, the radio silence since May has been for a number of reasons, a large aspect of which was some infrastructure work behind the scenes.

I manage to b0rk the pi which hosts this website, but rather than spending ages recreating all the websites, database, config, etc. I decided to put everything into Docker containers, so they can, in theory, be deployed anywhere, and should have a very rapid restore time if anything breaks. All the config files are in source control.

So each of my sites running on this host is now in its own Docker container, with an nginx running in front and doing the SSL termination and routing. Even more excitingly, this blog is now running on static HTML generated in nextjs, with a headless WordPress behind the scenes supplying some of the content.

I only switched www.eutony.net over this afternoon, and I’m not sure how long it will take new posts to appear, so it’s quite exciting really!!

Slightly unintentionally I have built up a collection of “meaningful” ties, principally from my almae matres. I didn’t really set out to do it, but now I have started doing it I am always on the look out for opportunities to get a tie which represents something.

I’ve put them on my 365, but thought it would be fun to collate to a single post.

Kicking off with my old school tie (which is horrible, and I haven’t worn since the 5th year – and I have also photoshopped out the burn mark I made in it one chemistry lesson!)

My school also had a house system (a bit like Hogwarts), and awards were giving to those who contributed to the life of the House or School (representing in sporting events, mainly). These were called “colours”, and translated into a special tie you could wear!

I was pretty rubbish at sport, but I did something or other to merit being awarded half-colours. I’m pretty sure I haven’t worn this since school, but it is just about passable.

My degree was from Imperial College, and this is the college tie.

This is possibly my favourite tie, and one I have actually worn as a tie on various occasions.

I am most proud of this tie, and I needed to prove my eligibility to buy it!

While I was at Imperial, I was the radio Station Manager for a year, and in recognition of nearly failing my degree that year I was awarded Social Colours by the Student’s Union.

I did my docorate at the University of Leeds.

Having a PhD does allow you to wear an academic hood, but at more than £100 to buy one, I thought the tie was not only a more economic option, but one I might actually wear. It’s the standard Leeds tie.

My ordination training at St Hild college culminated in a BA which was technically awarded by the University of Durham.

I also think this tie is really smart, and I have worn it in anger.

My latest addition (which only arrived this morning).

Turns out that there is a tie which commemorates being a Chartered Engineer, and this is what it looks like!

I had the excitement last week of finding out that my application for professional registration was successful – and I am now a Chartered Engineer! Technically CEng MBCS for those who are interested.

I hadn’t really clocked on to professional registration or being a member of a professional body like the BCS. Obviously I’d heard of Chartered Accountants, but never really put too much thought into it. Anyway, in my current job (at JBA Consulting) there is a emphasis on professional registration, so I thought I’d look into it. Turns out that it’s a demonstration of competence in a range of areas which I was already working in, an agreement to behave according to a code of conduct, and that you have sufficient academic (or experiential) qualifications. Because I did a Masters in Software Engineering as an undergrad I automatically ticked the qualification box, which helped a lot.

I thought I was in with a good chance of meeting the competence criteria, but you can never be completely sure with these things.

I personally have always viewed software development as closer to engineering than science, and being a member of professional body (and especally being professionally registered) means publically agreeing to adhere to a code of conduct which
covers areas which I personally have always considered to be non-negotiable for any professional, or indeed any Chrisian come to that – such as working for the public good, being ethical, continuous development, knowing your limits, etc.

The Engineering Council have a range of professional registration options to reflect people being at different stages of their careers, and I would now encourage anyone in a profession to at least look into the options – I’m sure most workplaces would support you in it.

Just a post to mirror the post on my other blog – I’ve decided it’s not the best use of my resources to continue to pay for domain and WordPress hosting for that blog, so in a couple of weeks revjameshandley.com will lapse expire, and my vicar blog will only be available via revjameshandley.wordpress.com.

I’ll try and update links from this site.

In all honesty blogging has taken something of a back seat in my life at the moment in any case.

This is sort of a meta-post to give fair warning that I’m moving away from a paid WordPress hosting plan, and am going to allow “revjameshandley.com” to expire in a couple of weeks.

My hope is that this blog will revert to the free plan, and still be available at revjameshandley.wordpress.com. If not I’ll have to come up with a different plan!

Either way, all the existing permalinks will break (sorry).

I’ve finally jumped on the Wordle bandwagon, and enjoy tinkering away every day. Best yet has been two guesses, due to a spectacularly good first guess. Worst was six, which I put down to Covid-19 brain fog.

Just in case anyone doesn’t know, Wordle is a really simple “mastermind” like game, where you have to guess a five letter word in six guesses or less. For each guess you make (which itself has to be a valid five letter word), you get an indication for each letter of whether it is the right letter in the right place, a right letter but in the wrong place, or a letter that doesn’t appear in the word at all.

Obvious questions are whether it is theoretically always solvable, and then what is the best word to start with? Before we dive into this, a quick shout out to Hannah Dee, whose linux refresher through the medium of Wordle didn’t exactly plant the seed in my mind, but did water it.

Back to the question. If the answer didn’t have to be a valid word, the answer would be “no” straight away. There are 26x26x26x26x26 (over 11 million) permutations possible, and you have six guesses. Admittedly you can rule out a lot of these permutations after every guess – if you happen to choose 5 different letters, none of which appear, then that brings it down to 21x21x21x21x21 possibilities (a mere 4 million). However some basic arthimatic soon exposes the problem. We guess 5 letters each turn, so after 5 guesses, we have tried a maximum of 25 different letters. There are 26 to choose from. So by the time we get to guess six – our final guess – we can be certain which unique letters are in the solution, but can’t be sure of their position, or which have been repeated.

However the fact it must be a valid word helps enormously. Taking Linux’s “huge” American English dictionary, I reckon there are 11,302 five letter words, from “aahed” to “zymix”. In all honestly we can probably rule out a lot of these, but let’s continue with this list, as the worst case. Like Hannah, I’ll be using Linux command line tools along the way to show how I got my stats.

Bit of housekeeping to start with – there’s a few diacritics and apostrophes in the source word list, so we’ll filter out anything which isn’t pure ASCII, and then filter it to just words with five letters from a to z in.

$ grep -P "^[[:ascii:]]*$" /usr/share/dict/american-english-huge | \
  grep -P "^[a-z]{5}$" > wordle-words.txt

$ wc -l wordle-words.txt

11302 world-words.txt

Intuitively we’re trying to gather as much information as possible as early as possible, in terms of presence and position. Therefore we want to start with the letters which are most likely to occur. This way if they are in the word it might not reduce the list much, but we get positional information, and if they are not in the word it reduces the list a lot.

So, let’s count how many times each letter appears in a word.

$ grep -o "." ./wordle-words.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -b -g -r | column

   5807 s          2828 l          1637 c          1194 k           228 j
   5723 e          2722 t          1628 m           869 f            92 q
   5242 a          2414 n          1531 y           856 w
   3832 o          2013 d          1387 h           593 v
   3636 r          1898 u          1334 g           340 z
   2901 i          1661 p          1307 b           237 x

If we take the 5 most common letters across those 11,000 words, these are “s”, “e”, “a”, “o” , and “r”. Sounds like “AROSE” is a good first guess! If we count all the words which contain one or more of these letters, it’s an amazing 10,782. We can be almost certain of a hit, and if not we’ve only 520 candidate words left to search.

$ grep "[arose]" wordle-words.txt | wc -l

10782

If on the other hand we used the least popular letters we could (actually quite tricky to find words using them – but “BUZZY” is pretty bad), we only cover 4,665 words. Our odds of a hit have gone down from ~95% to less than 50%. What’s worse, if we don’t match any, we are still left with 6,637 words to search. Not good.

Let’s ignore the position information for just a moment, and see what happens with the possibilities of hit. The huge advantage we have is that if we only hit “A”, we know we didn’t hit any of “ROSE”, which also tells us a lot.

$ grep "[arose]" wordle-words.txt | \
   grep "a" | \
   grep -v "[rose]" | wc -l

797

$ grep "[arose]" wordle-words.txt | \
   grep "a" | \
   grep "r" | \
   grep -v "[ose]" | wc -l

431

Do the above for all the possible combinations and you get:

So, even without considering positional information, we have reduced the word list from 10,782 to a maximum of 894. If we take the position information into account, we reduce it even further.

$ grep "[arose]" wordle-words.txt | \
   grep "a" | \
   grep -v "[rose]" | \
   grep "a...." | wc -l

123

$ grep "[arose]" wordle-words.txt | \
   grep "a" | \
   grep -v "[rose]" | \
   grep -v "a...." | wc -l

674

Doing this for all the combinations is pretty tedious, but a dig into AS, which is our least favourable combination:

So it seems reasonable to estimate our maximum new candidate list is 750 words. Not bad for one guess.

For the next guess, we want to choose a distinct set of letters to maximise our coverage. The next 5 on the list are “i”, “l”, “t”, “n”, “u” – “UNTIL”. Our coverage with UNTIL against the original list is still pretty high at 8,690 matches vs. 2,612 non-matches. Of course if you are doing this specifically, rather the generically, you would use the actual candidate word list after the first guess. It also turns out there is only one five letter word which does not have any letters from “AROSEUNTIL” in it, and that word is … “PYGMY”.

So after two guesses, we know we have we have either hit at least one letter, or we know the answer is pygmy. We also know there are at most 894 possible words it could be (although this estimate is too high), and we’ve still got four guesses to go.

For completeness, what happens when “AROSE” doesn’t match at all? Let’s rinse and repeat with the 520 words we had left when we didn’t match any:

$ grep -v "[arose]" ./wordle-words.txt | grep -o "." | sort | uniq -c | sort -b -g -r | column

    403 i           188 n           100 d            35 z             7 q
    260 y           157 c            95 g            30 w
    255 u           138 p            89 f            21 v
    200 l           134 h            83 b            15 j
    190 t           114 m            73 k            13 x

This time we can’t make a word from the top 5. Best option is something like “UNITY”, which it turns out hits every one of our remaining 520 options. So in this scenario we’ve got 4 guesses left, we know at least 1 letter, and something about its position.

Whatever happens, after two guesses we know at least 1 letter (or the answer), our candidate list is reduced to <10% of the original word list, and we’ve still got four more guesses.

So I would feel pretty confident saying “yes” – it is always solvable in 6 guesses. I know I haven’t proved it by a long stretch, but I’m happy enough.

The only trouble with this is it does kind of take the fun out of it a bit, and you lose the sense of closing in on the solution. You also know that you will never score a “2”, unless the second word just happens to be “UNTIL”.

But I’ll give it a whirl for a few days – solving wordle by making the first two guesses “AROSE” and “UNTIL”! My predication is that I will usually only need 3 guesses.

Had a very frustrating couple of days fighting WordPress, so I thought I’d share my findings in the hope that someone else may benefit. The slugs incidentally are the part that form the permalink of the page/post – so this post’s slug will be 2022/01/14/wordpress-slug-autocorrect, leading to a permalink of https://www.eutony.net/2022/01/14/wordpress-slug-autocorrect

Rather than spin the whole narrative, I’m going to just say upfront – WordPress does not allow you to have pure numeric slugs (e.g. “365” or “123”), and if you try to do this it will ‘autocorrect’ to add a “-2” on the end. Simple as that.

In trying to chase this down, it turns out that there is a whole bunch of other reasons why it also might add a “-2” on the end. These include if there is:

• a media item with the slug name,
• a deleted item with that slug name in the bin,
• a tag or category of that name, or
• an old slug hanging around in wp_postmeta (the metakey being _wp_old_slug).

My problem was this – I have a templated page which is a sort of summary of my 365 photo project, and shows the most recent 10 photos. [It does this with a bit of PHP which hits the API at photo.eutony.net and generates a page of img tags and links to that site]. Naturally enough I wanted this to be at www.eutony.net/365. Not unreasonable, I wouldn’t have thought, and it worked when I first did it.

Anyway, I fairly recently updated WordPress and PHP, and all seemed to be well. However I noticed on the front page that my 365 photo wasn’t updating. Turns out there were a bunch of missing PHP modules (such as curl) that meant the backend caching had broken. So I eventually fixed that, and then noticed that my /365 page had turned itself into /365-2.

Even worse, navigating to /365 took me to a fairly random one of my blog posts where the title started “365-“!!

I nailed this last problem first – turns out there is some wordpress magic called “template_redirect” which does some canonical SEO stuff, but also guesses what page you might be looking for! In WordPress 5.5 the ability to turn this off was added (make.wordpress.org/core/2020/06/26/wordpress-5-5-better-fine-grained-control-of-redirect_guess_404_permalink) – upshot is that you need the following line in your theme’s function.php


add_filter( 'do_redirect_guess_404_permalink', '__return_false' );


Once I discovered about the WordPress numeric slug limitation, answer was to rename the slug to “/365-photos”, and then add a couple of PermanentRedirect to .htaccess to preserve the previous published permalink(s):

RedirectPermanent /365 /365-photos
RedirectPermanent /365-2 /365-photos


As often with computing and software, the solution, once you know what it is, is a two minute job to implement – it’s getting to it that takes hours.

As we approach the end of each year, I like to look back at my New Year’s intentions, and see how I’ve done.

Only it turns out I didn’t make any at the start of 2021 (or indeed review my 2020 ambitions). In fact between February 2020 and October 2021 I wrote just 3 posts.

The reason for this is obvious, but not really visible at all in anything I’ve written, except a passing reference in May 2020 about doing a church service from home. It is of course the Covid-19 pandemic, which started in December 2019, really hit the UK in March 2020, and is still going strong two years down the road.

By January 2020 our household was getting nervous about the disease, to the extent that we cancelled a trip we had planned to Cambridge in February half-term because of the risk, and instead went away to a remote cottage in County Durham.

On the 16th March came the “work from home” order, and minimise social contact, then on the 23rd March the first lockdown was announced; and from 26th March to the 10th May the UK was in complete lockdown. Everything is closed except for food shops and healthcare, and people are not allowed any contact with people outside their “bubble”, and only allowed outside once a day for an hour’s exercise. “No person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse”. Churches were closed, so church has go to online! We used YouTube, others used Zoom. Our eldest son’s high school started partially closing from the 18th March, so that he had his final day in school before the closures were announced – his final day of year 11 happened without him realising. GCSEs were cancelled, and grades issues by teachers instead. Joe Wickes kept us fit with his daily exercised, and BBC Bitesize provided home schooling!

From the 10th May we had a new regionalised system, with levels of covid determining the rules for social contact. Schools partially re-opened in June (they had been open for key workers the whole time), but it wasn’t until September they fully re-opened. Over August things relaxed considerably, and we were able to go to Cornwall for a summer holiday – but my household were in no doubt that restrictions were going to return as we headed into winter.

14th September 2020 saw new restrictions, such as the “rule of 6”, with tightening on 22nd September to a tier system. 5th November was the start of the second national lockdown (although schools stayed open), which lasted until the 2nd December, although a strict three tier situation was in place.

At the start of January 2021, the Prime Minister annouces that everyone should go back to school. On the first day of term, we enter another full lockdown, with all schools etc closed, and a full “stay at home” order.

This one lasts until 8 March, when schools re-open, and we take Step 1 of a four step roadmap for lifting restrictions. 12 April was step 2, 17 May step 3, and finally step 4, with almost all legal restrictions lifted on 19 July (four weeks later than planned).

In the meantime vaccines had been developed, and immunisations were forging ahead – natural or artifical immunity being the only route of any pandemic.

Church was also interesting. On the 17th March 2020, the Archbishops said churches should not be holding worship services in the building, and from 26th March all churches were completely closed, and we streamed our services online. The first one snuck in from Church, but from the end of March until September all our services were streamed from our homes. On the 13th September 20202, we started having Holy Communion in-person with very restricted numbers in the building, followed by two livestreamed services; one from home still, and the other from the building. In October 2020, we switched to our current pattern, of a 9am Holy Communion and a 10.30 Morning Worship from the building, both in-person and livestreamed. In the January 2021 lockdown, we were able to continue to use the building, and have a handful of people running the service.

Some restrictions have now been re-introduced (10 December – working from home advised, and facemasks mandatory) in the light of the omicron variant, and this winter was always going to be a rough ride. I am certain we have more restrictions to come in the next few days, but my hope is that come March time we will truly be moving into “living with Covid” (in the same we live with the cold, and with ‘flu), and we will have no more need for restrictions by the summer.

The above is somewhat dispassionate, on purpose. Truth it is has been an incredibly tough couple of years for me and my family, and one that has come very close to breaking me at times. We have been blessed enough to avoid any serious illness so far (but I can’t believe that one or more of us haven’t caught it, although none have ever tested positive). Truth is this time last year I was in a pretty bad place, and the last thing I was able to do was look back at my hopes for 2020 (none of which I managed, incidentally), or set any sort of ambition for 2021 beyond surviving.

Of course it wasn’t awful the whole time, and we had some really good times too. We’ve had to invent new games and rituals, discovered new local walks, and really appreciated seeing friends and family when we were able. The slower pace of life (outside work!) was a gift a lot of time. But it has been tough, and I think explains why I more or less stopped blogging and posting photos.

I can’t promise 2021 will be better on either of those two fronts, but I do know that God walks with us.

As a part of my quest to reduce plastic, and maybe save some money, I switched over to shaving with a safety razor at the end of 2019. There was also the hope of getting a closer shave, so I wouldn’t be quite so stubbly at the end of the day.

Previously I was using disposable razors, either the Gillette type ones where you change the head (Mach 5, or whatever) or the bog standard supermarket 10 pack of twin blade razors, with shaving gel that comes in a squirty can. The disposable razors are 10 for £1, and same price for a can of shaving gel, which probably does a month or so?

Anyway, I went for a Hill and Drew Double Edge Butterfly Razor and Case, which at the time was only £10 from The Shaving Stack. This turns out to have been an absolute steal; it’s a great razor, and should last me for many many years.

I also bought a badger shaving brush (which is more or less essential if you’re not using a squirty can), which was £15, but again should last many years.

I did try shaving soap, but didn’t really get on with it, so switched to Talyor of Old Bond Street Shaving Cream. This does does come in a plastic pot, but one pot lasts me probably 9 months of shaving every day, which is pretty good. They’re not cheap at £10 a tub – but better to recycle than the squirty gel. You could probably make them go a bit further than I do as well – you really do only need the tiniest amount to lather up your whole face.

Than there are the razor blades. I use Astra Superior Platinum Double Edge Razor Blades, which I bought in a pack of 100(!) for £12 delivered. They even come in little cardboard boxes of 5, and wrapped in waxed paper.

In terms of usage, I gather it’s best to change the blades every couple of days, but I tend to use them for a week, with one day off shaving a week. This is about the same as the disposable ones, which I also usually made last a week – sometimes two.

So, objectives achieved?

Well, definitely less plastic. The only plastic I generate now from shaving is the empty pot of shaving cream once or twice a year. This contrasts with maybe 30 or 40 plastic disposable razors, and 5 or 6 shaving gel cans.

There is no doubt the shave is significantly closer (especially the first 2 or 3 with a new blade).

Cost? Well, there was an upfront cost of £25 to get going, and ongoing costs of 50p a month for blades, then £1 a month for shaving cream. The disposable ones are probably slightly cheaper than this, and the shaving gel comparable. Clearly if you use a Gilette disposable or semi-disposable then the Astra’s are a significant saving. So probably not much in it either way in terms of pounds of pence, but you’re not not really comparing like with like.

More qualitatively, shaving with a safety razor is a completely different experience. For literally the first 3 months I cut my face every day!! I was so used to dragging the disposable razors over my skin at any old angle – you have to be much more careful and precise with the safety razors. But on the other hand I find it a more enjoyable experience – it shaves so beautifully and easily if you do it properly, and is so much closer. The whole lathering up is quite fun to. I’ve always enjoyed wet shaving, and it’s even better, in my opinion, with a safety razor.

Actually speaking of nicking oneself, I also use an alum block to stop the occasional little cut which still happens. The alum stick also doubles up as my deodorant. That takes a bit of a getting use to, as you still sweat, but it doesn’t smell. The alum kills off the smelly bacteria without blocking up your pores (which is what normal anto-persperant deodorant does – and of course that usually comes in yet more plastic too).

I did briefly flirt with the idea of the full cut-throat razor, and the whole stropping thing, but decided (a) I wasn’t brave enough, and (b) it was probably just a step too far.