I had my first proper scam/fraud phone call last week, and it one level it was really very impressive. My mobile rang, and the conversation went like this: Them: “Hello is that James?” Me: “Can I ask who’s calling?” Them: “This is Starling Bank fraud department – we’ve noticed some unusual activity on your card […]

My blogging has been ad hoc for a while now – mainly because I’ve being doing other things with my time, but also because a lot of the things I would have written about need careful curation before posting, the internet and the church being what they are. But one thing I have done, but […]

As previously mentioned I finished 2024’s Advent of Code. But I wasn’t sure that I really understood the solution to Day 21, so the purpose of this post is explain it to myself! Fair warning: This is a long and technical post! Day 21 Day 21 was a beautiful problem, but an absolute stinker in […]

Well, for the second time in my life, I “50 starred” last year’s Advent of Code. By the way, if you’re anyway connected with computing, and haven’t seen Eric Wastl’s keynote presentation Advent of Code, behind the scenes I highly recommended it. Anyway, it was mainly plain sailing this year, except for 2 stinkers which […]

Fair to say that, based on the last week or so, neither my son nor I are going to make our millions on crypto. ETH is down 10% DOGE is down 13% SUI is down 8% What is quite interesting is just how unstable the currency is, which I kind of already knew. A few […]

Two or three years ago I switched my current account over to Starling Bank, and it has revolutionised the way I manage my money. What initially drew me to Starling was the the ethical policies, 0% fees overseas usage (ATMs and paying by card), and – yes – because of the shiny fintech challenger bank […]

I made a few tweaks to my website over the weekend – chief one being to decrease the static page refresh time and update packages, but ran into all sorts of problems trying to build the Docker image. Error: Could not load the “sharp” module using the linuxmusl-arm runtime Possible solutions: – Manually install libvips […]

I am now an investor in cryptocurrency! Ok, so that’s probably putting it a bit strongly. My younger son really wanted to buy some Dogecoin, so we finally relented and let him spend some of his Christmas money on cypto. I decided for fun that I would match him in a different currency so we […]

Back in January 2024 I’d identified some things which we thought were going to change in 2024, and most have come to pass. Bedroom redecorated (which a bonus of fixing squeaky floorboards) Jafar the snake is doing nicely (his “birthday” is the 5th Jan) My car is now fully electric We’ve switched to Zen Internet […]

Well, I am now the proud “owner” of a full electric car. I went for a BYD Atto 3 in the end, so I hope the Chinese government doesn’t decide to apply my full emergency brakes while I’m on the M5! I say “owner” because I’m actually leasing it through work, so it’s technically a […]