I recently blogged about my e-mail backup strategy, using imap-backup. However I’ve found in real life this tool trips up quite a lot, and doesn’t really sync very satisfactorily on an ongoing basis. It’s also been slightly nagging at me that I’m just mirroring – so if an e-mail is deleted it’s gone for good […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

Right – so if everything is working properly, this should get posted to Mastodon and Twitter, with a short excerpt shown at both. There’s always an inherent danger with calling something “Final” – I fairly regularly see documents circulated with “UpdatedFinal” or “FinalV2”. As always, there’s an xkcd along these lines: xkcd.com/1294/