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 […]

We’re going to start having a “movie night” once a week, where we settle down on the sofa and watch a film together. It got me to thinking what we’d actually watch, so I thought I’d compile my ultimate film list. The criteria are films which really one ought to have seen, and include classics […]

2004 is shaping up to be a year of change. We’re not planning any major life changes, but there are quite a few things which have, or will be changing this year: Our boys have swapped bedrooms .. and with that will come a redecoration in due course We now have a pet snake (Jafar)(!) […]

My son asked this week about what the easiest way to make a flowchart (for a Factorio mod he’s designing!). I pointed him at Miro, and it made me realise there’s actually quite a few online tools I use a lot at home and work, which are worth a shout-out. Some of these I may […]

Just a very quick website update. When I first migrated to using next.js as my front-end, I used the WPGraphQL plugin to fetch data from WordPress. GraphQL is really nice – especially the facility to tailor queries and include related data – but on WordPress it seems really slow. Obviously I am running WordPress on […]

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 […]