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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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. […]

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, […]

I’ve just adding a plugin (“WP Twitter Auto Publish”) which I think will auto post my blog entries to Twitter… So this isn’t a very imaginative one, but gotta test it somehow! Update – All seems to work. I’ve deleted the tweet it generated now.