Kind: Articles
Traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body.
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International Volunteer Day
It's International Volunteer Day, and thanks to being on sabbatical I got to spend most of the day volunteering with Three Rings. I liveblogged everything I got up to in a series of notes to try to shine a light on what volunteering (in a developer/devops role) with Three Rings can look like; this post is a summary of all that liveblogging, plus a few extra thoughts.
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Babies and Baubles
Each year, we encourage our two children to each select exactly one new bauble to add to our tree. The result is a decoration that's a celebration of the changing tastes and interests of our two kinds: a mismatched, discordant, crazy mixture of colours and shapes, but in which each and every item is its own story.
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99 Days of Blogging
I've blogged a total of 219 posts spanning 99 consecutive days of blogging, a personal best by a long stretch.
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Stuck in a Lift
About twenty years ago, I spent three hours playing I-Spy in a broken-down elevator. And in doing so, I learned two things about my friend Fiona.
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Horse-Powered Locomotives
You probably know the story of George Stephenson's Rocket beating its competitors and going to to influence steam locomotive design for generations. But did you know that one of its competitors... was a horse in a carriage?
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US Constitution and Presidential Assassinations
A thought came to me this morning: if a US President-Elect dies before their inauguration, does their running mate automatically get the Presidency? Finding the answer led me through a warren of interconnected Constitutional Amendments.
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Sadder Than Fiction
There's a short story that I tried on-and-off to write, but I've now given up on it. The concepts it makes light of all feel a bit too close-to-home, as conspiracy theorists increasingly migrate from the 'harmless nutjob' to the 'dangerous political leader' category.
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XPath Scraping AdamKoszary.co.uk
My old colleague Adam's started blogging again, but his blog doesn't have an RSS feed. Which means it's time for some more XPath Scraping in FreshRSS, and an excuse for me to explain the testing and debugging process I use when making XPath Scraping rulesets!
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Sabbatical Magic
Two weeks into my extended break from work and on my way home from Spain, I've discovered something magical about a sabbatical: it frees me from my compulsion to think about next week's work, at the weekend.
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Hero of Alexandria
Hero of Alexandria is my hero. And it's not for the steam engine he didn't invent (that was Vetruvius), nor for his formula for the area of a triangle, nor even for his programmable robot (yes, really). It's for his square root algorithm.
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Hour of Ambiguity
Waking during the "hour of uncertainty" at the end of European Summer Time, I find myself wondering why we no longer expect computers to tell us what they're doing about daylight savings, and when.
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My Oldest Article of Clothing
I own a shirt that I bought for 50p, 23 years ago. How on earth has it lasted so long?
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How I Learned to Enjoy Pickled Onion Monster Munch
I like pickled onions. And I like the vinegar flavouring and the onion flavouring from salt & vinegar and cheese & onion crisps, respectively. So I ought to like pickled onion crisps too. So why don't I... and can I rationally persuade my brain that it's wrong?
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Bad Names for Servers
Not for the first time, our eldest child has drawn me a network diagram. It's cute, but I've outright refused to name one of the new servers I'm provisioning after our dog. Here's why...
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Nex in CapsulePress
I've extended CapsulePress to support Nex, an ultra-lightweight smolweb protocol from the Nightfall City community.