The 90mph office
Posted on Tue, Sep 19, 2023
| Alan Pope
Lightbulb moment On Thursday, October 13th 2016, while on a train, slowly recovering from a pub-based night out, I had an idea!
The idea is to take a train somewhere (unspecified) for four hours, have lunch, then take another train home. The train would be my 90mph office with scenery for those four hours in each direction, and I’d get to enjoy lunch somewhere new. I’d do a full days work with the view out the window constantly changing.
[Read More]Go manic for mantic
Posted on Mon, Sep 18, 2023
| Alan Pope
Earlier today I posted a poll on Mastodon.
As I write this, there are fifteen hours left on the poll, and it looks like this with around a hundred votes:
Most people seems to think I should wait for a month. That result may change overnight, of course, but I can’t wait! I’ve got a blog post to write, and time on my hands!
So let’s upgrade now!
Also, nobody seemed to spot that I got the releases round the wrong way.
[Read More]Ringtones on iOS
Posted on Sun, Sep 17, 2023
(Last modified on Tue, Sep 26, 2023)
| Alan Pope
In a change from our regularly scheduled blogging, I present a short how-to. This is mostly for my own memory, because I’ve had to search online how to do this multiple times, and I can never remember it. Writing it down for you might aide my memory.
I found myself playing some retro games on my SteamDeck today, while the tyres were being replaced on my car. After a bit of time playing Golf in a virtual GameCube, I rolled the clock back further, and played a bit of OG Tetris on a virtual GameBoy.
[Read More]Outdated snap packages
Posted on Sat, Sep 16, 2023
| Alan Pope
Canonical is planning an ‘All Snap’ desktop next year. It will likely be available side-by-side with the traditional deb-based installation we’ve been used to since 2004.
If the “All Snap” or “immutable” platform is to be a success, Canonical needs to get a grip on the broken, uninstallable, insecure, and outdated snaps provided in the snap store.
This is a long post, so feel free to skip to the ‘Solutions’ section for my positive thoughts.
[Read More]Backup the caravan
Posted on Fri, Sep 15, 2023
| Alan Pope
Second in my series of Tales From Tech Support. Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me.
In the early 1990s I worked as a Technician at a local college. I would set-up and tear down experiments for students. I’d also have to look for ‘booby-traps’ they’d set for us. But that’s another story.
I would sometimes get called upon to perform technical support for external organisations.
[Read More]95 bits per second
Posted on Thu, Sep 14, 2023
| Alan Pope
Feel free to skip this blog if you’re triggered by “Old man yells at cloud” or “Grandpa tells us about his childhood” style posts. This is the second in a row after a moan about my cellphone. A more lighthearted story will follow tomorrow, I promise.
I grew up (and still live near) a small village in the UK called Mytchett. It’s not famous for much other than “housing” Rudolf Hess, who was held there for a while during the Second World War.
[Read More]Small phone is best phone
Posted on Wed, Sep 13, 2023
| Alan Pope
I’ve owned plenty of mobile phones over the years. My current daily driver is iPhone 13 Mini, sporting a bright, funky, and cheap OIIAEE Silicone Case. Look at it. It’s gorgeous (ignore the notification badge count, please).
Picture taken with the potato camera on my old OnePlus 5.
As I mentioned in a previous post, my favourite phones include the flyweight Nokia 6600 (2.1"), bantamweight N82 (2.4") and featherweight iPhone 4s (3.
[Read More]Happy Birthday Steam
Posted on Tue, Sep 12, 2023
| Alan Pope
Steam - the video game distribution and launching platform from Valve, is twenty years old today. Steam has become quite a fixture of PC gaming life in those two decades.
I didn’t really pay any attention to Steam initially. I wasn’t really into PC gaming in 2003.
At least partly because, coincidentally, my daughter also turns twenty today. She was born just hours ahead of Steam.
A short while later, here we are, probably not thinking about video games.
[Read More]My 2023 podcast listening list
Posted on Mon, Sep 11, 2023
| Alan Pope
Podcast consumption At the start of 2021, I wrote up my 2021 podcast listening list. In it, I categorised podcasts I listen to broadly as ‘Must listen’, ‘Regular listens’ and ‘Once in a while’.
Back then I was using PocketCasts on Android. The full list of subscriptions can be found here.
Android ➡️ iOS In June 2022, I switched from Android to iOS as I moved from OnePlus 5 to iPhone 13 Mini as my primary device.
[Read More]A virus for the BBC Micro
Posted on Sun, Sep 10, 2023
| Alan Pope
About a year ago, I left a comment on a Nostalgia Nerd video about Viruses. It’s a good video, worth a watch, like most of their content.
Here’s my silly comment.
At 1.7K 👍, it’s my most upvoted comment on YouTube, ever. I do enjoy free Internet points.
Some of the replies to me on YouTube were quite 🌟fun🌟.
“Any chance you made a back up? I’d love to look at the source code”
[Read More]Code page 437 aesthetic
Posted on Sat, Sep 9, 2023
| Alan Pope
At Axiom, our design team has recently come up with a “new” (to us) 🌟aesthetic🌟 for some of our online content. It shows up in posts & ads on social media and in featured images on blog posts. Here is an example.
Announcing distributed tracing support
└ Visualize traces in a new waterfall view.
└ New dashboards to explore your services.
└ No sampling, no compromise.
└ All your traces, all the time.
[Read More]It's MY monitor
Posted on Fri, Sep 8, 2023
| Alan Pope
This is the first in (maybe) a series of “Tales From Tech Support”, which are true stories from my point of view. I’ll probably only post these on a Friday.
In the 1990s, I worked as a contractor for a large, well-established accounting firm.
We’d often buy new equipment and unpack it at the helpdesk, throw away all the packaging, and then take the actual kit to the user for deployment.
[Read More]Developer Tools
Posted on Thu, Sep 7, 2023
(Last modified on Fri, Sep 8, 2023)
| Alan Pope
I have long said I’m not really a developer. Whenever I used to see news articles in the past quoting me as “Alan Pope, Developer at Canonical”, I would cringe quite a bit. I say to my professional developer friends that I’m not one, and they often roll their eyes at me.
What makes someone a developer though?
I have a GitHub account. I have developed code myself. I’ve badly written HTML, BASH shell scripts, JavaScript, Python, and even some (finished, and some unfinished) “games” in BlitzBasic, BlitzMax, Z80 & 6502 assembler.
[Read More]ThinkPad Z13 SSD replacement
Posted on Wed, Sep 6, 2023
| Alan Pope
One thing I’ve loved about ThinkPad laptops for many years, is the upgradability and repairability. Ever since the early days, it’s been possible to noodle around inside a ThinkPad.
Sadly, some of the modern X1/Ultrabook line, and some others, are less upgradable than previous generations. My year-old ThinkPad Z13 has a few options for noodling around inside though, including storage.
My Z13 shipped with Ubuntu out of the box. I wanted to try something different, but didn’t want to wipe the OS off the SSD.
[Read More]Every cellphone I have owned
Posted on Tue, Sep 5, 2023
| Alan Pope
Time for a listicle!
I’ve felt the need to list (almost) every mobile phone that I can remember owning and using, ever. There’s at least one missing from the list. My stupid old brain won’t let me recall the niche brand of phone I bought some years back. It’ll come to me one day.
There’s a table below with some of the interesting manufacturers specs, and further down are some rambling memories from my experience of owning the various devices.
[Read More]Using bimmer connected with my Mini
Posted on Mon, Sep 4, 2023
| Alan Pope
tl;dr I own an BEV (Battery Electric Vehicle) BMW Mini. I previously wrote and talked about getting a ’takeout’ of my car charging data from BMW, and putting it into Axiom to answer some common questions from the ‘EV Curious’. I’m now getting ongoing data from the car, but I had to use 3rd party tools to do it.
BMW BMW has an API for getting car data (beyond the ’takeout’ I used last time), to get the ongoing daily charge data.
[Read More]Updated 'Must-Have' GNOME extensions list
Posted on Sun, Sep 3, 2023
| Alan Pope
Back in December 2020 I wrote up my personal Must-Have GNOME extensions. It’s been nearly three years, two job changes, and a few Ubuntu upgrades, so I thought I’d take another look.
tl;dr:
What changed Out I no longer have these installed.
Sound Switcher Indicator This used to crash a lot for me, to the point I’d go and look for it in the panel and it was missing. I figured if I don’t realise it’s gone, I probably don’t need it that much.
[Read More]You know your life is over...
Posted on Sat, Sep 2, 2023
(Last modified on Thu, Sep 7, 2023)
| Alan Pope
Every so often my brain reminds me of a conversation from long ago. Sometimes I’ll go for months without thinking about it, but then it’ll trigger, and I can’t stop thinking about it. It happened this week.
Many years ago I taught technical courses for SAP in their London training centre. There’d often be moments during the day when the students were busy doing exercises and off-topic conversations would start. Here’s how one went down.
[Read More]Full text content in Hugo
Posted on Fri, Sep 1, 2023
| Alan Pope
tl;dr I’ve enabled full content text rather than summaries in the RSS feed for this blog. The irony that I am then summarising the entire post in one line here at the top, is not lost on me.
History I’ve used various tools for my blog over the years. Initially in the late 1990’s it was hand-crafted HTML and some FrontPage extensions. Later I used Polarblog through the mid 2000’s then dropped that in 2006 for Drupal and subsequently WordPress.
[Read More]ZeroTier is my personal VPN
Posted on Thu, Aug 31, 2023
(Last modified on Tue, Sep 12, 2023)
| Alan Pope
Back in July, Martin introduced us to ZeroTier on the Linux Matters podcast, episode 8. He detailed why he’s using the tool and how. Worth a listen.
Per their website, ZeroTier “lets you build modern, secure multi-point virtualized networks of almost any type. From robust peer-to-peer networking to multi-cloud mesh infrastructure, we enable global connectivity with the simplicity of a local network.”
Interesting marketing, but do I need this though?
[Read More]