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On MacOS clearing the DNS cache with dscacheutil -flushcache && killall -HUP mDNSResponder is annoying. Very annoying. Because of that fucking sudo that you need to add everytime you want to run it. 
 Want to get rid of it? Add the commands to your sudoders file. Yup, this exists on MacOS. 
 Here’s the Ansible I use to make DNS flushing experience just that little bit more…
WHEN WILL WINTER END? 
 Currently reading: The Regicide Report. 

While water is wonderful I really don’t want it leaking into my apartment because of faulty pipes and taps. Even more so I don’t want it secretly leaking out of my apartment into someone elses. This is what we call A Fucking Disaster. 
 That’s why I’ve been integrating leak sensors wherever I fear water leaking. Like everything else I’m installing, these are wired…
Are you secure? Are your loved ones secure? Is your home secure? Are your loved ones secure at home? Is your dog secure? Are your accumulated mounds of jewellery secure? Are you secure in the knowledge that things are secure? Are you secure in yourself? Have you secured your potential? These are all questions that we must ask. 
 I’ve never done home security before. Never had an alarm or…
Lighting. It’s great. It lets you use your eyes, read cereal packets, and hunt for lost pennies. But, even better, it’s totes easy to automate. Which is why a smart light bulb is the first thing any neophyte home automator reaches for. 
 But despite the inherent snazzy socks potential, lighting turned out to be the most aggravating aspect of renovating my apartment . 
 Of…
This complete apartment renovation isn’t my first foray into home automation - I’ve had my rental place automated for years, and it’s given me a lot of insights into how things work in the real world. 
 I’m using a mishmash of wi-fi, Zigbee and ESPhome gadgets. This is understandable - landlords hate you smashing open walls to rewire things - but these wireless…
In 2023 my partner and I were lucky enough to buy an apartment in Berlin. 
 I say lucky. What I mean is that it was a deeply adult decision that I’m grateful we both could make. But my god, it was financially and emotionally stressful. 
 Nonetheless, we now have a 90m2 apartment in a neighbourhood that was, if not quite fashionable, was certainly nice. 
 
 
 
 
…
A disk in my ZFS pool has just started to die - and, quite annoyingly, not in a consistent way . 
 This sombre news means that I need to replace a drive in my zpool. gulp, etc 
 First things first - what drive is dying? If things are bad enough zpool status will be complaining about which drive is experiencing errors. But hopefully it won’t have got to that stage, and your…
There’s a wee trend going around called “Blog Questions Challenge”. You answer a bunch of pre-defined questions on your blog, and then tag some more people to do the same. 
 This is near enough to the concept of a chain letter to make me flip the proverbial bird and storm out. However, after a refreshing cup of tea, and a therapeutic smashing of small tchotchkes, I came to…
I’ve added schema.org data to each page of this site. Just to annoy the Indieweb folks. 
 < script type = 'application/ld+json' >
 {
 '@context' : 'https://schema.org' ,
 '@type' : 'BlogPosting' ,
 {{ with $featured - }}
 'image' : {{ $featured . Permalink }}},
 {{ end }}
 'url' : {{ . Permalink }},
 'dateCreated' : '{{ .PublishDate.Format ' 2006 - 01 - 02…
This project to remind you what day of the week you exist in is ridiculous and I love it. 

❤️ the 1UP and Berlin Kidz crews. 
 This vid shows a tag bombing between the two groups. Drone footage catches everything in realtime. 
 

Death Metal 

I’ve been putting off enabling dark mode on my site for weeks. Then I actually went to do it and remembered that it’s actually really easy. 
 Doh, etc. 
 @media (prefers-color-scheme : dark) {
 --text-color : #ffffff ;
 --canvas-color : #161616 ;
 --text-color-subtle : #cdcdcd ;
 }

It’s easy to setup the Home Assistant Ollama integration . But before you do that you need to make your Ollama installation accessible to external devices. 
 To do this you need to ensure the Ollama service is bound to 0.0.0.0 . 
 launchctl setenv OLLAMA_HOST '0.0.0.0' 
 and then restart Ollama with 
 brew services restart ollama
 Source 
 
 Ollama FAQ 
 

A very useful utility that allows you to define pre-commit git hooks via a simple Yaml file. 
 I now use it on this site to clean up the Mardown files and remove Exif data from images. 

Spent the last Saturday of my vacation fixing the build time on my site. 
 It was originally taking over 19 minutes due to it building all of the Opengraph images from scratch each time, and doing some extensive Exif scrubbing. 
 Now it’s down to 1m10s via the judicious use of caching and by moving the exif scrubbing to the original files as part of a pre-commit hook. 
 All this…
This is just a dummy to test grouping by month and day. 


 Engineers bear a burden to the public, and their specific expertise emanates from that responsibility. 
 
 ❤️ - and goes rather nicely with what I said about software engineering . 

Someone should only dare to use the term “Engineer” in their job title if they can analyse, design, test and build systems within an understood set of constraints, including, but not limited to, accessibility, safety, and cost. 
 The common definition of engineering as “doing something technical” can fuck right off. 

My goodness this is a very interesting thing for people to look at as a purely academic exercise. 👀 

Just to note that my self-hosting and home automation infra can be found on Github . I keep everything there, nothing hidden. (Secrets obviously encrypted…) 

It fills me with ick, but I just connected OpenAI to my Home Assistant. It’s not doing anything like controlling my home or doing anything “intelligent” (as LLMs are, after all, merely Stochastic Parrots ). 
 No, all it’s there for is to answer questions that we throw at it. My wife really likes asking Siri random stuff, and she’d miss it when it goes, and so she…
The Home Assistant Voice hardware has been hinted at for months, but now it’s finally here. 
 What is it? 
 The Home Assistant Voice (they need a better name) is a tiny piece of hardware that does two core things: listen for a wake word, and act as a voice satellite. 
 A wake word is a common way of starting a conversation with a voice assistant. You’ve undoubtedly heard…
A nice little tool for testing your YAML files. 
 Yes yes, YAML is awful, I know. But so is everything else. 

Gah, I wish this little CLI tool was maintained, because it’s amazingly useful. It allows you to take any HTML and extract the data from a given CSS selector. 
 I just used it to write this bookmark, as part of a new janky bash script. 
 #! /bin/bash
 CURRENT_YEAR = $( date +%Y ) 
 CURRENT_MONTH = $( date +%m ) 
 CURRENT_DAY = $( date +%d ) 
 CURRENT_TIME = $( date…
God I loved this show. 
 
 

If your homelab is being used by others it isn’t a homelab - it’s home production. 

When the “threats” are tweets that come from anonymous single-figure troll accounts and - despite knowing this - you publicly link these trolls with the tiny trans community… well, I think we can all safely say that your faux concerns are clearly rooted in deep transphobia. 

Jaysus, how did I miss that we’ve passed the 4 million dead mark for COVID-19? 😔 

It’s exactly 6 years today that I moved to Berlin with my partner. Time flies when you’re a) having fun b) in a pandemic. 

Hands up all the women who talk about the tech industry in therapy. 

Yes to self-explaining variables pls. 

DevOps is irritatingly interesting, and very, very hard to combine with a passion for accessibility and slow-tech. 
 #a11y #devops #slowtech 

I think… I think I love you @MhairiBlack? 💜 

Are you the developer who never talks, or are you the developer that never stops talking oh god please stop talking 

Hoooooo boy. 

I was about to mock this but it’s actually hella relatable. 

Amazing article on time by @holman. 😍 

Mood. 

If you can’t block them then at least you can swear at them. 😍