Recent content on Brainsteam
I received the sad news that IBM Hursley’s clubhouse burned down over the weekend . This was a particularly sad ending for the club which was scheduled to close in September due to poor finances. 
 I haven’t been there for years but I have really good memories of many lunches and breakfasts in the clubhouse restaurant with my colleagues over the years. I used to go there for lunch…
I’m kind of sad to see that so much scientific discourse still happens on x/twitter. Especially given how much damage the owner of that site has done to the pursuit of science in the last 2 years. 
 Many people who initially left twitter have since returned and started posting there again in anger. Many people simply never left. If you’re a career scientist looking to get…
Back in may when we had our first record-breaking heatwave of the year, we decided to get air conditioning professionally installed in our house. We have a 1960s semi-detached house with retro-fitted additional insulation in our loft. Like most british houses, it was built to retain heat in chilly winters. As such our house is like a furnace in the summer and our upstairs bedrooms can get up to…
On the 7th night after his escape , my wife spotted Rupert on the security camera and decided to stay up late to coax him into the house. I’m pleased to say we got him. This time, its definitely the right cat because Giles did not react viscerally as if er had brought a war criminal into our house. 
 We are so pleased to have little Rupes back 
 

Last weekend my cat Rupert went missing. He’s a small ginger tabby and a house cat along with his brother Giles (yes my wife named them after Rupert Giles RIP Anthony Head). 
 
 After the heatwave in the UK the temperature in our house reached 34°C and we needed to vent the hot air out of the upstairs so we opened a couple of windows when we thought the cats were downstairs. Big…
in an effort to stay cool today while my wife and daughter made use of my portable air conditioner I booked to work from a co-working space this afternoon in a familiar spot. 
 Portsmouth North Harbour was once IBM’s uk headquarters and I came here for my student internship interview in 2010. IBM are long gone now but the building contains a number of businesses including coworking…
Today is Father’s day in the uk so happy father’s day to those who celebrate. It’s a special one to me this year as its the first with ny daughter. she got me (with some help from my wife) a card, a customised book and she got a baby grow with “my first fathers day” written on it 

The UK is braced for another “record breaking” heatwave starting tomorrow with temepratures up to 36C next week. I hate the heat, we are not well equipped for it here. Air conditioning is pretty uncommon and our homes are insulated for winter so they don’t cool down easily. Our daughter did no enjoy the heatwave in May and this one is going to be hotter… I’m hoping…
A couple of weeks ago my wife left her new shiny ASUS Zephyrus laptop precariously balanced on the arm of the sofa and one of our cats jumped up and knocked it off. The screen shattered but I was able to plug it into an external monitor to verify that the computer itself wasn’t damaged. 
 So then I went about trying to figure out if it was repairable. iFixIt seems to suggest yes but the…
N decided we should start our day at 6:30 today so we went for a beach walk 

Apologies for the noise on the feed - I’m messing with my website again this evening and I accidentally re-submitted a bunch of webmentions to bridgy! 

What I’m up to at the moment as inspired by Derek Sivers’ NowNowNow project: 
 Last updated: August 2026 
 August 2026 
 Still enjoying the trials and tribulations of parenthood and dealing with a 9 month old. Every day she learns something new and she’s so much fun to be around (compared to when she was first born when she was a screaming potato). 
 We recently…
Really enjoyed the Stranger Things finale. Just the right amounts of action, suspense and closure. The ending gave me real LOTR vibes with so many epilogues and so much closure. A thrilling and entertaining final adventure with a melancholic reminder that time waits for noone and the only certainty in life is change (and mortgages/rent)
 

Since having our daughter in November , we’ve been logging events like feeds, nappy changes etc. Whenever you speak to a midwife, a doctor or a health visitor they always want to know how many nappy changes you’ve had (to check for dehydration and constipation etc) and how much formula the baby is drinking. It’s difficult to remember these details, especially when you’re…
Woke up last night at 2:30am to a little tinny voice on repeat and then a siren noise. Initially I thought it was outside them I thought my wife was watching something on YouTube and eventually I went to look around the house for the source of the noise. Eventually I isolated the noise to our loft… Friends, climbing up into the pitch black loft at 2:30am to investigate a mysterious noise is…
I noticed my uptime monitoring service has been showing my home server dropping out for a few seconds at a time for the last few days. I found it very strange. Upon further examination it turns out that the TP-Link powerline adapter in my upstairs office is completely dead. No power LED. Nothing. It is about 3 years old so no chance of a warranty fix. I’ve ordered the new model off Amazon.…
It seems like only yesterday that we were at the beginning of 2025. Another year has passed and it’s been somewhat eventful. 
 +1 Ravenscroft 👶 
 The biggest theme this year has been our fertility journey culminating in the birth of my daughter in November . Mrs R and I needed a little bit of extra help with having a baby and underwent IVF treatment early in the new year. We found…
My daughter was born in early November. Since then, I’ve been experiencing parenthood for the first time. It’s incredible but it’s also frequently rubbish. Like everything, it’s a very polarised subject. Other parents will tell you that it’s the best thing you’ll ever do. Anti-kid people will tell you that you’re being irresponsible bringing a life into…
Picked up Yet Another Zombie Survivors and Vampire Survivors on Steam this week. They’re both excellent fun and easy to dip in and out of between nappy changes and bottle feeds. They’re also easy to play without too much thought - perfect for the sleep deprived mind.
 

I’m sure this is an unoriginal thought but if you’re a techie like me, baby gadgets are something else. I’m thinking of writing a “my defaults” post just about our baby “stack”
 

My daughter is here. She was delivered via emergency c-section yesterday after a somewhat dramatic weekend. I’ll keep it light on the details in this public forum but Mrs R is recovering well and our little girl is having some help adjusting to life outside the womb from the NICU before we can take her home. I’m overjoyed, we both are. She is the cutest little chonk with a shock of…
Made something of an expensive mistake last night dropping a big pot on the induction hob. The cost of repair is about the same as a new unit so I’ve ordered one on AO with measurements from the old and new data sheets and I just hope that it can be swapped like-for-like by the AO installer without involving a kitchen fitter.
 

In mid-September I had solar panels installed on my house. I’ve had them for a month now. I also had a 5 kilo-watt hour battery installed too so I can “capture” some of the solar energy during the day and use it at night. Overall I’m really pleased with the system and as a chronic nerd, it’s been a really interesting experience 
 Why Solar? 
 I decided to…
I’m feeling particularly despondent about the quality and tone of discourse in online spaces I hang out in at the moment. I’m seeing a lot of very angry people shouting at each other and trying to one-up each other for fake internet points and clout. In the last few days, each time I’ve opened up lemmy and mastodon I’ve very quickly found something that makes me sigh with…
I’ve switched from #vscode to #vscodium for my personal projects now. The open library of plugins ( https://open-vsx.org/ ) is definitely good enough that it’s not been a problem at all. Last time I tried about 18 months ago, Python support wasn’t ready but I’m finding Astral’s ty ( https://github.com/astral-sh/ty ) to be good enough for my use cases. 

I’m up to date on Murderbot Diaries now and have to wait until may next year for the next one to come out. I am in the mood for more sci-fi and cyberpunk. Maybe I’ll pick up the Judges series (prequel to Dredd: The Early Years). I’m kind of itching to re-play Deus Ex with all the chatter about a remake being on the horizon.
 

After our life admin week, the live admin continues unrelenting. Scaffolding is up ready for our solar panels to be installed today
 

This is seriously cool. It’s still pretty low bandwidth at 8-16 bytes per second but if the community got involved to the same extent that they did for GGML/GGUF we’ll have 56kbps modem screeching by the end of the week 
 I can see this being really useful for loads of cool stuff. I can also imagine hackers setting up loudspeakers playing data noises all over the place and having…

 I’ve been struggling with my motivation for writing weeknotes recently - hence there being a few missing ones. I should try to keep up the habit though. I’m going to try bullet-points instead this time - hopefully easier to write and easier to read too. 
 
 I managed to convert one of my summer interns to a permanent hire and extend the other’s internship 6 months…
It’s been a little while since I blogged and my weeknotes have been a little bit inconsistent over the last few weeks. Today, instead of a weeknote, I have a personal update which is slightly different to my usual musings about software development or the scifi books I’m reading. 
 It turns out that Mrs R and I have a fairly big lifestyle change coming up in the sense that…
A selection of my projects and works. 
 FreshRSS FlareSolverr Plugin 
 
 Plugin for FreshRSS that uses FlareSolverr to bypass captcha and Cloudflare challenges for RSS feeds. RSS feeds are generally meant for automated consumption and sometimes people misconfigure their bot protections, preventing FreshRSS from collecting new posts from feeds. This plugin helps in those situatons. It…
We had quite a busy week last week. On Tuesday, I woke up, to London and got to go to the BBC proms at the Royal Albert Hall where I watched Anoushka Shankar play with an orchestra . It was nice to see something a bit different and the music was great. Expressive, melancholy and at points, rich and heavy. At some points it left me reminiscent of a heavy metal band. I stayed at the Holiday Inn…
Today I have been playing a lot with a plugin for Jellyfin called AudioMuse AI . It’s a tool that uses the actual audio features of your music library, including things like tempo, tone and timbre to profile your music library. It uses this information to make recommendations about similar tracks, genres and styles. 
 It seems to be a pretty powerful tool and so far I’ve been quite…
Had a perfect evening last night watching Anoushka Shankar perform with the London Contemporary Orchestra in the Royal Albert Hall from the corporate box my employer hires every year for the BBC proms.
Sometimes working for big companies has its perks!
 

I've spent a bit of time today updating my FreshRSS plugin that integrates with FlareSolverr to bypass CloudFlare challenges. 
 Why 
 Generally an rss feed is supposed to be machine/bot readable so hiding one behind Cloudflare is a bit of a strange thing to do. The idea of this plugin is to grant access to RSS feeds that are being over-zealously protected by cloudflare. 
 What's New…
A short note this week due to an acute lack of motivation. 
 On Monday Mrs R and I had the day off and spent the day entertaining my mum and her partner who came down from the midlands to visit us. My mum is a bit of a history buff so we took her to nearby Portchester Castle. I was able to climb all the way to the top of the tower and take some photos looking across the bay. The rest of the…
Finally got around to installing PiHole on our home network. Gotta say it’s pretty impressive. I’m running it on a 10 year old raspberry pi 2 and it barely uses any resources at all. Let’s see if it can block obnoxious ads that come through from
 

Publishing last week’s weeknote a bit later than usual due to having my parents visiting this weekend. 
 Last weekend I recognised a regular pattern in my thoughts: it was time for my annual caffeine detox. I first noticed that caffeine makes me really anxious around this time last year. I tend to inadvertantly increase my consumption of caffeine in the summer months via iced lattes and…
I missed my weeknote this week. To tell the truth I had a bit of a stressful weekend. I was feeling pretty anxious over trivial stuff which is a fairly standard sign that I’m overdoing it with caffeine. In the summer I switch from aeropress coffee to iced lattes which I make with a double shot. I also drink more pepsi max…. This adds up. 
 So over the last few days I’ve been…
An article in Raspberry Pi magazine about building a self-leveling robot reminded me of a project that I undertook as a teenager. When I was in sixth form, we built a self-leveling platform in order to earn an engineering crest award . These days solid state semiconductor accelerometers are now commonplace and very cheap due to their ubiquity in smartphones and similar tech. In the mid 2000s,…
I particularly enjoyed this week’s PTPL newsletter in which Ellane lays out some good practices for using read it later apps. 
 I’m a bit of a digital magpie so I tend to just store everything I find that could be remotely interesting. I should try applying this advice and making sure that whatever I save down can be tied back to a specific purpose by future me. 
 
 If you…
Finally decided to go swimming this morning after signing up for my employee gym benefit. I haven’t been swimming in about 5 years so I was quite pleased with my performance. I didn’t realise that my Garmin venu2 was waterproof and a swim watch. I’ve got very achy shoulders now but the endorphins were worth it.
 

Busy week at work with two demos to senior leaders and the wider labs that both landed very well. The heat in the UK has not let up and we’ve been very thankful of our portable AC unit. Heat is not very conducive to exercise and with a formal diagnosis of shin splints from my GP, my usual walking regime is off the table for a few weeks. On Sunday I decided to go for a swim for the first time…
This week was an absolute scorcher with some respite over the weekend and more hot weather expected next week. I’ve been busy working with my science manager counterpart on some product scoping work. We’ve got an ambitious deadline in November which when we work backwards, doesn’t give us much time at all. I’m also running an intuitive round local/small models which…
I was reflecting on the fact that I’ve put on a little weight recently. Nothing crazy but I’m feeling a bit “round” and some of my favourite clothes are feeling a little tight. So I need to eat a little better and do more exercise. The problem is that exercise bores me a lot. 
 I Don’t Like Sport 
 I can’t stand competitive team sports like football,…
Thoroughly enjoyed watching Parcels’ set at Glastonbury on iPlayer. Can’t wait to see them live in September
 

This week I’ve been catching up with work after my trip to Norway. 
 I was able to get up to London a couple of times. I got the opportunity to meet my new intern in person for the first time and we had a good chat about what I’m hoping to get him to help me with during his time in my team. I’m also continuing to work with the product team on a big strategic pivot which was…
I’m reading SevenEves by Neal Stephenson and thoroughly enjoying. My head canon is that JBF is played by Mary McDonnell in her Battlestar Galactica heyday.
 

I've recently noticed and zeroed-in on something that I've been doing for years. I'm a very verbose writer. More specifically, I write with a lot of asides and footnotes which makes the structure of my sentences overly complex. I also write long documents when short ones will do. I offer a lot of surplus explanation and exposition where it probably isn't required. 
 My writing style is such…