clp's techy blog
In the shower this morning, one of those stupid thoughts formed itself in my mind: I wonder what the entire corpus of toots looks like, in alphabetical order? I can sort of answer this: I'm one of the admins of mathstodon.xyz , a big-ish Mastodon instance. I could run a query to get the text from every toot the server is aware of. The immediate concern that arises is whether this could reveal any…
I have a raspberry pi that serves a Nextcloud instance and some other personal sites. Rather than storing data in the cloud, we say we store ours in the cupboard. Until this week, it was a Raspberry Pi 3. Working on it was a bit of a pain because it didn't have much memory, so I've finally cracked and bought an 8GB Raspberry Pi 5. The old machine had been booting from an SD card, but with big…
Note Well, that didn't take long to solve! Mair A-W pointed out on mathstodon that it was missing a \makeatother command after the \renewcommand . Doh! One of my jobs at work is to help lecturers to get their LaTeX documents working with Chirun . Doing this, I've learnt a lot more about LaTeX than I ever wanted to. I've spent hours debugging errors. Usually, I delete sections of the code until I…
I've made my own web-based coding environment for working on little projects. A few years ago I found Glitch . It's great: a web-based coding environment that makes it really easy to quickly start editing a web page. It has a live preview that helps to quickly see changes take effect. But over time, as more and more of my stuff ended up living on Glitch, I was a bit uneasy about relying on someone…
I'm collecting registrations for a work conference through Microsoft Forms, because that's the tool my employer gives me. I want to get the data out of Excel as soon as possible, so I clicked the button to export it as a .CSV file. I loaded that in Python, and got an error message: UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe5 in position 4071: invalid continuation byte That told me…
At work, I've had to produce VPAT documents for the software I'm responsible for. The VPAT template asks you to list, for each of the WCAG criteria, whether you support it or not, or if it doesn't apply. The W3C have made a WCAG-EM Report Tool which helps you to work through the WCAG criteria and make notes about whether they're satisfied. At the end, you can download a copy of the report in…
Last August we bought an Ultimate Harmony cargo e-bike from amcargobikes , which is the English branding for the Danish company amladcykler . Now we've had it a while, I thought it would be worthwhile to write a review to help anyone else considering buying one. I'm not used to writing reviews and I don't have any financial incentive to do it, so this is quite a rambly collection of thoughts about…
A lot of what I do on a computer involves web development. For work, I develop several projects which involve running a Django server, which I have to run locally while I'm working on them. And for client-side stuff, I always run a simple HTTP server to serve static files, because browsers apply a lot of security restrictions to pages loaded through file:// . For years, I would type in things like…
At the moment I'm writing up one of my regular development update posts on the Numbas blog. I try to write one every couple of months. The posts act as a changelog for the various projects related to Numbas. It's been just over seven months since the last one, because of everything , so this time there's a lot to talk about. The way I normally do this is to go to GitHub and scroll through the…
Problem: really high CPU, so the web frontend becomes unusable. Sidekiq was still on top of its queues, so I didn't think the problem was there. Postgres was not seemingly overloaded. I spent most of a day upgrading the main machine to the latest Ubuntu LTS, and then trying to take a dump of the database. I thought I'd royally knacked it when the first do-release-upgrade crashed halfway through,…