Blog posts by Chris McLeod, posted to https://chrismcleod.dev
I had a problem where the integrated WiFi 7 adapter on my MSI motherboard would randomly just… disappear… from the system. As in, completely drop off the PCI bus and not show up again until I’d completed a couple of rounds of clearing the CMOS, and even then, it was a bit temperamental as to how many times I’d need to go through the dance. Annoyingly there was no rhyme or reason as to when this…
I cancelled Disney Plus in September (though my annual sub runs until March). A year ago, I downloaded my entire Kindle library and stopped buying from their store. Netflix was cancelled in December. Audible went bye-bye sometime last summer. None of this was planned, exactly - more like a series of small decisions that eventually accumulated into something larger. The reasons are varied but…
It’s that time of year again . I’ve been seeing people’s update posts pop up in my feed reader this morning, so it’s time to look at my default apps for this year. There are a few changes this year, as I’ve started a long plan of detangling from major centralised services and moving to more self-hosting and smaller platforms. As before I’ve marked updates with a ✨ emoji. 📨 Mail Client: Apple Mail…
Important This post originally mentioned another linux installation that is based on Arch. I’ve removed references to it from the instructions because I should have known better . Thankfully it was one very optional step, and the remaining guide holds up with base Arch. My Surface is now on a vanilla Arch install. My three year-old Surface Laptop Studio (first generation) has been starting to feel…
I wrote a while back that I was hosting the images for this blog on Azure . After I wrote that post I moved the site wholesale over to Azure Static Web Apps (SWA), and the site has been running pretty smoothly since. Unfortunately, Azure are deprecating the particular CDN service I was using, and the alternatives looked Enterprise-grade expensive. The actual switch-off wasn’t happening until 2027,…
I’ve been wanting to redo the theme of this site for a while. I had some specific ideas in mind, but no cohesive vision. Then I thought to myself - “why don’t I base it on the editor theme I enjoy using so much and spend most of my day looking at?” Or something like that. And so, after a couple of evenings hacking away at the CSS, https://chrismcleod.dev has a new, fresh coat of paint. The colour…
For the last 2-3 months I’ve been running an experiment on my use of social media. I wanted to see what works best for me now, compared to assumptions I’ve carried for the last few years. For the last several years (since around 2017 or so…) I’ve been conservative on the number of accounts I follow on any given platform. “Carefully curated”, you might say. Mainly this was so I didn’t feel…
I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to setup, but I finally added a snippet to VSCode for inserting Frontmatter into a Markdown file - handy for e.g, adding a new post to an Eleventy -powered blog. To add a snippet, press Ctrl-Shift-P or F1 , then select “Configure Snippetts”. Decide where you want to create the snippit - it can be at the project-level, language-level, or global. I chose…
I’ve been a bit in the doldrums this week. It’s never fun when your health suddenly changes, especially when it decides to do it in a terrifying manner. But that’s for another day. As part of all this kerfuffle, I’ve been sat at home most of the week “to rest”. Rest, for me, takes a few different forms; if I’m in the mood, I’ll maybe play a video game, or I’ll work on a hobby project, or I’ll…
A few days ago I came across a blog post that reminded me that I had intended to bridge my fediverse accounts to Bluesky using Bridgy Fed. I tend to cross-post most “micro blog” text posts to both Mastodon and Bluesky anyway, but occaisionally I post something to one place or the other. Plus, I’ve just setup a Pixelfed account for photo sharing and it turns out you can bridge that in the exact…
It’s been over a year since I last wrote about what I use, and I’ve been seeing plenty people’s update posts pop up in my feed reader this week, so it’s time to look at my default apps again. There are quite a few changes this year, nothing terribly exciting - I’ve marked these updates with a ✨ emoji. 📨 Mail Client: Apple Mail + web 📮 Mail Server: Fastmail 📝 ✨ Notes: Obsidian LogSeq ✅ To-Do:…
Advent Of Code has been around for ages. It’s one of those things that I’ve always wanted to do, but never managed to get into the groove of. I’d maybe do the first puzzle, maybe even a couple of days, but eventually the time of year would overtake me and it would fall by the wayside. This year is a little different. We’re currently eight days through, and I’m fully up-to-date with all of the…
It’s been a while since I wrote about Bluesky. My previous “Hello World” for Bluesky was a quick overview of using the APIs to authenticate and post to Bluesky. It remains a popular post all these months later, and several people have let me know it helped get up and running with integrating with the AT protocol (ATproto) network [1] , which includes the Bluesky service. The thing is,…
Yesterday was stressful , not going to lie. I had a lot of questions about how I’d found myself in the predicament. I was being chased for a debt that wasn’t mine, where I was specifically told someone had talked to a debt agency, given my details, and “passed security validation” with them. It was now on me to prove I wasn’t related to the debt in question. As the facts I’d been given and…
Picture the scene, Dear Reader; it’s just after 10am, and you take a moment to open the just-delivered mail over the remains of your morning coffee. Among the deliveries of small paint pots for your latest hobby project, is a non-descript envelope marked “private and confidential” but not bearing the usual hallmarks of being from your bank. Intrigued, you open it up, and nearly spit your coffee…
I’ve been playing around with the new ios 18 beta, now it’s available to the public. While I have found it a pretty dull update so far, I particularly wanted to try some some of the new customisation options. I haven’t found a colourful tint that works for me, but I am loving this kinda Brutalist black-and-white scheme I stumbled into: Close Close
I just added [1] the new Mastodon/Fediverse link attribution meta tag to this site, partly because I think it’s a neat idea, but also because it took ~2 minutes to do and I’m all for quick wins at the moment. Adding the tag is straightforward, if you’re familiar with HTML. Put the following in the <head>...</head> section of your web page HTML, replacing the value of content with your @-able…
I mentioned in the last post I was really enjoying dragonriding in the Pandaria: Remix event that’s going on in World of Warcraft right now. I took a break from the game for a couple of years, so this is my first time trying the new “dynamic flying”, and it is by far my favourite feature added to the game. I can easily loose 10-15 minutes at a time just swooping around the zones, and right now,…
I was planning to write a blog post about getting up early in the near future, but Johnny Decimal went and beat me to it , so that spurred me to write it sooner. For the last four months or so we’ve made a point of waking up at 5am. Prior to that I’d found myself getting up later and later. Some days I was essentially going straight from bed to desk (by way of the shower), having breakfast as I…
The Craftsman is a Coffee and Alehouse in Aberdeen . Wanting to visit somewhere outwith the quarter of the city we normally stick to, it’s located just next to the harbour, and in my youth used to be the Schooner Bar - famed for its 7am opening times and being one of the roughest pubs in Aberdeen. Times have changed though, and The Craftsman is much more welcoming and modern. It was much more…
At the start of the year I restored a lot of old posts to this site from a WordPress backup. While this worked great for posts that had “standard” content, I was missing hundreds of posts and even more metadata that relied on the IndieWeb Post-Kinds plugin for WordPress . In the export file this plugin data is largely stored as serialised PHP data structures within the XML. The tool I used to…
Second Home is a newly-opened café + studio in Aberdeen . My partner visited while I was in London , and was raving about the brownie she’d had ever since, so we decided to make a date of it and go for brunch at the weekend. The food and drink were great, and the atmosphere was very relaxed and spacious. I can see us becoming semi-regular visitors! Close Close
I recently came into possession of a Raspberry Pi 5B, and was trying to figure out what to do with it. I came across this article by Jim Bennett on setting up a headless Raspberry Pi 4 as a headless development machine , and it got the cogs turning. My “development environment” on my personal laptop is a bit of a mess; I have been doing a lot of certifications and other learning over the last…
I got on a plane for the first time in about 6 years this week, and about 11 years since my first solo trip. Not a huge amount has changed; the local airport is slightly nicer, and its security is less burdensome, but it’s still akin to cramming into an aluminium tube and taking a hopeful running jump into the skies. One thing has changed since my last flight: I am quite a bit larger nowadays.…