The occasional ramblings of a software engineer, dad of 3, cycling-mad drinker of tea!
Back in 2023 I wrote about automatically configuring Git based on the remote repository URL, using Git’s hasconfig:remote conditional includes to switch identity, email and signing key depending on which client’s repository I was working in. That configuration solved the identity half of working across multiple GitHub accounts, but it didn’t deal with the authentication side of things.
Shortly after upgrading my workstation to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, I noticed that my KeePassXC SSH agent integration had quietly stopped behaving the way it used to. The keys I store in KeePassXC, which I use in conjunction with git and SSH, were no longer being loaded and unloaded as I unlocked and locked its databases, so this was something I wanted to get to the bottom of.
Back in January 2025 I wrote about influxdb-weather-ingestor, a small Kotlin application I built to capture outdoor temperature data and send it to InfluxDB. At the time it was a fairly straightforward Micronaut app that pulled data from the Meteomatics weather API, looked up coordinates via postcodes.io, and wrote the results to InfluxDB on a schedule.
If you’ve been running an Ubuntu server for a while, especially one that was set up a few years ago, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered the dreaded “no space left on device” error when trying to install a kernel update. This is almost always because your /boot partition is too small.
I recently migrated my UniFi-based networking setup over to a Cloud Gateway Max (UCG-Max). The whole thing took about an hour, which included a couple of minutes of internet downtime. Despite being a bit anxious about what might go wrong, I found it surprisingly simple.
I’ve always wanted more visibility into what our Intergas boiler is actually doing. When is the burner firing? What’s the flow temperature? Is the pump running? How’s the water pressure looking? The boiler’s built-in display shows some of this, but I wanted historical data I could graph and correlate with the indoor temperature data I already capture from our Honeywell Evohome system.
The occasional ramblings of a software engineer, dad of 3, cycling-mad drinker of tea!
I’m a long time user of YouTube Music. I love that it’s able to reach in to the incredible library of electronic music that has been uploaded to YouTube over the past few decades. I also love that it allows users to upload their own music and have been starting to curate an uploaded library songs that aren’t available on streaming platforms. This feature has allowed me to slowly but surely upload…
I recently posted about Connecting to a private ECR repository using VPC Endpoints, which is a really useful approach when you want to keep your traffic to ECR within your VPC and not have it go out over the public internet.
Here’s the scenario: You’ve created a private ECR repository, you’ve uploaded an image to it and now you want to run that image as an ECS task. But… you don’t want ECS going out over the public internet to the ECR API. Instead you want to keep the traffic inside your VPC.