Manchester 2024
A few weekends ago I visited Manchester to see some old colleagues and spend a weekend playing board games, and I had a blast!
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May, June, and (a little of) July 2024
There has been a lot that has happened over May, June, and July so there wasn’t a ton of time for photography but here are a few pictures from the period. Friends, games, an election, and a little bit of me trying to be artistic.
My First Adult Trip to the Emergency Ward
Another thing ticked off the bucket list, I think.
Being Comfortable
I’ve been thinking a lot about “being comfortable” for the past couple of weeks, and how dangerous being comfortable can be.
📷 April 2024 in Pictures
April flew by - but it was full of great memories: time with friends, visiting family back home, and lots of exploring. Come to check out photos from April, stay for the ‘Fuckboys Ain’t Shit’ street art.
An Overhaul of My Blog: Introducing Version 3
I’ve redesigned this blog from the ground up. Introducing semantic search, mixed content types, a better newsletter, and more. This is a look at what’s changed, and why.
Star Wars: Episode 1 the Phantom Menace
This week The Phantom Menace re-released in cinemas in the UK 1 to celebrate it’s 25th anniversary, and I took my friends out to go see it. 90 or so minutes later, I left with a very different impression of the film. Here’s a 5-minute review of one of George Lucas’ most divisive works.
Kew Gardens
I rented a Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 for the weekend and decided to head to Kew Gardens to try the lens out. I’ve only been once before, when it was out of season, so I’m glad this time I could see it full of life and walk away with some pictures!
Extreme Ownership
Extreme Ownership is the book that changed the trajectory of my career. The lessons I drew from the book are fundamental to my understanding of leadership, and spill over into key values about how I live my life.
Jpegli for JPEG Encoding: Dark Magic in Software Encodings
I’ve had one version , or another , of my “Responsive Images to Hugo” program for the best part of a few years now. It’s a pretty simple program, takes some images, runs some processing, and then uploads them, so that I can easily reference them in this blog. I’d just finished a new iteration of the program 1 (one that converts images to WebP files), when Google…
📷 Photo Gallery: March 2024
A few pictures of trips out and friends I’ve seen in March.
📷 Photo Gallery: Stockholm 2024
This was my first trip away with my camera and from a few hundred images taken these were the ones I liked enough to share. Of course, the ones of me were taken by Joel!
Solving Inconsistent Blank Blog Homepage
For the past few months, when I publish a post to this blog there’s been a small chance that the homepage would be a blank empty page but bizarrely all the other pages seemed to work just fine. After a while of banging my head against the problem I managed to figure out what was going on. This post explores how I figured it out, what the problem was, and how I eventually solved it.
Introducing the Best Worst Ad Ever: The MotivAider ®
Reading a fairly serious book, I stumbled across a recommendation for the MotivAider ® and a quick Google search led me to this incredible piece of advertising.
Stockholm Spring 2024 Booked
I’ve booked a last minute trip to Stockholm for the end of the month.
Photos From 2023/2024
Since my last photo dump I’ve got a fair bit better at photography (hopefully!). The pictures cover a trip to Cambridge, a trip back to my hometown of Corby, and some walks around Egham.
Downtime Due to DNS
A quick story of an (ongoing) incident that was triggered by messing with DNS on another domain I own.
Saying Goodbye to D&D 5E
In mid 2022, I decided to stop running my two-year-long Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons (D&D 5E or 5E) campaign and to migrate to a new tabletop roleplaying system. This post won’t touch on what I’ve decided to move to 1 , but instead focuses on why I decided to make the move.
Pictures From My August Bank Holiday Weekend
I bought a fancy full-frame mirrorless camera and figured I’d put it to some good use, not that I really know how to use it yet! Here are some pictures I took over the bank holiday weekend.
UK Games Expo 2023
I just got back from the UK Games Expo and I thought I’d write up what I played, what I bought, and a few thoughts on the expo itself.
DIY E-Ink Photo Frame
In June 2021 I found the EPD Waveshare E-Ink display and decided to experiment with it to create a digital photo frame. Here’s a project recap from start to finish.
"What Are You Carrying?" & Other Questions: March 2023 Edition
Every month, in the Tom Bihn forums a staff member posts a short set of questions for folks to answer. I liked them, and thought I’d write up my answers here instead!
Ronan's Finally Defeated
Recently my friend Joel and I have been playing a lot of Marvel Champions, here are a few thought fresh from beating Ronan.
2022 in Board Gaming
I played a lot of board games in 2022 here’s a round-up of some of my favourite board game memories and games from the year.
What Did I Play? July 2022
In July, I played 29 different board games. Here’s a few thoughts on each!
A Solution to the ambigious "Item is being held while the addressee is notified" USPS Tracking Status
If you get a USPS tracking statement like “Your item could not be delivered due to payment of charges. It is being held while the addressee is notified” and you aren’t sure what is going on, this might help.
Board Game Geek API
I recently updated the script that populates my board game collection on arranfrance.com and I ran into a few tricky parts of the Board Game Geek API and thought I’d share.
UK Games Expo 2022
I just got back from the UK Games Expo and I thought I’d write a bit about my experience as a first time visitor over the three days I spent there.
Changing How I Process Information
Exploring how I’m altering the way I take in information
Button Shy Games in the UK
Button Shy Games has recently started shipping from a UK hub. I’ve ordered a few games and wanted to share about my experience.
What I Use
Here is a non-exhaustive list of the things I use every day either for fun, writing code, or just doing “life things”.
Google Wi-Fi and Elgato Key Light Air
During lockdown, I decided to (somewhat impulsively) purchase an Elgato Key Light Air to improve my lighting on video calls. Unfortunately, I ran into some trouble setting it up with my Google Wi-Fi Mesh Network.
Alacritty and Byobu
I noticed the default Ubuntu terminal, my daily driver, has been feeling a little slow recently. Having heard about Alacritty , a fast new terminal written in Rust, I figured I might make the jump over and see what it was all about. The kicker, Alacritty doesn’t have tabs - this post dives into how I made the switch to a tabless world less painful.
Battlefront 2 PC Performance Woes
I recently bought Battlefront II on the Origin sale. Unfortunately, despite having a fairly neat gaming PC it ran really poorly.
Fighting a Instability Issue with a Windows Gaming PC
Recently, using the bones of a friends gaming PC (namely the case, motherboard, PSU, and a couple of HDDs) I built a new gaming PC . Unfortunately, after putting it all together I’ve suffered from a number of strange instability issues that have been difficult to track down. This is a glimpse into the rabbit hole I’ve been down this past week or so.
Eureka's Top 9 Baddies Ranked: Number 3 Will Surprise You!
Eureka is a series of movies created by Pymm Productions - if you haven’t heard of them it’s probably because you don’t live in Englefield Green, it’s fair to say they’re a little bit niche. In Eureka: Journey to the Underworld and the Christmas special Eureka and the Five Gold Rings , Eureka and Brad face a number of monsters and gods, some of whom are easier to…
These Cowboys Can't Win: Beaten by the Eagles
This was perhaps the most embarrassing game the Cowboys have played all season. More embarrassing than our 0-4 loss to the Jets and significantly more embarrassing than the game versus a weak and vulnerable Patriots. The Eagles came into this game, deservedly so, as massive underdogs. The Cowboys just had to play 60 minutes of good football to walk away as NFC East champions.
Replacing Code with Visual Studio Code
Today I started the process of moving from Stylus to Sass. As a part of that process I also switched to using CSS variables over Stylus or Sass variables. In order to make that transition easy I used find and replace to replace each $variable with --variable - as a manual process this wasn’t too bad. I only had about 20 variables to replace. Changing all of their appearances however to start…
Election Night 2019
Well it is election night 2019 and it looks pretty bleak. A majority of 86 - with the largest share of the vote for the Conservatives in a long time, similarly historical and equally bleak is the Labour seat count - the lowest allegedly since 1935.
Replacing Vue With Vanilla JavaScript
After a few recent tweaks to my blog I realised that a large portion of its JavaScript bundle size was taken up with Vue.js . I’m a huge fan of Vue - I think it’s a great framework for developing applications but given I was using it just for a search box and a pop up it was hard to justify keeping it.
Jonathan's Movies Discover Bug
Spotting bugs is easy but fixing them can often be a challenge. Here’s the story of how I lost three hours of sleep last night to an unlikely bug.
Marvel Movie Rankings
This post is up-to-date as of August 2022 . This post lists my (hopefully!) up-to-date ranking of all the Marvel movies I’ve seen. As caveated in my original attempt to rank Marvel’s catalogue there are a lot of issues with creating a list like this. Marvel movies don’t allow like for like comparisons - even within the bounds of a specific character’s story directors change…
Japan 2019 Day 8
Day eight of ten is Hiroshima day! Hiroshima is one of the parts of the trip I’ve been most excited about mainly because of its history of being the first place targeted by a nuclear weapon but also because of the island of Miyajima, which comes heavily recommended.
Japan 2019 Day 7
Today was the day we truly escaped the confines of Tokyo and headed South for our three day excursion to Kyoto and Hiroshima.
Japan 2019 Day 6
Day six of our trip to Japan was meant to be a trip to Kyoto but a last minute change of plans due to fortunate weather meant we decided to climb Mount Takao - a mountain about an hour outside Tokyo that has views of Mt. Fuji on a good day!
Japan 2019 Day 5
Day five of ten has arrived and it’s by far the most touristy of our time so far (and probably to come). Before we left for Japan, Joel booked a tour of Studio Ghibli - a famous Japanese animation studio, somewhat equivalent to Pixar. Spaces are so limited you have to book a month in advance and today was our day to visit!
Japan 2019 Day 4
Today was another reasonably late start - we didn’t get out until the afternoon. This is partially driven by yesterday’s late night, both Joel and I were up till 3am blogging and working on some PhD work respectively, but also the strange adjustment that comes to travelling east.
Japan 2019 Day 3
The third day in Japan was definitely our shortest. Both Joel and I were shattered from our first two days and jet lag caught up with us so we involuntarily spent most of the day asleep.
Japan 2019 Day 2
This was such a busy day I fell behind on my blogging!
Japan 2019 Day 1
The first day of my trip to Japan with Joel is over! And it’s been a long one - 31 hours total.