Recent content on George Honeywood's blog
Despite being on an estate that is pretty well connected to the internet, our block was the exception. We could get copper broadband, but it seemed like it would be so terrible to not be worth it. Openreach’s checker says it would have “Up to 1 Mbps upload”! Instead when we moved in, we decided on a 4G router from Three, which has worked well enough for the past year or so.…
This post is written in Typst! I had a first pass at making Hugo deal with Typst’s HTML export support last weekend, see Typst + Hugo . It worked, but not very well! It was OK for one dedicated page, but not good enough for writing normal blog posts with. You had to add a dedicated template for each page, and manually export the .typ files to HTML out of band from Hugo. A couple of years ago, this…
(2025-11-02 update: I’ve now done this much more cleanly, by forking and modifying Hugo such that it can render .typ files directly. See my new post here .) One slightly vain thing that I’ve wanted to do for a while is have my CV available in both PDF and HTML form, without the hassle of keeping two different versions in sync. On the face of it, this sounds pretty trivial, just write…
I wanted to do something a bit weird the other day. I’ve got two networks. 192.168.0.1/24 and 192.168.1.1/24 , which are at different sites — .1. is at my parent’s house, .0. is at my flat. A Jellyfin media server lives on the .1. network, and I want to be able to reach that from my the .0. network, where I have a Roku with the Jellyfin app installed. The really easy option here…
My desk-dominating Oki Microline 320 Elite dot matrix printer The joy of the dot matrix printer is how simple the interface is – it’s just a file, /dev/usb/lp0 . When you write some ASCII character into this file, the printer prints it. That’s it! Below are five increasingly complicated ways to write to this file. The obvious way to go about this is a normal shell redirection,…
I am quite a big fan of ZFS. One of its useful features is snapshotting, allowing you to record the state of your filesystem at a specific point in time. This means if you later change or delete files, you will be able to roll-back to this previous snapshot, or restore individual files. So far, so normal — even NTFS has a kind of snapshot/restore capability. What makes ZFS’s snapshots…
Typst is pretty much what I have been looking for since I was about 15 and had to write my first long form report for school. I didn’t like using Word; I spent too much time fighting the formatting and I couldn’t easily run it on my PC at home. At the same time, I needed a bit more control over layout than what I could easily get using Markdown and pandoc. An example of a document…
So I have a little Tenda PA6 Powerline/HomePlug WiFi extender that I use as an additional WAP in the attic room of my house. This room has been getting very hot recently (around 35 °C), and when I touch the device it feels to be at least 60 °C. Tenda’s website says that the PA6 can operate in temperatures up to 40 °C, but I wanted to see if I could get some temperature readings out of the…
This is a summary of the Final Year Project that I completed as part of my last year at Royal Holloway. The task was to produce an “Offline HTML5 Map Application”. You can try out the result, OSMO, at files.george.honeywood.org.uk/final-deliverable/ . The code is available on GitHub , and I have also written a formal report . Building an offline HTML5 map application is a slightly…
I study at Royal Holloway, a university probably most well known for the iconic Founder’s Building. According to Wikipedia, it is an example of French-Renaissance style architecture. Founder’s is often used in TV and film as visual shorthand for a grandiose university or school setting, starring in Avengers: Age of Ultron, The Crown, You, and most importantly, Midsomer Murders 1 . On…
For Christmas one of my housemates got us a second-hand Roomba. I tried to not take this too personally. It came from Germany for the princely sum of £60, which got us the Roomba 555 from 2009. There should have been a video here, but your browser does not seem to support it. You can try visiting /blog/the-roomba/images/docking-960x720.mp4 instead. Somewhat unsurprisingly, a 14-year-old Roomba is…
I’ve become a bit obsessed with typewriters. This is an Olympia Traveller de Luxe. The term “traveler” is definitely relative — it weighs about 5kg, and is quite the pain to carry. Even though it is indisputably simpler than a modern laptop, the complexities of it seem more striking. It is packed with tiny linkages that all work in harmony to get the text on the page. Even…
Since I’ve started using VS Code over SSH , I’ve encountered the slight irritation that the session will drop when I suspend my laptop. This is to be expected, as the underlying TCP connection can’t survive without regular keepalives. Restarting the remote session means that I lose the integrated terminals that I have open, meaning I have to go through and type out yarn dev or go…
I’ve recently had an opportunity to do some work away from home. I’ve never worked on anything other than my desktop PC before. I do have a decently capable laptop, but it has limited RAM and storage – and hence it is not really suited to running multiple Node.js servers and various Docker containers; let alone the significant faff to get everything set up on my laptop as it is…
I’ve been working on a tool that takes an OpenStreetMap history file and creates a database with every version of the way that has existed. On the surface it looks like you just need to save each of the ways versions , but it is a little more nuanced than this. OSM’s data structure doesn’t make this very convenient. Ways get a new version number whenever nodes are added or…
Recently I stumbled upon on a page on the OpenStreetMap wiki which details some of the significant non-volunteer sources for OSM’s data (and takes an amusingly long time to load). Near the bottom I discovered that Dorset (my Local Authority) publishes an OGLv3 licensed dataset of public rights of way (PRoWs) within its boundaries, including public footpaths, bridleways, restricted byways,…
demo Last weekend I took part in a hackathon with 3 of my housemates. We decided to make a social network app that inspires people to live a more eco-concious lifestyle. It has a concept of achievements, which are simple changes or tasks that people can make to reduce their environmental impact. You can either privately complete an achievement, or publicly create a post linked to that specific…
A couple of years ago I decided that it would be a great idea if I tried to remove as much Google from my life as possible. I think the reason behind this is that I was slightly afraid as to what Google was getting up to with my data, but also I enjoy fiddling with hosting my own stuff. Google’s expansive software graveyard isn’t exactly a big selling point either. Using Firefox was an…
the problem One of the most satisfying things for me, as a contributor to OSM, is to see how my changes have improved the map for everyone. There currently are a number of ways to achieve this, which primarily focus on the micro level, for example a single changeset (such as OSMCha ). These are very useful for checking for things like vandalism, and simply just showing what that changeset did to…
I’m going to use this blog to write about random things I care about. It may or may not turn out well – it must have gone at least a little well if you are reading this. For anyone interested, this website is created using Hugo, which is a static site generator. I used to have a blog made using Wordpress, which was a bit overkill for my needs and I got bored of writing stuff for it…
George Honeywood Computer Scientist, Royal Holloway graduate. Currently working as an Infrastructure Assistant at GSA Capital. (CV also available as a PDF .) Experience Infrastructure Assistant GSA Capital Sep 2023 — Present London Maintaining and monitoring internal infrastucture, including an extensive Linux estate, VMware cluster and Slurm compute cluster. Promptly and professionally handling a…