Recent content on JonBlack.gg
At work we have a community-neurodivergence slack channel with a weekly workflow that runs asking: What went right this week? So this is a bit of a copy paste of what I said there I’m working on multiple somethings outside work but which are definitely usable at work, and I seem to be making great progress on them. There are these moments where I get not quite what I’d call…
Arc Raiders is a cooperative third-person shooter developed by Embark Studios. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, players team up to fight against robotic enemies and complete various missions. The game emphasises teamwork, strategy, and fast-paced action, making it a thrilling experience for fans of the genre. I remember it like it was last week (Because it fucking was). The day I spent sixty…
Required preamble: So, for a period of about 3 years ending in 2017, I worked at Telstra as a Salesman/Customer Service representative. I was one of those guys you would see when you came into a store, selling mobile phones, internet plans, Foxtel deals, and more. I worked for a franchisee who, at the time, owned two retail stores and a business centre (a business centre being a…
Required preamble: So, for a period of about 3 years ending in 2017, I worked at Telstra as a Salesman/Customer Service representative. I was one of those guys you would see when you came into a store, selling mobile phones, internet plans, Foxtel deals, and more. I worked for a franchisee who, at the time, owned two retail stores and a business centre (a business centre being a…
[last updated: 2025-09-22. Ongoing article.] Ooooh I’ve been wanting to write this one for a while, I just didn’t have the energy to, but I guess I can just write bits at a time. Here we go. Quick background on me: For the last 8 years I’ve worked in IT. Well actually, it’s been called numerous things from IT, to TechOps, to Digital Experience, to WorkTech, and back to…
It was about a year ago to this July past that I had the key moment that absolutely destroyed my motivation in professional wrestling. I had recovered from another bout of covid from the month prior, come to training where there were about 20 other people, and thought I was ready for another group training session. But I only managed to last 15 minutes in a two hour class. I had barely finished…
Now for the sequel to “Shortcodes are awesome”. Did you know that Hugo supports image processing? As in image conversion? This is damn good, because prior to today I was storing all my raw images in this repo at .other/raw-images/ and they were being sent to cloudflare each time a build was initiated. Plus it was so annoying trying to track what I put up in posts and had transcoded…
I recently discovered Gource and have been running it across a lot of repos. I decided to see what my blog repo looked like and how it’s structured. I’m hiding filenames and my username (since I’m rather inconsistent at naming my user in git config), but where you see multiple users editing things at once that’s just me on two different machines with different usernames.
Man, I have absolutely fallen in love with this video by @Ah_Lecks I honestly think I’ve watched it at least 15 times now, It’s something that I can also put on in the background for the next hour and just zone out to doing other stuff.
Alternative Title: “(Wo)man, What the fuck Is Going On?” Writing this as I fly over the Indian Ocean, heading to London for a work trip powered by the miracle that is satellite internet. Reading some abc.net.au articles, I just discovered the news that the UK Supreme Court has ruled the definition of a woman is to have been born female. Their stance essentially being “Not a…
Required preamble: For a period of about three years ending in 2017, I worked at Telstra as a Salesman/Customer Service representative. I was one of those guys you would see when you came into a store, selling mobile phones, internet plans, Foxtel deals, and more. I worked for a franchisee who, at the time, owned two retail stores and a business centre (a business centre being a…
That time in 2015 where I got a customer a $6000 credit, and summarily ragged on
Upon installing Spotify on my desktop and phone again, cue my surprise when I see that the Streaming Quality is set to “Low”, and the Download quality is set to “Normal”. Just gonna pop those to “Very High” real quick, and disable the auto-adjust quality option. Honestly, what shady bullshit is this? If you pay for a service, don’t let them cheap you out.
Strictly speaking, I want more music leaks. I’m just going to add some of my favs from time to time so I can build up a go-to list.
Bit of a quick tip; The clip builder function in Dota 2 is really good for explorting clips, it has a dedicated high quality rendering option wherein each frame is exported to jpg and then reassembled into a mp4 file. However the clip builder only allows for at most about 60 seconds of footage. If you pop into the launch options for dota and input -console , you’ll get the command console.
DNS lookup tools usually need servers to run. That’s dumb. So I’m making my own that runs in entirely in the users browser. Totally feels like: Will post it once I’m dumb done.
Yo yo, the DNS tool is done. It’s over at dns.give.jonblack.gg it works by using DNS-over-HTTPS and is browser based, so you can’t take the site down even if you tried. Even better unlike some who write the entirety of something with GPT, this was done by hand over the course of 5 hours, with GPT giving advice on bootstrap/css. unlike digitaloceans dns lookup tool, it can actually…
Oh my god, Hugo is just the greatest framework for static site generation (and this blog). I checked out this previous Enlightening Thought which had a link to a youtube video, and found that it was blocked from embed on non-youtube sites. Turns out there’s no spotify shortcode native to Hugo, but you can easily make one for use across your blog! I found this code in a github gist by user…
I think writing this is a bit overdue given I’ve been doing contracting for a good month now and earning a fair amount. Plus this can also serve as an FAQ I can send to clients who my have questions about how I do my work. What environment do I use? I have the following: A Windows 11 based PC (Physical, at home). A Mac Mini M1. A MacBook Pro M2. A MacBook Air M1. 2x Gigabit async baremetal…
If you weren’t already aware, with the rise of OpenAI API-powered bots, the slow poisoning of your news feed with groups and pages you don’t even care about, and a rise in vitriol from regular commenters (boomers); now is probably the best time to leave Facebook. Recently, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, who also owns Instagram and Threads, decided to do away with their…
real talk, winget is too good for it to be windows/microsoft. it’ll get messed up at some point, lawyers or businessmen trying to sell everything as SaaS will get to it. quote this, i think we gotta learn to appreciate things when they are here, no matter the future prospects. that’s a ‘real good enlightening shit’ lesson right there. this thought bought to you by hearing a…
Context So, I bought a Pixel Tablet back in December 2023, low and behold it had issues with the touch screen where the digitizer wouldn’t register touches on the right half of the screen. That’s fine, I delayed doing a warranty claim since I could still use it in docked mode as a speaker and throw “Okay Google” commands that way. Months pass and it’s now late March…
So I contacted google support today to see if I could get a left earpiece from my Pixel Bud Pro (Gen 1) replaced, silly me lost it while I was at the gym. Chat gave me this link: https://support.google.com/googlepixelbuds/workflow/14089847 I gave it a quick test and it turns out it’s generic, it’ll work for anyone/doesn’t reset or deactivate once used. So if you want to save…
Having just returned home on an hour long train ride from volunteering at the Starrcast convention here in Austarlia, I feel this afternoon I had the most surreal and foundational experience of my wrestling life so far; and it took place outside the ring. After finishing the events at the convention, I retreated backstage to pack my things and then headed outside to join my mates, it was there…
Allow me to wax poetic for a minute; If you work in an office, and your chair offers excessive or near infinite decline (leaning back), I feel for you because the amount of energy I am using just trying to keep upright in this chair right now is making me tired. If you are an office outfitter and have a choice in the matter then I implore you, please, please don’t make the mistake of buying…
Some people have asked about the colour scheme I use for my terminal, here it is for easy copy pasting: Key: Color Example Hex Code Where to apply it #21B568 Foreground #141727 Background #5CC97D Cursor #FFFFFF Block Cursor Foreground #1B6648 Selection Background NULL Selection Foreground #FFFFFF ANSI Color 0 #F24E50 ANSI Color 1 #008463 ANSI Color 2 #ECA855 ANSI Color 3 …
Interesting thing I’m not sure most people have considered: The advent of bluetooth means that going to the beach produces a rather unpleasant experience where multiple families have large bluetooth speakers each blasting different genres of music. Today we went and we’re stuck between a large islander family playing Rasta, and another white australian family playing what I can only…
I absolutely realise that I may be being a bit of a menace in doing this, but I’m bored and feel like doing a project. It’s fun to collect and who knows what’ll happen. Plus, what’s the worst that happens? I inspire other people to try the same and end up drawing more interest in public library services? As two ex-girlfriends-who-are-librarians have told me, more…
An impomptu summary of my thoughts on Dune P2. Dennis Villenue has established himself as the most (in my words) *feature complete* film maker of the generation. Wow, that felt epic. Score was great, visuals were fantastic. It really has a huge, galactic war feel for the last 45 mins. Cannot buy into Zendayas character. Something is lacking there in terms of relationship building as well as…
I disovered a cool way to automate getting pages indexed by Google faster. My blog is fully static, so no moving parts once it’s been generated and thrown on cloudflare pages. However the problem with that is that once a new page or post is generated, I need to wait for google to do their periodic scrape of my sitemap.xml file. I found a funky new project over @…
Something I tell people at the wrestling school I attend: by default, social media fucking sucks. i think more people should turn off allowing comments from accounts they don’t follow, on any platform. disable seeing reaction counts, mute people you’re not interested in hearing from (though you can still follow them i guess so they can get some semblance of connection or to avoid the…
If your linkedin status. Is formatted like this. Where every line ends with a period. With double spacing so you can get the read more button to show. So you can drive impressions via clicks of that button. And your content is just a shitty story. You’re not interesting. You’re probably pretty boring. And the people who like your stuff are probably boring as well. But that’s just…
Wow, that was weird. So, the last two days you may have seen this site go from weird points of looking like my original Ghost CMS blog, to this more simplistic look. The reason why is because I took a look at what Ghost had been costing me to host on a digital ocean droplet for the last few weeks ($20/month) and there was money to be saved. So I manually replicated each of my previous posts over…
Create two device groups and a custom command. Your first group is for detecting if SwiftDialog has been installed. I simply call this Software - SwiftDialog - Installed Go create a Custom Command Response, I call it Software - SwiftDialog - Install Check and the code for that is: #!/bin/bash [ -e /usr/local/bin/dialog ] && echo 'True' || echo 'False' and the criteria is simply Software -…
My take on best practices around usernames and email addresses. Watch me make myself an enemy of anyone who works in People & Culture nowadays. One thing that seriously pisses me off from my time hopping from company to company is this weird obsession with the “we want all our employees to use firstname@company.com for their email addresses” mantra. Seriously, what the hell? Companies…
In a world full of people using modern solutions such as Selenium, the easiest solution may just be the oldest… using your brain + cURL. I saw this contract tonight on UpWork. Title: “Create email list of migration agents in South Australia” Description: “We are looking for a skilled freelancer who can help us in creating an email list of migration agents in South…
Rather than going into AnyDesk and manually grabbing a users device identifier, we can just grab it direct from the system.conf file on a users device and throw it into Mosyle as a variable that can be looked up. Here’s the code: if [ ! -e '/private/etc/anydesk_ad_uniqueIDHere/system.conf' ] ; then echo '' else grep -E 'ad.anynet.alias' '/private/etc/anydesk_ad_uniqueIDHere/system.conf' |…
Valve, contrary to the beliefs of your marketing and sales department, Australia does in fact exist. Let’s be frank, Valve Software hasn’t had the greatest track record with Australia. In between numerous issues with pricing controversies and using EB Games as an exclusive retail partner, and now with the Steam Deck’s unavailability , they leave a bit to be desired. Further proof…
Thought a nice way to start this blog off would be a series similar to the “Hey, Scripting Guy!” series from Microsoft’s Ed Wilson, so I’m hijacking the name and appropriating it into “Hey Jon!”. I currently rock with a Hetzner AX51 storage server (HDDs) . I find it has a great price for the power and what it puts out, running in Finland seems to have a good…
I am a systems administrator here in Melbourne, Australia. Into professional wrestling in my spare time, and honestly, I just love to tell stories and post solutions to problems that very few other people seem to have 🙄