A relatively quiet half of the year. We’ve been enjoying the brighter days and more stable weather by being generally more outgoing and active. We recently purchased some E-bikes which has meant less time driving and more time doing things outside, and we’ve had a good few days out in nature as well. Solstice itself was largely fun, but a little hectic for my taste. We climbed…
We entered the winter period after the Autumn Equinox by getting stuck down with an awful illness. Based on the reports across the region, I think we were among the first wave to fall to an aggressive flu. It took us a long time to recover and it was very scary for a while. We made it through though, and we’ve mostly managed to recover. This winter has been characterised thus far with…
I know that at least two human beings read my blog via RSS, so I’m writing this post to issue an apology if I’ve just pumped your feed reader full of my old blog posts. The reason for this is that I’ve done some updates to the site structure and as part of that I’ve changed the way that the permalinks for posts are created. There are full details in the site changelog, but…
Well, another half-year! This update is very late at this point, as the Solstice is well in the past and we are well into the late summer. I feel that the last six months have passed in five minutes and two years simultaneously. There have been weeks that felt like days, and weeks that felt like months. Our Winter Solstice celebrations were beyond perfect, and we rode out the winter in a very cosy…
In November last year I popped my SIM card out of my smartphone, into a nano-to-micro SIM adaptor, and then slotted that into a Nokia 8110 4G. This has been my daily driver since then and I’ve found it to be a very comfortable experience and I have found myself to be happier day-to-day since making the switch. Nokia 8110 4G on Wikipedia My new setup is tailored very much to my needs and fits…
I’ve made the source code — such that it is — for this website licensed under a Free Software license, the GPL v3. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while but was put off by the fact that if I exposed the git repo to the public, then everyone would be able to read my shonky drafts. I’ve solved that issue by moving my drafts to another folder on my computer. The content of the…
What a long half-year! I honestly feel that it’s been about four years since I was writing my Summer Solstice update. I think it’s because having a small child means that the days can become a bit long and tiring, but they also each hold new challenges and firsts which means my perception of time stretches with all the novel things that occur. The tail end of the summer was great. We…
Update 2025-11-09 : It appears that the gerda.tech domain has lapsed and is now owned by some spammers/scammers. Thankfully, someone has archived the old web page and uploaded the latest (last?) builds of GerdaOS and the Nokia 8110 recovery to an archive site. In this article, I’ve updated all the links pointing to Gerda.tech to the archived version of the site. Reading between the lines, it…
I’ve moved all of my software and related projects from my Gitlab.com account to SourceHut, the hacker’s forge. SourceHut.org My SourceHut git profile It seems to be the given thing to announce this move on one’s blog, so here it is. Outside of my day job — which requires that I use whatever software forge a project or client needs us to, usually Github — most of my forge usage…
I’ve had to block Keychron, the mechanical keyboard company, from sending me emails via my hosting provider’s SPAM filter. Luckily, I use separate email addresses for purchases, web accounts, and correspondences; but even with these measures in place it’s just gotten too much. Keychron have been sending me multiple emails a week from the “ support@keychron.uk ” email…
So I’m a father now. This has been a wonderful albeit monumental shift in my life and my daughter, D, is a constant source of joy to me. I was originally really worried that having a baby would be inherently at odds with my needs as someone with ADHD and ASD, but I’ve thankfully been proven wrong in this case. I still do require the odd bit of “me time” to recharge my…
This post came about because I’ve spotted some places in my life where I want to be able to use alternative software that better meets my values and how I like to work, and I wanted to get these thoughts out in the wild to force myself to organise them. I’m at a place in my life where I don’t possess the skills to implement a lot of the things I want to see in this list, and I…
Jack Baty and Derek Sivers each posted about how they handle backups and it prompted me to write down where I’m at with backups. I’ve been reflecting on my backup regime for a while now, with a view to making my system more robust and manageable. Jack’s post on backups Derek’s post on backups Backups are important to me because I like to keep the majority of my files as…
I am very keyboard-driven as a computer user, and 2023 was the year where I properly started using a Tiling Window Manager for my computing. It really fits with the way I like to do things and has made using my machine a lot more pleasurable. This post is about some tweaks to Firefox that I’ve made via extensions and userChrome.css to make it fit better into my workflow. Most of the software…
This has been a weird half of the year. It’s been dominated by the fact that we’re very likely going to be parents in 2024, which is amazing and terrifying at the same time. Mixed into that are the regular challenges of ADHD medication and the British medical system, increasingly complex social demands on my time, and disruptions such as COVID infections. There’s been some low…
It’s a pleasure to report that I am writing this update from a much better place than I did the last one. 2023 has not only been mostly quiet, but it’s also been mostly positive with a few notable exceptions. I did start titration for ADHD medication with mixed results; I am miles better during the day but I crash pretty hard during the evening which stops me doing some things I want…
I’ve just upgraded my smartphone. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. It’s — luckily — not massively impactful on my life or finances but a series of decisions and mistakes have lead to me upgrading a few years early. I only ever swap out or upgrade technology when it becomes basically unusable for the majority of what I want to do with it. My tolerance for workarounds and…
I started generating this site via a static site generator in 2021. Initially it was meant to be a short-term solution because my dynamic Indieweb software powering my site had fallen over and wasn’t generating forms properly, meaning I couldn’t post. I instantly fell in love, however, with the workflow of generating a static site and I will need some serious convincing to go back to a…
I’ve had an on-and-off relationship with tablets for a little while now. I got my first tablet in 2012 which was an Asus Transformer Pad TF300T . I used it during the summer for watching Netflix, with the rationale that it had less power consumption that my laptop, and then used it for about half a semester at university to take notes on. After that my laptop supplanted it again for most…
I’m writing this on a machine with no wifi, because my broadband connection fell down about an hour ago and my service providers are not picking up the phone. I can tether using my phone’s data connection, but that’s only got about 2GB of allowance so I try to preserve it so that it doesn’t get eaten up automatically by data-hungry daemons such as Nextcloud. Besides, the…
This was a bad Solstice, sadly. It’s unfortunate because up until the last week or so, we’d had a really good half a year; if a stressful one. We moved house, sold my old flat, and did a bunch of walking. We’d already agreed that we were getting married, but we still wanted to do a semi-surprise proposal so I had A’s engagement ring custom made by a local jeweler and had an…
Recently, I felt a compulsion to write a section on my About Page regarding how I go about doing my computing. Part of this is because I’m currently going through a wave of being nerdy about computing again: switching my OS, and migrating some things like text editors 1 . As I was writing this section, I felt it turning into a bit of a history of my computing rather than what I wanted it to…
Wow. This last six months have been seriously intense. Overall they’ve not been quite as rough as the previous six leading to Winter Solstice in 2021, however a lot has happened. My partner and I began the journey of prepping our flat for sale and house hunting for our future home. One factor has been that we’ve made the decision to plan for our future and seek a home which has the…
I read the vast majority of my books, especially fiction, on my e-reader. I bought it in 2012 as a treat to myself for doing well in my semester exams at university. I replaced it about three months later, when the few books I’d carried to uni with me fell on it and damaged the screen. I replaced it with another of the same model, though, and all is well. That means I’ve had the device…
Note: This post marked the first time I wrote something in Esperanto first, and then translated directly back to English. As a result, the sentence structure and language in this might be a bit jarring compared to my other writing! I’ve used Ubuntu since 2008, when I first discovered the world of GNU/Linux. I never really ‘distro-hopped’ much, because I was quite content with…
I love plain text and markdown. Scott Nesbitt’s The Plain Text Project is one of my favourite blogs, and I’ve previously written about writing a thesis in Markdown myself. One day, through The Plain Text Project, I discovered this post by Dan Lucraft around his Plain Text Personal Organizer . I instantly clicked with the idea and couldn’t wait to try it out. The purpose of this…
Note: this post is being finished a little later than usual, in January 2022. This is because I had some PhD thesis corrections to make for a January deadline and I wanted a rest after that. I’ve dated it in December 2021 to represent when the bulk of it was written. Here in the Northern Hemisphere the sun has finished dying and has been resurrected; beginning its slow climb towards its…
Hey, another short post to update on the site itself as there’s been a few changes to the site that I want to document, if only for myself! I’m thoroughly enjoying working with Jekyll and the realm of static sites. When I began, I was familiar enough with Jekyll to get a site working but the overriding of default templates confused me as I like to see all the files that I’m…
I was hiking round the Indieweb recently and stumbled upon this post on Ruben Schade’s site. I recommend you read it as it’s a pretty good primer but my summary of the post is that Ruben and his partner ordered pizza from their local chain via an iOS application and then the estimated times on the app changed suddenly, prompting them to go to the store to pick it up: We ordered our…
Hello there. Just a short post to keep the blog ticking over. As you may have read from my previous posts on migrating the site to Jekyll , my Summer Solstice Update , and in my Now page ; I’m learning some Esperanto in my downtime. I’m thoroughly enjoying it and I’m at the point where I want to try my hand at writing longer texts in the language. As such, I’ve produced an…
I once tried to establish a “Weekly Review” type of blog post, inspired by my love of reflective writing as well as seeing how Rhiaro has managed to keep it up and keep it interesting for so long. These didn’t last very long, and I’ve grown more comfortable with the idea that I don’t write shorter posts as often as I’d like. I also have a ‘Now’…
I’ve made the decision to migrate this site temporarily away from Brimstone and into a static site. The reasons for this are pretty straightforward and nothing too controversial I hope; time/effort/headspace, and workflow/what I want from this site. Brimstone, my custom blog/cms/indieweb software, has been a bit creaky for a little while. While I stand by the code and design decisions I made…
Hi folks, if you’re reading this then either you’re a close friend/colleague, or one of the few random strangers on the web who read my blog occasionally. This post is intended for the former group. Basically; my father sadly died this weekend just gone (2021-02-27) after a struggle with COVID-19. He put up a hell of a fight and for a while things were looking like he’d get a…
As of last night I’ve been journaling every day for a solid year. I began on 2019-11-05, after several months of putting it off. I had just finished returning from a wonderful trip across Europe with one of my closest friends and was very tired and run down; owing from a really weird and busy year of adapting to my new life and work. I’d put off starting to journal for a few reasons:…
Just had a really nice experience where a loved one asked me to facilitate the conversion of an ebook from epub format to PDF for reading on her computer. Since converting data is kinda my jam, and I am well-versed in Pandoc this seemed like a one-command job. Pandoc complained at the file being converted for some obscure reason, and manually trying out a few different options under --pdf-engine…
Dear…, This year has been extremely difficult because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The difficulty has been exacerbated by the Government’s mishandling of the crisis, which looks set to worsen with the withdrawal of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme at the end of October. The Job Retention Scheme, fought for by trade unions and employers as the means to avoid an immediate collapse across…
In my dark and murky past as a full time PhD Student and in my current alter-ego as someone writing up a PhD Thesis on the evenings and weekends I have spent a lot of time writing things. A lot of academic writing occurs in either Word or LaTeX and since my undergraduate I’ve been firmly in the LaTeX camp; using it to write papers, essays, etc. When I started my PhD I was originally planning…
I’ve just discovered via r/swoletariat this absolutely fucking unreal 2018 Guardian editorial from Zoe Williams Do you boast about your fitness? Watch out – you’ll unavoidably become rightwing Great start there. Bit rich coming from a person whose editorial board posts transphobic shit and Israel apartheaid apologism Yesterday was Fitness Day. Sorry, let me give that its proper title:…
My phone intersects on various aspects of my life such as minimalism, de-googling, FLOSS, etc. As a result of that I’m often posting lists of apps on various subreddits to share my practices and I thought it’d be neat to collect it all here. I have a barebones android phone without any of the Google framework in; meaning I don’t have the playstore etc. My apps tend to be from…
I seem to have given off the impression that my routine is the most important thing in the world to me and while this is partially true on the surface; it is for wholly different reasons than most people think. I think folks might view me as having this rigid, highly-disciplined, approach to constructing my day. And that deviation from it causes me severe distress. From my perspective, I’ve…
This was posted as a review to Coworker.com as part of the nomination for the 2019 Coworker members’ choice awards. I am reproducing it here for longevity and access, in case someone searches for Goodspace and the original review is no longer up It is hard to describe in words how unique and special TURF @ Goodspace is, and how much good it has done both for personally for me and the city of…
I was staying in Lisbon for work and chose the VIP Inn Berna for my accommodation because it was reasonably priced, located very near where I was working, and looked comfortable enough. All hotels are basically all the same anyway. I arrived late in the evening, and the check-in process was very smooth. The young woman on the front-desk was incredibly helpful and spoke immaculate English,…
Today is 2019-05-01; May the 1st. Commonly referred to as “May Day” the date holds two very special meanings to me and is, I feel, particularly important this year. The first of these meanings is a very old one. May 1st has traditionally been a spring festival in the Northern Hemisphere. The neopagans have generally re-appropriated this as Beltane . Following the Equinox, it is a fire…
I last wrote something longform in this blog in February, about how 2018 was a long and brutal year for me . The post reflected on 2018 and low-key announced that I’d landed myself a new opportunity. I wanted to give a sort of update, sort of belated announcement of what I’ve been up to for the last six months since October. On October 8th, 2018 (2018-10-08T09:30:00+01 for all you ISO…
2018 was a long year. I’ve put off writing a little reflection on 2018 for a while now. Part of that has been due to how tired I am. Part of that will be simply due to my priorities not laying with updating a blog. Part of that will be me not wanting to sit down and take account of everything that happened. I hit burnout this year. It had been building for a while. You know the kind of…
Back in May I posted a list of stuff that I own in reflection of what I found the most useful. I’ve just changed my living situation, shed a lot of clutter, and am also in a major period of reflection. I’ve since acquired a few new things as well here and there. As such I thought I’d do another list. This one will be slightly different. In the previous list I didn’t take…
“When it comes to the overwhelm; the easiest way to solve that is to turn it off. Really just turn it off” - Patrick Rhone in Minimalism: A Documentary About The Important Things Since around a month ago on the 5th of October I’ve had myself locked out of Twitter. I achieved this by ensuring that two-factor authentication was turned on, and by asking my friend S to change my…
Every three months or so I do a gratitude list in order to try and cultivate gratitude, stem my desire for novelty, and seek tranquility by training myself to want what I already have. I usually write these in a notebook, but I am of the web and thought it would be cute to publish it as a blog post that I update every day. A is for Autumn. Crisp outside, the right levels of light, and a favourite…
Minimalism is one of the inspirations I draw from when hacking at Brimstone . So far this has manifested by removing things like excessive UI elements, cumbersome Javascript and CSS frameworks (thankfully PureCSS exists), and streamlining things such as how Posts work and are displayed. I had a thought recently when considering the About page, and how a more minimal approach might look. At the…
After years of performing hard labour, my poor laptop finally deteriorated to the point of becoming almost unusable. It had lived with a pretty bad fractured screen, a missing power key and a broken left trackpad button for a little while but that’s not what did it in. What did it in was the power connection. Over the last few months, it had developed a wonky connection to the power charger…