Recent content in Paperstack Blog on Paperstack
This post is mostly so that future me can find my Debian package without having to ferret around on various laptop and other disks :)
I just set up (yet) another machine. My go-to OS these days is Debian 13, and there’s a certain subset of tools that I always seem to set up. Previously I’ve tended to pop them in manually, or use a little bash script, but I thought I’d have a…
On building a mocking library for Apache Kafka.
Big slow tests I’ve worked a lot with Apache Kafka in the last few years. If you wake up one morning and think “I know, I will use Kafka as the queue in my tiny homebrew project” then you are probably in for a world of pain. If, however, you are in world of vast data flows with strict auditing and compliance requirements, then,…
When I got a 3D printer I swore I would not be one of those people who spent all their time printing upgrades for their 3D printer. I’m not doing too badly, but printing with the Ender 3 is nonetheless a bit of a self-referential hobby.
Mine has recently been failing to print cleanly and I’ve been putting off the investigation - this weekend was time to dig in and fix it.
Ugh, this drives me absolutely mental! This is me filling in my passport application form…
Nope, nope, nope …yeah, it’s complaining about my use of the ‘ä’ character in my home address. I’m applying from overseas. Now, I can actually mis-spell that with an ‘a’, and the post office here (Postnord) will understand, but damn it, the British…
Well, this is one of those 21st Century problems.
I saw a book recommendation on Hacker News a while back for “Too Like the Lightning” by Ada Palmer. One of the great (and expensive) things about the modern world is that buying a book is a few clicks away, so I bought a copy for my Kindle.
So far so good, I got a few chapters in; it’s quite dense and opaque, but I was…
Alright, all the cool kids are doing cool things with LLMs. Now’s my time to make a mess with them.
The HNTags.com Website Yay, it’s yet another clone of Hacker News? No, not quite that.
Categories I found myself wondering the other day just what proportion of stories in Hacker News are currently about AI now that LLMs are the flavour of the month. It would be handy if the…
Another one from the “I never can remember this damn thing” file … putting it here so I know where to look it up next time.
Incidentally I think there’s a “proper” way to do this, but this works fine and is quick. The “proper” documentation for this is at: https://developer.gnome.org/documentation/guidelines/maintainer/integrating.html
Steps…
Putting together a homelab Kubernetes cluster in my own stubborn way. I’m assuming a reader who’s basically me before I embarked on this little expedition, so I won’t go into minute detail about day-to-day Linux setup and administration - only the things that are new to me and have changed since I last encountered them.
Part 0 - Best laid plans Part 1 - Installing the…
With one thing and another I’ve recently been feeling quite nostalgic for the technology landscape of my early university days (around 1990) and so I wanted to write a little bit about that.
Background To set the scene for you, I was at university - or rather at polytechnic - in South Wales. Polytechnics were the very much less prestigious more vocational institutions. While I was taking…
Putting together a homelab Kubernetes cluster in my own stubborn way. I’m assuming a reader who’s basically me before I embarked on this little expedition, so I won’t go into minute detail about day-to-day Linux setup and administration - only the things that are new to me and have changed since I last encountered them.
Part 0 - Best laid plans Part 1 - Installing the…
You remember NetBooks, right? Are they making a comeback? I dunno, but they do seem to exist again - at last!
Back in February I made the mistake of browsing AliExpress for something and a tiny laptop caught my eye.
The original advert has long since been repurposed to some other machine, but it was similar to this one:
A similar advert for a similar machine The full title was this…
Putting together a homelab Kubernetes cluster in my own stubborn way. I’m assuming a reader who’s basically me before I embarked on this little expedition, so I won’t go into minute detail about day-to-day Linux setup and administration - only the things that are new to me and have changed since I last encountered them.
Part 0 - Best laid plans Part 1 - Installing the…
Putting together a homelab Kubernetes cluster in my own stubborn way. I’m assuming a reader who’s basically me before I embarked on this little expedition, so I won’t go into minute detail about day-to-day Linux setup and administration - only the things that are new to me and have changed since I last encountered them.
Part 0 - Best laid plans Part 1 - Installing the…
Putting together a homelab Kubernetes cluster in my own stubborn way. I’m assuming a reader who’s basically me before I embarked on this little expedition, so I won’t go into minute detail about day-to-day Linux setup and administration - only the things that are new to me and have changed since I last encountered them.
Part 0 - Best laid plans Part 1 - Installing the…
Putting together a homelab Kubernetes cluster in my own stubborn way. I’m assuming a reader who’s basically me before I embarked on this little expedition, so I won’t go into minute detail about day-to-day Linux setup and administration - only the things that are new to me and have changed since I last encountered them.
Part 0 - Best laid plans Part 1 - Installing the…
This article got some traction on Hacker News and spent most of a day on the front page; see bottom of this page for some related footnotes.
About a year ago I started a new job as a Staff Engineer with a larger FinTech. Plenty of upside, and I’m enjoying myself a lot, but the downside is that I’m obliged to work on a Mac. I kind of hate Macs. Not quite as bad as Windows, but damn…
This one’s just a little aide memoire for the (many) times I’m fiddling around with the tramming and/or calibration of the 3D printer.
Code Meaning G0 Xn Yn Zn Move G28 Home G29 Bed Level M500 Save Settings M501 Restore Settings M503 Report Settings M211 S0 Disable Endstops M851 Xn Yn Zn XYZ Probe Offset M420 S1 Enable bed leveling M48 Pn Probe repeatability test (n probes) M117…
Checking a newly created DynamoDB table I wanted to use the AWS CLI tool to quickly check that a record looked right. From the “probably should have been obvious to start with” department…
The key format wasn’t actually that obvious from skimming the --help output until I’d bumped my nose on the error messages a couple of times, so here’s the idiot’s…
After getting stuck in PostNord limbo for a week or two my Ender Extender 400 kit has finally arrived. This lets me expand the build platform of my Creality Ender 3 Pro from a paltry 235mm square to 400mm square. On paper that’s a small difference, but it looks a lot bigger in real life.
Before... and after! The kit is actually quite spartan - the major components are a handful of longer…
This is a memory-jogger for me when making changes to my 3D printer’s firmware.
Background A while back I upgraded my Ender 3 Pro 3D printer by replacing the standard motherboard with the Bigtreetech SKR Mini E3 V1.2 32 bit board (long since superseded by their newer boards). I also added a BLTouch sensor for automatic levelling.
Before the upgrade the servo noise drowned out the fan…
After a day spent cursing the EATX standards gods, offering up a few skinned-knuckle blood sacrifices, and the other appropriate motions in getting the second hand desktop computer with a GPU back up and running, I was able to spend this morning trying out Stable Diffusion running locally, which was the actual purpose of the exercise. Forthwith, the obligatory random AI generated…
TL;DR Disable i915 graphics module to stop freezes in Ubuntu on a Latitude 7490
I recently swapped out my day-to-day personal Dell XPS laptop for a similarly specced Dell Latitude, the 7490 with an i7-8650 CPU and “Mesa Intel® UHD Graphics 620 (KBL GT2)”. The change was driven by a combination of diminishing battery life, the lack of any ports other than USB C on the XPS, and the…
That’s the word that drives me nuts when I see it in print. Or more realistically in online posts. The only legitimate usage of “the aforementioned” is to put it into the mouth of a character who you want to sound pompous.
What’s wrong with it that it is always intrinsically redundant.
For example “The aforementioned usage is …” becomes “The…
This could be told as an epic tale of consultancy derring do in the Tolkien style, only with less bad verse, fewer elves, and a minimum of talking trees. But life is short. Here is the précis of a project for a vast multinational that demonstrates that the forces of evil are nothing when compared with the forces of bureacracy and incompetence. Bullet points are better than talking trees, right…
I recently noticed an odd feature when scrolling the page on Hacker News. The white background would fade in and out between various off-white shades that varied roughly in proportion to the amount of text on the page. I didn’t hate it… but it was slightly distracting and just the other day I decided to poke around in the CSS files and see if it was something I could disable.
As a teenager I read an unholy quantity of sci fi of variable quality. The golden age stuff in particular is strong on ideas and slightly hand-waving science. Not so strong on how humans work. Anyway, over the years one acquires a little personal vocabulary of cool sciencey stuff (sometimes from other sources - I read a lot of pop science too) that colours one’s view of the world. Here are a…
Well, I’ve wrapped up with Diabol AB and from next month I’ll be looking for something new.
<rant>
Which means it’s time to drag my LinkedIn profile up to date and hate every step of the way. Their internal engineering culture has a great reputation - see I ❤️ Logs for some insight into that - but god I despise the website. Because…
By accident or design some…
At any given time I seem to have about a dozen ridiculous pipe-dream projects kicking around my head. Often enough I’ll start one or another in a desultory way, but typically I don’t get very far. In some ways that’s the joy of personal projects - when I get bored of them, or (more likely) my eye is caught by the shiny new thing, I can leave them unfinished with no consequences.
My current work from home setup is pretty good, but with two very different sized monitors, and my spare mouse that turns itself off to save power, I have a tendency to mislay the mouse cursor. I guess it’s part of getting older too? Er. Anyway, Macs have a nice feature that makes the cursor get larger when you ‘shake’ it, and I wondered if there was something equivalent in Gnome…
Things I learned (so far) trying to draw 3D stuff in the browser to view on my Oculus Quest VR headset:
WebVR is now WebXR You must have a “secure host” for the site to enable WebXR, which basically means https protocol or http to localhost. Port forwarding from the Quest (‘reverse’) only works over usb and the error when you try to set it up over tcpip is not helpful.
Explaining and demonstrating the use of template parameters in wiremocked responses within a Spring Boot based integration test.
This article is available on both my blog Paperstack and on my GitHub account (which also contains all of the source code).
Contents What is Wiremock? What is RestAssured? The application under test Port management Using templates Afterthoughts Source…
When I moved to Sweden I discarded the majority of the physical books I’d accumulated over the years. While it was a painful exercise I’m pretty glad to have downsized my shelving requirements. A couple of years later I feel like I made the right decisions on what to discard. So far I haven’t once thought “Oh, I wish I’d kept…” Perhaps that means I could…
TL;DR: I may be about to break my email - so if it seems like I’m not replying to you you might want to poke me via another channel (Facebook, Phone, Post, Elaborate Steganographic Cat Pictures and so forth).
Update: The switchover seems to have gone ok; the websites are all up and running just dandy, and the email’s still getting through to me. Looking good!
I’m…
Just today I was piffling about with Rust to do some very simple AWS commands (nothing you can’t already do with the AWS command line tools). Getting up and started with Rusoto on my laptop was a little tricky though. Rusoto requires the OpenSSL libraries and headers as a dependency, and they’re not in the usual place(s) on Ubuntu - or at least not on 18.04.03 LTS which is what…
I’ve just put an article on using Testcontainers from Java up on Github, complete with example code in the same repository:
Integration testing against real services with JUnit and Testcontainers
I think it’s pretty good, so go read it if integration testing from Java is part of your daily existence :)
On Sunday 7th July 2019 I got married to Hanna. The following speech expresses as well as I can how I feel about that.
I am a lucky man.
I have the great fortune to be the son of diligent parents, to be brought up, fed, clothed, educated (at no little expense), encouraged, supported - occasionally berated when it was necessary. My parents were proud of my small accomplishments and generous…
An earlier post about some niggles with Ubuntu packages reminded me of just how smooth things are in general. The minor bumps are much more visible as a consequence, but really I have it pretty damn good.
Let me tell you young whippersnappers (and get off my lawn!) that I started with the boot’n’root disks in the 0.96.* days and my first packaged Linux was SLS. So I know how green…
Update: I amended the implementation to use Lambdas instead of requiring you to derive from the Continuations class. The shenanigans to get ‘yield’ to work are distinctly sketchy though. Be warned.
From the ‘code fished out from under the bed’ department, this is a little entertainment I worked out a few years ago. It was up for a while on another blog that I later…
Abstract: Ubuntu 18.04 astonishingly installs Open JDK 10 instead of Open JDK 11 for package openjdk-11-jdk. I explain why and that I think that was bad choice.
*[Update](#update): This package was finally updated to contain Open JDK 11 on 16th April 2019, so we did get there eventually.* Surprise! Currently if you’re a Java developer, an Ubuntu user, and prefer Long Term Support (LTS)…
To take my mind off The Rigamarole 2018 planning frenzy I’ve recently been reading “Farthest North” by Fridtjof Nansen.
It’s an extraordinary story from the “heroic age” of polar exploration. Having read and accepted the theory that the pack ice drifts across the arctic region, Nansen decided to build a ship, the Fram, that could take the pressures of the…
Update: See foot of page if you’re on Ubuntu 18.04
From time to time I pretend to be a swing DJ of sorts. Mostly this has been for The Balboa Café which I used to run before heading to Sweden, but sometimes also for dance classes or other events.
My Dell XPS 13 (9350 edition) running Ubuntu (currently 16.04.05 LTS) at some point acquired an irritating audio problem:
When sound is…
Radio Sweden in simple language
Visual aids for Swedish
Good (I think?) explanation of some verb conjugation rules
A while ago I fell in love with Hanna, a wonderful Swedish lady. After a while she and her cat Neo (we call him “Mr Anderson”) decided to come and stay with me in London for a while. Mr Anderson has his pet passport and appropriate immunisations so he’s allowed to travel within Europe and to the UK. For that trip in July of 2017 they both flew into London Heathrow.
This is where I give things a whirl for blogging with the Hugo static site generator.
The topics will be whatever I feel about writing about at the time, but you can probably assume that a bunch of technical Java programming topics will pop up from time to time along with notes about settling down in Sweden (I moved to Stockholm in December of 2017).
For details of what this site is and…