Geeking out on tech, craft, films, photography, nature and cats since 2002. If you stick it out for long enough, blogs become cool again.
We haven’t gone away on holiday for the past couple of years. It doesn’t feel fair to leave Bianca (now a grand old lady of 20) in a boarding cattery, so either only one of us can go away (the other staying at home to look after Bianca), or neither of us do. Mr. Bsag very kindly volunteered to do the cat-sitting for a couple of successive years, but it didn’t feel the same going away without him.…
Walking in to the room was an overwhelming experience. The triage nurses in the lobby of the Accident and Emergency unit took a few brief details then asked us to check in using the iPads on the wall just around the corner. As we turned the corner, it hit us that the waiting room was absolutely full. All the seats were taken, and people leaned against the walls and in the passageways, so that they…
Well, hello again! I don’t think that I have ever had a gap in posting as long as this before. Several months ago, I decided to explore moving this blog from both my previous host ( Netlify ), and away from the static site generator I had been using ( Hugo , more on those decisions below). However, life got in the way. We sadly lost a family member, Mr. Bsag got an injury that resulted in us…
I’ve been doing a bit of sewing recently after a bit of a break in which I really didn’t have the energy . I still have to take it much slower than I used to do — no more non-stop sewing days — but I am finding that if I spread cutting out and sewing over several days, I can manage it. This is actually quite nice as it forces me to take my time and pay attention to the details. In the process, I…
I was sitting at my desk at home, pottering on the computer, when a grey shape flickered in my peripheral vision in the garden outside. This was quickly followed by a clattering of wings and a high pitched squawk. I looked out the window and quickly spotted him standing on his prey. There, at the centre of a blast radius of feathers, a male sparrowhawk. We’ve had sparrowhawks in the garden before,…
I’ve been doing some more NixOS pottering over this weekend, working out the details of a thorough backup strategy. Before I moved to Linux, I used (and still use) iDrive for my backups. Its reasonably priced, and has servers based in Europe, and seems to work well enough. You can also run it on Linux, but I had some trouble getting it working with NixOS. I have also used the Gnome Circle app Pika…
Happy New Year? I dearly hope it’s better than the last one for all of us, but time and reality is gradually sanding the corners off my innate and irrepressible optimism. I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but this is how the end part of the last year was for me, and what 2026 looks like. A lot of lovely things happened in the first three quarters of last year. For one, I was able to make a…
Since getting back into running NixOS , I have been having a whale of a time configuring my Linux machine. The declarative life is somewhat addictive. However, I felt that I could be improving my configuration in a couple of ways. First, while I was learning how to configure NixOS, I had tended to scatter bits of code about randomly, and so it started to become a challenge to find what I needed.…
The incident I’m about to tell you about happened a few weeks ago, but life is busy, so I’ve only just got around to writing about it. Prepare yourself for The Tale of the Train Seat Incident! I get the train to and from work these days because of the whole ME, lack of bounce in bungee situation. On this occasion, I was returning from work on a busy train, and ended up in the section of the…
My ZSA Voyager keyboard has a new travelling companion: a ZSA Navigator . I love using it, but it has taken a bit of time to figure out the best configuration for me. Of course, the Navigator frees up critical loafing space for Bianca. When I saw that ZSA had made an add-on trackball unit for the Voyager, I was immediately interested. I’ve always enjoyed a trackball, and had a Logitech thumb…
As I wrote in my previous post , the other main hobby I practised during my recent holiday was tinkering more with my Linux box. This post will be a bit piecemeal, but I wanted to write about a few changes I have made recently. A zellij project showing lazygit in the left pane, and taskwarrior-tui and a shell in the right pane. Niri window manager When I last wrote in detail about my setup , I was…
This year, we did not go away when I booked my annual leave. It was a decision that arose out of a combination of not wanting to leave our elderly cat in a cattery, the fact that I was so exhausted from ME fatigue that I felt the work involved in going somewhere on holiday might be counter-productive, but also — if I’m honest — the fact that neither of us got things together sufficiently to book…
Friday morning did not start well. I swung a leg out of bed, and made gentle contact with our 18-year-old cat Bianca, who was crouched miserably by the side of the bed. Then I noticed spots of blood. Lots of them. I checked her and the clues in the blood-spattered environment over carefully, and — long story short — the blood was coming from her urinary tract. Like many older cats, Bianca has…
I have been thinking about setting up network attached storage (a NAS) for a while. The largest collection of files in my home folder on all my machines is in the Music and Photos folders, and since they are on both my Linux box and my Mac mini, that felt like unnecessary duplication and complexity. I need to sync the contents of both and back them up separately, which — given their size — is not…
I spent a bit of time over the Easter break getting my editors configured on NixOS . Yes, editors plural. Yes, it is overkill. But I can, so I have. Editors can be one of the trickier things to configure in NixOS, or at least, they present more decisions to be made about how one will configure them. Most editors have their own package managers which handle installing, configuring and updating…