I signed up to a new account on Wednesday, and I still can’t login to it because I have to wait for a code to be sent in the mail, which I’ll have to then use on the phone to “activate” my access, and I can’t help but think this is bonkers in 2025.
Notes
I block most ads at the network level, so I don’t really need any ad-blocking browser extensions… but I do install uBlock for the ability to “block” arbitrary page elements, such as the “trending stories” block in Phanpy I just nuked for my sanity
Microsoft want to increase my Microsoft 365 Personal subscription price from £60 a year to £85, and they’re not even throwing in any new Copilot features to try to pitch it as “better value”… 🙃
I moved my Windows UI default back to light mode, after a couple of months of only using dark mode. Holy crap everything is bright.
I was about to switch my broadband to a new provider, which would be more self-hosting friendly, but their online switching system doesn’t recognise my current provider and I have to call between 9-5 😑
So it seems like my FTTH internet connection doesn’t allow for as simple self-hosting as my old ADSL connection did, due to NAT-related witchcraft. It looks like I’m going to need to tunnel out using Cloudflare or similar, which complicates plans slightly.
test
My partner has an online proctored exam today, and I’ve never seen or known anyone to cause so much chaos and panic through the sheer force of their own anxiety.
Every so often I look over at the Raspberry Pi in the corner of the room and think “I could host my own Mastodon instance on that…”
I’m considering getting a “proper” camera for taking photos of miniatures. I’ve upgraded every other part of my setup over the last couple of years, so this would be the “missing piece”. I’m not sure what to get though; I’ve not looked at cameras for years…
Jumping around between Windows and Mac for the last month or so has absolutely destroyed my scrolling muscle memory. You know the joke about always plugging in USB the wrong way first time? It’s like that, but with scrolling the mouse wheel.
Every so often the wind blows hard enough against the house the room shudders and it feels like the window in my office might get punched right out of the frame and fly away 😬
I’ve taken worryingly (if, thankfully, temporarily) ill twice in the last few days, with no completely clear cause that makes sense. What a wonderful bit of extra stress to start the year with.
🤞🏻 hopefully I’ve fixed up my cross-posting so it properly accounts for the different post lengths across Mastodon and Bluesky. Longterm, the plan is to get Bluesky posts using rich-text facets so URLs don’t take up any of the character count, but that’s not a job for tonight!
Finally got round to playing Plunderstorm, and I’m enjoying it way more than I thought I would. I think it’s helped by being so fast to play/requeue - so even if you die a lot (like me) you can still rack up enough currency to unlock the rewards
I think my ideal blogging platform would be some sort of smooshing together of Micro.blog and Pika. M.B has all the integrations and technical gubbins I could want, while Pika just “feels” nicer to use (for the most part because it doesn’t have all the gubbins…)
Not to brag, but my partner and I have got our bedding change time down to less than 9 minutes, and I’m pretty sure we can get below 7 once we’re back on a single duvet.
Weather forecast then: sunny, getting into positive temperatures.
Me: shovels and grits path to deal with the layers of compacted ice.
Weather forecast now: it’s going to snow imminently and stay below zero. Sucker.
I guess it is one of life’s great ironies that my brain seems to find most of the music on playlists designed to “help you focus” to be distracting as hell.
Just posted 3 updates to LinkedIn (new role, 2 certification renewals), and that’s quite enough of that site for this year…
Junior Taskmaster was delightful. Hopefully it gets a second series!
I would normally be back to work today, but thankfully booked some extra days off. Just as well, because getting out of bed was really hard
I could be doing anything at all with my time off, but apparently my brain decided I should spend this evening trying to cobble together a personal-use iOS app without any experience at all in iOS app development…
I found an old NAS in a cupboard earlier; currently hoping it boots again after having to use the “reset to factory settings” switch in an attempt to get it to join the network.
I just completed all 25 days of Advent of Code 2024! #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/
First time ever getting past days 1-3 🎄 1st-place on one private leaderboard, 2nd-place on another. Not bad for starting 5 days late 🥳