Currently trying to do a web search to find where the logs are for a piece of software that predominantly deal with logs. You can imagine how fruitful the results have been so far. πŸ˜€

Heed the advice of Jim Nielsen and watch out for websites that ask you to enable notifications to “prove you’re not a bot.” It’s usually just an attempt to push spam. Had to walk through turning this off for someone when they started receiving ads via notifications from some crappy site.

πŸ”— Thought Detox

Someone on Micro.blog posted a link to this little web-app years ago, where you can write your thoughts and they float away into the ether, never to be seen again. I didn’t grab a link to it at the time, which I regretted. Well, I’m not making that mistake twice.

Via Anil Dash

πŸ§‘β€πŸ’» New post on TIL Computer: Feedback Of Conditional Updates In PostgreSQL

A good indication of how busy the work week is is the number of biscuits packets I bring home with me, rather than eat at lunch time. We’re at two packets this week.

Two individually wrapped Arnott's biscuits packets are placed on a green and grey bench.

It’s come to the point where my inability to approach or talk to people might start affecting my career progression.

At the station. A Mernda train came and went. Next one rocked up a few minutes later, another Mernda. “Another Mernda?” Not unheard of to have two consecutive trains for the same line. But it’s also not unheard of for me to completely miss my train because I wasn’t paying attention. πŸ˜„

The house guests have returned. Rico is settling in quite well, considering it his first time here. 🦜

A cockatiel with a yellow face and grey body is perched on a cage, while another white cockatiel stands in the background.

One of those days where I doubt my ability to do this job. 😞

Thought we were done with the swoop-o-meter for the year, didn’t we. Well, I guess there’s a little more spring left to go. That’s 5 noisy miners now. πŸ‘·β€β™‚οΈ

Smack bang in the middle of the automation smiling curve for my current task. 😩

A meme  depicting a smiling curve graph illustrates the relationship between problem size and satisfaction. The left size says 'Job really small. I'll just do it manually.' The right size says 'Argh, too big. I better automate.' In the centre is an arrow pointing to the lowest point on the curve with the annotation 'Automate half the job, but then realise it's probably quicker to just finish it manually.'

I’ve been waiting 5 minutes for the work VPN to log me in, and I’m still waiting. I guess the VPN client slept in today.

Oh, it just timed out. Must’ve hit the snooze.

Spent the morning upgrading my self-hosted Forgejo instance to the latest version. I started 30 minutes before heading out the door to an event, which is “always” a great idea. πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈ

After removing the repo managed version of Forgejo, which never worked for me, I was able to download and install the latest Debian package. I did have to uninstall the previous version first, which was a little terrifying. I did create a Hetzner snapshot before I started, just so that I can revert back to a working version should I screw everything up. Fortunately I didn’t need the snapshot, but I did need to move “app.ini” out as installing the package would’ve overwritten it and apt was refusing to proceed.

I eventually got the packaged installed and Forgejo running again. Fortunately everything was still there when I check the frontend. But when I tried doing a push, Git was throwing an error indicating that it couldn’t find the repository. I was unable clone any repos either, either using SSH keys or HTTPS.

I not entirely sure what was causing this issue. It may have been the move of “app.ini”. I did this as root, and maybe Forgejo, which runs in a jailed account, had an issue with reading or writing to that file. I changed the owner back to “forgejo” and also went through the the pre-update actions upgrade guide, and either one of those must’ve fixed something as Git started working again.

Anyway, I now have an updated version of Forgejo running. And despite the weird Git thing, it went relatively smoothly. But there are a few lessons here: always read the upgrade guide, and don’t do something like this minutes before you need to be somewhere else.

It’s done! Cyber Burger, the Pico-8 arcade game I’ve been working on for the last few months, is finished and can now be played online in a (desktop) browser. Check it out here.

Now that my 1Password subdomain woes with Android Vivaldi has been tamed, it’s time to turn my attention to Safari:

A password manager pop-up displays a list of saved password suggestions for the same domain, with no subdomains, 8 times.

In this world of micro-services and Kubernetes, it was nice to be working on a system built as a monolith running in a plain old EC2 instance. But recently, during load testing, the service we’ve been working on as been showing signs of stress β€” timing out, maxing out the CPU β€” and it’s become clear that scaling up has taken us only so far. So now might be time to rearchitect this into micro-services and move it into something like Kubernetes. This was probably always going to happen. I’m just glad that it’s happening now, rather than before it was necessary.

I’ve been spending so much time on this tool to generate a report I’ve been asked to produce, and it’s super overdue. The funny thing is, if I delay one more week, the report would be trivial to produce, and the tool will become unnecessary (the tool’s almost finished too).

Listening to this part of HV got me wondering if the secret to punctual trains is just a whole lot of them. You’re less likely to do something to delay a train β€” like hold the doors open β€” if you know the next one’s only a few minutes away, and will arrive on time. One builds on the other.

Okay, so apparently I held out for exactly 1 hour and 15 minutes, as I’ve just opened a Bluesky account1. The reason is that some old Twitter accounts have moved over there instead of Mastodon. I get a lot of enjoyment from those accounts and it’s good to see them still posting.

I do wonder where they moved their old Twitter archive. A tweet of theirs I linked to as a shortcode broke this blog for a time when they deactivated their Twitter account. I do hope they either POSSE or PESOS with a domain they control so I can fix it (they’re so close: they’re using a domain for their handle, all they need to do is setup a website).


  1. All posts on Bluesky and Mastodon go through here first so you don’t need to follow me there if you follow me anywhere else. ↩︎

Wondering if I should open a Bluesky account. Do I need another service to look at every day? Am I desparate enough for β€œmoar reederz” to set up another POSSE channel? It’s tempting. Will hold off for now, but who knows how long I’ll be able to maintain my willpower.