My news reader is filled with people posting their tips for working remotely in this time of COVID-19 and “social distancing.” I wrote my own six tips for working from home fifteen years ago(!!! – yay for blog archives!), and they largely still hold up, mostly because they aren’t tips around what no-longer existing technologies to use or anything like that. They’re focussed on what you can do to make your working from home experience better for you.

If I had to add any more tips, the biggest would be – make sure your work area is comfortable and ergonomic. If you can, invest in the best office-style chair you can. Ideally, have a decent-sized desk which affords you a good amount of working space. Basically don’t try and work for hours in an uncomfortable, cramped, space. If you don’t have access to that at home, try decamping to somewhere like the local library, even for a couple of hours (when you know you won’t have to make any calls!).

FraidyCat has introduced me to RSS.app and RSSbox as a way to follow Instagram accounts without having my own account, and now I can’t help but think it would’ve been great to know about these before I deleted my account and lost the list of all the accounts I followed…

I forgot about a server I’m using to host a friend’s project until today, and now I can’t get Ubuntu (18.10) to upgrade to a newer, supported, version. The usual upgrade tool won’t work because a) the release isn’t supported any more – although I can hack around that sorta easily enough, and b) there are also a couple of package updates pending… but I can’t install those updates (easily) because the release isn’t supported any more and the sources don’t exist now. I could try editing sources.list, and using apt dist-upgrade, but that path usually leads to a lot of pain.

While I’m sure my friend won’t mind they’re running an out of date OS, as long as it’s running fine – I do mind! But it doesn’t look like I’m going to get it sorted tonight 😑