Cool. Sometime recently, Flickr migrated their signup process to their own native system. I’ve been curious about Flickr under its new owners, but as recently as a couple of months ago, signing up still required creating a Yahoo account — something there was zero chance of me doing.

I’m not sure what I’d use Flickr for nowadays, but I do have fond memories of the service in its heyday of the mid-2000s. I can syndicate from this site to my Flickr photostream, although that means I’ll probably have to start using the full-sized original images in posts instead of the resized versions I use currently.

For whatever reason, I’m finding I’m just not “feeling it” with any of the miniatures I’ve been painting recently… not so much with the models themselves, more with the results of my efforts. I know I can often be overly critical of my own work, but this feels different to usual

I’ve been experimenting with using Python to generate text-based data for an experimental spin-off app from our team at work, and for my first “real world” use of Python, I’m pretty impressed with how efficient it is for doing this.

I’ve got a simple script iterating over a collection of strings to produce all possible combinations of those strings. The output of that script is being fed into a text file via Bash. So far it’s generating ~52GB of data in roughly 15 minutes, and it’s only part-way through the possible combinations. I’ve had to kill my test run because otherwise I’m going to run out of disk space on my laptop SSD! CPU usage was a moderate 26%, and RAM usage was tiny, at only ~2.8MB. Previous attempts at this using other languages tended to saturate one or both of these resources in fairly short order.

It’s fun to try out a new (to me) tool every now and then!

What size do you consider “critical mass” for an active community centred around a niche hobby/topic? Asking for a friend…

I’ve seen a lot about What3Words this week, but I haven’t seen much in the way of a look into their privacy practices and data collection. I’ve no doubt the concept is cool and useful, but I’m too wary of all location-based apps these days to buy in to the hype.

I had hoped to use my lunch break to prep and spray primer a few more test pieces for practicing painting white, but it’s a typical very cold, wet, Scottish summer’s day, so that’s not going to happen 😐🌧

While I was on the server to update the certbot configuration, I finally finished implementing the redirect to webp images I started adding last month. These should start coming through once browser caches of the original images expire. From a random sample the webp images are around 40% smaller than the source (compressed) jpeg files.

So I think that’s everything moved off of Cloudflare now. I’m going to leave the domains in the CF dashboard for a couple of days, so I can be sure DNS is working right, then I’ll start deleting them.

It’s pre-8am, and I’m working from home, so I’ve used what would have been my commute time to progress my Cloudlflare migration. All the DNS records are in place now. I’m just waiting on name servers to switch over. While that’s ongoing I’m updating all my certbot settings, and that should be everything of mine moved off of Cloudflare, at last.

So that’s my test domain successfully moved off of Cloudflare 👍

The rest should get done over the next few days, if nothing comes up.

Part way through switching my first domain off of Cloudflare, and I remembered I’d need to switch the configuration of certbot too, to ensure my HTTPS certificates can renew without issue.

One more thing to add to the list, which I don’t have time for tonight. I’ll need to sort this all out some time next week.

Once I’m back in front of a computer after vacation in a few days, I’m pulling all my domains off of Cloudflare. White Supremacist and terrorist content doesn’t deserve an “always online” guarantee, and until Cloudflare act on this, they don’t deserve my custom.

Just had to teach 2 experienced developer colleagues about the CSS position property and the interplay between relative and absolute ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Twitter really makes managing Lists unnecessarily difficult 😐

I’ve just generated a webp version of every image file I’ve ever uploaded to this site, with the intent to add a redirect for browsers which support the format – that should be most, nowadays. I haven’t done the redirect yet, but I’ll turn that on later.

I also took the opportunity to fix a whole bunch of missing thumbnails and missing sizes for my images. A previous mishap on my part meant there were a lot of these missing. WP-CLI didn’t seem to work for me, but there’s an easy (although repetitive and boring) way to do this through the library:

* Open the image
* Click “Edit Image”
* Flip the image, then flip it again
* Save

So hopefully that’s any broken images fixed, and soon, speedier and more optimised versions will be served.

Sent to me by a colleague 😅