Out for our lunctime state-sanctioned exercise, and noticed a seal had managed to make it all the way past the Diamond Bridge on the River Don, in Aberdeen. I’ve never seen them in this area before!
Reposting: a tweet
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That’s us officially had the general order to work from home where we can, for the foreseeable future.
Reposting: Sarah Cawkwell on Twitter
“Idea.
If you’re one of those people panic buying staple goods in bulk, when this passes and you have excess dried pasta and loo roll and tinned goods, consider donating them to a foodbank.
If you plan to bulk buy, buy extra for a foodbank.
Don’t be one of Those People.”
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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!).
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While I’m sure my friend won’t mind they’re running an out of date OS, as long as it’s running fine – I do mind!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 😑
Reposting: a tweet
Today’s one of those days where I’m really struggling to concentrate and focus on anything at all. Which is slightly bothersome, as I’m working from home today to “concentrate” on doing some online training I’ve struggled to find peace to do in the office.
Reposting: Kenny Backus 🇨🇦🦝🇨🇦 on Twitter
“tired: fantasy maps with clearly delineated borders between several medieval kingdoms
wired: actual maps of medieval kingdoms”
Reposting: Tom Chivers on Twitter
“A thought that just occurred to me: everyone should be required to play D&D or Warhammer or some other dice-rolling game at school, to get a visceral sense for how often "low probability" events come up. Rolling double ones is a <3% chance, but it happens ALL THE BLOODY TIME”
What I mean about that last Inoreader thing:
When I first setup the OPML subscription I had to map it to a folder created in Inoreader. All feeds were dumped into this folder as the feature didn’t support the category information in my OPML file.
The number of sources in my OPML file was starting to get unwieldy in just a single folder, so I had begun the process of reorganising into topic-based folders. The subscription management preference UI in Inoreader is a bit clunky, so this was slow going.
Anyway, I more or less finished, and went for lunch. When I came back, there were a whole lot of new folders showing in the sidebar. I figured there was maybe some old organisational data kicking around (tags and folders seem to be more or less synonymous in the app, and a feed can belong to multiple), so started moving things around again and deleting the excess folders. It wasn’t until I’d deleted a couple that I realised they matched the category names in my OPML file, and put two and two together.
To tidy everything back up again, I deleted all subscriptions, folders, and tags, before re-syncing with the OPML file. Everything was automatically nicely organised, and hopefully will remain so 😃 The only dowside was losing the read status of the feeds, but a quick “Mark All as Read” sorted that out.
I was in the middle of reorganising my feeds in Inoreader, when they appear to have rolled out an update to the OPML Subscription functionality, completely throwing things off and causing me to need to start all over again.
“The European Commission wants staff to use end-to-end-encrypted messaging app Signal as part of a push toward greater security.”
Now, if only I could convince anyone I know to use Signal instead of WhatsApp…
I think yesterday might have been the first day this year I haven’t posted anything on this site.
Last night, Mrs K. and I were at a loss for anything new to watch, and not in the mood to read or do anything hobbywise, we ended up rewatching several episodes of Tabletop.
First thing’s first: gosh I miss that show. It was so simple, fun, and “pure”.
Secondly: we couldn’t believe it when YouTube was telling us the newest of these videos was four years old. It really felt like just a year or two had passed.
Anyway. I was watching with a slightly different perspective than the first time through. At the weekend we had played Munchkin with one of the kids, and we all had a really good time*. I was looking for some more games to add to the collection, that would be friendly to young children, while still fun and appealing for the whole family… and preferably not take long to play through a game or a round.
The first candidates which met the criteria were Roll For It and Sushi Go, coveniently both played in the same episode. Roll For It has a simple premise: roll a number of dice, then try to match the values on a card to score the points on that card. Sushi Go is a brightly-coloured card game where players score points for “collecting” various dishes.
No longer having to deal with The Wheaton Effect, both games were readily available for around £13 each. which made them good “impulse purchases”.
It’ll be a couple of weeks until we get to try these games with the kids, but I’m already looking forward to it. I love exposing them to new and different ways of spending their free time.
* I don’t think they really understood the game, or really read most of the cards, but they quickly developed a strategy of making monster fights harder for the other players before offering to help them in exchange for some of the treasure.
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A quick question (hopefully) for Aaron: how does the multi-website feature of Monocle — mentioned here — work? I tried looking through the code, wiki, and issues page for clues, but couldn’t figure it out. Has it been removed? Or have I just missed something obvious 😅
Welcome to Aberdeen; we have Old Gods!
(Hopefully the video above works… it’s direct from my phone, and it was random as to whether it would display in the preview)
TIL it’s possible to put certain domains on an allow-list in Firefox, which stops them from being automatically deleted when the browser is closed (if you have that option turned on). Handy if you have some sites where you don’t mind a session persisting, but want the default for all other cookies to be “only persist as long as the browser session.”
I’m copying some virtual servers around our ESXi hosts, using ovftool, and ran into a problem with one of them throwing Error: Fault cause: vim.fault.FileNotFound.
This support thread gave me a clue to the eventual solution. Adding the --noImageFiles didn’t fix the problem for me, but going into the VM properties and disconnecting the virtual disc drive from the .iso file it was attached to did get rid of the error and let me kick-off the transfer.