Rants
2024
The only good cloud is a google cloud
2023
Enforcement can have the inverse effect
I live in a small city which is extraordinarily easy to cycle through.
Everything is a short distance, the cycle infrastructure is kept tidy and there is a distinct absence of anything that could even remotely be considered a hill.
2022
Microsoft Teams; using one monopoly to aid another
2021
DevOps; a decade of confusion and frustration
I don't trust Signal
2020
Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me
Ok, I’ll admit, I’m not the largest fan of centralisation, but rarely do I so swiftly and effectively feel the crushing weight of it.
I happen to use a very nice Chromium-based web-browser which, when it opens has javascript disabled. Often I find that nothing works so I re-enable javascript and continue about my day.
2019
How to survive an open office.
I’ve been struggling for some time to find a decent enough guide to actually accomplish anything meaningful (other than ad-hoc break-fix work) in my office.
One of the things I know is that this problem seems to affect me more than others, so for many people this advice (or lamentation) might seem like it comes from a weird place.
2017
On the importance of self-hosted backups.
A long time ago I built a pretty big storage computer (16TB) which I built because SSDs at the time were pretty small and most laptops came with only a single possible SATA drive bay for storage.