Latest Posts:
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Japan travel with a kid in 2024
About ten years ago I had a whole website* dedicated to tips on how to travel in Japan on the cheap. After so many few years without visiting, though, it felt very out of date – and with the yen now reduced to 50% of what it was, living off convenience store rice balls and staying in…
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JTX Cyclo Studio v5 to Peloton
Some code to generate a Peloton resistance value from the JTX Cyclo Studio v5 bike
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The Ferrier Estate, 2009
I took these in 2009, shortly before the estate was demolished. They were lost when Flickr clamped down on image storage, but copies have been floating around the internet since, so I thought I would upload the whole set here. Many of the buildings gave the feeling of a post-apocalyptic video game environment – trees…
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The “Pauper’s Palace” of Grove Park
Marvel’s Lane Clinic, Grove Park SE12 is just around the corner from me. When idly Googling the history of it, I found this 1902 magazine article being sold. It does appear to be the 1900s equivalent of the Daily Mail complaining about TVs in prisons, but nonetheless – it’s interesting to see a glimpse of…
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Renting an electric car in Norway
On a recent trip to Norway I found myself needing to rent a car – and, for the first time, most of the cars available were electric. As someone who doesn’t own an EV, and doesn’t live in Norway, I wondered if it would be a pain – if you have the same questions, here’s…
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Some books I read to a six-year-old this year
My list of “novels I read in 2022” is, I’m pretty sure, one novel long. I have excuses; I will spare both of us the excuses. But I have been reading to Small – now six, going on seven any day – at bedtime. Here are a few he enjoyed.
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Updating DigitalOcean Mastodon Droplet from 3.1.3 to 4.0.2
Mastodon v4.0.2 is out, and has some handy-looking new features. But if you’re using the old DigitalOcean droplet, which was based on v3.1.3, upgrading is a bit of a faff. Here’s how I did it – in two stages. I should not upfront that this isn’t a *recomended* method – it’s just what worked for…
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Deploying a tiny Mastodon server on DigitalOcean
Given the current bin-fire state of Twitter it seems entirely reasonable that everyone I know there is building a survivalist-style-bunker on Mastodon. But there’s a pretty immediate roadblock that faces every person trying to set up a new account: which server to choose? While Twitter is monolithic – one site, one account, one @name –…
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Apple App Store Connect API JWT tokens in PHP
I found it surprisingly hard to generate valid JWT tokens per this documentation, and kept getting a 401. Here’s some working code.