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Latest Posts:

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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 –…

  • 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.

  • So long, and thanks for all the kittens

    Make America Kittens Again was released (well, deposited unceremoniously on Github) in February 2016. Later that year it went viral, capturing more global attention and users than probably anything else I’ll ever create in my lifetime. Now it’s gone. Sorry.

  • Community Fibre – FTTP installation and equipment

    Some information and photos on the equipment and installation of a Community Fibre FTTP broadband connection in London SE12