tomroyal.com

Latest Posts:

  • 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…

  • 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

    UPDATE FEB 2024 – given a certain ex-President’s regrettable failure to Just Fuck Off, MAKA is back in the Chrome Store again.