Tomorrow, I've been tasked with taking some drone photos. Our regular drone pilot is away on paternity leave. I've never flown a drone before, so I've just taken it outside for a rehearsal flight. IMHO, the hardest part of flying a drone is figuring out how to switch the bloody thing on! Also, the DJI Mini 3 is an incredible bit of technology.

Happy to read/hear that OggCamp is returning after a 5 year hiatus. The calendar has been marked for October 12th and 13th 2024.

Updating some CodeIgniter instances to 4.5.0. There are breaking changes: codeigniter4.github.io/userguide/insta…

The day job has disabled OpenVPN connections in favour of using IKEv2. Took me a minute to get it working under Debian using strongSwan. VPN vendor provided zero instructions for Linux, however Windows and macOS set-up instructions were well documented, naturally.

Sat in a coffee shop this afternoon in Nottingham and I counted 8 laptops being used by customers, 7 of them were MacBooks. I'm not sure this has any significance, but I thought it was interesting. The other laptop was a HP.

Today marks 2 months of using Windows 11 exclusively. I've been using it for a work project and I've not used my Linux desktop machine once in that time. I really missed GNOME when I started using Windows, but as the weeks have gone on, I've found Windows to be a more than capable alternative. Not sure if it is related, but I recently received an email from Satan in which he was bemoaning the cold weather he has been experiencing of late.

So, Apple have decided they will not kill PWA support on iOS devices after all. This is good news. I'll still be switching to a Google Pixel device.

I've been thinking about switching to an Android phone for a while. Thing is, I've not pulled the trigger on this as I've been pretty happy with my iPhone -- it generally just works. Apple's recent shenanigans around PWA support has cemented my decision that my next phone will be a Google Pixel device.

Adding what3words support to an existing PWA. Pleasantly surprised by the clear API documents and ease of set-up. Good job what3words devs!

Struggling to find a RSS reader for Windows that I like. Fluent Reader comes close, but it's not quite there. I use NewsFlash with my GNOME desktop and I really like it. I've been thinking about writing my own feed reader. I mostly think about this when I'm using Fluent Reader.

Listening to the Vergecast 'How AI will change phones — and the whole internet'. Has an interesting interview with The Browser Company’s CEO about Arc browser. I'm interested to give Arc a try and I've signed up for the Windows wait list.

Just purchased Black Mesa on Steam, it's currently got 80% off and is selling for £2.99. Looking forward to reliving the Half-Life experience.

Upgraded a busy Debian web server last Thursday night and so far I've only received one reported issue. Not bad considering the amount of old PHP applications this thing runs. I was expecting a busy weekend fixing issues, but it never happened. I did spend a while testing everything before the upgrade, so that probably helped.

Today, I've mostly been head scratching over an issue with some PHP code, turns out the problem was due to the date getting out of sync in WSL2. I think this happens when I put my laptop to sleep?! Anyhow, I've installed the ntpsec package which immediately fixed the issue. Will keep an eye on it.

How many times do you run a specific set of shell commands, before you create a script to automate the process? Sometimes, I think I wait far too long.

We have a BitLocker encrypted drive at work and we have lost the recovery password. We think the device was provisioned by a trainee and they forgot to record it. Anyhow, has anyone tried/had any luck with BitCracker? github.com/e-ago/bitcracker

I've performed a clean install of Windows 11 23H2 on my Razer Blade 15 and spent a while setting up a dev environment with WSL (Debian). It's early days, but it seems to be performing a lot better than before. Recent hardware upgrades (2TB NVMe SDD and 64GB RAM) may have helped with performance. I'm actually enjoying using Windows for a change, mostly, but I'm keeping my Linux machine close by, just in case I feel like rage quitting.

It's taken a week, but I'm feeling somewhat normal again after catching COVID. I'm still taking it easy, but I'm steadily getting back into work and catching up. If you can avoid catching COVID, I strongly recommend you do.

This is the second time I have had COVID. I seem to recall that I slept my way through it the first time around, so this insomnia business is new to me. I should probably make use of this bonus time I find myself with, but I think I'll probably waste it playing some Starfield.

I have COVID-19. Apparently, ~40% of people with COVID suffer from insomnia, which might explain why I'm typing this status update at 03:30am. Becky also has COVID, so our house currently feels and sounds like a plague house.