I found a delightful new café in one of the new developments nearby while escaping from our very hot house in search of somewhere cooler. It’s called Chá-Fé. I assume that’s a portmanteau of the Chinese for tea 茶 ⟨chá⟩ and “café”, and they do indeed sell both tea (a range of interesting, good-quality teas from Taiwan and Japan) and coffee.

They said they’d opened three days earlier, and they had a reasonable number of customers on a Monday afternoon. I hope they do well.

I spent ages setting up printers. We have two: a black and white laser printer, and a cheap 4 × 6 inch thermal printer for postage labels. They both work well under Linux, and I previously had them connected to an old Raspberry Pi running CUPS and sharing to the network. However, now that I’m using a little second-hand ThinkStation as a home server, I wanted to consolidate printing onto the same device.

Getting the printers to print was quick and easy. Getting them shared was easy, too. But getting anything to work with the shared printers was impossible. Jobs would be queued on the client, but never print. On the server, they either didn’t appear in the queue, or they did but were held, and un-holding them did nothing.

In the end, I gave up and just cloned the /etc/cups directory from the Raspberry Pi. That solved the problems, but I still don’t know why it didn’t work before, and I can’t work out what’s changed in the stock Debian configuration to make life harder.

I set up fast WiFi roaming between the house and garden office using OpenWRT on a couple of TP-Link TL-WDR3600 access points that I bought cheap on eBay. One was barely used, and the other hadn’t even been unpacked from the box.

I set them up with the same SSID and password, and enabled 802.11r fast roaming. They’re both connected to the same wired network (there’s a cable out to the garden) and I can now walk from one end of the house to the other, step outside, and walk to the garden office, with strong reception all the way.

It was very straightforward. The hardest part was coming up with a name for the network.

I spent some time updating my CV, and tried to make it a bit more accessible and useful to someone reading it. There’s no longer space for me to list every piece of work I’ve done, so instead I’ve summarised some highlights and given specific details about my most recent few contracts.

(I am available for work!)

I’ve bought a ticket for Haggis Ruby in Edinburgh in October. I haven’t been to Edinburgh since 2012, for the now-defunct Scottish Ruby Conference. On that occasion, there were storms and floods and landslips, and I was marooned in Newcastle for one night before making my way to Edinburgh the next morning via a replacement bus to Berwick.

I hope the trip is smoother this time!

Just a few links this week: