Archive: 2024-12
Week 208: Festive arrangements
We had to change our Christmas plans in a hurry. We had intended to have a Christmas Day meal with some friends who live locally, with each of us cooking some of it. But then, on Christmas Eve, one of the couple who were hosting the meal fell ill. She spent most of the day in hospital, and even though she was able to go home by the evening, they had to cancel.
Installing packages from Debian Bookworm in Trixie
I run Debian on my computers, and, because I like the improvements that come in newer packages, I run Trixie (aka testing), instead of Bookworm (the last stable release). As they say:
The main advantage of using this distribution is that it has more recent versions of software.
Despite the testing designation, I’ve yet to experience any significant problems, but I do occasionally suffer the inconvenience of packages disappearing from the repository entirely. A recent example of this is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, better (and infelicitously) known as GIMP.
Week 207: The Incident
The week started inauspiciously at work when an application started reporting continuous errors from a problem with the API that it uses to synchronise messages with an email inbox.
Week 206: The Queen Elizabeth II Memorial Sewage Treatment Facility
I’m writing this extremely late this week, because the usual chaos of the last working week of the year has combined with some unexpected chaos. But that’s for next time.
Week 205: Decades happen
We both took Monday off and went to see the 80s photographic exhibition at Tate Britain. It’s an interesting mixture of big events (the miners’ strikes feature large), everyday life, and images of minority and subculture experiences that give a different view on the decade.
Week 204: Gravitational event
I broke my laptop. I normally cycle down to Peckham, but on Tuesday evening I discovered that one of my front brake pads was prematurely worn, so on Wednesday I went in on foot instead. I was dressed and ready in plenty of time to catch the infrequent-enough-to-need-planning (four trains per hour) service to Peckham and arrive before I had to join a Teams call. (That must be the most depressing four word sequence in the English language.)
Subscribing to feeds that Cloudflare blocks
If you run your own feed reader (I use Miniflux) you might find that you can’t successfully follow some feeds that are behind Cloudflare, because their aggressive “Bot Fight Mode” is doing what it says: aggressively preventing automated access, without any regard for the fact that automated access is exactly the point of RSS and Atom feeds.