Kev Quirk publisher

The constant outrage on #Mastodon (and maybe other social sites?) for [bad thing of the day] is so tiring.

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Do you know what the hardest thing to do on earth is?

Quantum physics? No.
Solving world hunger? Nope.
Getting Trump impeached? Nah.

It's climbing the stairs on leg day! 🦵🏼

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I decided I was bored with the previous design, but wanted something that was in keeping with the previous design (brutalist and using a monospace font) yet different.

I abandoned the yellow accent and went back to blue, my favourite colour. I also changed the font to Victor Mono.

I like how the new design draws from different versions of the site's history - lots of neo-brutalist design, clean colours and font, plus a bit of whimsy. If you're reading this via RSS, here's what the new design of the site looks like (although I'd recommend you head to the site and experience it properly):

I love how Pure Blog makes it so easy to change things like this. All I really did was pick a new colour palette, then add some custom CSS. The rest is all default Pure Blog, pretty much.

Hope you like the new lick of paint!

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Why do so many calendar apps offer Sunday as the first day of the week? It's not the first day of the week, it's the last.

Why is that even an option FFS?

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I've recently switched to Gnome's default apps for email etc. So instead of #Thunderbird doing all the things, I have Geary, Calendar, and Contacts. Most of the time I only need email, so it's nice having a much simplified UX.

I also like how integrated into Gnome they all are.

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I've noticed recently that my phone needs to be charged way more often than I used to have to do it. I used to be able to go for nearly 2 days on an 80% charge, but I started having to charge daily. Sometimes even multiple times per day!

My first thought was that my 2.5 year old Pixel 9A might be starting to show signs of age, and the battery was on its way out. But I have always had charging optimised, so it only charges to 80%. Looking at the health of my battery in settings, it shows the health as normal and reports a 100% capacity. So it's not the battery.

The final straw came when I went to bed one evening with a charge of around 65%, only to wake up the next morning with just 30% of my battery remaining. How the fuck had my phone used so much battery while I was sleeping??

I checked which apps had used all that battery and to my surprise it was Google Maps and Android Auto.

6.5 hours of "screen time" while I was asleep!

Ok, something is clearly fucked with Android Auto here, but I've been using it for years and it's been fine, so what's changed?

New car

The only thing that has really changed from an Android Auto perspective was that I'd got a new car which now used wireless Android Auto instead of having to plug a cable in.

After some research, it turns out that wireless Android Auto is an absolute resource hog.

Unlike standard Bluetooth audio, the wireless projection that Android Auto uses forces your phone to continuously compress and stream a high frame rate video feed over a Wi-Fi link, all while aggressively hammering the GPS and cellular radios too.

To make matters worse, if the car is parked anywhere near the house, the phone can get stuck in a persistent background polling loop that blocks deep sleep, basically turning the handset into an expensive pocket radiator.

Nice in winter, but not so bueno when you need your phone and it has a dead battery!

The fix

The fix, dear reader, was rather simple. Disable wireless Android Auto. However, in practice it was more difficult than I had expected.

I had to enable developer options within Android Auto's settings so the "disable wireless Auto" option became available.

Why is that even a developer option? It should be a standard option IMO.

Then I had to fiddle with the car's settings to not force wireless Android Auto, but instead prefer plain old Bluetooth. By doing this it allows me to still use Android Auto when I plug a USB C cable in, but by default it only uses Bluetooth.

The infotainment display in my car is pretty nice, so I'm not really missing anything by not using Android Auto. Plus, it annoys me that Navigation always shows up - I don't need it most of the time, so why waste the computing power and screen real estate?

Anyway, it's been a few days now and my battery is back to lasting me a couple of days. Worst case I need to quickly pull out my phone to open Spotify or my podcast app, AntennaPod, before I drive away, so the car picks up the media stream.

If I really need it, full Android Auto is only a USB C cable away, and I know it won't hammer my battery after I get out of the car.

Final thoughts

I've ranted about how complicated modern cars are before, but this is just another example of how annoying it is. I'm a technical person, so can work this out for myself, but many of my friends and family would have had no chance in figuring this shit out, let alone fixing the problem.

It's too much - they're too intrusive. I don't need to be connected everywhere. I don't need phone notifications in my car, and I usually don't need a sat nav - plus my car has it's own sat nav! I just want a way to stream media from my phone, without it getting as hot as the surface of the sun and wasting a tonne of battery power. Is that too much to ask?

Anyway, it's fixed now (I think). If you're having battery issues on your phone, it might be worth checking your wireless phone connection to your car too.

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Inside Ukraine's Kill Zone

by Reuters

Really interesting (and saddening) look at the front line in the Ukraine/Russia war.

Read post ➡

Saw this on Dense Discovery. It's a really interesting look at how the shape of warfare has changes from soldiers with weapons, to drone-based attacks.

The days of heavy mechanised manoeuvres are over; a drone costing a few thousand dollars can disable a tank worth millions.

-- Reuters

I served in Iraq and Afhganistan with the British Army in the early 00's. Back then drones were used, but were in their infancy. The fact that we've completely moved to this kind of warfare in ~20 years in scary.

I learned a lot in this post. It's both interesting and extremely saddening. My thoughts are with all those involved in this needless conflict.

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Carl's Doomsday Scenario

Author: Matt Dinniman
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-fi
Released: 2021
Rating: ★★★★★

"The training levels have concluded. Now the games may truly begin."

The ratings and views are off the chart. The fans just can't get enough. The dungeon gets more dangerous each day. But in a grinder designed to chew up and spit out crawlers by the millions, Carl and Princess Donut need to work harder than ever just to survive.

They call it the Over City. A sprawling, once-thriving metropolis devastated by a mysterious calamity. But these streets are far from abandoned. An undead circus trawls the ruins. Murdered prostitutes rain from the sky. An ancient spell is finally ready to reveal its dark purpose.

Carl still has no pants.

They call it Dungeon Crawler World. For Carl and Donut, it's anything but a game.

Learn more on Goodreads ➡

Similar to the first book I absolutely loved this one too, and finished it in a couple days as well. This book focuses on the next level in the dungeon, level 3, and introduces new concepts to the game, as well as new characters.

Of course, Dinniman continues to develop the main characters as well, and I'm finding myself beginning to like Princess Donut. Which is strange, as I'm not a cat person. 🙃

Some intergalactic politics are starting to make their way into the story line too, which acts as a nice reprieve from all the mob killing...sometimes. I hope to see these story lines continue to develop as Carl and Donut (hopefully) continue to find out more about this whole shit show they find themselves in.

Blooding loving this series.

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The New Patrol (Liam Scott #2)

Author: Andy McNab
Genre: Military Fiction
Released: 2014
Rating: ★★★☆☆

KNOW YOUR ENEMY.

Liam Scott is back in Afghanistan, this time with 4 Rifles. No longer the new guy, it's his chance to prove himself and take the lead. But the warzone has changed dramatically, and so have the rules.

Working alongside the Afghan National Army, Liam and his new patrol face daily attacks from Taliban insurgents. But the real threat seems to be coming from within his unit.

It looks like there's a traitor in their midst.

Learn more on Goodreads ➡

This is the second book in the trilogy, after reading the first book to my oldest son, he wanted to continue and read this one.

As a veteran myself, parts of this book were close the the bone. I found myself having to take a moment to compose myself a few times, but it's a good read. In hindsight, it's probably too mature and graphic for him, but we're commited now, so we will continue.

We're planning to start the 3rd and final book soon.

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This is what rainy days were made for. 🌧️🐶

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A friend asked for help setting up a blog, so I went with #Pureblog (obviously).

We went from nothing to fully working blog, with all the customisations she wanted in about 25 minutes.

I know I'm bias, but I love how flexible and powerful Pure Blog is becoming.

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Dungeon Crawler Carl

Author: Matt Dinniman
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-fi
Released: 2020
Rating: ★★★★★

You know what’s worse than breaking up with your girlfriend? Being stuck with her prize-winning show cat. And you know what’s worse than that? An alien invasion, the destruction of all man-made structures on Earth, and the systematic exploitation of all the survivors for a sadistic intergalactic game show. That’s what.

Join Coast Guard vet Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, as they try to survive the end of the world—or just get to the next level—in a video game–like, trap-filled fantasy dungeon. A dungeon that’s actually the set of a reality television show with countless viewers across the galaxy. Exploding goblins. Magical potions. Deadly, drug-dealing llamas. This ain’t your ordinary game show.

Welcome, Crawler. Welcome to the Dungeon. Survival is optional. Keeping the viewers entertained is not.

Learn more on Goodreads ➡

Started reading this book after a couple of friends in work recommended it to me. Couldn't put it down and read it in a couple days. I've gone straight onto the next book in the series, and I'm really looking forward to seeing where it goes.

The book has Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy vibes in that it doesn't take itself too seriously, and is a lot of fun to read. Highly recommended.

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So one of the things I've been trying to do as part of my journey to lose weight and get fit is sort my diet out. As the saying goes, "you can't out-train a poor diet". And the worst part of my diet is definitely snacking in the evening.

The routing generally goes:

1. Have dinner.
2. Put the kids to bed and settle down with my wife on the couch.
3. Crave snacks out of habit.
4. Get snacks and eat them!

I'm the type of person who finds an arbitrary thing to aim for very motivating. It's not enough to just want to stop snacking in the evening, nope. That shit will fail pretty quickly. But if I have a streak I have to maintain - now we're talking!

So I decided to build a simple little tool that I called Snacker Tracker. It's just a tap of a button every evening to say whether I've snacked or not, and it maintains a streak. Here's what it looks like on my phone:

Free pass & design

I decided to implement a free pass into the site as well. So I'm allowed to have 1 evening per calendar week where I can snack and it won't affect my streak - after all, I want to be able to have some fun!

I thought about bundling Simple.css in to make it look pretty, but I decided to have some fun with the CSS and went with a neo-brutalist aesthetic, which I think looks great. So much so that I'm thinking about re-designing this site in a similar way, but I've managed to hold off on that...for now.

Retrospective log

Snacker Tracker also has a way of adding days retrospectively, so if I forget to log a day, I can easily go back and do it:

I've only been using Snacker Tracker for a few days, but it's making me pause when that inevitable pang happens in the evening. I'm finding that instead of instinctively raiding the cupboard for some crisps or a chocolate bar, I'm thinking "don't screw up your streak" and not doing it.

I know I'm not hungry during the evening, it's just a habit. My hope is that with time I'll re-train my brain to not expect sugar in the evening, and the pangs will go away. Until then, I'm gonna continue tracking my snacks with this fun little site in the hope that it makes me form better habits.

But Kev, why don't you be a proper grown-up and just use your willpower?

-- All the internet people

Because, Internet Person, it's a habit that I don't even think about, and this forces my to think about it. Yes, I know it's arbitrary and rather childish, but it's working, so what's the harm?

Will you be releasing Snacker Tracker so we can try it?

-- Another internet person

Maybe. I threw it together pretty quickly and the code is rough. A lot of my spare time is focussed on Pure Blog and Pure Comments at the moment, so I don't think I'll have the time to clean the code up to the point where I'm happy to release it any time soon I'm afraid.

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The Smell of AI

by Kevin Wammer

Kevin talks about his opinions for various use cases for AI and LLMs.

Read post ➡

I started reading this post and thought to myself "oh here we go, another piece about how awful AI is..." but as I got further into it, I found myself nodding along.

While I don't feel as strongly as him about AI generated images I do agree with the premise of everything he said. It's refreshing to see some pragmatic opinions on AI and its uses as a tool.

Ended up being a good read.

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I regularly get marketing emails off the back of this site. "Here's a free license for our tool" or "can we put a link to our service in a post?" At least back then they were slightly human.

Now all I get are AI generated shitty emails with no personality whatsoever. Not bashing AI, I'm bashing the lazy marketeers.

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Working great 👍🏻

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Last November I replaced my oldest son's PC with an £88 iMac that was so successful that I'm now doing the same thing again for my youngest son!

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One of my favourite things to do online is perusing the IndieWeb. It's fun, and I've been able to discover a tonne of interesting people along the way. But every now and then, I come across someone who has published their salary history on their site.

At first, I thought this was a great idea. It feels transparent, and it theoretically gives people an idea of what they could or should be earning in a particular field. But as I've discovered more people doing this (for the record, I've only seen it a handful of times), a pattern seems to have emerged that makes me think it might actually have the opposite effect.

Before we go any further, I want to state for the record that I have nothing against people publishing their salary. If you want to do it, that's entirely your call. Personally, I've decided not to post it here, but I am open about it - if you want to know what I earn, email me and I'll gladly tell you.

Discussing pay here in the UK isn't as taboo as in other parts of the world, either. We actually have legislation in place that allows us to talk about our salaries with co-workers.

So what's my concern?

A double-edged sword

Of the handful of times I've seen people sharing their salary history, they are always very high. For context, a six-figure (£100,000) salary in the UK puts you in the top 4% of earners in the country.

This is where my concern starts - we only ever see these high outliers, so the sample size is incredibly skewed. Nobody is rushing to publish their £25,000 salary history, which means the curmudgeon in me can't help but feel that these pages can sometimes read more like a humble brag than genuine advocacy, even if the author's intent was entirely pure.

For the reader, this can be deflating, rather than empowering. A developer earning a perfectly respectable £50k (which already puts them in the top 15% of UK earners) might look at Jane Smith earning £105k and think, "Jesus, I'm doing terribly."

But salary is highly subjective. It depends on where you live, the company you work for, the unique responsibilities of your role, what your peers earn, how hard you negotiate, and how supportive your manager is.

When you strip all that context away and just publish a high number, what is the reader supposed to do with it? If our developer goes to their manager and asks for a 100% pay rise because they saw Jane Smith online earning £105k, they're going to be laughed out of the room. Because, without context, the raw numbers are useless.

I'm all for paying people the maximum amount possible for good work, but unfortunately, we live in a world where many organisations want to pay their staff the minimum they can get away with.

So what's the alternative?

I don't know what the perfect answer is, but I don't think it's telling people to stop sharing. Transparency is important, and it's severely lacking in the corporate world.

Perhaps the solution is context? If you feel comfortable publishing your salary, maybe add a disclaimer explaining the unique circumstances behind it, stressing that it's a record of your personal journey, not an industry target or a standard benchmark.

Or, maybe just ignore everything I've said in this post, as who am I to tell you what to do with your site. 🙃

I've thought about adding a salary page to this site many times, but I've always held off. Honestly, I think I'm grossly overpaid for what I do, especially compared to roles like nurses, police officers, or members of the armed forces. I'm incredibly grateful for it, and I've worked hard to get here, but I don't want to add to the noise.

If you publish your salary on your site, more power to you. But it's worth considering how that number might be perceived by the people reading it, and whether it's truly helping them or just making them feel left behind.

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Rebirth

Author: RR Haywood
Genre: Sci-fi
Released: 2026
Rating: ★★★★☆

How do you prevent a hero from saving the world?In the first trilogy, three heroes were extracted from their timelines to save the world. Now we need them again.

Meet Ben Ryder, Safa Patel, and Harry Madden.

Just not as you knew them.

Three selfish b*stards who hate each other almost as much as they hate everyone else.

REBIRTH takes us back into the Extracted world for another wild adventure chock-full of Nazi gold, Soviet soldiers, dystopian future landscapes, greed, lust, wrath ... and a sabre-toothed tiger called Tiddles.

Learn more on Goodreads ➡

The 4th book in the Extracted series, RR Haywood continues to make these books great.

It's a complete pivot from the first trilogy of books. Same characters, but completely different storyline. The book ends with "to be continued..." so I'm hoping this will be another trilogy of books, as the story is just getting started. Great series of books, highly recommended.

A few people have recommended Dungeon Crawler Carl to me, and I think I'm in the mood for something with a little more humour. So that's what I'm going to start reading next.

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Wife: I need help clipping the goat's hooves. Here, hold this...

Me: ...

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Follow up from this post - I just signed into my Vinted account (to delete it) and it didn't send me an MFA SMS so how the fuck is me giving them my number securing my account in any way?

The internet is fucked.

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Brilliant. I'm such a "valued customer" that they couldn't even be arsed to put my name in the email.

Why is it even necessary to have a "business intelligence database" with a 3rd party? I ordered a fucking laptop. Can a tech company not create their own customer database?

Full email here - https://cdn.kevquirk.com/framework-breach-email.pdf

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I have a habit of giving all our pets nicknames, there's many of them for each of our dogs. We've Nelly for 4 days and already I have:

Nells Bells
Nelly Bean
Nelly Furtado
Man Eater (after the song)
Nelly the Elephant

It's anyone's guess which will stick. Our other dogs, Tia and Sid, are t-bone and squid (short for Sqidley) respectively. 🤷🏼‍♂️

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Wooh! The last few weeks have been absolutely mental here in Casa del Quirk.

Around 2 months ago we started renovating the stables to make things better for the goats and chickens. We've had an extraction system put in so fresh air is always circulating, as chickens are very dusty and goats don't like it too hot and stuffy.

While we were at it, we also had some new fencing and gates put in, as well as better hard standing around the stables. Finally we had the old, rotten windows and doors replaced with lovely new ones that have shutters so we can control the air flow depending on the weather.

Our stables with the new windows and doors

As you can imagine, this has been a significant expense, but we planned for it. So it's all good, but then...

Sick pet

Around a month ago we noticed that our older (and favourite) dog, Tia, had rather smelly breath and her mouth was bleeding when she was playing with her ball. We figured it's just old age and bad teeth, so we took her to the vet to have her mouth checked and properly cleaned.

Unfortunately it was bad news. Tia has a benign but aggressive tumour growing in her gum. Apparently they're relatively common in older dogs (she's nearly 14) but if left untreated it would get very painful and we ultimately end up having to have her euthanised as it would significantly effect her quality of life.

So we paid the unexpected £1,000 (~$1,350) bill to have the initial tumour removed, her teeth cleaned, and a biopsy. In the meantime we were also referred to a specialist to hopefully get the issue sorted properly.

Last week Tia went to the specialist to have a full body CT scan. This would give them more info about the tumour in her mouth and what our options are, but also (because she's so old) let us know if there's anything more malicious going on in her body.

We have to be pragmatic about this - the treatment was going to be expensive, and we had to make a call on whether we wanted it doing if they found something like cancer lingering somewhere in her body. Luckily for us the old girl came back with a clean bill of health and the tumour was treatable. That was another £1,500 (~$2,020) down the drain, but well spent.

The procedure to treat the tumour involved taking around 40mm (~1.5") of her lower jaw away. It's a significant operation and the recovery, especially for an older dog, will be difficult. On Monday she had the procedure, it went really well, and yesterday she came home a day earlier than we expected. She's a tough old girl.

She's much better today, but still struggling as she's been through a lot. Having a pet that's in pain is the worst - you can't really reassure them like you can a human, so you find yourself hopelessly watching them suffer.

It's heartbreaking, but it's for the best. We're still to get the bill for this procedure, but the vet has estimated an eye-watering £4,400 (~$6,000).

If anyone is playing along, that's £6,900 (~$9,200) in unexpected vet bills over the last few weeks. She also isn't insured as it's prohibitively expensive for a dog of her age. So we need to foot the entire bill.

Anyway, on to more positive news...

New pet

Last Saturday we welcomed the newest addition to our family, Nelly the 8 week old Labrador/cocker spaniel cross. The breed is known as a Cockador apparently - very unfortunate name if you ask me.

Nelly on her first visit to the vet, being very good.

Like any puppy, Nelly is a lot of work. Especially if you add into the mix a very sick dog, and the kids being off school for the summer holidays. I've also been working long hours recently, so my poor wife has been juggling most of this on her own. She's at her whits end.

Nelly, Tia, and our other dog Sidney are all getting on well though. Nelly is even helping distract Tia from the pain she's in.

It's fair to say that all our savings are gone, and the last of Tia's treatment will need to be thrown on a credit card so we can pay it off over the next few months.

Things are extremely busy and stressful at the moment. But hopefully we will have Tia for a couple more years so her, Nelly, and Sid will become a proper little pack that gives us lots of lovely memories.

Pets are a gift and we wouldn't have it any other way. I just wish vets bills were a little cheaper!

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Thinking about selling the 64GB RAM from my laptop and paying off my mortgage...

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Our new addition to the family, Nelly, has arrived and she's causing havoc already. 🤣

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Signed up for a Vinted account. My options to "secure my account" were adding a phone number, or to logout.

I fucking hate this side of the internet. Scumbags.

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Today is the first of August. Where the hell did the first two thirds of 2026 go??? 😵‍💫

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So many links in one post. I ended up going down all kinds of rabbit holes off the back of this single post (also the second time I've linked to Sal's blog today 🙃).

I discovered Coyote's blog, and Sylvia's. So went ahead and read some of their posts. I was already aware of Brennan's fantastic blog, but it's a great read, so check it out.

Anyway, I completely agree with what Sal, Coyote, and Brennan say in their posts - the backbone of the internet is the hyperlink, so go forth and link out to your fellow bloggers with reckless abandon.

It's what makes the web, the web. 🕸️

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Apparently left-handed people can't use a fountain pen as the left hand smudges the ink as they write. I call bullshit on that. I'm left-handed, and I use a fountain pen just fine - even with an "overhand" grip.

I read this post from Neal Stephenson a few days ago (thanks to Sal for sharing it), where Neal - a professional, left-handed writer who writes his books with a pen and paper - shares some of his experience and advice on writing with a fountain pen.

I've been back using fountain pens for a few months now and it's going great, but as Neal says - it's all about the paper. I use a decent quality notepad for writing my notes, with either a £30 Lamy Safari fountain pen, or a ~£100 Kaweco AL Sport. Both work great and I'm yet to find myself with pen on my hand. Here's an example of me writing in my notebook, using both my Lamy and Kaweco.

As you can see, I have an overhand grip where my hand swipes across the ink as I write, but the ink is dry by the time my hand gets there. Both these pens have a medium nib too.

So if you're left-handed and think you can't use a fountain pen, you can! You just need some decent paper.

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Toot.community is shutting down

by Jorijn Schrijvershof

Sadly, toot.community is shutting down in October. This post talks about why Jorijn has made that decision.

Read post ➡

So much of this post resonated with me and aligned closely with my reasons to step away from Fosstodon. Being a fediverse server admin is a thankless job and as Jorijn says:

I find myself feeling more angry or discouraged after spending time as an admin, and that’s not what I want from social media or a volunteer project.

Over a year on since I stepped away from the Fosstodon team, I'm much happier now, but the experience has tainted my experience of social media. These days I probably visit Fosstodon maybe once per week. Every post I write is written here, on my site, and syndicated over there. I feel this is much better for me personally, as it keeps me away from the latest drama.

When I do go visit the timeline, it's usually fun because it's fleeting. I don't have time to get involved in the latest drama. I go, check notifications, quickly peruse the timeline, and leave. It's a much healthier way of engaging, I think.

More broadly, I think the issue with admin and mod burnout on the fediverse is what will limit it in the long run. It's almost entirely propped up by volunteers, who don't want to be involved with the drama, or be attacked for making a decision you don't agree with. And as a result, servers like toot.community fall by the wayside.

I don't know what the solution is here - I actually don't think there is one. It's a fundamental limitation of the way in which the fediverse is architected and as a result, another great server is gone. 😔

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Always fun when your bike runs out of electricity on the way to work.

Note to self: connect the trickle charger TONIGHT!

(Wife is on the way with my jump box to save me)

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The poor buzzard was still there when I was walking the dogs this morning, so clearly something was wrong. Luckily my wife was able to get hold of a local falconer who was able to catch him and hopefully nurse him back to health. 🦅

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Taking the dogs for a walk with our oldest and we came across this beautiful buzzard just sat there. Wasn't bothered by us really. I just hope it doesn't have a bust wing or anything.

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I think if I had my time again, I would have become a software developer. I just so much fun - coming up with ways to solve a problem in an elegant way is very satisfying.

Then people emailing saying they enjoy the tools I'm creating. Very rewarding!

Mind you, would it still be as fun if it was my job? I don't know. 🤔

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Your RSS Reader Is Robbing You

by Antonio Santos

Antonio opines that by using RSS feeds instead of visiting people's sites, we're robbing ourselves of enjoying the design many site owners have put a lot of work into.

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On the other side of the argument is this post by Christian Cleberg where he argues that using RSS allows us to consume many different sites with typography that we prefer.

Maybe the site's font isn't that nice, or it's too bright, too dark, too small. Using RSS normalises the design across all sites and allows readers to have the same experience across all the sites we read.

I lean more to Christian's way of thinking, but I do regularly visit people's sites too, just to see the design and how it may have changed over time. It's a simple click of the post title on my RSS reader, Miniflux, so it's simple for me to get the best of both worlds.

So I don't think our RSS readers our robbing us - we can have our cake and eat it.

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Security versus Privacy

by Loren Stephens

Loren talks about the differences between Security and Privacy, but also how (and why) he prioritises one over the other.

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I actually wrote about this topic back in 2019 - I agree with Loren that Security and Privacy are often used interchangeably, but they're objectively different things.

Anyway, that's old news. The thing I wanted to comment on in this post is Loren's position on how he prioritises one over the other. He says:

So, when I ask myself which one matters more, I consistently arrive at the same answer: security first, then privacy.

I used to be among those who avoided Google services due to privacy concerns, and I understand why. [...] However, by choosing to avoid Google, many people end up using less secure alternatives. They've prioritized the second question while neglecting the first.

I agree strongly with this. I've fallen foul of this myself, where in my efforts to de-Google, I've ended up using worse tools both in terms of security and functionality.

At this point in my life, I just want my shit to work well and get out of my way. I do, however, prioritise security, then privacy, then functionality. Ultimately, I care more about keeping my data secure, than anything else.

That's not to say I don't care about privacy. I just care more about securing my data.

If I can find a tool that gives me both security and privacy, I'll use that every time.

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Yup. Goat-proofing the chicken door really worked a treat. FML. 🤦🏼‍♂️

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Today was spent goat-proofing the automatic chicken door. We recently moved it to ground level and now the goats use it as a scratch post. 🐐

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Back in May, I wrote a post about how I'd migrated all my repos away from GitHub. This ended up being a combination of my self-hosted Git server on my Synology (for my private repos) and Codeberg for my public ones.

Well, since then Codeberg has just given me problem after problem. I had issues working with repos via SSH for weeks. It just kept timing out, or taking an age to actually do anything. So I switched to HTTPS instead, which seemed a little better, albeit still generally very slow.

This morning I came to do a bit of work on some issues and PRs that have been logged against the Pure Comments repo and (unsurprisingly at this point), I was greeted with this:

I've been trying to get to the repo for around 30 minutes now, and it just keeps failing. I can't work like this - I'm a busy guy, so when I do get time to work on these fun side projects, my shit needs to work.

People give GitHub a hard time for outages, scraping, etc. but in all the years I've used it, I've never had an issue. It has always been quick, and it always worked.

In my boredom while waiting for Codeberg to sort themselves out, I decided to peruse my RSS feeds and I came across this post by Sal. It seems he's been having similar problems with Gitlab.

Moving back

This was the final straw. I've had enough of battling with Codeberg, so I've switched back to GitHub. Some may not like this decision as Codeberg is generally considered the more community friends code hub, but I need to make a pragmatic choice here as the constant issues are sapping most the fun out of these projects.

I'll continue to host my private projects on the Synology, as that works great. But as of right now, we're back on GitHub for all [my projects. I think I've caught all references to Codeberg across the various sites and docs (thanks to Gemini), but if you see a problem, please log an issue.

There is 1 final update on Codeberg for both Pure Blog and Pure Comments. This points the updater back to GitHub, from then on, subsequent releases will be on GitHub.

What about...

I'm bound to get some comments and suggestions about other options other than moving back to GitHub, so I'll try and hit them before you take the time to comment/email with recommendations:

1. What about a self-hosted Forgejo instance?
   Absolutely not. I don't have time to maintain something like that. I'd rather spend my free time working on fun projects than managing infrastructure.

2. But GitHub are really bad because of [reason(s)] what about [other tool]?
   Nope, sorry. I don't want to use other platforms that potentially introduce the same issues I've been having with Codeberg. Look at Sal's post further up - he was on Gitlab and having similar problems to me.

3. This is disappointing, are you sure about your decision?
   I'm very sure. It is disappointing, I agree. But I've given it a lot of thought over the last few weeks and I'd rather go with the tool that I know will work, than the one I have to battle with. Plus, this is all public code, so I don't think I'm giving anything away by switching back.

4. I'll NEVER use GitHub. I'm gonna stop using [project] now.
   That's a shame, but it's your call.

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Anyone using Pop!_OS with Cosmic? I tried it when it was first released, but I looks like they've done a lot of dev work to it and it's improving all the time.

Considering installing it again...

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A few of us were talking to one of the summer interns at work about age:

Someone: How old do you think Kev is?

Intern: [with all the confidence in the world] 50?

I turn 42 in August. FML. 🤣

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I went for an 8km (5 mile) run this evening. I'm working my way up to 10km, but I think this was a little too much, too soon. We'll see how my middle-aged joints are in the morning...

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Every time I look at Sven's blog I get jealous. I loved his previous design so much I copied it (with his permission). His new design is so fun and it's making me want to make mine more fun (no copying this time though).

I'm just not sure I have the time at the moment. 🤔

https://svbck.blog/

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