Kev Quirk publisher

Terence Eden asking on Mastodon what people's setups look like. Here's mine - 38" ultrawide LG monitor that docks to my Framework 13, Fully standing desk, fish tank and motorbike helmets on the wall. I love my home office, but I do like heading into the office too.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

So today marks the 4th anniversary of us moving to our 2.5 acre smallholding in north Wales. I can't believe it's been 4 years already - it feels like 5 minutes ago that I wad writing my 3 years at the smallholding post.

Last year's update wasn't as positive as previous years thanks to us having to get a new roof, which cost a shit tonne of money, and caused leaks all over the house. But I'm happy to say that the update for this year is mostly positive. I ended last year's post by saying:

If next year I can get the polytunnel and conservatory done, I'll class that as a win. I'd love to get a quad bike for towing the flail too, but again...money.

Unfortunately there's no poly tunnel, no insulation in the conservatory, and no quad bike in the barn. Let me explain...

Goats

In March of this year we decided it would be a good idea to get some goats. My wife had been talking to a goat farmer in mid-Wales for a few months, and we decided the time was right to get some. So we ordered 4 male pygmy goats and brought them home in the back of the car!

Our first 4 goats arriving home

While we were at the farm, the farmer showed us a beautiful half pygmy, half "normal" goat and her 2 kids, along with a little pygmy goat that followed her around like a lost puppy. We immediately warmed to all of them, but we couldn't fit them in the car, so we had to pass.

After a week or so of thinking about them, my wife decided to head back down there and pick them up too. So we ended up with 8 goats all together. I'm really glad that my wife decided to get the second batch, as the mum (now called Betsy) is so friendly and one of my favourite of the group.

Betsy being lovely (as usual)

Improving their home

We're very lucky to have a pair of stables at the back of our property, one was already used by the chickens, so we setup the other for the goats. However, the stables and surrounding needed some work. We had to:

• Install a land drain and level the ground
• Extend the hard standing around the stables
• Get some fencing installed
• Replace the doors and windows
• Install ventilation and power
• Create a "rock wall" for the goats to play on

Unfortunately this all took up what little budget we had left following the roof, so the poly tunnel and insulation in the conservatory had to wait.

We completed the renovations on the stables and both the chickens and the goats now have a lovely little home that has lots of space, but (more importantly) meets their needs.

Goats and chickens on the rock wall

Here's a little gallery of how the work progressed on the stables:

Land drain installed and ground leveled Extended hard standing around the stables Fencing being installed New windows and doors being installed All finished...ish Bonus photo of a happy Lando sitting in his food bowl

Chickens

As well as goats, we decided to add to our flock of chickens, but instead of just buying more we wanted to do it a little differently. We have a rooster now, so all our eggs are fertilised and we decided to try and hatch some eggs instead. We also wanted to get something a little different, so my wife bought some guinea fowl eggs, which we put under a broody hen to see if they would hatch. They did, and we ended up with 5 beautiful (but noisy) guinea fowl.

Three of the fowl keets The other 2 with their adopted mum, Nugget 4 of the 5 fowl today, still with Nugget

The guinea fowl were a great success - 5 of the 6 eggs hatched. So we decided to attempt the same thing with some of our chicken eggs, especially since a fox had gotten one of the hens and we wanted to hatch some of her eggs. Unfortunately we had no broody hens at the time, so we decided to buy an incubator and cheat.

We attempted to hatch 12 eggs, but only 3 were successful unfortunately. We think 2 of them are roosters too, so we will see how that goes as they grow up and undoubtedly challenge their dad. We're thinking about doing it again this spring, but we're worried about having a plethora of roosters and what we will ultimately have to do to them. 💀

Finally I installed some new perches for the chickens to roost on in the evening. Below is a removable shelf that makes things way easier to clean.

Another blow

So at this point we had used up everything we had saved. We had literally nothing in our savings account. Then we noticed that our older dog, Tia, who's 14, was getting very smelly breath and whenever she was chewing her favourite ball, her mouth was bleeding.

So we took her to the vets and they told us she had a fairly common type of benign tumour growing in her mouth. Although it was benign, it was very aggressive and if left untreated she would have 6-12 months if she was lucky. And it would be a very uncomfortable end for her.

We had to get it looked at, but this was going to cost thousands and in a 14 year old dog, I wasn't sure if it was worth it. The last thing we wanted was to put her through all this only to find out in a few months that she had another terminal condition that would end her life anyway.

I know that sounds heartless, but I think at times like this it's important to be practical and take into account how much the dog will suffer, and whether we're doing it for us, or them.

She needed a CT scan on her jaw to see if surgery was viable, so we decided to get a full body CT scan done instead. This would give us a good indication if anything else untoward was going on in her body. Lucky for us the CT came back all clear and the surgery on her jaw was viable, so we went ahead.

Three operations, 1 infection, and lots of discomfort later for poor Tia, and she's now fully recovered after having around 40% of her lower jaw removed. Unfortunately for her, this means her rather large tongue often dangles out of her mouth these days. But we think she's still gorgeous.

As if this wasn't punishment enough, we also got a new puppy, Nelly, at the same time that Tia was going through all this. So managing a sick dog, a new puppy, and keeping 2 kids entertained during their summer holidays really wasn't a fun time.

We had bought Nelly way before we knew Tia was sick. The kids knew she was coming, and we had all met Nell multiple times. So although we knew it would be a nightmare, we didn't want to renege on buying her. Let me tell you, dear reader, it was rough. Like, really rough, but we're glad we stuck it out because Nelly is beautiful and such a wonderful addition to our family.

What's next?

Tia's surgery ended up costing us around £6,000 (~$8,000). We already had no money, so it had to go on a credit card, which we will pay off over the next few months.

Our plans for year 5 are the same as year 4, I think - we'd love to get a poly tunnel in and the roof in the conservatory insulated so we can use it all year round. But we will need to see how the finances go - hopefully there will be no more unexpected expenses for a little while. We can only hope.

In the meantime we continue to enjoy our brood of various animals and the little plot we call home.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

We had a Hotpoint engineer come out to repair our washing machine yesterday. While replacing the machine, he forgot to connect the waste pipe and we came down to this mess this morning. 😡

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

The amount of AI generated sales emails I get these days is astonishing.

If you can't be arsed to write your own sales pitch, why the fuck should I be arsed about your product?

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Someone emailed recently to tell me that they like the idea of Pure Blog, but they thought the admin interface was "really ugly" so they can't use it. Fair enough - beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, but I don't think that was a fair evaluation of Pure Blog's admin UI.

When I built Pure Blog, I wanted it to be different from the rest of the crowd. The whole point of it was to have just enough features, and no fluff. So to me a more brutalist/utilitarian UI made sense.

The likes of Grav, WordPress, Ghost, and Bludit all have similar interfaces. White and grey with blues, purples, and greens. Rounded corners etc. All very iOS-ish. All very...safe. I wanted Pure Blog to stand out from the crowd and have its own identity, and honestly, I'm thrilled with the results.

Pssst. If you haven't tried Pure Blog yet, check out the demo site.

But what I like may not be what you like, which is why I built Pure Blog to be very customisable from the start. You can change the fonts from mono, to sans, or serif with the click of a button, or you can change the look of the entire UI if you know some CSS.

And this is what I said to the person who emailed me saying it was ugly. But they came back with...

Great. Do you have any examples?

I didn't! So I decided to create some examples and show them here so you can see just how customisable Pure Blog really is. I know other CMSs can customise their UI too, but unlike them, Pure Blog needs no plugins, hacks, or bullshit. This can all be done with standard Pure Blog right out of the box.

So here are some examples of the Pure Blog admin UI where all I've added is custom CSS within settings.

Cupertino

How about bringing a macOS / iOS vibe to your Pure Blog site?

Purely Ghost

Or maybe you like the super clean lines of the Ghost UI? Well, you can have something similar to that too if you like:

Pure Press

Are you a WordPress purist who really wants to be as faithful as possible to their design? Well guess what - you can have that too!

Windows 4 lyfe

Maybe you're a lover of anything Bill Gates touches. If so, a Windows theme might be more your thing.

How about Windows 11?

Or Windows XP?

Or if you're really old, Windows 95

Terminal FTW

Maybe all this GUI stuff isn't your jam? Do you yearn for the days of yore when the interface to a computer was terminal-only with a monochrome CRT monitor?

Well, Pure Blog can do that too:

Green – the connoisseur's terminal.

Or orange, the truly old-school terminal.

Your imagination is the limit

I think these screenshots show what Pure Blog is capable of. Your imagination really is the limit. So just because you think the default look of Pure Blog is ugly, don't fret - you can easily change it to be whatever you want it to be.

If you're interested in grabbing any of these themes for your Pure Blog installation, all the CSS is available over on the docs site.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Out for coffee this morning with my wife, as is our Wednesday morning routine, and this little guy came to sit with us.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

First fire of the year and Sid is loving it.

Not sure we appreciated the giant queen wasp that came bumbling out of the chimney though.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

I've had lots of hobbies over the years. To name a few off the top of my head, there's been fish keeping, guitar, harmonica, fountain pens, watches, motorbikes, this blog, web development, 3D printing, tattoos, digital minimalism, table tennis, and many more.

Some of my hobbies have stuck, but I've never gotten so enthralled into a hobby that I become obsessed. Instead, there's generally 4 steps in the process:

1. I decide I want to take up a hobby.
2. I read, watch videos, and obsessively learn about the topic.
3. Invest lots of time and/or money into the hobby.
4. Decide I've learned enough and move on.

I don't always get to step 4. For some hobbies, like watch collecting and motorbikes, I continue to invest some time and money into them, and they continue to bring me joy. But I'm not obsessed. I see someone wearing an interesting watch; it piques my interest and we can have a conversation about it. But I'm not the type of person who can tell a watch brand from across a room (unless it's a Casio).

Similarly, I love riding and working on my motorbikes - both bring me genuine joy. But I'm not the kind of biker who has to get out on their bike as much as possible, where driving the car is some kind of punishment. I enjoy driving too.

While walking the dogs this morning I was idly thinking about all the random possessions I have scattered around the house that are the culmination of many abandoned hobbies. I started to think about why that is, and it dawned on me…

It's not guitars, or harmonicas, or fish, or motorbikes, or watches, or anything else. It's learning about those thing that I find so enjoyable. It's the nitrogen cycle of an aquarium. It's learning to place your fingers at the right part of the fretboard on a guitar. It's learning to ride a motorbike safely and smoothly through some technical twisty roads, or learning how a clutch works and how to strip it down.

It's learning. Learning is my hobby.

And once I've decided I've learned enough about a topic, I'm good. I don't want to be the next Eric Clapton, Valentino Rossi, King of DIY, or Teddy Baldassarre. I want to be good enough at those hobbies, then move on to the next thing I can learn about.

I think that's why computers have always interested me, because there's always something new to learn with them.

So in future, instead of going neck deep and spending money on the next frivolous hobby, maybe I'll just spend some time learning about the thing to see if that satisfies my learning hobby. It probably won't though, as I'm something of a magpie when it comes to shiny things.

But hey, at least I'm having fun and I'm not hurting anyone, right?

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Been trying a new email client, Hylki, after reading about it on OMG! Ubuntu! Really enjoying it. It's modern and has a tonne of features.

https://hylki.app/

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

I really enjoy writing. Not typing - writing. With a fountain pen on good quality paper. I find the whole process cathartic; putting pen to paper demands far more use of my grey matter than hammering away at a keyboard.

I mentioned in a recent post that when I finished an English course many years ago, I was hunting for creative reasons to type. Similarly, over the last 6 months or so I've gotten into fountain pens, and now I'm looking for ways to write creatively.

I thought about handwriting some text then scanning/photographing it to publish it here, but that feels too convoluted. Plus, I feel like writing with a pen is more of a personal endeavour.

Then it struck me - why not get a few pen pals!

So I'm throwing this out into the wild - does anyone fancy exchanging letters with me?

The only real requirement is that you can read and write in English (sadly, it's the only language I speak). I'm looking for perhaps 3–5 people to swap letters with. Naturally, we'll need to share postal addresses so we can send our prose back and forth.

There’s zero pressure when it comes to frequency, either. Just write back whenever life allows. If a month or so passes without hearing from you, no hard feelings. I'll just assume our correspondence has naturally run its course.

If you're interested, please fill out the short form linked below. Since I can only manage 3–5 pen pals, submitting the form doesn't guarantee we'll write, but if we seem like a good match and share common ground, I'll reach out by email to swap details and get things going.

I won't be publishing these letters online - these are purely offline, private conversations. I'd ask that you keep them private, too.

If you prefer not to use Google Forms, feel free to email me with the following:

• Your name
• Preferred email address
• Which country/city you live in
• A little bit about yourself and why you want to write to me
• Some topics you'd like to discuss

Sign up to become a Pen Pal

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Following my recent post about not checking Mastodon, a reader raised an interesting privacy concern regarding Webmentions. They explained that they had stopped using Webmentions altogether because Fediverse users often don't realise - or explicitly consent to - their replies being republished on an external blog.

This surprised me, as I'd never considered that Webmentions could be a privacy concern.

To my mind, a public post on an open platform like Mastodon is precisely that: public. The Fediverse is decentralised by design. When you reply to someone, your message doesn't remain isolated on your home instance; it federates across countless independent servers. Pulling a public reply onto kevquirk.com via a Webmention bridge is conceptually no different from fosstodon.org relaying a reply originally posted on mastodon.social.

Unless the concern is about deletion persistence (e.g. cached mentions remaining if a post is deleted), I struggle to see where the privacy violation lies when republishing content that was broadcast publicly to the open web in the first place.

Am I missing a subtlety here? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Took the dogs out on the field this morning. All the dewey spider webs were beautiful in the morning sun.

I'm no Jack Baty, but they're good enough.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

My relationship with Mastodon has been somewhat tumultuous over the years, until I eventually stepped down from Fosstodon around 18 months ago. I have to say, it was the right decision. I don't miss running Fosstodon one bit.

But since then, I've found myself less and less engaged in the Fediverse. Mainly because there's so much outrage over there. It's so tiring.

The majority of my timeline is fun, but the outraged minority have ruined for me. To the point where I don't want to be there, and I'm much happier having not checked the timeline for the last month or so.

I'm not off the Fedi, however. What I've done is build features into this site that allow me to automatically cross-post to the Fedi. I even have a custom page that only I can access, which allows me to create a note as simply as posting to Mastodon:

As well as this, I've implemented Webmentions in Pure Comments as of earlier this month. So I can reply to any comments from afar too.

It's nice. I can see still engage with people on the Fedi, all while not having to put up with the checking the timelines.

What Now?

I have around 12,000 followers on my Mastodon account. Because Mastodon really doesn't scale well, those 12k followers take a fair amount of Fosstodon's resources. Which I don't think is fair if I'm not really using the service (I do donate every month).

So I'm thinking about spinning up a single user GoToSocial instance that I can live on. That way I'm not using any of Fosstodon's resources and I can do my own thing, on my own server.

I own thefedi.uk and thefediverse.uk so something like @kev@thefedi.uk would be quite cool, I think. I could even provide accounts to friends in the future then too. On the other hand, I'm not sure I want the headache of managing a federated server again.

Maybe I should stop overthinking it and just stay on Fosstodon. What would you do in my position?

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

This site is the most fun I've had in a while. Destroy any website!

https://destroy.spritefusion.com/

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Today marks a year since my little sister, Lisa, took her own life. She was 34.

It was an overdose, but we don't know if it was an accident or suicide. We’ll never get an answer, yet I lean toward believing it was by choice. As grim as it sounds, picturing her with some control over the end brings me a small measure of peace.

I still think about her every day, and I still get upset regularly. Especially when I've been to visit my nephew and I see the sadness in his eyes.

At first I was angry at the selfishness of it all, but I think that's gone now. These days I'm just sad.

Mum blames herself, and has asked me numerous times where she went wrong. I never have an answer for that. What can I say? "Well the rest of us turned out ok, Mum. So you did fine." That feels dismissive of her emotions. So I just give her a sad smile and ask her to not think those things.

I miss her. I miss her laugh and dry sense of humour. I miss how she would always call people on their bullshit. Never afraid of speaking up.

Hopefully next year it will be a little less raw...

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

I think it's time... #Ubuntu

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Last weekend my wife called me over to show me something on her phone. She was going through her old emails and came across some emails we had passed back and forth, from when we first met.

She and I met in a club and went on a couple of dates, but then I deployed to Afghanistan with the Army. We continued to converse via email mostly, and phone where possible - this was before the days of FaceTime etc. - and the rest is history. That was in 2006, and 20 years later we're still very happily married with a couple kids.

Anyway, upon reading the emails I immediately wanted the ground to swallow me up. Not because they were overly mushy or lovey dovey (they were), but because the spelling and grammar were horrendous. I was never a particularly academic kid - in fact, I was mostly disengaged in school and really didn't try. I was clever, but I never applied myself. I was too busy being a stupid teenager. As a result, my written English was awful (it's still not great now, but it's better).

For example, I didn't know the difference between "there", "they're", and "their". And you can forget about "your" versus "you're". "Too" vs "to"? Not a chance. Where, were, and we're baffled me. I had no idea where a comma was supposed to go in a sentence, and I'd never even heard of an Oxford comma.

You get the idea.

Fixing the problem

During my time in the Army, written English wasn't really needed, so I wasn't too concerned. But after getting out and finding a job in IT, it quickly became apparent that my lack of basic English knowledge would hold me back. So I decided to fix it, and enrolled in a night school course.

To my surprise I really enjoyed it. It turned out that writing and learning are a lot of fun, and I was constantly looking for ways to practice my new found writing skills. I think that's part of why I still love typing - I just find creating words on a screen a lot of fun. Yeah, I'm weird. I know.

So I completed the night school course and came away with much improved grammar and a desire to write all the things. But replying to emails and writing reports in work wasn't scratching the creative itch for me.

Discovering blogging

One of the services the IT company I worked for offered was web hosting. I'd never really got involved in any of that, so learning about DNS, web servers, MySQL etc. was really interesting. I'd done a bit of basic web design during my college IT course, but never anything more.

"College" in the UK is different to college in the US. We call that university here. In college we do our A-levels, which are intermediate qualifications between high school and university. I don't have a degree.

A few of our customers had WordPress sites, and it blew my mind. Here is a web application that I can host myself, on my own server, with my own domain name. Furthermore, I can write what I want and publish it on the web for anyone to read. This was the creative outlet I'd been looking for!

So in 2010 I registered kevquirk.com, set up WordPress on a shared host, and started writing. Sixteen years later I'm still here, and still thoroughly enjoying writing on the web. Albeit no longer on WordPress.

Final thoughts

It's funny how these seemingly unrelated things connect together in retrospect and take us down a road we never thought we'd walk. Back in 2000, when I was leaving high school, if you'd have asked my high school English teacher (hi Mrs Daniels!) if she thought I'd be producing creative writing on the web for 16 years, she'd have laughed in your face. Hard.

But I am. And it's all thanks to a basic written English course that I attended for a couple of months, just to improve my writing to help me with work.

I'm not really sure how to wrap this one up. I suppose my final thought is that it's never too late to learn. And you never know where it will take you. A simple thing like a basic English night course could end up forming the longest running, most enjoyable hobby you have in your life.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Nelly the pup absolutely loving life in the field! 🤣

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Because a basic sitemap would be boring!

https://kevquirk.com/sitemap

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

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

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

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! 🦵🏼

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

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!

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

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?

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

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.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

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.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

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.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

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.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

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.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

This is what rainy days were made for. 🌧️🐶

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

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.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

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.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.