The move to Linux
Life ... the universe! SysAdmin
I got sick of Windows, it's bloat, it's constant push of AI into everything and just decided it was time to look at alternatives. Read more
Blog
Podman and Devcontainers
There has been a lot of talk in the development community about the practice of devcontainers; that is, using small disposable containers for developing, proving and then ultimately colaboration during your development process in order to remove the need to install tooling on your machine. Read more
Terraform, AzApi and Parallelism
For the past few months I’ve been buried neck deep in Terraform, pipelines and such - building large amounts of Infrastructure as Code, simplifying life for engineers where possible (but not me lol) which is why I’ve been fairly quiet. Read more
Troubleshooting PowerBI Deployment Pipelines
PowerBI is Microsoft “premier” reporting technology, but anyone that has worked with it knows how absolutely woeful it is when it comes to deployment approaches. You end up with these (sometimes massive) pbix files to move around, and keep in sync between multiple environments. Read more
Apps for everything!
When did we become a user base demanding an application for absolutely everything? I recently caught myself in this trap, but realising that most apps on your smartphone are just absolutely terrible. Read more
Fediverse Rambles
For the past few month’s I’ve been exploring alternatives to the “traditional” social media platforms for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and the like - mostly after Elon’s rather … explosive … purchase of the bird platform. Everyone expected it to get a little rocky, but I don’t think anyone expected the mass layoffs, or the absolutely crazy ranting that ensued. Or even the technological lurching that has taken place since. It does feel like just a matter of time until that particular house of cards comes a-tumbling down. I think the most telling thing for me is the information that was posted regarding it not actually having a true cold-start process in place – one hopes that this piece of information is no longer true. Read more
[Domestic Abuse] - Aftermath and Getting Help
Trigger warning: This is going to be a series of posts about domestic abuse, and things that have occurred to me in recent years. I am not going to name people, I am not going to give details. It’s simply to try and identify where - I believe - the system is failing to sign post and help people in these situations, and I am writing this to both hopefully help others in the same (or similar) situations, but also to try and give myself somewhere to … order my thoughts. The first post on this is here Domestic Abuse - In the beginning Read more
Calling Time
Trigger warning: Seems I do trigger warnings a bit on this blog! Sorry! This one has references to health issues. Read more
Google Nest - How smart is smart thermostat?
Life ... the universe! Development
Just how smart is a Google Nest thermostat really? I’ve had one for just over a year now, and yes, it has reduced my oil consumption in this old property considerably, but any learning (or even, moderately decent, non-simplistic switch based) thermostat would have done the same. Read more
Microsoft Azure, Pentesting and standards
Penetration testing against cloud deployments can be a very contentious issue with some companies, but with many of the verticals that I work it’s a necessary evil - whether you are deploying IaaS components or PaaS, buying a SaaS platform or a mixture, it’s highly likely your project is going to need to look at some form of security assurance. Read more