• Happy new iPhone and new iOS week to all who observe! I have been holding off upgrading my phone for a few years now. I picked up a 12 mini at the height of the pandemic (when going too far from a charger was not all that frequent) and have...

• This week has been a planning week at work, along with the regular things that we need to keep on top of. And while I do enjoy being prepared for what is to come, it can be tricky to balance introducing and thinking about new work, with try...

• This week, I finally feel like I'm back in the swing of things! But we'll see how long that lasts as we're getting in to planning for the next quarter at work (and Abby is off overseas in the next few weeks).
• I have been chippin...

• This week was our first week back at work post-holiday. What a shock to the system 😅! While nothing at work was on-fire, there were several days in the week where I thought to myself "was I able to do all of this before" — it was ...

• We spent the first half of this week in New Zealand, wrapping up the rest of our trip from last week.
• On Monday we drove out to Rotorua — a city with seemingly infinite geothermal activity. Local parks have fenced off geothermal pools, our ...

For the longest time, I have wanted to be able to write with just an iPad, with markdown, in some native text editor and not need to copy and paste text in to a WYSYWIG.

My previous attempts included: - WordPress; which was okay. Though it ...

• Short week at work this week. This quarter's refresh day fell on Monday. It was sunny up in Canberra, so I used it to clean the fly screens and do some other outdoor tidying. On Thursday morning, I flew in to Melbourne and met some coll...

The first few weeks of any new project are always the most exciting! When exploration and problem solving us abundant, and suffering for decisions of yesterday is scarce.

Over the last few weeks I have been putting together a small app to h...

• We're getting ready for a couple weeks of holiday in the coming weeks! It'll be the first time we've had a proper holiday since 2017, and I am so excited! There are no concrete plans, other than get on a plan to New Zealand, pic...

• I started a new iOS project this week to help out Abby's sewing hobby (but also to take a look at some of the new things with SwiftData). The last project I started with SwiftUI was a re-write of Mercury, but CoreData proved to be a rig...

• I caught up with a colleague from Melbourne and their partner this week for lunch, and it was lovely! Lunch time hangs and unscheduled social time are some of the things that I miss the most about "working from the office". There ...

• Almost half way through the year, and half way through winter! This weekend was a beauty here in Canberra. It was sunny as usual, but we had a couple of days of weather warm enough to leave some windows and doors open. Now this is probably ...

My playdate arrived while I was in Melbourne last week! I pre-ordered it when they opened back in 2021, and it was absolutely worth the wait! The hardware itself so solid and adorable and the OS is whimsical AF. It shipped with a couple of g...

• Another week in Melbourne in the books! I spent this one mainly visiting family and working. The last time I was down, my team was all of 3 people. It has since gained 4 more, so I took this chance to meet almost everyone (thanks again COVI...

• This morning I flew out to Melbourne. I have a habit, when travelling, to get to wherever I need to be well in advance of the suggested arrival times. So if an airline is asking me to be at the gate ~40 mins before departure, I am usually t...

I've been playing through Diablo IV this weekend — so far it has surpassed my expectations! Aesthetically, it feels much more like a direct sequel to Diablo II, than Diablo III. The whimsy of Diablo III was interesting at the time, but ...

It's been icy this week! So much so that most mornings have involved frosty grass (which is always entertaining to see the dogs walk on before they realise how chilly it is).

It's also another short week as we celebrate(?) the King&...

The weather this week was suuuper weird! It's like Autumn was throwing out one last hurrah. After a couple days of -6°C last week, we had some pretty warm ones this week. So much so that I had to carry my jacket on my walk to the shops! ...

I took down Mercury from the iOS App Store this week and have opened a PR to remove it from the Mastodon marketing site. I built it in my spare time over ~2018-2020, then hit a bunch of App Store Review roadblocks. With the inability to addr...

This week's post marks 4 months of weekly posts! I have never really gotten in to the habit of writing (as much as I have wanted to), but I have found that even just writing these weekly posts has made it easier to get in to the habit of...

It's Tears of the Kingdom time! I played the heck out of Breath of the Wild, and am so excited for this instalment in the series. I am not usually a fan of open world games, but that's usually because there's only a small section...

Over the many years that I have been working with Ruby, I have never really learned to use a debugger, and really only lean on tools like Pry to start a REPL session at a particular line in some Ruby code. From there, I reach for Ruby's ...

• Regular length week this week ;)
• I have been adding some behind the scenes features to this blog. Up until now, I have been using a handful of micropub clients, and some Ruby scripts to publish and manage posts. This has all been working we...

• Yet another long weekend, making for a short week :D Though I think this is the last longie for a little bit now. This time, we were off on account of ANZAC day. The public holiday fell on a Tuesday this year. Some folks took the Monday off...

• This week has been rough on many fronts. Layoffs at work have meant we have lost some of the most brilliant people I have had the chance to work with. Some had been with us for a good chunk of their career and the company's life. It'...

• Another short week this week on account of Easter, which was nice! Speaking of, Greek Easter is this weekend — so Χριστός Ανέστη to all who celebrate :D
• I've been working on clearing out all of the brush around our shed over the last fe...

I've been using Obsidian for a little while now. At first, it was largely just a replacement for Notes.app, like Ulysses before it, I preferred it purely because I could see the markdown files that it was saving. As time went on though, ...

• I've been trying to get back in to scrobbling things I listen to to last.fm again. Partly so I can display the week's top track at the bottom of these posts, but also because I looked back at my scrobbles from 2008-2009 and found so...

• We've recently purchased an Ooni pizza oven 🎉. Our closest Good Pizza Place™ is a 40min round trip away. Which is fine if we can eat in, but because the pizzas are so thin, they travel incredibly poorly! We used to have a pizza stone fo...

• It's been a bit f a quiet week this week — well, at home anyway. Work has been full on, and maybe that has contributed to the quietness of the week.
• Contrary to what I mentioned last week, the weather has started to turn here in Canberr...

• I finished the Lightfall campaign this week on legendary! It was pretty amazing knocking over the last encounter solo. It took me a bit of bumping up against the whack physics in Destiny, but got there in the end :) The missions and setting...

• This week, the temperature has cooled way down in Canberra. I've had to double up on long sleeve shirts some days to stay warm, and some of the leaves on our trees are starting to turn 🍂
• I've been playing through the new "Ligh...

• I've been working on the backend of this blog to pull in all the stuff I have, from various places of the internet. So far, that's been photos off of Instagram as well as places I have checked in to on Swarm. It's been a bit of ...

• I am coming to the end of my week in Melbourne. It's been a great little week. Taking the train to work continues to be a novelty as does getting home past 7pm. I don't know how I managed to do that in the pre-work-from-home days, a...

• I've been listening to the latest The Adventure Zone campaign, Steeplechase . Based on the Blades in the Dark tabletop RPG, it seems to be a much faster paced campaign as compared to some of the other DnD based campaigns. So far I am qu...

• Nintendo dropped a surprise release of Metroid Prime Remastered on us this week! I remember reading, and re-reading all of the promotional material of the original when it was announced out in ~2001. Then being amazed by the detail in Samu...

• 📲 New blog, who this? I have been re-building this site with Hanami & Tailwind, following the W3C's Micropub spec (mainly so I can leverage plethora of amazing compatible clients out there to write posts like this).
• Since the enshit...

I often get asked about recommendations for resources to learn Ruby (and how to program, generally). This list is intended to catalogue the various resources I have shared over the years and be an easy reference point for future learners.

I have a couple of small hobby apps that were on Heroku's free tier (RIP) that I have now moved over to Fly.io. Fly.io has a migrate from Heroku process for Rails apps, but as far as I could see, not for any Ruby app. So I had to do thin...

It's not often that I get a new computer, but on the odd occasion that I do, I like to have all of my config prepared and ready to copy over!

To achieve this, I am using chezmoi and GitHub to keep an up to date snapshot of my dotfiles. ...

Like most people*, I like to name the various devices in the house after a theme. For the longest time, my devices were unnamed, until I moved to Apple's ecosystem and picked up my first external SSD for time machine.

My chosen theme was the...