Five years ago, I purchased a Roberts Digital radio for the kitchen. Mainly to listen to the radio but also this device could play music from Spotify, a USB stick or act as a UPNP client. As I already had the Plex Media Server set up which had a DLNA option, this looked attractive. The setup worked pretty well apart from one minor glitch. And, like a dripping water tap, or the endless, harrowing screams of a baby played on a tight loop in an American interrogation facility, any minor technical glitch can’t simply be ignored. ...

I anxiously coaxed my wife out of the door to her work trying not to raise her suspicions. My stomach was fluttering as I had an important early morning meeting. To fully prepare, first, I chose my mask. I had two options; a flesh coloured creation that resembled a one bosom bra or a more sinister black model. I tried the pale pink mask but as it, err, masked my nose, mouth and chin, it made me resemble a burns victim who had endured time consuming and expensive reconstructive surgery which had either failed or was still ongoing. ...

There’s nothing worse than yet another lockdown Netflix list. Sons Of Anarchy Heard about this series from Linux Outlaws many years ago. Jax Teller is a very handsome man. I am convinced he is the bastard son of Kurt Cobain and Brad Pitt. A decent series about biker gangs in California that inevitably features gratuitous violence and goes through peaks and troughs (the season when they went to Ireland was very weak). ...

Today is the 18 May 2020 and marks the 40th anniversary of when Ian Curtis took his own life so I was pleased to see that Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris are remembering the event - ‘Moving through Silence’ I grew up in South Manchester and it’s hard to describe how important music and football were during my formative years. I never saw Joy Division play live but some of my schoolmates did (‘He did this weird dance’). However, I have visited Curtis’ memorial in Macclesfield cemetery. ...

Sometimes, I spend a lot of time on technical tasks that are of seemingly questionable benefit or limited practical use. For example, I remember converting the format of my 977 blog posts between markup languages and migrating the content to esoteric blogging platforms (more then once). I also wasted an unbelievable amount of time meticulously editing the meta data (YAML front-matter) and writing scripts simply to preserve Disqus comments after a change to the permalink structure. ...