Jonathan Dowland's Weblog

I’m really enjoying getting back into ice skating, but I can only get to the rink once a week (at least over the summer -- I'm aiming for twice weekly once Schools re-open) and I have the itch to do more skating than that. Where I live we’re blessed with a seaside park with lots of smooth paths, a recently resurfaced beachside promenade, and a newly-built pedestrian/cycle path stretching up and down the coast: all great surfaces for roller skates. I convinced myself to buy some inline skates…

Since I wrote about my fly30 ice skates, I'd continued to battle pain around the navicular bone in my feet. The action that seems to have finally fixed it was to perform a "punch out": a very localized remoulding of the area of the boot that presses against the sore area. I basically followed the process from this helpful YouTube video. I narrowed down the exact spot by borrowing some lipstick and transferring it from my navicular bone to the boot lining, then making that more permanent with a…

I enjoy reading The Guardian's monthly round-up of new SF novels, which can be found in their Science Fiction Books section, and can also be read via feed. Since the round-up is of new books, at the time the round-up is published they're usually only available in hardback. When it comes to choosing a book to read, these days I am tending towards paperbacks: I've largely ran out of room for hardbacks. So I decided to apply a time delay to their feed. Six months is roughly enough that a book…

(no, this isn't a blog post about Joy Division songs) Last time I wrote about Interzone, I was discussing issue #294, the first published under new management in a paperback-sized format ("JB6"). The format and presentation of the magazine was fantastic: it fit in a lot of my pockets, and was packed with 15 stories as well as the regular columns, in full colour with fantastic layouts and illustrations. Sadly there was only one more physical issue before Interzone was forced to become a…

I used to ice skate as a teenager but I stopped at University. I tried to pick it back up in 2024 but had to stop when I got ill. I restarted in 2025, initially with a weekly skate session but last month I started group hockey skate lessons. There's not a lot of pics of me skating… this one from an IR camera I've been skating in a pair of Bauer1 Nexus N77s that I bought 7 years ago on a work trip to Toronto. These did a great job of getting me back into the hobby for 6 years but recently I felt…

I bought a new synth! Kind-of. I've traded my Minilogue-XD (full-size version with integrated keyboard) for the desktop/modular alternative. Modular Minilogue XD Why? Partly, because it fits on my desk better. Partly, because it changes the way you engage with the instrument. It makes a huge difference: the ivory keys come with so much cultural precedent. The module version of the synth gains a switch that lets you use the 16 sequencer step buttons as note inputs, so you can still play the…

First Light box My youngest daughter and I recently started playing the tabletop game HeroQuest. Specifically, the recently-issued, cut-down variant HeroQuest: First Light. This is quite advanced for her age, and I'm a little surprised she's taken to it, but she's really loving it, It's pushed her to read bits of lore on cards and quest books that is way above her expected reading level, and we've been exercising her maths by adding up the gold we find on our quests and calculating what the…

It's been ten years since I configured ?mount on demand backups to reduce the risk of my backups being zapped by mistake. Way back then I wanted to go one step further and use dedicated ?mount namespaces for backup jobs, but systemd didn't provide the necessary support (and still doesn't, despite the promisingly-named JoinsNameSpaceOf= configuration option.) I recently updated my setup to achieve this by hand. All backup jobs now have an extra pre-start instruction ExecStartPre=mkbackupns which…

HMS Blueberry Royals are my favourite ships in No Man's Sky. The HMS Blueberry is not my first Exotic/Royal ship (that was the Gravity Hirakao XVI, and a story for another time). After years of on-off playing, I recently found my first Royal multitool: Blue, with gold detailing. I have a Royal-style jetpack (I don't remember where I got that). I thought I'd try and colour-match my multitool, ship, jetpack and outfit. Since I only had one multitool, I matched the others to it. And the HMS…

In or around 2014 I bought an iPad Mini (2), and following the normal lifecycle of iOS devices, a major OS update eventually killed it as a useful, general-purpose device: operating it was just too sluggish. It remained useful as a streaming media player for a little while longer until eventually the big streamers (BBC iPlayer, Netflix, etc.) stopped supporting the version of their app which the iPad could install: the last officially supported iOS was 12.4.8 in July 2020, and by November it…

I blog about nvim-µwiki, a neovim plugin I wrote over a year ago but forgot about.

Where I ponder the notion of a digital garden, versus a blog, and point at some recent changes I've made to my homepage which are not blog posts.