but she's a girl...

Those of you who read my blog regularly will know that some of my posts are rather niche. I have to warn you now that this one attains a whole new level of nichey-ness. However, in my usual spirit of ‘this is interesting to me’ and ‘writing it down helps me to remember it later’, here it is. This article might also be interesting to you if you:Use an external keyboard both with and without a built-in laptop keyboard;Write code and need accented characters occasionally or constantly;Use multiple…

We all love to start new things. It’s exciting! The creativity overfloweth! Keeping those things maintained over the longer term is harder work, and can seem boring and routine. It’s an act of resistance to keep caring for the thing you created, but the great thing is that it pays you back more and more the longer that you continue to do it. It’s also work that — in my opinion — you should do yourself, with your own hands and brain. Let me try to explain why.I posted at the start of last month…

We haven’t gone away on holiday for the past couple of years. It doesn’t feel fair to leave Bianca (now a grand old lady of 20) in a boarding cattery, so either only one of us can go away (the other staying at home to look after Bianca), or neither of us do. Mr. Bsag very kindly volunteered to do the cat-sitting for a couple of successive years, but it didn’t feel the same going away without him. Now that my ME/CFS is worse, it has also taken away the main thing that we went away for: taking…

Walking in to the room was an overwhelming experience. The triage nurses in the lobby of the Accident and Emergency unit took a few brief details then asked us to check in using the iPads on the wall just around the corner. As we turned the corner, it hit us that the waiting room was absolutely full. All the seats were taken, and people leaned against the walls and in the passageways, so that they had to shift every time someone went past. It was around 23:30 on a Tuesday. At this point, we had…

Walking in to the room was an overwhelming experience. The triage nurses in the lobby of the Accident and Emergency unit took a few brief details then asked us to check in using the iPads on the wall just around the corner. As we turned the corner, it hit us that the waiting room was absolutely full. All the seats were taken, and people leaned against the walls and in the passageways, so that they had to shift every time someone went past. It was around 23:30 on a Tuesday. At this point, we had…

Well, hello again! I don’t think that I have ever had a gap in posting as long as this before. Several months ago, I decided to explore moving this blog from both my previous host (Netlify), and away from the static site generator I had been using (Hugo, more on those decisions below). However, life got in the way. We sadly lost a family member, Mr. Bsag got an injury that resulted in us spending 9 hours overnight in A&E (the Emergency Room, for North Americans), I had some bad bouts of ME/CFS…

I’ve been doing a bit of sewing recently after a bit of a break in which I really didn’t have the energy. I still have to take it much slower than I used to do — no more non-stop sewing days — but I am finding that if I spread cutting out and sewing over several days, I can manage it. This is actually quite nice as it forces me to take my time and pay attention to the details. In the process, I have noticed some seemingly rigid ‘Laws of Sewing’ over a few projects. If you make a mistake, it…

I was sitting at my desk at home, pottering on the computer, when a grey shape flickered in my peripheral vision in the garden outside. This was quickly followed by a clattering of wings and a high pitched squawk. I looked out the window and quickly spotted him standing on his prey. There, at the centre of a blast radius of feathers, a male sparrowhawk. We’ve had sparrowhawks in the garden before, but they tend to be swift, fleeting visitors. A sparrowhawk’s natural territory is on the edge o...

A sketch of the basic backup scheme. I’ve been doing some more NixOS pottering over this weekend, working out the details of a thorough backup strategy. Before I moved to Linux, I used (and still use) iDrive for my backups. Its reasonably priced, and has servers based in Europe, and seems to work well enough. You can also run it on Linux, but I had some trouble getting it working with NixOS. I have also used the Gnome Circle app Pika Backup, which is delightful, but that is obviously no...