Just this guy, you know?

Aim 3 of 2023 is to read more. I’m going to post reviews as I go. March is still Q1 but this does feel like a very late start.

I’ve picked up the guitar again after 12 years away. I wanted a refresher on the things I’d forgotten. So I picked up How Music Works by John Powell.

It tells a very neat story from the foundations of “what is sound” all the way to selecting a key for your composition and thoughts on audiophiles.

At work we use Azure for infrastructure and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to define it as code. Microsoft released Bicep as a nicer way to write your templates.

We’ve recently finished porting a service to use Bicep. It took a lot longer than I’d hoped but we got there. Here are some of the things I learnt along the way.

Decompiling

You can decompile your existing templates with the Azure cli:

At work, we have a weekly Code Gym. Someone will bring a kata/problem along and we’ll split up to tackle it. Usually pairing across normal team boundaries. Pretty normal stuff. We have been doing this for two years now and feel like we’ve run out of kata. So we’ve been trying to invent new ones. I am going to post ones I’ve created which should hopefully be useful to someone.

Non stick pans annoy me. When you buy them they’re incredibly effective. Then slowly degrade until they’re more stick than the alternatives. The prime example is my last pan which had a weird wavy texture that when the non stick coating failed, food would get stuck in the valleys. Awful experience, terrible design.

So I’m trying stainless steel. I’m not sure I have the discipline for seasoning cast iron pans yet. For Christmas I asked for a pan from Samuel Groves who make cookware here in Birmingham. As well as being local they will also service your pan which is very appealing when you’re considering purchases with a Built To Last mentality.

Rather than resolutions, here are my aims for 2023:

1. Paint more miniatures. I had a very good summer of painting miniatures but flagged in the final third of 2022.

2. Play more games with said painted miniatures. I’ll be giving a local club a go soon which should hopefully make this one easy.

3. Read more. It’s not difficult to read more than me. In 2023 I’d like to find a way around my inability to read at home.

   [Read More]

As always, I’ve listened to a lot of music this year. Some old. Some new.

My most anticipated release this year was Ridge and Furrow EP from Dark Forest. DF were my favourite discovery last year and I just love them. The new EP is excellent, Skylark being my favourite track. I hope they put out a full album again soon.

A blast from the past is Jethro Tull’s Heavy Horses. Originally released in 1978, I’ve been listening to the 2003 remaster on Spotify. I listened to Original Masters growing up but never investigate JT’s back catalogue. I heard Acres Wild somewhere (Planet Rock maybe?) which put me onto this cracking album.

I’ve been in Army Bosh Mode for a while now. The French Napoleonics, DAK, and 30k Space Wolves have taken up all my hobby time. I need to mix it up.

Tickets for Warhammer Fest 2023 went on sale and I picked up a Golden Demon ticket too. I’m going to do a diorama. It’s been a while since my last diorama but I think I have a good idea. I’m planning on documenting the process here.

I’ve signed up for a Mastodon account. I had a poke around there a few years ago but it was almost entirely people talking about how great Mastodon is. Now there seems to be a (sub)critical mass of people where you can just have a conversation about stuff that isn’t Mastodon. It’s got a bit of the quiet pub vibe that Ideni.ca did back in 2010ish. So far it’s nice.

As per my previous post, I destroyed my Ghost installation. Nginx was shafted, networking in general was shafted, node was shafted. It was a mess. So I gave up and decided to go with a nice static site. Just like I always should have.

I managed to fix the networking enough to SSH into it. From their I dumped the mysql database into a file using a little bash

mysqldump -u root -p ghost_production > ~/mysqldump

From there back to my local machine where I used rsync to get the files downloaded with the classic:

It’s alive! It’s static! It’s a complete rebuild.

To cut a long story short I utterly ruined the VM my site was running on. This has given me the push to redo the site using a static site builder. I’ve chosen Hugo because I quite like Go.

I’ll slowly put my old posts up. Right now it’s a manual process but I’ll try to automate it.