We've all heard the common refrain that electric heaters should not be plugged into extension leads. I'm fairly sure, too, that most of us will have ignored that advice at least once.

We "temporarily" plugged our living room heater into one.

We didn't do so blindly and first checked a number of things: The lead is clearly marked as being good for 13A at 250v. The heater is rated to 2kW so at 230v should draw 8.69A. The lead was in good condition - the heater's plug sat tightly in it's socket - and there was nothing else even relatively high load plugged into the lead (and wouldn't be).

So, it seemed like it should be fine. But, of course, I wouldn't be writing this post if that had been the case.

The other day, the heater dropped offline (yep, it had to be that heater). When I went downstairs to check, it was completely off - the display wasn't on and it didn't respond to its button etc.

The lights on the extension lead were on, except for the one corresponding to the heater's socket. Had someone turned it off?

I went to toggle the switch, but it wouldn't move. When I went to unplug the heater, the switch lit up a little accompanied by a crackling sound indicating that electricity was arcing inside.

The lead, obviously, needed to be taken out of use. But, I wanted to see how badly it had failed and so, rather than binning it, took it apart.

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There was an Octopus powerup between 9am and noon.

The idea behind powerups is that excess green energy should be absorbed instead of the local operator having solar/wind farms take capacity offline.

So, when there's a powerup, we try and really take advantage of the free electricity - running electric heaters, the tumble dryer etc - shifting any usage that we can into the powerup period.

Normally, we absorb quite a bit of energy

Today though, was by far, the worst that we've had:

So, what went wrong?

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Recently, I wrote about Bonnie, the border collie that we took into our home at the beginning of February.

Although that post made some reference to the circumstances that she came to us from, I didn't really talk very much about her ex-owners. Bonnie should be the focus, not them.

This post, however, is a bit different.

Over the last week, I've had some interactions with Bonnie's previous owner which has left me feeling quite annoyed and frustrated.

I find that writing can be quite cathartic as it helps me to put my thoughts in order. So, I figured writing a post would help me work through and process my feelings around this week's events.

In this post I'll walk through the discussion, the request and my thoughts on it.

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I subscribe to various RSS feeds using Nextcloud News.

It makes them easily accessible on my phone whilst ensuring that things will be marked read if I instead read the feed on my desktop (that's not to say that it's perfect, though: as I've written previously, I also use fediverse notifications to help make sure that I see new posts).

Recently, however, my phone has generated fewer notifications for Nextcloud News. It actually took me a little while to notice: I was still getting some notifications, including for a once-weekly serial so it seemed like things were working (humans are bad at noticing the absence of things etc etc)

Eventually, though, it occurred to me that I hadn't seen a notification for https://neilzone.co.uk/ in quite a while. Neil posts semi-frequently and I'd definitely seen things going about in the Fediverse, so this struck me as odd.

When I went into Nextcloud News to check, the latest post showing for Neil's feed was dated February 2022. Either I'd failed to notice the feed not updating for 2 years or something else had broken.

The latter seemed much more likely - I remembered that at some point during the last couple of years, Neil redesigned his site and the feed moved, around that time I updated News to use the new url (but probably hadn't checked very carefully after that).

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It's not uncommon to have to remove a laptop's keyboard in order to perform other work on it.

The Thinkpad x280 is actually a little different in that respect, because it only generally needs removing for replacement or because the motherboard needs removing for some reason.

Despite the relative rarity, Lenovo seem to have but some care into making the process much easier than it was with some older thinkpads.

This post details the process of removing the keyboard and fitting it back in.

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I know that I'm far from alone in not particularly liking Slack, nor am I likely to be the first to observe that it seems to be particularly bloated case-study in poor UI/UX design.

But, whether I like it or not, Slack is something that I have to use quite regularly, annoyances and all.

One of the more annoying defaults is the way that the handling of Enter/Return can change mid message:

For a newline in a message, you press <shift+enter>
Now you're on a newline.

```
Now though, you're in a codeblock
for a newline you need to press <enter>
if you hit <shift+enter> it'll send the part written message
```

Now that you're back out of the code block,<enter> will send
<shift+enter> will add a newline

Inevitably, this leads to message threads getting disrupted by part-finished messages, followed by a simple message before the hurried editing starts:

This is problematic because I should be focused on the content of the message that I'm writing, not what state of key-combination I'm currently in.

Someone at Slack/Salesforce must have realised that this behaviour is unintuitive, though, because it turns out that there are options in the Advanced Settings section to help prevent this premature eslackulation.

I found the settings by accident, so thought I'd write about them here as well as what what I was actually looking for (and still haven't found).

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Recently, I unexpectedly received some money - not a huge amount, but something that I wanted spent on something tangible and fun (rather that setting it aside or spending it on day-to-day expenses)

After some (though probably not enough) thought, I decided to spend it on a hot tub: we both live with chronic pain, so as well as being a fun purchase, it had the potential to perhaps help make life a little easier (it's also not something that I'd normally... errr... splash out on).

The funds that I had could stretch to a decent inflatable tub or an (extremely) entry level hard shell tub. The choice seemed obvious, especially as the inflatable carried the additional benefit of being easier to move around if we later decide that we aren't happy with the original placement.

The Spa that I chose (a Lay-z-spa Barbados) is also wifi enabled, opening up the possibility of using HomeAssistant to automate its operation - including creating automations to suck up energy during Plunge Pricing (or Powerup) events.

In this post, I want to talk a little about the various bits that I've set up to monitor and control the tub.

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For (almost) all the years that I've had a personal website, I've not had a comments section. The reasons behind this changed with time, though at one point I had moderation duties elsewhere and didn't really fancy also dealing with that on my own site.

But, comments are not without their value: they can be really helpful, particularly if they provide information that you might have missed or overlooked.

Last year, I played around with embedding webmentions in order to add a comment-like section to my website. However, I recently decided that I wasn't comfortable with the idea of scooping comments out of social media for storage and display elsewhere and so have disabled them.

As part of that process, I had a search around the web and read other people's thoughts on the topic. Some of those who agreed that webmention backfeeds are too invasive have instead settled on an alternative solution that I quite like.

You can see some good examples on Robb Knight's site:

Social media activity is no longer pulled in and displayed, instead remaining in the fediverse (which allows users or instance admins to continue to edit and delete as normal). Clicking any of the icons in the block will take the reader into the fediverse where they can see those actions.

In this post, I talk about updating templates to add similar functionality to a static HTML site generated with the Nikola SSG.

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On February 12th, we took in a (nearly) 5 year old Border Collie in need of a new home.

Unfortunately, the home that Bonnie came to us from wasn't looking after her needs very well: despite there always being someone home, she had been spending most of her day shut in either a 4' x 6' kitchen or in the garden, with no real forms of enrichment available to her in either.

At night, she slept on a towel in the kitchen (apparently she'd previously wet her bed and it had been thrown out and never replaced). Despite living next to the park, she didn't get a daily walk unless their neighbour (our friends) went round to take her out.

On one of the days that they were unable to do so, the sound of Bonnie howling and whimpering at the back gate carried across the park as she tried to come out and play with the other dogs. It was one of the most heartbreaking sounds that I've ever heard (and nearly prompted me to knock on their door to try bring her home - it was only a concern I might make things worse that stopped me)

The owners were a young family who, with a bit of encouragement, came to realise that the situation was neither fair or tenable. With their agreement, the neighbour contacted a few friends to see whether anyone was able to give Bonnie a new home (avoiding a potentially traumatic trip to a rescue centre in the process).

Days later, Bonnie moved in with us.

Not unexpectedly, it soon became clear that she had a few behavioural issues that we hadn't previously been aware of.

As we approached the two-month mark, it occurred to me that it might be good to put together a post so that we've something to look back on and see just how far she's come already.

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I've never been a huge fan of tapping posts out on a mobile screen, but there definitely are times when I feel a real need to get something out of my head and onto (virtual) paper.

Last year, I switched to using Obsidian to keep notes and draft posts.

On desktop, the move was easy. The mobile version of Obsidian did take a little more getting used to (the same functionality is there, it's just sometimes harder to find), but it's still preferable to anything else I've tried for this.

Initially, I used Nextcloud to keep my vault synced between my phone and desktop. Unfortunately, as I found when playing with the gadgetbridge db, Nextcloud's ability to sync a directory on newer versions of Android can be a little flakey.

As a result, I ended up in a split-brain situation, with my phone holding a version which simply didn't exist in Nextcloud (leaving me in a position where I was sure I'd updated a draft but it not being in my vault when I checked.... on desktop).

In this post, I'll talk a little about using FolderSync to have notes synced between Nextcloud and Android.

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