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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In December 2023, I added support for webmentions to my site. As part of the setup process, I also configured a backfeed of mentions from external sources such as Github, Mastodon and Twitter - the idea being that if you comment on my content on social media, it'd show up as a comment under the relevant post (hopefully adding something of value for other readers).

At the time, I noted that I did have some qualms about the ethics of collecting mentions from other sources:

I was reading a post by Terence Eden discussing the ethics of syndicating comments using WebMentions and found myself a little undecided on the question that Terence poses, at least as it applies to extracting comments from silos like Twitter

...

Jumping back to the introduction to this post, this is where I feel a little conflicted about the ethical posture of collecting and syndicating mentions.

However, I reasoned that it wasn't all that different in principle to users taking a screenshot of a social media post and sharing it elsewhere, hardly an uncommon occurrence.

Recently, my discomfort with the idea of pulling people's comments from Twitter/Mastodon/wherever and displaying them on my site was reignited after reading "Mastodon Webmentions and Privacy" by Robb Knight.

Although privacy is a strong motivator, it's not the only concern that I have with having a webmention backfeed active, so I've decided to disable the collection and display of web mentions on my site.

In this post, I'll talk a little more about why I've chosen to do so.

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I'm a fairly prolific note-taker and have been, in both my personal and professional lives, for years.

I manage my notes with Obsidian (in fact, even this post was drafted in it) putting its Daily Notes Plugin into use to manage my to-do list. At the start of each day, the rollover daily todos plugin copies any incomplete to-do's over from the previous day's notes.

This combination gives me a fresh notes file each day with any unfinished tasks copied across.

I've been using this system for quite a while, so there are now a lot of daily note files, which does make manually navigating to an older set of notes a little inconvenient.

Recently, I've developed a more regular need to look at the previous day's todo list: I've found that it's sometimes quite helpful to also be able to see what was completed in the previous day (as well as being useful for giving updates, it helps me avoid getting stuck in a rut where it feels like I'm not getting anything done).

Obsidian has template support which is able to insert the current date, but it's quite simple and cannot do date maths to work out what the filename of the previous notes file would be.

In this post, I'm going to write about the approach that I've taken to have Obsidian show me yesterdays work and display a link back to the relevant notes file.

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When we first had solar installed, I really didn't envisage it leading to us switching to using electricity for heating over winter - after all, the sun doesn't shine very much, heaters are pretty energy hungry and mains gas was quite a bit cheaper than mains electricity.

However, my perception of the viability of using electricity to help heat the house shifted once we moved away from fixed rate tariffs and onto Octopus Agile. Plus, of course, using heaters to consume the free electricity delivered in a Octopus Powerups really has been something of a no brainer.

In fact, having Solar probably doesn't really factor into it much at all. We switched to Agile because the battery allowed us to load shift, but it plays no real role in running electric heaters in the evening.

In this post, I'm going to write a little about the approach that we've taken this winter, along with some issues that we've encountered along the way.

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