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

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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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The sofa in our living room, is actually only part of a sofa: it's the long side of a corner sofa.

When we originally bought the sofa, it was the perfect size and shape for our living room. Unfortunately, our landlord later did what landlords do and decided to switch letting agent on the sly, landing us with a section 21 no-fault eviction in the process.

At the next house, although the sofa could physically fit into the room, it absolutely dominated it.

Finally we moved to our current home, which has a layout that really can't accommodate a corner sofa at all. So, we unhooked the shorter side, leaving us with a straight sofa and an open-ended sofa-bit.

For a while, we had the sofa-bit on the opposite side of the room, but it never really worked particularly well: the seating cushions tended to find their way off the open end and move about under your arse as you get on and off the sofa. Not really needing that extra seating, we eventually moved the sofa-bit into storage instead.

For various reasons, we're taking in another dog. In preparation for this, I wanted to make sure that there'd be enough lounging space and so decided that the sofa-bit needed to come back out of storage.

Conscious of the cushion slipping issue and emboldened by my relative success at making and upholstering a pelmet I decided that I'd make a new end for the sofa.

This post describes that process.

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I occassionally find that I want to cast a browser tab from my laptop - usually to put a chart onto a display so that I can periodically glance at it.

However, my laptop runs a fairly strict set of firewall rules - after all, it's a portable device and, on occasion, will connect to networks that aren't mine.

Strict firewall rules can prevent Chromecast discovery from working, mean that no devices will appear available to be casted to.

This post details adding rules to iptables to allow casting.

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