For all the years I’ve been in IT, I’ve never really scripted a lot of things to automate tasks I perform regularly. That’s not entirely true, I guess… I use Ansible daily at work, creating or modifing roles that are responsible for automating tasks on various machines across the department, but when it comes to simple local tasks, I’ve kinda just stuck to either creating aliases or functions that I source with my {bash,zsh}rc file or running something from the history file.…

I’ve been very lucky to be able to buy a Steam Deck as a replacement to my PC, which I’ve wanted to replace the CPU of for some time. I opted for the eMMC model and replaced it with a 256GB NVMe SSD that I already have, which put the Steam Deck in at just a bit more expensive than replacing the CPU alone on the PC. Lower power usage is a welcome benefit with energy costs going up so much!…

At what point do you just say no? My job consists of me being the only full-time dedicated admin, which means I end up tackling a whole bunch of things just because I happen to be there. Unfortunately, one of those job happens to be dealing with printers. My last job resulted in me moving to a telecoms based role, away from a more desktop support orientated position, where I dealt with a range of Xerox MFDs - which at the time, I was quite chuffed about.…

I guess this is day 6 and day 7 as I started yesterday’s post first thing and i’m writing this close to the end of the challenge! The experience has been really good. On reflection, I see that access to the internet all of the time has afforded me something that’s probably not the best thing for my health in the grand scheme of things. While having access to the web allows me to keep up with hobbies and interests whenever I want, it also provides access to the 24/7 news cycle across the world, which as of right now in 2022 isn’t fuil of many nice things.…

The last few days haven’t seen much personal time to really write home about. Work has been pretty busy with summer being the time of year that we tend to get a lot of the more significant work done. Today is the first full day since Sunday that I’ll have that’s not dedicated to working. That being said, I’ve taken notes of some observations/experiences from what free time I have had!…

The internet really should be classified as a human right to have, also as a utility. I worked from the office yesterday and it only occurred to me while I was heading for the bus that I would have to spend some of my budget on buying a ticket and making sure that a bus was actually going to show up. It’s possible to buy a ticket on the bus, but they add an extra charge to already over-priced costs, and regarding checking on the status of the busses, the system is pretty awful and the app is really the only way to tell if a bus is going to show up.…

Initial reflection I realise I’m quite wasteful with content. I’m one of those people that can’t really have silence (hint: ADHD). Even if I’m going to the kitchen to make a coffee, I’ll stick on a podcast of something to silence my brain, possibly not really taking in what I’m actually listening to. It’s more like white noise in a way. This is something I would like tackle: be more mindful of what I’m listening to rather than it going to waste.…

Today is day one of the old computer challenge v2. I attempted this last year, but ultimately work was too busy for me to actually do anything. This year it’s slightly different. Instead of using an old machine for a week, the focus is instead around limiting your use of the internet like back in the days of dial-up, where you’d have a plan limiting you to a certain amount (or the price would go up significantly).…

Taking my time… forcefully I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a while, but never quite got around to it. Encountering Solene’s Old Computer Challenge finally inspired me to give it a go – albeit a bit late to the game. My attention is all over the place, always has been and always will be – it makes it hard to complete things and as a result unhappy a bunch of the time.…

Not that I’m upset about it or anything, but I’ve spent the last couple of days week - it’s been a week - trying to get a multi-user instance of JupyterHub to honour system-wide environment settings. It’s not a thing, don’t go looking for it - you’ll end up like me; bitter and ginger. Sometimes it’s good to have your expectations challenged. I guess that from the lack of documentation on the topic, we have a relatively rare configuration running.…