Blog

The thoughts, opinions, happenings, and just plain ramblings of a seemingly boring person.

Presenting: The Admiral Ackbar ‘ACK’ Emoji

Categories Geekery, Work

I'm sure that someone else has thought of this before, but after a quick search, nothing turned up, so I'm going to provisionally claim credit for this lightbulb moment I had today.

I was going about my usual work day on Slack. When acknowledging a request or fyi from someone else, I usually choose one of the many custom 'ack' (i.e. acknowledged) emoji reactions. BUT, this morning I just realised that Admiral Ackbar's name from Star Wars (revered and famous for "IT'S A TRAP!") starts off being spelled the same way! 🤯

So thanks to ChatGPT's newish image creation … Read more →

3D Printing Stuff

Categories Geekery, Technology

Of all the tech fads/hype/coolness over the past decade, I have previously avoided getting into two of them: crypto (including NFTs) and 3D printing.

I don't ever see myself getting into crypto, so 3D printing was the only remaining one. I'd held off for a while because of three main reasons:

  1. Needing something actually practical to print.
  2. Affordability.
  3. Ease of use for a time-poor middle-aged professional with kids.

The last thing was definitely a big one. Gone are the days when I could spend a lot of spare time on a hobby (see the recent frequency of posts on this … Read more →

2024: Year in Review

Categories Life

5 blog posts this year, which kinda reflects how busy it has felt. As the kids have grown, spare time spent on anything but relaxing or recovering is a premium!

2024 has been a pretty decent year. It's gone by so fast, I've barely been able to keep up, but it's felt like the most 'normal' year in quite a while.

Again, there's no 'List of Tweets' blog post this year, because I've largely moved off Twitter. Although Mastodon was promising for tech nerds, Bluesky has emerged in recent times as the successor for a lot of people (especially since … Read more →

Going Down the Smart Home Rabbit Hole

Categories Geekery, Life, Technology
AI generated image from the prompt: image that represents going down a rabbit hole of Home Assistant. It should contain the Home Assistant logo and feel like going down a rabbit hole, ala Alice in wonderland. (logo added by me)
AI-generated image of going down a smart home rabbit hole.

I've long resisted the idea of implementing smart home 'stuff' in our house. It's never been that attractive to me. Use an app to turn on a light? No, thanks!

The doorbell 'gateway drug'

That was until recently, when I got a Ubiquiti doorbell to go with the rest of our Ubiquiti stuff. The catch was that to get notifications of doorbell rings on mobile apps, you currently have to enable full remote access to the whole Ubiquiti system.

That kind of stuff exposed to the internet doesn't make … Read more →

Astro Bot: Pure Joy and Happiness

Categories Gaming
Astro Bot game banner

Some of my favourite games of all time are the Mario Galaxy games. There haven't been that many 3D platformers that I've played over the years that live up to the variety and fun of those games, especially around their level's tight design and mechanics.

That's until the recent standalone Astro Bot game came along, almost out of nowhere. I liked the previous 'demo'-type games that previously introduced us to the cute little robot, but this standalone feature blasts it out of the park.

This game was made for me. Cute character, check. Finely tuned platforming, check. Awesome theme, check. … Read more →

5 Years Post-Transplant

Categories Life

On Monday, I marked the significant marker of 5 years since my liver transplant.

These past 5 years haven't exactly been what I'd hoped post-transplant life to be: getting through a global pandemic notwithstanding, I'm yet to go a calendar year after the transplant without a hospital admission. Nevertheless, I'm still continuously and enormously grateful to be here with my donor's liver, continuing my—and my donor's—journey.

These five years have gone by so quickly, but I just have to look at how much the kids have grown to see that passage of time. They've changed from infants to little … Read more →

Next-Level Networking

Categories None

At most of my jobs, there has been a certain amount of peer-pressure or peer-induced purchases. Early on it was for video game consoles and video games, and later it was other video game consoles and reading material.

At this current job, it's been homelab setups, and recently, networking gear.

The networking gear of choice for many prosumers recently is from Ubiquiti. It's definitely overkill for most use-cases, but pretty cool nonetheless.

So, with some WFH equipment allowance, I've bought a Ubiquiti Dream Machine SE (UDM-SE) router, and a WiFi 6 access point (U6-Pro).

The router

I've … Read more →

20 Years of Blogging!

Categories Geekery, Internet, Life, Rants

It just felt like yesterday that I posted the 10-year commemorative post, but here we are at 20 years already. 😬

Yep, 20 years ago today I posted my first ever blog post (although, back then I used the term blog 'entry').

The 'recent' post commemorating my 40th birthday did a good job of summarising most of the big events of the past 10 years, so I won't repeat them again. 🙂

Also, for the record, this post is number 980! 🚀… Read more →

2023: Year in Review

Categories Life

7 blog posts this year; I think I'm pretty happy with that 😁. Could be better, but could be worse.

Generally, 2023 felt like the first sorta-getting-past-COVID year, despite me getting COVID for the second time at the start of December.

There's no 'List of Tweets' blog post this year, because Elon removed easy access to the Twitter/X API for that kind of thing. Plus, the Twitter integration on this blog has been removed for the same reason.

Anywho, let's try something new for this end-of-year post in addition to listing the blog post highlights.

Health stuff

Health-wise, I had … Read more →

2.5Gb Networking

Categories Geekery, Technology
The new 2.5Gb switch sitting under our older gigabit switch

One of my greatest tech disappointments over the last decade has been the stagnation of consumer-level network speeds.

Over the last decade, gigabit networking has remained the standard, which is so disappointing compared to the fast and regular increases up to that point. From the late 1990s to the late 2000s, it felt like quick and routine jumps as we went from 10 megabit hubs, to 100 megabit switches, then to gigabit (1Gb) switches.

When we built our house in 2011, I wired it up with Cat 6 cable. … Read more →