Blog

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

Open-Sourcing My .bashrc File on GitHub

Categories Geekery, Technology, Work

gitprompt_Lucas_bullettrain_tags I've posted some pretty nerdy things on this blog over the years, but this would have to be one of the nerdiest things I've ever posted.

I use a Linux operating system on my work laptop (Fedora, to be precise). We're now fairly entrenched in a git workflow for the documentation we write: asciidoc(tor)-based source, and GitLab CE or GitHub as the hosted VCS.

For the non-uber-tech-savvy: because of the git workflow (amongst other things), I spend a lot of time running commands in a bash shell (or command prompt). One of the files that controls … Read more →

Similar Look, New Theme

Categories Geekery, Internet

After a slow start to the year, I've done a lot of posting in the past month. So I also thought it might be time to tweak the look of the site.

Although the look remains similar., I've just enabled a new theme. The older theme was a bit bloated and wasn't being maintained by its creator any more, but I think that I got good use out of it since I switched my blog to WordPress just over 4 years ago.

I wanted a more lightweight theme that was still easy to customise, and I think I found … Read more →

Now Secure! Enabling Let’s Encrypt HTTPS

Categories Geekery, Internet

LucasCosti.com SecuredWell, that was easy. It just took me about five minutes to get this website going with a free SSL/TLS certificate using Let's Encrypt as the certificate authority. LucasCosti.com now has a padlock! 😀

Side note:  here's a nice post explaining the confusing terminology of SSL vs. TLS, and I like Google's approach of sticking to HTTPS, where possible.

My host (Zuver, a VentraIP subsidiary) made the process of generating a Let's Encrypt certificate ridiculously easy. It was pretty much just logging into their admin portal and clicking a button for the domain.

The only things that … Read more →

Vale NoSquint

Categories Internet, Rants

I wrote about four years ago that one of the main reasons I still use Firefox as my default browser is because of the fantastic NoSquint extension, which allowed me to persistently set a larger text size for readability.

It was with great sadness (and distress!) that I discovered today that NoSquint is no longer being maintained, and that it has stopped working as of Firefox v47.

Before I go on to alternatives, I have to publicly thank Jason Tackaberry for 10 years of fantastic support for this extension. That NoSquint has worked flawlessly over 10 years of browser … Read more →

Modding Rey’s Speeder

Categories Geekery, Lego

Rey's Lego SpeederA while back I got the Rey's Speeder Lego set, and although it's good to have the main character of The Force Awakens in Lego form, it always bugged me that the side of the speeder where the cargo net is in the movie, was just some stuff stuck on using 1x1 clips.

So I decided to do my first serious Lego mod! I noted down the parts I thought I'd need, and then went to BrickLink and ordered them. They arrived in the mail today, and I went to work modding.

I'm quite happy with the result. In … Read more →

Home UPS

Categories Geekery, Technology

CyberPowerUPSEver since we moved to this side of the train tracks, despite being only 500m away from our the unit we used to live in, the power reliability in this neighbourhood has been very dodgy. Although we live in a relatively affluent area in modern city in a first world country, I would not call the power in our area 'reliable'.

We seem to have a power outage roughly once every couple of months, and that's not including the ones caused by weather events. It's not like I expect the power to stay on during a major storm or heat … Read more →

Rough Few Months

Categories Life

I've had a pretty rough few months. Soon after getting back from our 10th anniversary trip to Melbourne in late February, I was admitted to hospital with an infection in my liver. It's the first one that I've experienced since being diagnosed with PSC 6 years ago. After starting to feel nauseous and increasingly itchy over a week, one night I vomited (very rare for me), and the next night I had intense uncontrollable shakes. I was taken to hospital, diagnosed with a liver infection, and put on IV antibiotics for the better part of a week before being discharged … Read more →

Captain America: Civil War Musings

Categories Movies

The first half of Captain America: Civil War almost ruined the whole movie for me. All the action scenes were shaky-cam and super fast cuts, which I absolutely despise. Strangely though, the second half's action wasn't nearly as bad, and was actually very enjoyable to watch.

It's like the directors (the Russo Bros) each took half of the movie and shot it by themselves, and then had a different editor for their half too.

Spidey has his best film representation. His brief 20 mins or so in the movie is better than the previous 5 movies combined.… Read more →

The Season of Broken Things: New Monitor

Categories Geekery, Technology

LG 24MP77 monitorIt seems like recently has been the season of things breaking, malfunctioning, or generally needing replacement. It was my relatively new PS3 a few months ago, and now recently my not-so-old Dell monitor starting showing funny colours across the screen.

The monitor was a few months outside of the three-year warranty (which admittedly, is a half-decent warranty period), and Dell weren't too kind in offering me options for a replacement. I've got to say that I'm pretty disappointed in the quality of both the Dell product and the service. They seemingly couldn't track down my purchase in their own system … Read more →

Fake Tree Trout Through a Wall Frame

Categories Life

baseballI've been a long-time baseball fan. I've always wanted to go see a proper baseball game, but was thwarted most notably when we were last in New York because the Yankees couldn't be bothered winning a game or two in a best of seven series.

So last night we finally got around to seeing the next best thing in Brisbane: the Brisbane Bandits in the ABL finals series at Holloway Field.

It was a great night, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed! The Bandits won the game, and was some really great baseball: a few homeruns, double plays, and errors. … Read more →