push buttons, turn knobs, pull levers

Open Budgeting - Subscriptions & Licences

Budgeting for Subscriptions & LicensesTransparently tracking my financial expenses spent on subscriptions and licenses. I’m doing this in the interest of exploring subscription fatigue and to help others who might interested in doing similar. Recurring Expenses Expense Cost (Yearly) Category Required/QoL Want To Cancel/Replace Usefulness Satisfaction Frequency 1Blocker $12 Security/Privacy Required No Critical High Yearly 1Password $55 Security Software Required Yes Critical Medium ^1 (Was high before v8) Monthly Amazon Prime $85 Utilities QoL Yes High Medium Yearly Apple iCloud $54 Backup Software Required No Critical High Yearly Apple Music $130 Entertainment Required No High High Yearly Aus.

Energy, Sustainability and Deployment Frequency

Deployment / Delivery Frequency

I often end up needing to advocate for more frequent delivery/deployments with clients.

There’s the usual benefits commonly discussed such as improved feedback, reduced risk, well understood processes, maintainable dependencies etc… however what’s often missed entirely is how it relates to the health and sustainability of the team.

Zsh Configuration and Plugins - Part Two

Zsh Configuration and Plugins - Part two You can find the first post in this series here . FunctionsMany of my functions start out as aliases and then I convert them to functions when I need to add more functionality. You can find these in 9-function.rc . pdfcompress () { gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.

Github Not-So-Reusable Actions

Github Actions is a “BYOBE” (Bring Your Own Bloody Everything) offering that provides basic CI with surprisingly convoluted configuration to Github.

The product as a whole is an exercise in frustration, one of the worst parts is the lack of reusability and the complexity required to achieve it. Github’s concept of reusable workflows on Github Actions is clearly a cobbled together afterthought.

Zsh Configuration and Plugins - Part One

As of 2022, I’ve been using zsh as my primary shell for 14 years.

Over that time I’ve experimented with and accumulated a lot of configuration, scripts, hacks, plugins and themes. I’ve settled on a configuration that I’m mostly happy with, over this series I’m going to share my current setup.

DALL·E 2 - Selected works

Over the past month I’ve been playing with OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 , below are some of the interesting images I’ve generated. “DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.” “A renaissance oil painting of two developers arguing over which javascript framework is the worst” “A Ralph Steadman painting of 7 cats sitting on a fence, and one raven” “A poster of Bruce Lee posing in front of a wall painted with traditional Japanese dragon artwork” “An Art Nouveau painting of Batman outside a church” “Old man yells at cloud” Variations on “A romantic oil painting of a chicken wearing beats by dre and smoking a cigarette” “A Romantic oil painting of a chicken wearing ripped jeans, aviator sunglasses, smoking a cigarette leaning up against a wall” “A romantic painting of snoop dog and a cool chicken wearing ripped jeans and aviators standing in a recording booth rapping into a microphone” “A dutch masters style oil painting of the rapper snoop dogg rapping into a microphone along side a cool looking animal wearing ripped jeans” “An oil painting of the rapper snoop dogg as a marvel super hero whose super power is smoking” “A romantic style oil painting of the rapper snoop dogg as a marvel super hero whose super power is smoking” “A detailed psychedelic painting of a person listening to the band TOOL for the first time and having their third eye opened” “A white Romantic Sculpture of the dude from the film the big lebowski” “A dutch masters oil painting of a robot cat” “A red Tesla model 3 crashed on the side of the road due to it’s poorly designed suspension”

Beginner Harmonica Practice Exercises

Beginner Harmonica Practice ExercisesWay back in around 2008 I wrote up a doc with a list of beginner harp exercises and practice riffs, at the time it was uploaded to a few forums and a shared Google doc - both have since disappeared. To this day I still get regular emails asking for a copy of it so I thought I’d copy it to a post here.