Brett Hutley's Blog

On Wednesday we arrived back from France. We spent a week walking the first part of the Robert Louis Stevenson track (or the GR-70) as it's known by on the maps. We started off by spending a couple of days in Paris, staying at the Marriott Courtyard near the Gare de Lyon station. We had a fantastic view over Paris - including the Eiffal Tower!

Continue reading “Back from France”

Helen and I are popping over to Porto for a few days. Apparently a hurricane has just hit southern Portugal.

Playing around with an InkyPhat from Pimoroni.

The project OwnTracks looks really cool. It uses your phone to broadcast your location whenever you move. You can send your location to a designated MQTT or HTTP server.

There is an interesting idea that some researchers are thinking about which they are calling Intermittent Living. The general idea is that as the benefits of Intermittent Fasting occur by the triggering of the immune system through stressing the body, there are other stressing mechanisms which could trigger the body in a similar way. Body temperatures outside comfortable ranges for example.

There is an interesting comparison in this post that compares Avro, Protobuf and Thrift of binary messages sizes and how well the protocol supports schema evolution. Another interesting data transfer protocol is Parquet, which is optimized for column- oriented data.

I really like the ideas behind ActivityPub as used by Mastodon and gnu.social. There is an interesting post called "What is ActivityPub and how will it change the Internet?" that describes the promise of the protocol. For a contrasting look at ActivityPub versus Atom/RSS feeds see here.

I want to try using Mastodon, but I'm unsure about whether to set up a new Mastodon pod, or join one of the existing ones.

I use Emacs and GnuPG to save my passwords to an encrypted file. I'm really happy with this, as I save the encrypted file in Dropbox, and I can decrypt it across all machines and Operating Systems, and it syncs automatically. My Emacs config looks as follows:

(setenv "GPG_AGENT_INFO" nil)
(require 'password-cache)
(require 'epa-file)
(epa-file-enable)
(setq password-cache-expiry (* 15 60))
(setq epa-file-cache-passphrase-for-symmetric-encryption t)

Continue reading “Emacs, gpg and pinentry on Mac”

I've been using IntelliJ as my Java editor instead of Eclipse - and I absolutely love it! So much so that I bought a license for all of JetBrains' programmer editors! I'm still learning how to use all the functionality of IntelliJ, but I am finding my productivity has dramatically increased a few days after I started using it.