It seemed like a strange request, when a colleague asked me to look into upgrading our Function Apps to use .NET 10, ‘isolated worker’. Since when was it possible to change their runtime version ourselves? And what on God’s Green Earth was an ‘isolated worker’? It was time to investigate. There are a couple of important things to remember about Function Apps, as a starting point. Firstly, my colleagues and I had developed Function Apps exclusively as custom Logic App components, to handle more cumbersome data transforms.

There are a handful of Mediaeval buildings along the high streets of Tewkesbury that house taverns and pubs, and the town itself feels homely. I often find myself wondering, while I’m drinking at The Black Bear, whether the people who frequented the taverns during the Middle Ages were that different to us, and whether they talked politics in the same way we do today. Did the ale taste roughly the same then?

Typically a Linux operating system will create and use a swap partition that’s resident on the hard drive, and this would act as an extension to system memory. The swap partition and system memory are abstracted into a single virtual memory space, but the kernel, by default, will usually read and write data between the two in 4KB ‘pages’. I’ve only recently had a personal laptop with an SSD (which can’t easily be replaced), and it occurred to me that having data paged continually to a partition might reduce its lifespan.

Since the weather became too wet for coastal exploration, we spent a lot more time in Truro. I think ‘prosaic’ would be a descriptive word for the place, but it’s one of my favourite cities because it’s spaced out, uncongested and overall pretty chilled. Truro would be a small town (basically just a shopping precinct and a high street), if it didn’t have a cathedral, which is very notably an impressive display of craftsmanship both inside and out.

In the last post, I covered some very basic stuff for editing text in Vim. There are a few more advanced features I picked up while using it as an actual code editor. Basic keybindings Use ‘Esc’ key to enter visual mode. Select text, use ‘v’ and ‘Ctrl+Right’ Cut text: ‘d’ Copy text: ‘y’ Paste text: ‘p’ Line numbers Either use the :set number command, or add it to /etc/vim/vimrc.

Microsoft earned itself the rather descriptive name ‘Microslop’ in recent months, on account of having infested virtually all its products with ‘AI’/Co-Pilot stuff that nobody asked for and few want. It’s especially insidious and invasive enough in Windows 11 that one shouldn’t expect any privacy when using it. Visual Studio Code was a decent editor that I’d been using since Atom got deprecated. Now it’s primarily an ‘open source AI code editor’, its official Web site declares.

Instead of rethinking whether the identity verification thing was such a good idea, after an entirely predictable data breach involving ~70,000 users, Discord doubled down and made it a requirement, globally, to use some of its core features. Isn’t it strange that so many governments are suddenly trying to push the Online Safety Act bullshit, under different names, over the last year, and that the Corporate Media are telling us that messaging apps are to blame for what effectively are the social consequences of neoliberalism?

I really do like the town of Warwick, because it has pretty much everything within a short walk of where Robby and myself occasionally stay. There are two nice pubs, perhaps the best Indian restaurant outside Birmingham, and a market in the town square on Saturdays. The weather was dry and bright most the time, so we got lucky with that. The Castle Inn can get quite busy, with some event there every other night, and it always has a friendly atmosphere.

Lenovo Thinkpads have historically been the ideal hardware for running Linux, so I was initially optimistic about replacing Chrome OS on a sightly older (but relatively decent spec) laptop. Unfortunately it turned out the laptop was a Chromebook, and the vendor (Google, I’m guessing) really didn’t want anyone replacing the operating system. I spent a few hours looking for ways around that. The operating system I installed was Debian 13.2.0 (Cinnamon edition), and the installation media was prepared by using Rufus to flash the debian-live-13.

Although Substack was never designed to be just a newsletter service for something else, it can be pretty useful for that. I’ve been increasingly less inclined to use it since it became more of a ‘social’ media platform, with certain authors being promoted by The Algorithm. What really did it for me, though, was an email sent to authors the other week, which stated: ‘Substack is introducing age verification steps for those in the UK.