I learned some very interesting historical trivia about West Wales, while I was in Tenby this year. A hidden network of tunnels? My favourite art shop in Tenby is Nook, which is at the lower end of the high street. The shop now sells figurines made by the Tenby Ghost Co. - the general idea is a rip-off of what the York Ghost Merchants does, but why not? There’s always a long queue of tourists in The Shambles for the ghosts, purely because that company did some genius work in creating a mythos around them.

I’d been using Postman since the start of my career, when it was a handy, lightweight tool that did one thing really well: Sending REST requests and capturing API responses. Sadly, it became yet another victim of the Silicon Valley Lifecycle (’enshittification’ is such an over-used term): It became too popular, acquisitions happened, divorced-from-reality valuations were made, VC became involved, and the once-perfect application became a degraded monetised version of itself.

There was a time when I’d have obstinately argued that technology cannot be inherently moral or immoral, ethical or unethical, and that was my position in discussions about the ethics of ‘hacking’ tools, encryption and privacy-enhancing software, when I was an undergraduate. The tools I routinely use for systems administration and security testing are (or rather were) the same tools used by many criminals to break into networks, install malware and commit identity theft.

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?