Five years ago I revived an old HP Stream 11 as a simple travel laptop with Debian Linux. That install is now pretty old, and the laptop's pitiful 2GB of RAM struggles more and more with websites; so it's time for a refresh. Instead of just installing another Linux distribution I thought I'd try something a little different. Since it's #OctOpenBsd, and I have to admit that I've been BSD-curious for a while, this is a good excuse to give OpenBSD a try.

The childrens' excitement grew as the masts of a ship appeared behind the treeline, that must be our ship! quickly followed by confusion as the more and more sets of masts appear all along the treeline. Soon the bus turned off the road and bounced along a short gravel track before setting us down next to our vessel for the day: the fearsome Barbaros. A cruise boat built to look like a pirate ship, with three masts, a raised wooden quarter deck with the bridge, and (water) cannons down both sides.

I've never been on an all-inclusive package holiday before, it's just not the type of holiday we did as a family when I was young. That was more the get in a car, drive somewhere in Europe, stay in an self-catered cottage, then probably do some hill walking and see some local historical sights, kind of a holiday. Since doing holidays without my parents my instinct has always been to try and visit somewhere new, and often the further away, the better. With young children that's not such a good holiday.

Recently I've been thinking more about my friendships and what makes a good one, but I've also had the sad realisation that haven't made any new close friends in more than a decade, and spent very little time with those I already have.

In November 1998 The Offspring released their 5th studio album, Americana, to widespread success. The lead single 'Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)' made it to number one in the UK charts, and thanks to that I learnt what punk rock was - and I was hooked. That's also how it became the first CD album I ever bought.

Along with measuring temperatures, I want to measure the energy we're using to maintain them. We have a Elstar BK-G2,5 MT gas meter, to which I want to retro-fit the ability to remotely read it.

With the MQTT base station now up and running, we can start sending data back to the server to be stored, and for that we need some temperature sensors.

Having bought the domain hen.re on a whim, because it was short and a bit like my name, but with no real plans, I thought it'd be a fun little project to see if I could create small landing/home page. But a very small page, so small in fact, that it could join the 1kb Club, a list of webpages that are smaller than 1,024 bytes.

It's a good question; given that this blog has already, quietly and unnoticed, entered its second decade, and a question that I've never addressed. So perhaps it's time I did so, for myself, and anyone else who might be curious.

It turns out you can use some smaller Lego train sets on Brio tracks, which is a great way of combining the two systems, if you have children that want to design and build their own trains.