Perhaps it’s a delayed reaction from 2018, but this year more dance and electronic music choices have filtered into my listening. It might also be that, as I get older I find it easier to become distracted by clearly sung lyrics and need something more instrumental or where the words are not as clear. Or perhaps it’s also something to do with The Pandemic; that my usual stomping ground of ‘rock’ bands remind me too much of public concerts and gatherings, something that’s not clear when it will return, and how safe it will be to do so, and I’ve been subconsciously suppressing these in favour of what I think of as less party and more contemplative music. The top six picks, plus honourable mentions are available as a Spotify playlist .

Many browsers now enforce the use of HTTPS on websites to allow them to be used. If you, like me, want to enable this in Blogger (Setting > Basic > HTTPS - HTTPS availability) for your own domain (e.g. not ending “blogspot.com) but you get the error “bX-2kvjq7” you might not have validated your domain. In which case try: Settings > Basic > Publishing - Blog Address > Edit. Then make sure you’ve added both the CNAMEs suggested. If that doesn’t work, click the link in “you can verify your ownership of this domain with a TXT record through the Google Search Console here instead”. After the jump choose your domain name provider from the drop down and add the long string as a TXT record in your DNS configuration as instructed.

This year feels like it’s a much more guitar band heavy selection, even though I’m not sure that’s not true. It’s probably just that the top two choices come from two of my favourite bands, whom I fell in love with back in a time when only listened to guitar bands. As usual there’s a Spotify playlist to listen along to at home (or anywhere these days).

A few years ago I built a couple of guitar pedals , and decorated them. Since then I’ve built a couple of amplifiers, but felt the itch again to make something, and pedals are smaller and take less time; so it’s a quicker and easier way to get the feeling of success in having created something.

This is my Git cheat sheet. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My cheat sheet is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must manage my master. – The Repository Committer’s Creed

Becoming a parent means that 2018 has provided much less time to listen to music than what I would consider normal; which I suspect will become the new normal. (So much so that this review is not even being written in 2018, regardless of what the publish date says.) This means most of my choices this year come from a much smaller selection than usual, and contain fewer finds that seem to come out of the blue from hours of semi-random listening.

Backups are something that we’re all meant to do on a regular basis, but often don’t. Here I’ve collected how I currently do it, and what I think are the important things to remember when backing up. As always, any backup is better than nothing, so start if you haven’t, and then iterate and improve on it later.

My recent experience made me look more closely at my backups, how I manage my data, and how much is locked away in places and formats that are hard to back-up and restore from. If I, or anyone else, wanted my data to be more digitally independent, what are the important points to consider?

Last week the screen on my laptop went black, and stayed black. It’s at that point your blood runs cold as you start to think “When did I last back up?”.

If I’m taking my HP Stream 11 running Linux with me, it’s most useful when I can connect to WiFi. I keep forgetting how to do it Raspbian (which in this case is basically just Debian), as it’s one of those things I do just infrequently enough to forget.