Some words and thoughts about the process of building a home office in my back garden. Background I’ve worked from home from time to time a fair bit in recent years, but thanks to Covid this turned in to much longer and much more frequently. You can cope with being surrounded by house shrapnel for so long (kids’ toys, dinner things, shoes, boxes, excess furniture…) but we hit a point where it became time to do something a little bit more fit for purpose.

2022 was going to be The Year. The year that I got shit done, learnt new stuff, and generally felt all fluffy and cozy about myself. That hasn’t really gone to plan. At the start of the year, I migrated this blog to Hugo which was an initial step that as part of a larger concerted effort to get back in to doing more creative things. This was actually a part of an even bigger thing - New Year’s Resolutions.

This article popped up with a review of the Samsung M8 Smart Monitor. The review itself seemed pretty fair, but as is reasonable for The Reg, the comments were ablaze with people slating the device, despite it being pretty likely that none of them actually has one of these. As it happens, I do, so I decided to leave a comment, which seemed to make sense to reproduce here. My use case was pretty specific - I have a 49" LG ultrawide already (so not exactly short of screen real estate) but there are some occasions having the screen physically separate makes sense.

I am not a marketing expert. Or even a marketing, um, “average”. I’m not a marketing person at all. Well not willingly. Or knowingly. Or acceptingly. I mean, I’ve done some… sales… in my life. Bits and bobs… this and that. Made some cash along the way. Mostly through honesty and doing what I said and just delivering stuff. But. I am a consumer. In fact, my approach to sales and marketing is almost entirely predicated on the experiences I’ve had as a victim of marketing techniques; I know full well what annoys me and so my approach to sales and marketing is mostly just endeavouring to not repeat those same mistakes and do stuff that I know would annoy me.

If you’re reading this then chances are you already well aware of the recent AI-themed issue: operator of Google-owned LaMDA, Blake Lemoine, was suspended from his job for claiming that his AI was sentient. (Well actually, he was suspended for sharing company secrets, in the form of the chat transcript.) If you’re not up to speed, then you won’t have to look far to find the story. I first read about it on The Register.

Quick update on this as I’ve just migrated to a new Mac. For some reason I opted to do a sort of half-half job using the Mac migration assistant which, I may write about separately, because ultimately it’s been a bit of a mission to do this. One issue was how to get Music set up on the new Mac. The music library on the NAS is fine and nicely organised but despite the media itself being somewhere else, the Mac still relies on a file called ‘Music Library’ (by default) which is effectively a big list of everything.

I’ve used “the Mac OS” for longer than I care to admit but through many, many incarnations over the years. In the early days, you would look forward to the releases/updates of new major versions because they would bring major innovation. But over at least the last 5 major versions, I’ve updated but experienced very little in the way of new functionality that has been of any real use or interest. In most cases, it usually just becomes more irritating to use.

Over on the Cortex blog we have a janky-ass blog system that uses some filthy PHP and MySQL to do news article type things. I wrote it, it’s disgusting, we should do better, but it is what it is. The plumber’s toilet, and all that. Pending some time to actually do it properly, we wanted to polish the turd enough that it was semi-functional - and this included having in-post navigation - so that, from a post you could either jump forward or backwards to the post.

In the post on bootstrap style tables in Hugo I wanted to show the actual shortcodes you needed to create in your templates. But in some cases, Hugo was helpfully rendering the shortcode as the actual output, rather than the raw code. (This is likely because I have unsafe set to true for historic reasons.) You can create code blocks using backticks, e.g., ``` code here ``` but if you try and include HTML (or similar), then the tags themselves just disappear:

Tables in Markdown are a bit of an anomaly that requires a mish-mash of hypens and pipes. You can get the basics from this article at markdownguide. By default, though, how these then render will depend on your template (and the configured CSS) but it’s reasonable to say there’s a chance the tables will look a bit shit. What if we could have swanky looking tables à la bootstrap? Yep, but what if you don’t actually use bootstrap in your theme?