2022 update… with a fresh new look

OK bear with, this could take a while as I am currently writing this all in markdown. Or at least attempting to. I haven’t published in this way in at least 20 years since University days where it was popular to use LaTeX for typesetting scientific articles. For at least the last 10-15 years I’ve been using Wordpress as the CMS platform for this blog and, as we shall find out, for one reason or another I decided it was time for a change. So this may end up being a mini-series on how and why I moved my blog from Wordpress to Hugo and any experiences or observations along the way.

If you’re trying to configure Word Automation Services (esp. for use in the PDF Nintex tasks) then you may have used my previous post on the topic as a guide. Not seen it? It’s nice.

We recently upgraded a SharePoint environment but despite following the guide and configuring Word Automation Services and so on, workflows (or anything trying to use WAS) were failing with the error “there is no word services application proxy configured for this site collection”. All a bit odd because it all looked to be setup correctly.

It’s a Neff (aka Bosch) double oven with a slide-hide-door. Not sure of the exact model, but it looks like this.

About a year ago, it stopped working - on the CircoTherm setting only. All other heating modes were fine, and it would randomly occur sometime after switching it on but usually around 10 minutes. It would stop with some beeping and an error code - E6200 - on the screen.

Usual Googling turned up very little. You would think a fault code would be written down somewhere and exist - but there was nothing specific for this. In fact, all I found was this post on UK White Goods and this on Just Answer.

This was today:

Guernsey’s answer to a (half-)IronMan is the GraniteMan - a 70.3 style triathlon in Guernsey.

Here’s my bum.

Finished in a fairly respectable time. Well for me, anyway.

A story of when abandoned tech gets assimilated for undesirable purposes. AKA when I inadvertently created a massive open spam proxy. (Although in fairness I can also now say that I have created a site that was creating literally thousands of hits per minute… which is pretty huge.)

Let’s start with some excuses

(Warning: large amount of, shall we say, “scene-setting“.)

I don’t claim to be a web developer. Or certainly I don’t claim to be a very good one. Despite what some of my friends and family may think, it’s not what I do for a job. I know a little bit about a little bit but I am miles behind what some of the bigshots can do with the web nowadays.

Update: 06/01/2022

Just tried this all on macOS 12.0.1 (Monterey) and it was all fine. The only difference was that (a) Homebrew moaned that Xcode was out of date, so that needed a 12gb update, and (b) Powershell moaned about using stuff from an untrusted repository. In the end I trusted PSGallery by using:

Set-PSRepository -Name 'PSGallery' -InstallationPolicy Trusted

In fact the only real issue was the horrific shade of yellow that the highlighting decided to use for cmdlet names!

A vaguely tech-related philosophical-ish thought-piece.

Tedious irrelevant tech challenge #7582: I still buy music. On physical media. CD mainly.

Tedious philosophical quandry #29: are streaming services eroding our emotional connection with music?

I don’t know why I still buy physical media. The economics of it don’t really make sense when compared with all the kool-kidz streaming stuff that is available nowadays. I can buy one album for around a tenner. I can buy a month’s streaming service of near-infinite music for around a tenner.

In true form for this blog of documenting obscure things that will be inconsequential to 99.999999% of normal people, here’s (yet) another.

My — well-documented on Twitter, but as yet undocumented here — fallout with Drift Innovation’s Ghost cameras led me to emergency buy three GoPro Hero Session cameras - 1x Hero 4 Session and 2x Hero 5 Session.

The form factor of these diminutive cameras is highly appealing compared with the bulkier form of similar. You can really achieve a stealth cam thing.

A quick video showing how to replace the rear foglight customer on a BMW Mini.

Well this was a “fun” little technology frustration. We wanted to get the Disney+ app on our Sony Bravia 4K HDR television - specifically - the Sony KD-55XD8005. By all accounts, Disney+ is supported on all Android-based televisions and ours is Android.

Have heard from plenty of other people who have done it with no problem. Even someone, who lives nearby, with the exact same television - it installed fine. The only difference we can find is that I’m on a slightly different (newer) firmware edition: mine is PKG6.6575.0259EUA against his which is PKG6.6545.0255EUA.