Pither.com / Simon
Development, systems administration, parenting and business

A collection of orange flowers from our visit to Sheringham in the summer.

All taken in June 2018.

last week

Heating

We have given up! Our heating has been switched on. We were trying to make it to the totally arbitrary goal of reaching October before needing to do such, but after a couple of very cold and disturbed (presumably related) nights, we decided to give up just a little early. I wonder how long it will be …

Getting slightly ahead of myself but I've decided to go for a sunny autumn photo today.

All taken in October 2017.

No matter what I tried I couldn't convince "lxd init" to create, or configure an existing, LVM thinpool for it's use!

So I ended up doing it rather more manually...

Basic requirements before getting started at all:

apt install lxd thin-provisioning-tools

Then create a thinpool, in this case using all of the remaining space on the "local" volume …

last week

Escaping time based gaming

I've concluded that this style of game is really bad for me (or anyone I think). This is the style of game that demands (to make progress) frequent/regular bits of your time. Eg playing each day to collect a daily reward, or every X hours to restore your shield or collect built-up resources …

More photos from our recent visit to Chartwell, this time some views from their new tree house.

All taken in August 2018.

This article follows my meandering path to building a simple Python script (and dependencies) as a binary that I could easily run on multiple machines. If you just want to see what I ended up using, scroll down to the last section.

PyInstaller

I started out using PyInstaller as it was really simple to get running. To build a binary …

last week

Technology

The joy of Unicode with MySQL and Django - make sure you change at the table level, otherwise future column migrations will try to reset away from UTF8.

An interesting read on fork()-ing in Python and how it relates to multiprocess.Pool.

Since when could you get 14TB hard disks?!

Reading up on possible Python executable distribution …

It's late and I didn't plan this in advance, so here's a picture I like from somewhere we visited in June!

Taken in June 2018.

last week

Technology

Continuing with my recent server admin tendencies, I spent a while working out how to do a completely custom Ubuntu install on a physical machine rented from OVH, making use of the IPMI access they provide.

I also noticed and fixed a "Precendence: bulk" header in my RT emails.

Banking

Another twist on banking that combines a …

I recently spent a while working out how to do a completely custom install on a physical machine rented from OVH, making use of the IPMI access they provide. I thought I'd document it for future reference. So here's how to perform a custom/manual Ubuntu install via IPMI on OVH hosted hardware.

Disable OVH monitoring

First up is an …

A couple of weeks ago we paid a quick visit to Chartwell and noticed a tiny companion on our walk back across the gardens.

All taken in August 2018.

I use Request Tracker as the ticketing tool for support enquiries to my web hosting company and happened to notice (while looking at email headers for something else) that it's sending out ticket emails with the header:

Precedence: bulk

I can understand why this is a reasonable default, especially as RT is often configured to send automatic acknowledgement and status …

last week

Property (and stats)

A great (well, I think so) read from the ONS in their latest house prices index. There are some big regional differences in the changes they report but it seems a drop in transactions is pretty consistent across the county. That said the historic numbers do suggest a spike in transaction numbers in April 2017 …

A bumper Photo Friday this week with five of my favourite images from our recent holiday to Bletchley Park. All taken in August 2018.

If you've ever hosted a website, especially a blog, I'm sure you've considered Wordpress as the potential software to use.

Despite this personal blog not using Wordpress, I do use it for a few others, where I just wanted to get up and running really quickly with a pretty standard set of features. That was exactly what I wanted for …

last week

Social media

Since it's now frowned upon to post repeated content (even on Twitter), and it's tedious to manually think up a new way to say the same thing 10, 20 or more times; I've been thinking about ways it could be automated. It turns out I'm not the only one - here's an intriguing new feature from Edgar …

This weeks photo is from our recent visit to the Reigate fire station open day, taken in July 2018.

last week

General

Somehow I managed to end up spending three hours doing Windows desktop support!! This is something I thought I'd escaped from a long time ago. There's just one special SEOSS customer who Tim still provides this for and hence w hile he's on holiday I get to as well. It's fairly common for Tim and I to …

A couple of close-ups from a bunch of flowers recently gifted to Liz (not by me), taken in July 2018.