Supine Sourdough
Posted on May 8, 2020
(Last modified on June 3, 2025)
| 6 minutes
| Dave Megins-Nicholas
I’m a white white cishet software engineer who’s growing a man bun and trying to eat less meat so it must follow that I also make sourdough. I’ve been making it for a year and it’s great. It’s also incredibly simple. You don’t need all the ceremony you see online.
First you need your starter. Get this from a friend because it’s easier. I summoned my own but you don’t have to[1]. I store mine in a modified Kilner jar as below.
[Read More]Sabaton Open Air 2018
Posted on August 23, 2018
(Last modified on June 3, 2025)
| 4 minutes
| Dave Megins-Nicholas
As mentioned on various social media, podcasts, and documented on a damn wiki I went to the Sabaton Open Air festival in Falun! It was fantastic.
I wont bore you with the details. I’ll just highlight the most interesting bits.
Thursday’s highlight was Svartsot. I’ve listened to them for a few years and enjoyed them. A friend described them as “penny whistle metal” which isn’t technically correct but definitely gets across their folky and slightly repetitive theme. Glad I saw them.
[Read More]Eufy RoboVac 11
Posted on July 26, 2018
(Last modified on June 3, 2025)
| 3 minutes
| Dave Megins-Nicholas
We got a Roomba-like. The Eufy RoboVac 11. The idea has always appealed because I know I should vacuum more but I’m really lazy. In the new house we’ve got a white kitchen floor which could be a pain to keep clean. So we got the Eufy.
Why not just use a vacuum cleaner? But how often do you actually get it out of the cupboard and use it? Not as often as you’d like? … Exactly. I wanted to be able to press a button/set a timer and just have the thing run. That way the floor gets cleaned far more than it ever would previously.
[Read More]3 Months With Todoist
Posted on June 28, 2018
(Last modified on June 3, 2025)
| 2 minutes
| Dave Megins-Nicholas
TLDR: I’m still using Todoist but a bit less extremely.
I’ve almost finished my free trial of Todoist so I figured I’d dump my thoughts about it again.
It’s still the best TODO service I’ve seen. All my tasks still go in it and I still refer to it daily. Which is better than previous attempts at stuff like that.
Recurring tasks don’t seem to work as I’d like. For example I’d like to set up a recurring task to change the sheets on the bed. However I find if I miss the day and do it later, it seems to mess up the scheduling which sucks. I’ve not managed to reproduce it exactly so I’ve not submitted a bug report.
[Read More]Food Chain Magnate: First Thoughts
Posted on June 17, 2018
(Last modified on June 3, 2025)
| 2 minutes
| Dave Megins-Nicholas
Since the SU&SD review of Food Chain Magnate (FCM) back in February 2016 I’ve wanted to play it. Earlier this year there as a reprint/people found some spare stock/someone made bootleg copies of it. Jen said it was worth the price tag so I got a copy and just played it.
It took a good while to get to the table. It’s very complicated and needs a lot of space. The space issue meant that we waited until we got a bigger table. The complexity meant that Ele and I would play it first before inflicting a potential negative gameplay experience on friends. We actually got the game out a few weeks ago but ended up just reading the rules because we had to go out 2 hours later.
[Read More]VS Code, pylint, virtualenv, pytest shenanigans!
Posted on May 25, 2018
(Last modified on June 3, 2025)
| 1 minutes
| Dave Megins-Nicholas
Imagine you’re writing some code. Maybe you’re putting your recipes in git and doing CI/CD on them. Imagine you’ve got tests written in python using pytest. You’re not a complete scrub and you’re using a virtualenv. You’ve got pylint to lint your code. Your tests run. VS Code is highlighting import pytest
and saying that pylint cant find the module. WAT?
You’ll spend a while Googling but you wont find anything. Then you thing “hey, what interpreter am I using?”. You click the interpreter in the bottom left of VS Code and see a list:
[Read More]Using Todoist
Posted on May 1, 2018
(Last modified on June 3, 2025)
| 2 minutes
| Dave Megins-Nicholas
About a month ago Niklas from the Sixgun Discord sent me an invite to this service called Todist. Little did I know how much I needed it!
Imagine a Project Tracking system like Jira but designed for life as well as being not terrible. You can make tasks, assign them to people[0], give a deadline, add some comments, and put them in projects. Pretty simple CRUD right? Well yes but the execution is where the magic is.
[Read More]An Actual Smart Thermometer
Posted on April 25, 2018
(Last modified on June 3, 2025)
| 2 minutes
| Dave Megins-Nicholas
We’ve recently moved to a house rather than a flat[0]. I’ve noticed that adjusting radiators to get equal temperatures in various rooms is an art not a science. I know the Nest exists but it’s not smart enough. Here’s what I want:
Firstly just ditch the cloud. The small use case of turning your boiler on/off remotely are vastly outweighed by the internet of shit.
Our thermostat is positioned in the hall which has no radiator so there’s quite a delayed response. The front door is very close to the thermostat which is going to effect the reading. I’d like thermometers in every room so counteract this. Little device just pinging temperatures would be pretty low power so could conceivably be battery powered.
[Read More]1500 Points of Death Company
Posted on April 4, 2018
(Last modified on June 3, 2025)
| 2 minutes
| Dave Megins-Nicholas
As part of #4feldherren I committed to 1000 points of Blood Angels. Well that’s going to get turned into an army and for that I’d like 1500 points. So I’m making a little adjustment to my 1000 points.
Roughly 1000 points in:
143pts - HQ - Astorath
117pts - HQ - Captain with Jump Pack and Thunderhammer
239pts - Elite - 10 Marine Death Company with jump packs, power weapons, flamers, and inferno pistol.
239pts - Elite - 10 Marine Death Company with jump packs, power weapons, flamers, and inferno pistol.
239pts - Elite - 10 Marine Death Company with jump packs, power weapons, flamers, and inferno pistol.
That’ll be what I try to paint for #4feldherren. On top of that I’m going to add an extra 500pts(ish):
[Read More].NET Core (2.0) Travis Setup
Posted on March 26, 2018
(Last modified on June 3, 2025)
| 1 minutes
| Dave Megins-Nicholas
It took me about 2 hours but this is what you need to put in your .travis.yml
language: csharp
solution: dot-net-core-on-linux.sln
mono: none
dotnet: 2.1.4
install:
- dotnet restore
script:
- dotnet build
- dotnet test HelloWorld.Tests/HelloWorld.Tests.csproj
Why is this this good?
Well you don’t need build.sh
to set the permissions on. That was the first issue. You don’t install mono at all which speeds this up no end. Honestly I was testing this with a Hello World application and it was taking 3min to fail which is shite. Without mono it’s 90 seconds which is still terrible but I guess you get what you pay for.
[Read More]