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Non stick pans annoy me. When you buy them they’re incredibly effective. Then slowly degrade until they’re more stick than the alternatives. The prime example is my last pan which had a weird wavy texture that when the non stick coating failed, food would get stuck in the valleys. Awful experience, terrible design. So I’m trying stainless steel. I’m not sure I have the discipline for seasoning cast iron pans yet. [Read More]

Rather than resolutions, here are my aims for 2023: Paint more miniatures. I had a very good summer of painting miniatures but flagged in the final third of 2022. Play more games with said painted miniatures. I’ll be giving a local club a go soon which should hopefully make this one easy. Read more. It’s not difficult to read more than me. In 2023 I’d like to find a way around my inability to read at home. [Read More]

As always, I’ve listened to a lot of music this year. Some old. Some new. My most anticipated release this year was Ridge and Furrow EP from Dark Forest. DF were my favourite discovery last year and I just love them. The new EP is excellent, Skylark being my favourite track. I hope they put out a full album again soon. A blast from the past is Jethro Tull’s Heavy Horses. [Read More]

I’ve been in Army Bosh Mode for a while now. The French Napoleonics, DAK, and 30k Space Wolves have taken up all my hobby time. I need to mix it up. Tickets for Warhammer Fest 2023 went on sale and I picked up a Golden Demon ticket too. I’m going to do a diorama. It’s been a while since my last diorama but I think I have a good idea. I’m planning on documenting the process here. [Read More]

I’ve signed up for a Mastodon account. I had a poke around there a few years ago but it was almost entirely people talking about how great Mastodon is. Now there seems to be a (sub)critical mass of people where you can just have a conversation about stuff that isn’t Mastodon. It’s got a bit of the quiet pub vibe that Ideni.ca did back in 2010ish. So far it’s nice. [Read More]

As per my previous post, I destroyed my Ghost installation. Nginx was shafted, networking in general was shafted, node was shafted. It was a mess. So I gave up and decided to go with a nice static site. Just like I always should have. I managed to fix the networking enough to SSH into it. From their I dumped the mysql database into a file using a little bash mysqldump -u root -p ghost_production > ~/mysqldump From there back to my local machine where I used rsync to get the files downloaded with the classic: [Read More]

It’s wild how it’s been 3 years since the last Sabaton album. Pandemic adjusted it’s ~1 year I guess. In between we’ve had a few singles in which have been somewhere between Fine and This Has Aged Poorly. On first listen I wasn’t impressed so I’ve given it a lot more time before committing opinions to the blog, listening to it a lot. First I’ll break down what I think of each track, then the album as a whole, and finally something about what I want from Sabaton these days. [Read More]

Last year I wrote about useful stuff to buy/use. This will cover some useful stuff I found this year. Order your coffee beans from a good roaster. Previously I’ve either had a Pact subscription or picked up random bags from cafes I’ve visited. Obviously with the Pando that’s been hard. I’ve taken to alternately ordering from Quarter Horse or Square Mile. I’ve been getting the filter roasts generally, always in bean form. [Read More]

About 4 years ago I bemoanedthe heating in our house. It turns out that providing you’re willing to connect things to the internet it’s super easy. It was probably possible the time I wrote the post if you’re okay with the internet[0]. Simply use Tado°! Replace your thermostat with theirs, connect the internet bridge to your network and you’ve a minimal setup. At this point through the app you can define arbitrarily complicated heating schedules, have it adapt to the weather, detect open windows by drops in temperature, reduce the heating if you leave the house. [Read More]