The wife rang me at work and asked if I could have the dog (Charlie) for an hour while she nipped for a trim at the hairdressers. Charlie and my employers are very used to each other, so it's not a problem;

Before you start berating people, it's a good idea to get the full facts first. Yes, I know, probably the less confrontational approach would have been to say, "Excuse me, I was expecting some tablets,

A month or so ago I bit the bullet and invested in a new mobile phone. A Samsung S26 Ultra, to be precise. The one fear holding me back was 'Banking'. Ten years ago, if you'd asked me if I used my phone

Hivewatchers is gone. I don't celebrate it, and I don't mourn it. image source: ChatGPT Hivewatchers is no more. Well, bugger me. I have to admit that came as something of a shock. While I like to tell

All images are mine unless otherwise stated. I have already posted these images to Facebook so that family members can see them. "Fares, please!" A few weeks ago, the wife and I took our grandson

For a very long time now, I've always felt that Hive is like a pyramid, or perhaps more accurately, a layer cake. Those at the top seem to have all the cream, those in the middle are doing OK with the

I know I've said this a thousand times before, but! I couldn't do 1st-line support full-time; I really couldn't. You have no idea how much respect I have for those who do that kind of job, day in, day

Our local chip shop is "CASH ONLY", he has notices everywhere written on fish & Chip wrapping paper saying "Cash is King!" and "No card payments!" never mind Jeff Bezos

I was being moaned at that my Witness votes were about to expire and that I needed to do a Governance Transaction if I still wanted to be considered one of the good guys. I'm gonna hold my hand up and

Yet another story that's perfect podcast material IMO. In 2021 Tesco purchased VMware vSphere Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation from Computacenter, which is a reseller of VMware. Now, in the murky

From Monks' Manuscripts to Machine Minds: How Power Fears Shared Knowledge I saw a post on Mastodon yesterday alluding to AI being the spawn of Hitler! I laughed so much that a little bit of wee nearly

Over a year ago, I noticed that the V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum) had acquired the David Bowie archive and was planning to create a dedicated venue for it, so I waited for tickets to be released.

image source I've been lucky enough to secure tickets for the David Bowie exhibition at the V&A Storehouse in London, which I'll be attending tomorrow, Saturday, 27th September 2025. As you can imagine,

Taking Charlie for a walk, I decided to 'go exploring'. Instead of heading down into Bourton, I turned right and after a short walk, I came across one of those Public Footpath signs for Windrush, Charlie,

Given it rained off and on while we were in the Cotswolds, we decided to go on a steam train ride from Broadway to Cheltenham Race Course.

The wife was determined not to go to North Devon, so to ensure we went somewhere different, she booked Japonica Cottage in Bourton-on-the-Water, Cotswolds. I've never been in that part of the country,

I've just spent a few days in the Cotswolds, and I'll write another post(s) about that. This is a bit out of sequence, to be honest, as we visited The Farmer's Dog on our last day on our way back home.

Walking with Charlie this morning, we met up with a big dog we've not seen in a while. I've no idea what breed it is; it looks like a German Shepherd, but its long coat is greyish silver with overtones

That's not good.

Someone's knocking on the door! Over the past week, I had my Friendica instance hammered by login attempts and bad bots. This is the process I used to track down the culprits, configure Fail2Ban, and set