Sometimes what would be best practice to improve accessibility in a pristine space is no longer best practice where standard practices in an existing endeavour mean that accessibility tools are less effective, or break, on what would have been the best practice.
In fact I am quite interested in what I am working on, and am happy to be learning new things. Unfortunately, not sleeping well, and other frustrations, have marred my enjoyment of my current circumstances. Still, I will prevail.
While it once might have been said that I had a few screws loose, nowadays I am not only getting things done, I am thinking clearly and coherently (except when exhausted of course, but that is to be expected). I’ve also been too busy to spend too much time on politics or news and all the things that I cannot change.
For Power BI, if your data source does not already have a date dimension table, Microsoft strongly recommends adding one in Power Query M-code. Here we show how to do that for a fiscal year date table.
A little personal creativity diversion from the technical/professional content of this blog.
I finished the second week of my new job! Though I did contract work for the same company a week before the holidays, at a very needed moment. So, I will have worked with them for three weeks, now.
My personal reset has been a success. I’m back on track with my training, my contract is going well, and my web presence refresh is making good progress.
I have achieved CompTIA A+ · ce certification, which is step one of my return-to-work plan. I’ve also been making progress on other fronts.
Bing chat fails to reason about who owns Princes and Madmen blog (me) and outright lies and claims that “Princes and Madmen” is a book written by Matthew Weiner.
Since I forgot to mention it before: I am a recipient of a 2023 O’Reilly DEIJ scholarship. I am also very close to official tests of my knowledge. And no, technology really doesn’t change that much.
Some updates on my training and paid work opportunities. (They’ve come through!). Maybe even a little bit too much at once.
When using markdownlint-cli/markdownlint-cli2 or the vscode-markdownlint extension for VSCode, one may wish to ignore a particular line. Here is a cheap way to do that using a shortcode.
markdownlint-cli/markdownlint-cli2
vscode-markdownlint
Having a demo/test site embedded in a Hugo module causes large bandwidth consumption during its normal use as a module. We split the site and module into separate git repos, but keep a deploy as part of the CI process.
In code, choosing spaces over tabs creates accessibility barriers. The developer ‘Holy Wars’ ignore this, so this article explains the issue.
If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t posted in a long time: “I have been up to tech!” I’ve created and updated quite a few projects.
When using Docker to containerize internal services like Samba, LLMNR, or mDNS a.k.a Bonjour one may find that the standard Docker model of using specific unicast ports forwards, is insufficient.
With browsers having built-in “Open link in new tab” functionality, it doesn’t make sense to break a basic web idiom (the back button) on a whim. Auto-opening link in a new tab/window breaks the back button and is unnecessary (because users have the ability to make that choice for themselves).
How Artificial Intelligence can win at board games.
Setting up an email relay that aliases addresses in various domains to a specific offsite user doesn’t have to mean backscatter. Here is one solution.
One of the lessons I’ve learned over the last few years is to relax and let others do what they do better than I.
About a member of the Mancala family of games known as Oware or Wari, with a look at an old Commodore 64 version as well as modern versions.
At some point you may need to upsize your PostgreSQL server, particular if you have implemented one on a old Raspberry Pi.
You may realize that you really wish you could start the Nextcloud instance from scratch without the hassle of a reinstall.
Setting up your own local Nextcloud can be useful for a number of reasons.
This article describes setting up a Raspberry Pi Model B+ as a private Gitea (lightweight Git hosting) server.
Raspberry Pi Model B+ as a PostgreSQL server with external storage.
Linux LVM thin pools and volumes initially seem to be a great way maximize the use of hard drive space by using only the space that is actually allocated to files. There is a major fly in the ointment though. Thin pools cannot be reduced in size.
If my feed was showing me what ’engaged’ me why did I get fed up and leave? There are several parts to the answer, but an important piece is that Facebook’s algorithm is largely an uncontrolled ‘positive feedback loop’.
We need mandatory third party security and privacy audits to matter as much to directors and shareholders as financial audits.
You may find yourself in need of a ‘bare metal’ server. If the workload is not too demanding, a Raspberry Pi can be a good choice.
For small deployments the Raspberry Pi is for servers.
A strange idea came to me in conversation the other day, namely that my schizophrenia helps me understand what it must be like to be Prince William.