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Emma doesn’t appear to have brought home any pathogens after having been at preschool for the week. The preschool does this thing where they have a little ceremony each month for all the children born in that month (as Emma was) and it was nice that she was able to participate in that. The school took a photo of all the kids and that means we now have one for each of the three years she’s been attending.
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No cycling practice for Emma this week. It was too cold on the weekend to want to go out.
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We applied for another property over the weekend. We’re still in the running for the other two but I prepared our yearly budget during the week and realised the more expensive one would really stretch things thin. As fate would have it, another relatively cheap property came on the market on Saturday and we jumped on it quickly. I’ll be looking at it this coming Sunday together with the cheaper of the original two. We’ll make a decision shortly thereafter.
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After declaring so confidently last week that iCloud was the place for me in the wake of Google announcing the end of legacy Google Workspace accounts, I realised that my extensive use of e-mail aliases meant iCloud (with its three alias maximum) was a no-go. Off to Fastmail I went and so far it’s been really rather excellent. After it took literal days to copy my e-mail from Google’s servers to Apple’s, Fastmail slurped it all up within an hour or two. Really, the worst part of the experience has been having to leave behind Mimestream.
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The best part is something completely unexpected. I’d forgotten that, for reasons us mere users aren’t privy to, Gmail doesn’t support push e-mail using Mail.app. The native Gmail app isn’t truly awful but it’s just a wrapper around a webview and it sucks at rendering any e-mail with remotely fancy HTML in it (like just about every newsletter). Well, that’s a problem I no longer have because Fastmail does support push e-mail and so I’ve been able to completely embrace the Mail.app lifestyle. Useful e-mail notifications on my Apple Watch? Yes, please.
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I neglected to mention this last week but I set up a third VPS. I’ve generally run Debian on my servers. It’s been great from a security and stability perspective but on the server I use for remote development, the glacial pace at which packages get added to and updated in Debian’s repository can make things frustrating. That’s not a knock on Debian; it’s simply part of the deal. It wouldn’t be as secure and stable if it didn’t have as thorough a vetting process. So I went exploring. I first tried FreeBSD and after trying (and failing) to get it to work on Linode, I gave it on a run on an instance at Vultr. Pretty quickly I bumped into problems due to difference between FreeBSD’s versions of tools and GNU’s. I quickly retreated to Linode checked out Arch Linux. It’s been about a week and I’m really enjoying it. I haven’t moved everything but it’s looking like my Debian-based remote development server is not long for this world.
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I got into Big Joel over the week. I’ve watched about half a dozen of his videos so far with my favourites being ‘The Room’ (about the film of the same name) and ‘Shane Dawson’s Trashfire Makeup Documentary’. Big Joel’s essays tend to all be around the 20 and 30 minutes so if you’re often put off by the length of the essays I typically link to, this might be more your scene.
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I of course watched the ‘Boris Johnson is a Liar’ video that the British satirist Tom Walker made for the New York Times (it’s also on YouTube).
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I want to like Paul McCartney’s solo work more than I do. While I didn’t find much on his most recent album, McCartney III, that grabbed me, I do quite like this cover of ‘Find My Way’ by Beck (Apple Music) from the III Imagined album that was put out in April of last year. Get it? Three-imagined. The man’s a genius.
