Al Phillips

This post comes as a result of a comment a friend made about what he thought was a good idea for a /r/dataisbeautiful post: “Some kind of graph showing the correlation between the population of a country and the number of people that answered it in the countries of the world sporcle quiz.” he said in a WhatsApp message. I think he knew exactly what would happen once I saw that suggestion… [Read More]

I’ve recently been doing lots of switching between Linux (i run arch btw) and Windows on my home PC. However, I also do a lot of things remotely. This is fine when you’ve got a pure Linux box, but dual-booting on consumer hardware leaves much to be desired. GRUB allows you to specify which boot option to select as default on your next boot (and only the next boot), which back-in-the-day I used to use to, in a slightly convoluted manner, reboot to Windows after defaulting to my Linux install. [Read More]

If your site doesn’t support HTTPS, better hurry up. Google already uses HTTPS as a ranking factor, but from July 2018, Google Chrome will label non-HTTPS sites as not-secure. The following setup is so simple that there’s basically no excuse for your site to not be HTTPS compliant. These instructions assume you’ve followed the mish-mash of a guide I posted for the starting setup. First of all, head on over to letencrypt. [Read More]

What follows is something of a personal reminder of how I got this webserver set up, using nginx to serve a static website which is generated by Hugo using git-hooks to deploy with a simple git push. I had to read several different tutorials to figure it out; those that I can remember I have linked at relevant points. A while later, I added HTTPS support using letsencrypt, but I’ll save that for another post since it required some more fiddling. [Read More]

I can now turn my lights on and off from my phone I forget exactly what drove me to do this, probably sheer laziness; I was getting tired of getting out of bed to turn the lights in my bedroom on and off. In the age of the smartphone and internet of things, it seemed obvious to try some sort of internet-enabled solution, just in case I was ever on the other side of the planet and wanted to turn my lights on. [Read More]

I’m not really one for taking many photos, I find it detracts from the experience of being in places. Better to have a couple of photos to jog the memory than take a hundred and not remember what was going on when you took ‘em.   Clifford's Tower A now empty shell, this is what remains of the Norman York castle. It was raining when we were at the top. [Read More]

In case you haven’t noticed, this page is Powered By Hugo ©️. Hugo is a very nice static website engine, taking your neatly arranged directories full of Markdown files and converting it into a pretty website. I had tried to do something similar with Flask but the process of getting a kind of “dynamically-static” site running where I could just drop in new files was too much of a faff. Then a friend recommended Hugo which, after a couple of days of messing about, seems perfect for my use case. [Read More]