My trusty old USB 3 hub has failed. It was only around a year old, but it was cheap and it worked. It wasn’t powered, but most of the time it didn’t need to be. One day I began having very strange issues with USB on my computer. Devices randomly disconnecting, devices never connecting until the computer was rebooted and so on. I eventually narrowed it down to the hub. I tossed it out after a quick internal inspection had revealed nothing obviously wrong, and went shopping for a new hub.

You may have seen my article on the air quality meter I built a while ago. Diyode, a print magazine in Australia kindly published an article discussing the process I took to create the thing! It’s a really cool feeling to be featured somewhere like this. The article is a great read, check it out over on Diyode: Sense of Smell.

The Finished Product - quite rustic! This article was recently featured in Hackaday and Diyode! I’m bored. I’m sure you are too. I’m personally very thankful that I can still work through this strange period - but there are still hours in the day to fill. I wanted a personal project, so I thought about remote working and the health impacts. Most offices here have air handling units, air conditioners, and fans to keep air circulating.

I recently installed Pop!_OS on my new desktop machine and have been loving it, but have been suffering with this really strange issue where the entire UI would stutter roughly every second for a few milliseconds. This got really, really annoying so I had a little dig around and found out the cause was actually a strange interaction between Ubuntu AppIndicator (a bundled extension for Gnome Shell in Pop!_OS) and YTMDesktop - an electron wrapper for Youtube Music.

Having speed makes others happy in the short term. Having velocity makes you happy in the long term. One of the biggest lessons I learned was to prioritise ‘velocity’ over ‘speed’. This probably sounds meaningless to you, but allow me to explain. At some point around a year ago, during my one to ones with my manager, we were discussing the fact that I was heavily distracted and finding it tough to concentrate on tasks I wanted to work on.

Knowing when and how to make breaking changes is tough. It is even tougher in the Go ecosystem. After being burned by making a breaking change and annoying people, I’m going to investigate how best to mitigate this annoyance. Disclaimer: This is mostly opinion, and only my opinion. This post is not associated with my employer in any way. You can contact me @normankev141 What even is a breaking change, anyway A simple definition of a breaking change is any change you make to your code that could break other code which directly or indirectly depends on it.

As a kid, I used to love playing Minecraft. I was technically precocious from a fairly young age, and naturally gravitated to attempting to host my own Minecraft server for me and my band of geeky pals to play on. The problem was, I had no idea what port forwarding was, nor how to log into a router. The solution I found was about as novel as it was dumb.

A long time ago I worked for an ISP as Tier 1 technical support. This is just one of many stories I have from my time here. These were originally published elsewhere on the internet, but are being reworked and republished here. Sometimes, the degree of insanity in a conversation can reach such a fever pitch that it is hard to recover. Sometimes, people can say things that leave you so flabbergasted that you aren’t sure if you’re being trolled or not.

I recently worked on a task which involved checking every single value in a Redis instance, and modifying ones which matched a certain format. This script needed to run in a fairly timely fashion, as it would need to be run frequently. Making requests sequentially didn’t cut it, so I learned about pipelining. This simple optimization meant that a script which I originally calculated to take over 50 hours to run ran in under 4 minutes!

It all started when I noticed these particular stickers absolutely everywhere all over London. I’d also seen them in other European cities! I was never curious enough to actually search for them, to figure out their meaning, so I just noticed, acknowledged my curiosity and moved on. I later did discover their meaning, but the way I discovered this was something I never expected. The ‘why suspect us.’ sticker in question