Bill @bill@mastodon.technology

Whilst my choice of reading material may be questionable, I’m loving the fact that I’m now incentivised to try and read more.

So far from “done” but the app is already proving useful.

Going to try and get a “readability” score published soon.

I need a new note taking system for when I’m out running. Siri just doesn’t cut it.

抚开研弄异…

I’m still struggling to go from character to tone reliably. I can have a good guess at the pinyin, but I don’t yet have a system for tones. I suspect this is where I need to bring the spoken and the written languages together. #Chinese

掉拉啦找无…

🎉 Hit my target of 600 characters by the end of the year. I can’t keep pace with the little one, but I’m making progress!

Tried to learn five new characters today.

I’m up to 420 characters…

To natives I’m sure this is obvious but it makes my mind boggle to see that I can read Chinese even when I have no idea what the words sound like. #Mandarin #中文

Proud dad moments… when you pick up one of your son’s books and realise that you can actually read the title of the book 😂

Enjoyed the Go London Study Group this evening. Added super sampling to my Mandelbrot set generator. #golang

If you are in the U.K. Monzo are giving £10 to anyone who uses a referral link to open an account. I don’t benefit from referrals, but you can.

Who doesn’t want a mobile first, cloud native bank that was built from the ground up in the last few years? AND it comes with a hot coral pink card. What’s not to love?

https://monzo.com/referral?code=hq3a7tf

It’s easy to miss just how quickly the tech giants have conquered payments in China. What stands out is how the humble QR code has enabled street vendors to take electronic payments with no investment in expensive card readers or payment terminals.

Beijing’s air quality has been a frequent topic of conversation since I’ve been here and so I built myself a simple air quality indicator.

In building this, it surprised me was how quickly we adjust our definitions of normal. When freak events become regular occurrences they no longer stand out whatever colour we make them.

For all my work with ops, alerts and dashboards I’m not sure why this surprised me as much as it did.

‪This prompted me to loook up the origins of the phrase “Siamese twins”. Whilst I can see the connection with the picture, I had no idea that it can actually be used to refer to word pairs:‬
‪* milk and honey‬
‪* short and sweet‬
‪* fight or flight‬

‪https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siamese_twins_(linguistics)‬

Trying to make banana bread whilst looking after a 4-month old wasn’t the best idea in the world. Completely forgot the eggs 😱 somehow it’s till edible. Cake anyone? 🍌 🍞

London in 24 hours

Dynamic DNS providers seem to have fallen by the wayside recently, either shutting down completely or competing to generate the most unwanted email. So I over-engineered a solution:
- Goggle App Engine service to give me external IP
- Go client to update Route53 hosted DNS when IP changes
- Packaged in a Docker container
- Deployed on Kubernetes
- Running on a Raspberry Pi cluster

There are a few tweaks to make mostly logging/metrics, but it seems to be working well so far.

A very London kind of evening.

Finally got script set-up to give me multi-architecture Docker images. Overkill for hobby projects I know, but who doesn't want to ship code to a cluster of Pis.

Chinese Visa application for a newborn requires me to provide employment status. I’m torn between ‘unemployed’ and ‘entertainer’.