Technology

I run Invidious on a TrueNAS SCALE box at home. Ads, tracking, the algorithm’s mood swings – none of that gets through. But Shorts still wrecked the subscriptions feed. Half the page was a wall of clips I had no intention of watching. I assumed there’d be a setting. There isn’t. Upstream has three feature requests asking for one (#3920, #4457, #3541) – all closed as “not planned”. The TrueNAS app wraps stock Invidious, so the GUI offers nothing either. ...

I’ve been trying to figure out which productivity app actually fits my workflow. Both WHPH (Work Hard Play Hard) and Super Productivity keep coming up, so I thought it was worth comparing them properly. WHPH (Work Hard Play Hard) WHPH is a general-purpose productivity app. It does several things: tracks your tasks, monitors which apps you use and for how long, helps you build habits, and gives you a basic sense of where your time goes. The sync between desktop and mobile happens over your local network – no cloud, no account, just devices talking to each other. ...

I have a drawer full of spare AA and AAA batteries. Some are fresh, some are from remote controls that died last winter, some I found in a toy. Before tossing them or putting them to use, I check the voltage with a multimeter. It takes thirty seconds and saves you from guessing. What you need A cheap multimeter is all you need. Any digital one will do — I’ve used the same £8 model from Amazon for years. The probes should be intact and the battery in the multimeter itself should have charge (if it beeps when you turn it on, you’re good). ...

Both are Firefox forks for Android. Both strip out telemetry. They diverge on what to do after that. Iceraven is built around customisation. It exposes about:config, supports a wider range of add-ons than stock Firefox for Android, and tries to replicate the desktop Firefox experience on mobile. Updates come through GitHub releases. It’s aimed at people who want to tweak their browser. IronFox comes from Mull, which itself is a privacy-hardened Firefox fork. It removes more telemetry than Iceraven, disables features that leak data by default (WebGL, for example), and keeps the interface stripped down. It’s on F-Droid and Accrescent as well as GitHub. The trade-off is that some websites break because of the aggressive defaults. ...

TOGAF is documentation-heavy and linear. Scrum is iterative and lightweight. Running them together means breaking the Architecture Development Method into sprint-sized chunks instead of treating it as a single pass from Phase A to Phase H. Mapping ADM phases to sprints The ADM doesn’t have to run in one direction. You can treat each phase as a backlog item and pull work through in sprints. TOGAF Phase Scrum equivalent Preliminary Sprint 0 — governance, tools, team setup Phase A: Vision Product backlog epics for the EA vision Phases B-D: Business, Data, Application, Technology One domain per sprint Phase E: Opportunities & Solutions Backlog refinement for implementation Phase F: Migration Planning Roadmap prioritisation Phase G: Implementation Delivery sprints Phase H: Change Management Sprint retrospectives Roles The Enterprise Architect maps closest to Product Owner — they prioritise the architecture backlog. The Architecture Board shows up at sprint reviews. The Scrum Master facilitates the process and removes blockers. ...

I used to take on any project that came my way. That was a mistake. Not every problem deserves your time, and not every client is worth working with. Over the years I’ve learned to filter opportunities through a simple set of questions before committing to anything. Can they fix it themselves? If the answer is yes – or if a decent blog post could solve it – then it’s not a consulting engagement. It’s a homework assignment. The value of consulting lies in the gap between what the client knows and what they need to know. Close that gap and you’ve got nothing to sell. ...

The quickest way to get a BIOS serial number on Linux: sudo dmidecode -s system-serial-number That’s usually all you need. dmidecode reads the DMI/SMBIOS table and prints the serial number directly. Other options If dmidecode isn’t available or doesn’t return what you need: # lshw sudo lshw -C bios | grep serial # /sys class interface (no sudo needed) cat /sys/class/dmi/id/product_serial The /sys/class/dmi/id/ path is the cleanest option if you want to avoid sudo. It exposes several DMI fields: ...