We haven’t gone away on holiday for the past couple of years. It doesn’t feel fair to leave Bianca (now a grand old lady of 20) in a boarding cattery, so either only one of us can go away (the other staying at home to look after Bianca), or neither of us do. Mr. Bsag very kindly volunteered to do the cat-sitting for a couple of successive years, but it didn’t feel the same going away without him. Now that my ME/CFS is worse, it has also taken away the main thing that we went away for: taking long walks in the countryside.
I have still taken time off work of course (at the time of writing, I’m nearing the end of a period of annual leave), and that provides lots of opportunities to potter and engage in my many hobbies, so it’s not all bad. We also try to schedule in a day trip to somewhere that’s quiet and in the countryside. On this occasion it was Hidcote, a garden managed by the National Trust. It was one of the nicest ‘days out’ we’ve had in a while.
Walking in to the room was an overwhelming experience. The triage nurses in the lobby of the Accident and Emergency unit took a few brief details then asked us to check in using the iPads on the wall just around the corner. As we turned the corner, it hit us that the waiting room was absolutely full. All the seats were taken, and people leaned against the walls and in the passageways, so that they had to shift every time someone went past. It was around 23:30 on a Tuesday. At this point, we had no idea that we would still be here nine hours later.
Well, hello again! I don’t think that I have ever had a gap in posting as long as this before. Several months ago, I decided to explore moving this blog from both my previous host (Netlify), and away from the static site generator I had been using (Hugo, more on those decisions below). However, life got in the way. We sadly lost a family member, Mr. Bsag got an injury that resulted in us spending 9 hours overnight in A&E (the Emergency Room, for North Americans), I had some bad bouts of ME/CFS fatigue, and so on. In between those times, I started to chip away at the blog moving task, but I kept getting delayed by having to make decisions about a long chain of dependencies. If I moved to Host A with static site generator B, would I be able to deploy from git host Z?
You might be thinking, “but surely your old site was still working fine all this time, so nothing (apart from the ‘life’ stuff) was preventing you from posting here in the meantime?”. That would be technically correct, gentle and perceptive reader, but it does not take into account my stubborn decision to only publish any new articles once the migration was complete. I know, it makes no sense. Anyway, the bulk of the work is done now, and the remaining tweaks and improvements can wait until later. I have a few ideas for posts that have stacked up, but for now, I’ll go through the decisions behind the move and what was involved before I forget why I put myself through all this.
I’ve been doing a bit of sewing recently after a bit of a break in which I really didn’t have the energy. I still have to take it much slower than I used to do — no more non-stop sewing days — but I am finding that if I spread cutting out and sewing over several days, I can manage it.
This is actually quite nice as it forces me to take my time and pay attention to the details. In the process, I have noticed some seemingly rigid ‘Laws of Sewing’ over a few projects.
I was sitting at my desk at home, pottering on the computer, when a grey shape flickered in my peripheral vision in the garden outside. This was quickly followed by a clattering of wings and a high pitched squawk. I looked out the window and quickly spotted him standing on his prey. There, at the centre of a blast radius of feathers, a male sparrowhawk.
I’ve been doing some more NixOS pottering over this weekend, working out the details of a thorough backup strategy. Before I moved to Linux, I used (and still use) iDrive for my backups. Its reasonably priced, and has servers based in Europe, and seems to work well enough. You can also run it on Linux, but I had some trouble getting it working with NixOS. I have also used the Gnome Circle app Pika Backup, which is delightful, but that is obviously not cross-platform. It is based on Borg Backup which is cross-platform (across Linux and macOS anyway), but I struggled a bit to think how I would link everything up.
A sketch of the basic backup scheme.
After quite a bit of reading on what might work well, I settled on Restic. This is cross-platform, has a long development history, is now quite well-established and stable, and has incremental snapshots and encryption built in. It enables backing up to a variety of remote locations natively, but can also be paired with rclone backends to enable an even wider range of possibilities. It is available as a brew on macOS, but on NixOS, you can set it up as a service for automatic backups using a systemd timer.
Happy New Year? I dearly hope it’s better than the last one for all of us, but time and reality is gradually sanding the corners off my innate and irrepressible optimism.
I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but this is how the end part of the last year was for me, and what 2026 looks like.
Since getting back into running NixOS, I have been having a whale of a time configuring my Linux machine. The declarative life is somewhat addictive. However, I felt that I could be improving my configuration in a couple of ways. First, while I was learning how to configure NixOS, I had tended to scatter bits of code about randomly, and so it started to become a challenge to find what I needed. Second, I was getting the itch to bring some of the benefits of declarative configuration to my macOS machines. You obviously have less control there (even with nix-darwin), but I have tailored my Emacs, Neovim and shell environment just the way I like them, and every time I use macOS, it irks me that I don’t have access to the nice configuration that is set up on my Linux box.
In my browsing around, I came across Denix, which solves both problems very nicely.
The incident I’m about to tell you about happened a few weeks ago, but life is busy, so I’ve only just got around to writing about it. Prepare yourself for The Tale of the Train Seat Incident!
My ZSA Voyager keyboard has a new travelling companion: a ZSA Navigator. I love using it, but it has taken a bit of time to figure out the best configuration for me.
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