On our particular Mastodon instance, Electromagnetic Field (EMF; #EMFCamp on the socials), a festival held every even-numbered year, is not something you could miss becoming aware of. Hence, we (that is James and me) have known it exists since its last outing in 2024. But it’s got to be the ultimate of fediverse...

Back last year, I attended my first Fleadh, Irish music festivals with a focus on competitions, as very much an intermediate tin whistle player. So intermediate in fact, that we had an accidental misunderstanding about what was meant by a slow air, which is a required element as part of the four styles of tune in...

The Radxa ROCK 3a Since we got a new thermostat, along with a new heat pump last year, we’ve been connecting that to the Open Source home automation software Home Assistant. This hasn’t been to do anything fancy, but Home Assistant produces graphs that are a bit prettier than those from the app that is provided with...

Although for some things it’s fairly obvious that keeping a backup is good idea – like photos and videos – there’s some things that I often forget to think about. So as a reminder to me, and perhaps a warning to others, I’m making a blog post on it, and also having a bit of a chat on general digital decluttering and...

The gas boiler in our house has definitely been on its way out over the past few years; not only that, so have several of the radiators, and having lived all spring with them off to prevent leaking, the looming onset of summer’s end, meant it was time for decisions. The cheapest option would have been just to...

In a new departure for me, I recently ventured into the world of competitive tin whistle playing; last weekend was my first experience of attending a Fleadh, at the Comhaltas Midlands regional event in Birmingham, UK. For those now questioning “what even is a Fleadh?”, keep on reading…

I don’t really like blog post titles that just promise tips, but this post is truly a mishmash of other stuff I’ve learnt, so I couldn’t think of anything better. I at least refrained from calling it ‘Clare’s top tips’, which was the title I put on the slides for this section when I was giving the talk these posts...

In this second part of my ‘Building an IndieWeb house’ series, on the whys and hows of this blog, I’m going to go over the very basics of using Hugo to make a static website, how to get that on the internet and the ‘syndicate elsewhere’ element of POSSE. This will be the post that’s the most techy of this series…

When an email went round at work asking if anyone was up for giving a lunchtime talk on a hobby, I volunteered to do so. I’ve got to be honest that I did suspect ‘static site personal blogging’ might be considered a bit too esoteric for them to accept, but no, they took me up on it. Whelp! That’s now done, so, to...

Here, I’m bringing together all 19 book reviews I’ve written for fantasy books read in 2024, as originally published on my Bookwyrm account. With the exception of cookbooks, fantasy has always been my most prevalent reading genre (although I’ll admit there’s a bit of presenting myself in a certain way on the...

Our damson tree had an unusually large crop of fruit this year, so I decided to make a batch of jam. The recipe below details what appears to have worked well. It was adapted from a plum jam recipe found in the book Jams & Chutneys, although the original recipe was for about half the quantity and gave the...

Having reached Fort William in 5 days, I was definitely hoping to climb Ben Nevis but was a bit unsure whether it would be a good idea after the days spent hiking. After my first ‘full’ breakfast of the trip at the BnB, I decided to first deal with where my ‘no plan plan’ was going to meet the rigid schedule of the...