Coffee now
Coffee now
Clare and James
You have stumbled upon the blog of Clare and James; this most likely means you know us, but whether you do or don’t, feel free to grab a coffee now and have a mooch around.
Latest Posts
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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’...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
As we left the story of my adventure on the West Highland Way, it was 10 pm and I had just set up at the wild camping zone at the Bridge of Orchy having covered 104.3 km of the 154 km trail in 3 days of walking. This meant we now had the...
The West Highland Way is the UK’s most popular long-distance path. It’s not hard to work out why – it takes in some of the best of Scotland’s scenery, yet is fairly accessible hiking. Apparently, some 40,000 people complete the entire...
I decided to walk the West Highland Way (running some 96 miles, or 154 km, from Milngavie, just north of Glasgow, to Fort William) after some original solo holiday plans fell through with a couple of months to go. I hence found myself...