What If ...

I am not sure what got me thinking about this to start with.

It might be the fact that it is my birthday this month, and I am one year closer to 40 than I was before. It could be the fact that a colleague was off sick the other week, and it took the team a bit longer than necessary to work out how something he built worked.

Either way, it got me thinking, “What if I got hit by a bus?”. Of course, it doesn't have to be a bus, but anything that takes me out of the picture, so that my family and colleagues have to pick up the pieces (hopefully metaphorically).

From a work front I am pretty good at ending the day in a state that someone can pick up what I have been working on. For any unfinished work I usually create a draft PR and put in what I have been working on and what is still left to-do. Work will survive without me, I have no doubt about that.

For my family however, apart from being beyond devastating I realised I am not leaving behind a manual to pick up everything I am responsible for when I am gone.

In our family I take care of the following:

• Everything to do with money (budgeting, bills, investments, pensions, savings)
• Car maintenance (MOT, service, car tax, insurance, petrol)
• Household maintenance (Boiler pressure, draining radiators)
• Anything technical (Wi-Fi, smart home, computer setup, self-hosting)

The last thing I want is for my family to have to work all this out on top of everything else.

So I have started to put together a manual for my family. Naturally I am self-hosting this and I have chosen to use Bookstack. I don't love the fact that it is split into shelves, books and chapters, but it is the easiest one to update.

Of course the elephant in the room is the fact that it is also self-hosted and if anything happens to my server they won't be able to access it. I also use an actual domain for all my self-hosted services (which points to a local IP address). If the domain doesn't get renewed everything will stop working.

It is good exercise to think about these things, and hopefully I have a very long time to work out the issues.

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❤️ Picks of the Week #

📝 Article — The maths you need to start understanding LLMs — I started trying to learn how LLMs work but realised a few things. 1. I really disliked vector algebra at university. 2. I am never going to have the compute power to train my own. If you want to learn this could be useful.

📝 Article — A short list of tech security tips when traveling — There are some good tips on this website. As for the public USB port thing, I remember seeing a device you could get that filters out any data signals, but it is probably best just to avoid them.

📝 Article — I ditched Docker for Podman — I really need to look into Podman. I have heard a lot of good things about it compared to Docker.

📝 Article — I'm absolutely right — This is one of my pet peeves with all the LLMs. If I am using AI to help with coding I shouldn't be the one to tell it something it told me was wrong.

📝 Article — “Why would anybody start a website?” — I am always surprised that more developers don't have their own website. I love tweaking my website. Yes technically there is no money in it, but it is just fun.

📝 Article — Purposeful animations — This is a fantastic article about how to do animations correctly.

📝 Article — Making a font of my handwriting — I have been wondering about ways to make my website more personal. My handwriting is awful though so I probably won't do this, but it is a nice idea.

🛠️ Tool — SimpleX Chat: private and secure messenger without any user IDs (not even random) — This looks even better than Signal given it is truly decentralised. I wonder how long until they start banning apps like this from the app store.

📝 Article — Things you can do with a debugger but not with print debugging — For languages that I often use I do use a debugger. For C# this is fairly trivial in VS Code and it works well. For other languages I do tend to rely on print statements a little too much.

📝 Article — Serverless Horrors — When I self-host stuff for myself I always do it on my own computers to avoid scenarios like this. For hosting services I try to keep things within the free tier as much as possible. The cloud can get expensive quickly.

🛠️ Tool — Pico CSS – Minimal CSS Framework for Semantic HTML — Semantic HTML is great for simple websites, but I then find myself needing more and then things get messy. I think I need to find a something in between semantic CSS and utility first, if that's a thing.

📝 Article — Chat Control Must Be Stopped — With me living in the UK I don't get a say in this. With the way things are going I am sure the UK is already monitoring everything.

📝 Article — Ex-WhatsApp cybersecurity head says Meta endangered billions of users — I really need to get my family to move over to Signal already.

📝 Article — No adblocker detected — This is a good idea. I never liked having ads on my website and I have a Pi-Hole set up on my home network, so I never see any adverts apart from YouTube.

📝 Article — I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens — We spend enough time in front of screens. We really don't need them in museums as well. There are other ways to make things interactive.

📝 Article — Behind the scenes of Bun Install — I am sure I have mentioned bun in one of my previous newsletters. I am going to have to try it for my next project.

🤖 AI — Nano Banana image examples — I missed when Nano Banana was announced. It looks pretty impressive. I think AI for editing is much better than trying to get it to produce “art”. I still prefer to run AI locally where possible though.

🤖 AI — A store that generates products from anything you type in search — Or you could just use AI to create silly stuff like this.

📝 Article — Japan sets record of nearly 100k people aged over 100 — I wonder if this figure is accurate given the false figures they have had in the past.

📝 Article — Hosting a website on a disposable vape — This is really cool. I love the idea of repurposing old tech. I am not sure why a vape needs a microcontroller though!

📝 Article — Wanted to spy on my dog, ended up spying on TP-Link — I love seeing how people reverse engineer things. I have a few Tapo plugs around my home, but I have been slowly replacing them with ESPHome ones.

📝 Article — Boring is good — I am far more interested in small LLMs that can be run locally for specific tasks such as OCR on images or converting stuff into JSON than the large LLMs that try and do everything.

👾 Game — I’m Not a Robot — I had fun going through these. I must admit the mole beat me when doing it on my laptop with a trackpad.

📝 Article — YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers — I have seen a few tech YouTubers mention this. It seems it was caused by an update to the EasyList which is used by most ad-blockers. So mostly just tech-savvy audiences that were affected.

📝 Article — Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year — Mattermost looks like a great alternative to Slack that you can host yourself. I think more companies should move to open source software instead of putting more money into big tech.

📝 Article — CERN Animal Shelter for Computer Mice (2011) — This made me chuckle.