Alex Johnstone

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:33:55 +0000

Enjoying Ben Rinnes and the Convals

I finally had all season tyres fitted to the car. Some Continental AllSeason 2 or something like that. Spent way too long debating if I should or not and then what models. Lots of interesting YouTube videos on tyres and how they work etc.

Was lucky with the garage where they were fitted. Basically a space for two cars and they fit tyres. There were “appointments” but it seemed like first come, first served regardless. I arrived as they opened and so was first in but others with appointments at the same time waited 45 minutes before it was their turn.

No doubt we’ll have no more snow and a very mild rest of the winter/spring. But I’m okay with that too!

A friend wrote about his career, it was enjoyable to read.

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:14:25 +0000

Whilst everyone is snowed in, the school set work to do (a la lockdown) and one of which was a landscape photo of a wintry scene. This was everyone’s favourite - probably because of the random dog.

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:38:02 +0000

Every time I look, there are more of these tiny ducks about the house.

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 21:46:23 +0000

I like neat, minimal and clean with no stuff or junk or clutter; but I also like this person’s setup. 🤷

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to. Alice: I don’t much care where. The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 13:53:22 +0000

Been thinking about moving my spreadsheets on Google Sheets to Proton Drive. I only have two I actually use, a money one and a SOTA mountain climbing timetable one. I’d like to self host them but so far haven’t found a comparable self hosted, open source spreadsheet software. They all seem to be more like low code databases. IronCalc looks to be the best thing but not sure it’s ready yet. First time I found it there were no instructions on how to install it, but now there are some.

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 18:09:49 +0000

My daughter has been making a calendar for her friend for a secret Santa she’s doing at school. She made it on the computer then printed it out and stuck to backing card. It’s scrapbook style with photos and little pictures related to her friends. It’s so lovely and a true gift.

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 21:24:01 +0000

I need to migrate away from logseq at work. It’s slow and annoying when it just stops working for 5 seconds. I was thinking VS Code and a few markdown plugins but now I’m wondering about emacs and org-mode 😈

Probably a bad idea.

I’ve sent off my postcard for freeshell.de. Planning to move my personal apps to it from the free Oracle VPS I have. Probably not a sensible idea to put my stuff on a free service run by one person. I need to get my accoutn verified first anyway, so I’ll check it out before I make mass migrations.

I kinda miss my old static blog for this site. Generated with jekyll which I used for several years straight without flitting between software. I got into a regular habit of writing something, either on my phone or the computer. I really enjoyed using 1Writer on my phone for it. Just it was more hassle to add images to, I did very occasionally do it, but it was mostly just an outpouring of rambling words. I admit, I do think a header image at the top of a blog post makes it more interesting or nicer to look at, which is sort of the style I’ve adopted here.

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 20:30:06 +0000

Image uploads on micro.blog aren’t as easy as I’d like them to be. Sure they’re a lot easier than a static site generator setup but uploading more than one at a time would be nice. Anyway, I’m sure I can find things to complain about for every blogging tool.

We were reading bedtime stories and then heard a screech from downstairs. Turns out the cat had caught a mouse, brought it into the house and then killed it in the hallway.

The pebble ring is interesting. Although the black one looks like a zip tie around his finger. It’s a neat concept that let’s you record a note quickly. When writing this an image of Dale Cooper telling Diane he should pre-order this ring popped into my head. Eric Migicovsky says he has 5-10 amazing thoughts everyday…

YouTube Video

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about getting another gold ring…not sure why but I’ve been leaning into gold jewellery. A watch is on my to buy list for a long time, although still yet to decide upon one. Mostly as I keep falling back into obsessively tracking steps and cycles and sleep etc. on my Garmin. I could wear two watches but I struggle with a watch on my wrong hand. So I’m tempted by the gold one. It’s not actually gold but looks nice, I’m watching the video and wondering where the button gets placed. I like the idea of it being on my pointer and then using my thumb to press the button.

Of course I have thought about setting up some system to make a blog from the ring! Not sure about the unrechargable-ness of it, seems like a waste and “don’t worry you can buy a new one when the battery runs out”. I guess there’s always trade offs.

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 23:28:47 +0000

Sometimes I want to document everything ever. I’m pretty good at work at making notes now, and it seems to be a very simple task that everyone is blown away with. The thanks I get for sending out notes from a meeting afterwards is disproportionate to the effort I put into writing those notes. Plus I can go back to meetings from literally years ago and pull up what was said.

But do I need to do that at home or for me? So what if I thought about some random thing 3 years ago. It doesn’t matter. Saving useful stuff, like what size thingy does the wotsit use, that’s helpful. Sometimes it’s “interesting” to go back and look at stuff but mostly as a passing curiosity. Maybe I regret all the notes I didn’t take? It is time consuming though, and I do like not having a burden or a commitment I feel like I have to do for myself.

Work is very formal, and structured and there’s a contract, so words are good. The rest of life is just whatever you want, and maybe what I want is not to spend the time writing about how I spend the time. Plus I’m still 5,000 words (in my head) away from where I write it down.

So let’s have another photo from this week’s hike:

Plus I already wrote a whole story for that elsewhere.

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 23:05:05 +0000

One of these was printed

After waiting ages, I forgot Stranger Things 5 came out yesterday. It’s now 11pm, so I’m not going to start watching it!

I’ve been enjoying the new 3D printer, making huge models I could never dream of with my old one. Although now I have a list of people who need Lego “minifigs”.

Did some christmas shopping the other day. Even went into a women’s clothes shop and bought some things for my wife. Today I get home and look in the wardrobe. What do I see? The exact dress I’d bought. The positive is, I can pick well; the negative is, I now need to take it back and find something else.

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 20:27:20 +0000

More hikes this week.

Reading “Touching the Void”, a true story of some mountain climbing incident. I’ve not got to the incident yet but they’ve been very close to dying several times already and I’m only a quarter in. Think there’s a TV documentary too.

Deleted my Strava account. It’s pointless for me. I’m not running or cycling or looking to beat other peoples times. What else can I delete?

This site? Did think about migrating my radio site here and being done with this one. Not really interested in posting on it. It’s work to do stuff though.

Also thought about selling the Leica M2…

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 15:14:53 +0000

The neighbours had a Halloween party today. I went with the kids for a bit but their kids go to a different school and everyone was from the other school - kids and parents. It was awkward for a while then we had to leave anyway for swimming.

Installed Debian on server and set most things back up. Some docker services didn’t work - like silver bullet - for reasons I’m not quite clear on. I might just scrap it as I don’t use it anyway. Need to setup tiddlywiki again. Although haven’t really missed it…but be good having it available to edit should I need.

Reinstalled Windows 11 on the family machine too. Cleared out all the junk, which is nice. Quick to get things back again though. Except Office. I bought Office 2016 and it’s impossible to download it again. I thought I’d saved it but it didn’t like the installer. There was one on archive.org but seemingly not quite right. It sort of works as I log in with my work account and I think that makes it okay…as we have 365 at work. For a minute I thought about subscribing- get office plus 1TB cloud storage. But I don’t want that.

Tidied garage too - hours of doing but hard to see improvements. Need to sort out storage better, still using some temporary shelves when we moved in 5 years ago which are terrible.

Want to sell my old 3D printer but it’s such a hassle. It’s so big and who really wants to buy it? I offered it to the hacker space but no one seemed interested. Haven’t quite ordered a new one. Wife asked if I’d really use it anyway. I think I would but she’s also partially right.

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 10:22:57 +0000

Had another fun SOTA outing this week with MM0EFI.

Think I’m going to get a Bambulabs 3D printer. Been putting it off for ages but it’ll be much better than my current one. The P1S is on sale but I might get the P2S instead…

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 22:13:20 +0000

The server has been offline for a while now, since the hard drive failed. I did buy a new hard drive but zfs couldn’t recover - at least not that I could do - and I’m supposedly working out what to do. It is interesting how I’ve not really missed the server though. Probably plex is the biggest miss but not really that much. The kids sometimes want to watch something from it but given we have so many other streaming services, or games etc. that they don’t really care. So I don’t know what to do with it. Probably would still like the linux server to tinker with but so far I’ve not had much time to deal with it.

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 20:04:43 +0000

Visited this lovely little cafe in Bettyhill on my trip to see my sister in Thurso (most north town of UK mainland), and had a cracking breakfast.

Her iPhone is stuck in a restore loop and using the computer doesn’t fix it. Get some generic 4013 error which can have lots of causes. All the simple stuff doesn’t fix it, so time to take it into the Apple Store (when I get time). No doubt they’ll tell me it’s broken and I have to buy a new one.

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 06:39:05 +0000

Had a spectacular day up near Ullapool in the north west of Scotland.

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 20:03:50 +0000

The kids are obsessed with the Pikmin Bloom app. We’ve cycled 16 km each day and walked around the local lake four times today! Got us up to 18.5k steps. Not sure how long it’ll last once we’re back home but certainly can’t complain about them not being active.

The weather is lovely here, but it’s also lovely back home and I can’t help think about all the summits I want to do. However, I tell myself that there are always more sunny days and the hills will still be there. Hoping to do a couple next week when we’re back and I go visit my sister. Just hope it’s not pouring with rain.

The more I think about the server the more I think I can delete stuff. Got a lot of tv and movies from over the years but all I need to keep are kids things, as they actually watch them again, whereas we never do. If it’s that good - like Lord of the Rings - then I should get the bluray. I also bet I could slim down the photos folder. So many raws I’ll never go back and edit, so many pictures taken of events that I really only need 10 of to remember it. We’ve made photo books every year, so I don’t need to worry about deleting the “wrong” photos. Although how I’ll actually go about doing this will be challenging and extremely time consuming.

I do have some home videos. The ones I’ve made into proper clips, I’ll just keep the final product but there are some I never did. Am I going to make those now? (no) but I don’t need 10GB of clips when a 2-minute video will suffice.

I came across 85GB of DnD related pdfs and helpers on my computer. Completely forgot about them and, surprise surprise, I’ve never used them or even opened a fraction of them. I keep them as “maybe the kids will play dnd” but if they do, they don’t want 85GB of pdfs. They want to learn and find out themselves. That needs deleting when I get home.

Would be great if everything would comfortably fit on a single 4 TB drive, and key items: photos, videos and documents are well under 1TB so I can use the Hetzner Nextcloud backup for everything.

I’d also like to have all the keeper photos on iCloud via Photos.app without having to pay the 2TB tier. Mostly so nice stuff pops up on the AppleTV or I can find nice photos on my phone.

Not sure what I’m going to do about Home Assistant. I don’t do any automation, and at most I look at the dashboard I made every so often. The most I do is upgrade the components and restart the service. It’s basically a glorified logger…of data which I never look at. It’s always “I could do so many cool things”, but I don’t. I like using Apple HomeKit as stuff just works and I can do it from my phone with no bother. It seems a shame not to keep using HASS but meh. I don’t want to install proxmox just for it. Perhaps I can setup a VM…I’m sure someone has a script for it. I can run it in docker but it doesn’t get all the features and that makes it annoying. Really, I should just not bother with it as it’s another thing that needs looking after.

I’m either going to install Debian or Arch Linux on the server and just use docker for services. I want it to be arch linux as I like the OS but installing Debian takes 10 minutes and zero thought.

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 11:47:14 +0000

I discovered Pikmin Bloom, which is like Pokemon Go, but based on step count. First day of the holidays and the boys and I walked around the lake twice planting flowers and are going cycling this afternoon to find some mushrooms to attack! 🍄

It’s been around about four years but I only just found it via reddit suggested subreddits the other day. Same waypoint system as PG and Niantic games of the past. No waypoints near where we’re staying, which is slightly unfortunate, but means we have to go cycling. I think you can request new locations in other games but not sure exactly how you do that. Perhaps some research for another time.

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 11:48:34 +0000

Yesterday was world mental health day. 🟡

Getting out in the great outdoors, fresh air, physical exertion, always makes me feel better. It can even be pouring with rain, but with some waterproofs on it’s still enjoyable. Mostly when you get back home and have a nice cup of tea. ☕️

I’m still half heartedly trying to fix the server but I think it’s gone. Maybe someone who’s a zfs wizzard could bring it back but I suspect me exporting the pool ruined any chances of that. It does present an opportunity to start again. But what should that be? Nothing? A wee Linux box? I do need to just DNS at home again as I’m going to hit the limit of NextDNS free tier. Too many stupid devices calling home endlessly.

We’re off for a week for the school hols so I’ll have plenty of time to think about it and still not decide.

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 15:24:17 +0000

I know AI generated images are old hat now, but this package looks nice for making super specific images - something I’ve found tricky before (although I’ve not really played with anything recently). A while back I wanted to have some very specific images for a web app but struggled to get it just right and then gave up.

Wrote up my last SOTA trip report on the forum. I always enjoy the conversations that follow - typically they’re completely non secateur, and this time is no exception.

The replacement hard drive arrived for the server. Plugged it in, still can’t import zfs pool. Now various things to try and figure it out. smartctl says one drive has had a communications error, which could be a cable but I think it’s only had one error. Then we get into wild commands like sudo zdb -lu /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x50014ee2b8f30293 | nawk '/txg =/{txg=$NF}/timestamp =/{printf "txg %d\t%s\n",txg,$0}' | sort -n -k 2n,2n | uniq | tail -10 to find historical transaction ids of … transactions… to revert back to but nothing happens. I don’t know how long to keep trying.

I have my photos, as they were backed up elsewhere, and maybe there were other things I wanted. Think I had some audiobooks from the library I’d saved, but suppose I can just borrow them again. Maybe other stuff too but I can’t even remember it so do I really need it? I now have Nextcloud on Hetzner backing up photos and docs. Do I even need a server?

I like having an always on linux box for tinkering with… I do have a VPS, so maybe that’s enough? But occasions when I want a minecraft server or some fun new thing on github to play with for a day or two, then a local - and considerably more powerful - server is probably best. However, what should I use?

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 21:08:29 +0000

Somehow I ended up watching a video of someone opening a Magic the Gathering deck from 1995, from the Ice Age expansion. That expansion was out when I first started playing the game. Makes me miss my old MtG cards, the art work was amazing - so much more character than the recent digital art.

I also think it’s time to rewatch Blackadder.

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 10:03:24 +0000

I very much underestimated how long it would take to sort out files on the computer. So many folders of similar but different things, so many subject/docs and docs/subject folders. Plus ebooks and calibre libraries all over the place.

Tried to consolidate as much as possible and delete even more. My Dropbox is nearly sorted out now. I’m now tempted just to use that - although it’s not quite as flexible as Nextcloud. Biggest decision is if I want to backup photos to it as well.

It has been good that I backed up my photos to my friend’s server as my internal backups had missed some files.

Probably I’ll get bored and just delete large swathes of files anyway.

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 20:28:00 +0000

I signed up to the Hetzner 1TB Nextcloud offering. It’s nice, I can pick and chose what folders get sync’d, and these can be all over my computer. Also want to tidy up all my documents across various cloud providers, ideally I’d have one system and sync it everywhere, but for now, it’s my hard drive and Nextcloud. I did look at Johnny Decimal, but that’s too much work for me. I just need a bunch of folders, and I have an existing structure that I’ve used for 15 years which I already know the strengths and weaknesses of it.

Just found a folder on my Dropbox from June 2015 where I was clearly researching ham radio licence exams. Trying to tidy up my Dropbox, which is not even starting on sorting out my key documents, it’s just a bunch of stuff I’ve collected. Mostly things can be deleted and then rearranged somewhat. Probably I don’t need Nextcloud, other than photo backups, as I’m sure all my docs would fit in the ~20GB or so Dropbox gives me. However, I do like the Nextcloud client more…

Carn Daimh before Amy

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 21:05:42 +0000

Just a quick outing today, to this little hill up in the Whisky area. It’s on my list to do for the Eastern Scotland (ES) region, and Fraser, MM0EFI, to get a complete. So he came out too, up another hill nearby, although turned out there were some bigger hills between us and our 2m contact was a bit sketchy. Was a nice walk, easy, and took about an hour to get to the top. Surprisingly, there were other people at the top but they didn’t hang about long. I setup by the fence and started with HF. Bands weren’t great due to all these CMEs hitting the Earth but got a couple of contacts on 40m and 20m before Fraser was on 2m.

I could see the rain (with the wind of Storm Amy) coming from the west, so I packed up and headed down. I went back a different way to make it a loop, although it was through fields with cows and quite muddy, but was sheltered from the breeze. I was home in time for school pickup, and the wind and rain had reached us by then. This evening the rain has eased off, but the wind is very gusty, 80 mph here according to the met office. Hopefully, next week I can get out and do a bigger trip before the school holidays come around again. See what the weather is like though.

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 07:34:22 +0000

The server had some issue last night, and this morning I see that it’s a problem with the zfs pool. Probably one of the hard drives has failed. I’m probably best turning the computer off.

I don’t really want to buy another hard drive to fix it, in fact I don’t really want to look after a server.

Well I bought another hard drive, but it won’t arrive until Tuesday. Seems good hard drives have long lead times even on Amazon. I’m trying to mount the pool as read only and copy off some things that I want. Most of the stuff on there could be lost and not cause issues. I have photos backed up elsewhere. Might be a few docs that haven’t been sync’d somewhere else though. It’s just going super slow, haven’t even managed to export the pool yet.

Whilst this is going on, I have been thinking about not having a server. Well not having one store stuff or have services that I don’t mind about losing (like Silverbullet or the minecraft server [that no-one plays on]). I came across this, Nextcloud hosting by Hetzner. ~$5/month for 1 TB of Nextcloud. Can even use your own domain. Nextcloud has loads of features too, and apps for every OS. Before I considered iCloud but iCloud not on a mac is horrible. All my photos are 600GB, so I could keep them all on there, as a backup. Probably many of those 600GB are junk photos I don’t need and could be culled. That is going to take forever so unlikely to happen. Nextcloud can also do client side encryption on devices, if you’re worried about things. You can’t see those files on the web of course, but you can set it per folder.

Other things I use the server for are applications. Self-hosted stuff, but do I really need them? (also I’ve thought having a mini-pc on all the time with some apps could be useful). Most of them don’t really matter. Probably AdGuard, Actual Budget (as I’ve been using that) and Plex are the main ones. I’ve since switched to NextDNS, so the interest keeps working even whilst the server doesn’t, and I quite like it, so I might just stick with it. Seems to do what I need. Once I get my data off, I should move ActualBudget to my private apps VPS. Plex (and I have tried JellyFin but I have lifetime plexpass so seems a waste not to use it) is good for stuff I’ve collected over the years, plus a few favourites saved. Admittedly much of it is never watched and could probably go.

I’m talking myself into returning to the server I had about 1-2 years ago, which was a small box with two SSDs in it.

It’s difficult, as pros and cons to it all. Whilst I had the server, I might as well use it, but if the hard drives are going to fail, do I want to buy replacements? They’re all 9 years old, and if one has gone then is it soon until the others? I’ve bought one with the hopes of fixing and then giving myself time to decide. I’ll probably keep it in my main computer as a backup drive if I retire the server.

I used to love selfhosting stuff, but these days I have no interest. As I get older, I want more time, not more chores, and so I’d rather go without or perhaps pay a small amount for something. I used to host Nextcloud, but found it overkill for what I wanted and didn’t like the potential maintenance of it, but if someone else is doing that… It also has a whole app store. Probably not use many of them, but things like the music app is quite nice, as it also uses the subsonic backend so other apps can access it. There’s also the photo management app, Memories. Perhaps I’ll buy a month and test it out. Or just play with the demo.

I thought about using it as an excuse to reorganise all our documents. Perhaps with the Johnny.Decimal system. Nextcloud has a notes app, so I could keep the index there too… Although the JD is maybe too much, and all I really need is to see someone else’s folder categorisation and copy that a little. Nextcloud also has tagging for files, so that adds more dimensions, although I like the idea of leaving it plain to make it useful in a simple file structure as well.