This was all well after the pandemic in case you where wondering.

Recently I saw an Instant pot pressure cooker for 50% off and as I had wanted one for ages for beetroot and beans cooking (for which its doing really well but thats for another day. Now as they say when all you have is a hammer; everything is a nail and so now I want to cook everything in the pressure cooker. My first attemps where using the “bake” mode which my pressure cooker has with its grill lid thing. This was okay but it only really cooked the top of the loaf so I would do the first half of the loaf the right way up and then turn it over for the second half which worked okay for a while. Then I got to thinking could I pressure cook the bread? A bit of a web search later and I think you can do it.

My first loaf was completed today and I think it came out okay. A slight pudding texture but that might be my mix. I made my usual mix that I will cover elsewhere and stood the loaf tin on the trivet over a cup of water. Let that boil for 40 minutes and the removed the foil lid that I had protected it from the worst of the steam with. It came out with a sort of pudding type feel to it but it looked almost cooked. I then removed the water and the pressure lid and set the bake cycle for 15 minutes and at the end had a pretty passable loaf. as I said at the top I don't go for big fluffy instagram loves and as Charles Dowding says there is no flavour in the air!

There is still a bit more refinement to get it just so but I think I now have a pretty low effort and tasty loaf recipe. Now if I could just not eat it all in one day that would be great!

So more for my own entertainment than anything I have been thinking about adding a sort of solar battery to the allotment. I keep looking at what might work but have never really got to the point of calculating anything. It looks like a decent MPTT charger and battery and panel would not be that expensive (relatively, of course this is a hobby not really a cheap food replacement :) So I think I still have some questions about the winter. First how will the batteries survive the cold weather? Second is there any real solar in the winter? I suppose it would be a fun experiment to see how this works. Set up a small system and the monitor what is going on. So maybe a charger/batter manager with an output would be good. Then I can log things like the solar output each day over the winter. On the plus side there should be less demand over the winter as I don't need to water things and the moles are less active.

So next steps would be looking at monitoring and then deciding on capacity. Look at some solar energy reports for my area? Maybe setup a really small solar panel that I can just power a lora sensor with?

Many years ago as I was starting my first job a friend and I designed a full screen desk interface. It had a high res full color screen in the middle of the desk and the rest of the desk was low res b&w monitor. The whole desk space was touch screen. You could take the document you where working on and slide it out of the main screen while you worked on something else, you could use a pen or our hand for drawing and typing. If you wanted to send a document to the person opposite you could just slide it off the top of your screen and it would arrive on the top of theirs. It was a great invention but we never got past the idea stage and the idea of that much CRT in one box never quite felt right.

I like to doodle, write, think on paper. I have always had a pad on my desk and now I am lucky to have a Remarkable e-ink tablet that I have beside me on the desk. It's a space to think, to quickly jot a note or just to play with the lines on.

My excuse for this extra tablet was two fold. First off I quite often have a video playing on my laptop and want to get sort of put it in the backgroud and do some other things but the screen is not really big enough. (This is my “home” laptop which I mostly use on the sofa) so I thought a second screen would let me push that video over there. And secondly I would really like have a larger drawing surface. So I could doodle and take notes.

For a lot of devices now on Linux you just plug them in and they work. Not quite so simple here. The screen worked fine plugged in the cables and off it went. The pen did work but it was more in mouse mode. So I needed something to make this work. I tried to find something in the package repos of my OS but no real joy. It's not a wacom tablet so it seems the support it a bit out of the ordinary. Next up was the XP-Pen drivers. They offer some Linux support which is great but it felt a bit clunky and I sort of got it working but no pressure support that I could see. It was also a binary install which always feels flaky. So I searched around and found the Open Tablet Driver Project which offered packages but also has a flatpak so I thought I would give that a go. It worked! There was a little bit of an issue with the old drivers still running but once I had clear that up and set the tablet to not use the entire virtual screen but only the tablet screen it seems to be working. And quite nicely. I've only had it a couple of days but it's already serving the “video offload monitor” use case fine. I've played around with the drawing but not had a real play. Yet.

So in conclusion it's pretty neat. It's yet another gadget in my overcrowded house but I think it's something I will use regularly but we will see. It works with Linux after a bit of tweaking.

Side note about flatpak: The Open Tablet Drive has a background process that runs on boot. I was surprised to see that the flatpak just ran that without issue. Looks like there is support for adding services from the the flatpak. I'm always suprised how flatpak is moving on and solving these little side issues. I know it still has a lot of issues but as a way to distribute software to all linux and not have to package to every distro it works in most cases.

I'm not sure that I will get used to this but I seem to be using the C-c, C-h shortcuts in emacs a lot more recently and I thought that this might lower the reaching about. I have not used it yet for this typing for all the shift chars so we will see how it goes...

But I am already liking the fact that k-1 or k-2 (holding down the k key and tapping the number row) uses the gnome shortcuts to move from my terminal to my browser with only one hand just moving up the numbers.

(defcfg
  input  (device-file "/dev/input/by-id/usb-KINESIS_FREESTYLE_KB800_KB800_Kinesis_Freestyle-event-kbd")
  output (uinput-sink "My KMonad kenisis frestyle2")

  ;; Comment this if you want unhandled events not to be emitted
  fallthrough true

  ;; Set this to false to disable any command-execution in KMonad
  allow-cmd true
  )

(defsrc a s d f  j k l ; )

(deflayer mine
  (tap-next-release a lsft)
  (tap-next-release s lmet)
  (tap-next-release d lalt)
  (tap-next-release f lctl)

  (tap-next-release j lctl)
  (tap-next-release k lalt)
  (tap-next-release l lmet)
  (tap-next-release ; lsft)
)

teh<Ctrl-x a g>the<CR>

That would tell abbrev add-global-abbrev for teh to the. You can also use <Ctrl-x a l> for local, which just does it for the mode you are in.

For me I wanted to insert the shrug emoji ascii art – “¯\(ツ)/¯” when I type shrug so I did the following.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯<Ctrl-x a g>shrug

You can also add an extra i in there. <Ctrl-x a i g> That's inverse so you can do the definition backward. I just cut and pasted the string in a buffer.

Now when I type shrug in emacs it creates an emoji every time. I don't know how annoying that will become but I might add an 8 before the def so I need to add 8shurg to get it as per more examples below.

Anyway here is my ~/.emacs.d/abbrev_defs.el config file with a few other gems that I forgot where there...

It's quite interesting how much of this stuff just works out the box. The keyboard shortcuts can seem cryptic though the which-key package can help there.

Also note that there is the command unexpand-abbrev that can just undo the last abbreviation.

;;-*-coding: utf-8;-*-
(define-abbrev-table 'global-abbrev-table
  '(
    ("8Delta" "Δ" nil :count 0)
    ("8Omega" "Ω" nil :count 0)
    ("8Sigma" "Σ" nil :count 0)
    ("8accent" "´" nil :count 0)
    ("8almost" "≈" nil :count 0)
    ("8alpha" "α" nil :count 0)
    ("8beta" "β" nil :count 0)
    ("8bull" "∙" nil :count 0)
    ("8cels" "℃" nil :count 0)
    ("8copy" "©" nil :count 0)
    ("8deg" "°" nil :count 0)
    ("8delta" "δ" nil :count 0)
    ("8down" "↓" nil :count 0)
    ("8eur" "€" nil :count 0)
    ("8gamma" "γ" nil :count 0)
    ("8in" "∈" nil :count 0)
    ("8inf" "∞" nil :count 0)
    ("8ksi" "ξ" nil :count 0)
    ("8lambda" "λ" nil :count 0)
    ("8ldquo" "«" nil :count 0)
    ("8left" "←" nil :count 0)
    ("8mdash" "—" nil :count 0)
    ("8mdot" "·" nil :count 0)
    ("8mu" "µ" nil :count 0)
    ("8ndash" "–" nil :count 0)
    ("8nin" "∉" nil :count 0)
    ("8not" "¬" nil :count 0)
    ("8nu" "ν" nil :count 0)
    ("8omega" "ω" nil :count 0)
    ("8para" "§" nil :count 0)
    ("8phi" "φ" nil :count 0)
    ("8pi" "π" nil :count 0)
    ("8plusmin" "±" nil :count 0)
    ("8pound" "£" nil :count 0)
    ("8psi" "ψ" nil :count 0)
    ("8range" "÷" nil :count 0)
    ("8rdquo" "»" nil :count 0)
    ("8reg" "®" nil :count 0)
    ("8right" "→" nil :count 0)
    ("8sigma" "σ" nil :count 0)
    ("8sup1" "¹" nil :count 0)
    ("8sup2" "²" nil :count 0)
    ("8sup3" "³" nil :count 0)
    ("8tau" "τ" nil :count 0)
    ("8theta" "θ" nil :count 0)
    ("8tm" "™" nil :count 0)
    ("8up" "↑" nil :count 0)
    ("shrug" "¯\\_(ツ)_/¯" nil :count 1)
   ))

Farmers should be protesting but not because of the tax change.

Labour are closing the tax loophole that allows the wealthy to put their money into farm land and then avoid paying inheritance tax on it. When this law was introduced let us believe that it was intended to let farming families pass on their farms but what has changed is that farm land, that was once worth a small amount for the product it could produce, is now worth more for the tax it can avoid. So farm land has become yet another financial instrument and not a productive item. Small farmers won't be hit by this as for the most part the tax relief levels still allowed directly and from things like business assets relief will mean they are okay.

Should farmers get to avoid inheritance tax any more than a shoe maker or a bakery? These are all skilled jobs that can be handed down between the generations why should farmers get a free pass? It feels like there should be some point where it makes sense but how do we make it fair across the board and stop businesses being yet another place to avoid tax.

What should farmers be protesting then? Well the fact the the large manufacturing and supermarket chains have an effective cartel driving down the amount they pay for crops and the quality and diversity of the farming. If we want to help farmers then we need to change from a race to the bottom where we will end up with the dust bowls of the 1930's US and take care of our land. We should be putting protections in place that make it fairer across the board for the farmers to do the right thing, to preserve the land, to produce varied crops and to protect our countryside for the next generation. While subsidies are on way of help the farmers we have to be careful that, like parts of the benefit system which top up low wages for employers, that we don't end up subsidising the huge corporates like food manufactures and supermarkets. Putting in place protections for contracts and purchase agreements that mean that farmers can get paid on time, can get some protection for bad crops and can run a sustainable business all feel reasonable. If this requires subsidies then we can add tax to the processed food that is making people sick.

On a more positive note the Apricot Centre is proving that we an farm in a more sustainable way that strengthens the countryside and does not treat is as an infinite resource to be exploited for maximum profit. Creating robust ecosystems that encourage nature and biodiversity and a healthy soil.

Fun to see the project moving on again to develop new tools and new thoughts. With the release of the new Prusa Core One 3D printer this week it seems like things are moving along nicely. My first 3D printer was a Prusa Mendal and I always looked at the newer Prusa printers with envy. The new Core One does seems like it ticks a lot of boxes. With the usual Prusa quality and the long lifespan and upgrade path but above all the open nature of the printers.

The Generic rule set based ones do offer some benefit for some web apps but unless your application is trivial you will find them blocking and having to add many exceptions and fix a whole new raft of bugs caused by blocked request. They are worth a try and you can run most of these in reporting mode which might give you a scope for how much work it's going to be to fix up the rules. They do provide some quite good protection for things like odd characters and weird paths that might break your app.

The second type where you specify the types of request you are expecting in your application and the WAF limits all incoming communication to those requests seem to be of little benifit. If you have written your application with a decent framework and followed best practice with security for that framework then it should already be filling that role. All it means is that you now have to copy your changes from one application into the WAF as part of your deployment. I think your time would be much better spent on a review of the security of your application and the change involved. If you can be sure of the requirements of you application to define a WAF rule then the same should be definable in the application itself.