Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱🇬🇧🇪🇺

This content has moved to https://popey.com/blog/2020/12/straightforward-linux-backups-with-rsnapshot/ I hang around in technical support back-alleys. All too often a new person turns up asking for urgent help. Their system is catastrophically broken and they have no easy way to fix it. With a bit of help they can usually come to a fork in the road. Do they wipe and re-install, or keep fighting with the computer to get it working. It's a knowledge, time, effort and convenience trade-off as old ...

In my previous blog post, Committing to a Project, I talked about getting started building something. Well, I rummaged through the Vault of Unfinished Ideas and rebooted it. Future posts I make on this subject will likely be shorter, and more bullet-pointy. This one is more of an introduction. As so often happens, a while back I pinged my good friend Stuart Langridge to get a sanity check on a game idea. I sometimes ping him with ideas, and he does the same with me. Our Telegram chats frequentl...

In my last blog post titled Paralysis of Choice I talked about my problem with committing to a personal project. I had a bunch of lovely feedback, some via the Twitter thread where I mentioned the post. A lot of it was from people telling me they feel the same way, or that it reminded them of other similar posts.  So I'm not alone! Good. Phew! A few days later Liam Dawe, my Internet friend from GamingOnLinux tweeted out "Tempted to make a game. Perhaps a wave based shooter, with some cool effe...

On the most recent episode of The New Show (a podcast I do with Daniel Fore and Joe Ressington), one of the listener questions was the following: Have you ever struggled with the paralysis of choice, especially when deciding on a tool, service or product to use, tech or otherwise? You can hear the discussion of this in episode 10 from around 25 mins in. Initially my thoughts revolved around consumption. I have no real difficulty choosing products as a consumer. I walk into a store, find a thi...

About 10-15 years ago, back in the heady days of Hampshire Linux User Group, we had a Wiki. It ran a heavily patched version of UseModWiki that we'd modified to add anti-spam and anti-abuse protection. We'd affectionately called it "AbuseMod". It's still kinda there, but I don't think the content is ever touched. We used it to co-ordinate meetings, take notes, and some other fun sillyness. One such fun was Hugo's Random Benchmark (Note: Not a benchmark). It was a single line we'd each run on o...

Every 3 years at Canonical we get a laptop refresh fund. I used my last one to buy a ThinkPad T450. My next one is due in November this year. I was considering replacing the ThinkPad with a desktop computer of some kind. I can certainly keep the T450 for portable work, but I mostly sit at the same desk all day, so figure I may as well get a desktop rather than a laptop. I recently mentioned to my friend and colleague - Martin Wimpress, that my ThinkPad T450 was becoming a bit long in the tooth....