I put googly eyes on the webcam so that I look at the right place during video calls and don’t appear to be looking off to the side when I’m trying to get an important point across.

I put googly eyes on the webcam so that I look at the right place during video calls and don’t appear to be looking off to the side when I’m trying to get an important point across.
A few months ago I wrote about my experience participating in Hacktoberfest last October and the prize T-Shirts have finally arrived so here’s a photo with them on! 😀
My colleague, Dávid Pörös, and I in our funky new Hacktoberfest T-shirts!
The weekend after we cut down the trees in the forest, my brother-in-law went over to help stack them in a neat pile and sent me this photo. They’ll be left to dry there for the next 3 years.
Several cubic metres of chopped wood stacked to dry out over the next few years
I’m imagining how much more full of interesting content, like photos or stories or ideas, this blog could be. What if every time I had posted something to a closed system, like Facebook, I had published that here instead?
This week we went wood chopping in the forest not far from the village. My family in-law use a boiler powered by a wood furnace to heat their house. That’s why it’s important to collect enough wood in advance, so that it can dry out enough to be used for firewood in years to come. They own part of some land covered in trees and with the foresters permission they collect some every year.
A small group of us drove out in the morning and cut down trees in teams of two: One person saws down the tree and cuts it up into metre-long logs, while the other person carries the logs out to the road and collects them into piles. The others have experience using chainsaws, so I’m on collecting duty.
It took us until about lunch time to collect as much as we planned. Lunch in the woods means ham and sausage. After that it was time to stack the logs on the tractor trailer. It’s pretty clever how some tall, thin trees were selected as supports to extend the sides of the trailer and stop the huge pile of wood from toppling. The amount you can see on the trailer in the photo is probably almost half of what we collected that day.
Back at home the wood gets split and then stacked for drying and, in fact, a few years ago I wrote about the wood splitting part. The next day I had quite a muscle ache from stacking all that wood.
This year was my first time participating in the online Hacktoberfest event.
I often use code from GitHub and occasionally publish my own projects there but I realised I rarely contribute to other people’s code. Hearing people talking about the event on the Ladybug Podcast, I was inspired to make a small pull request. The boost I got from something so insignificant being merged lead me to look through my favourite projects’ issue lists to see if there was a bug I could fix or a missing feature I could implement.
Yesterday I found a typo in a pull request description while browsing another team’s project which I stumbled upon. I mentioned it to the author but it turned out that that part of the text came from the repository’s pull request template, which means every pull request will have this amusing but irritating mistake. I sent them a pull request, modifying the template, to fix the mistake at the source and avoid it in future, and thought that would be the end of it.
It turns out that template was written once and then copied across to new repos, which means this typo actually exists in almost all the pull requests in all of that team’s projects. Well that escalated quickly. This is the point where the average person probably says “OK whatever, it’s not worth it for something so small, there are too many repos, it’s just a small typo, never mind” and stop. A very determined person might actually start opening browser tabs and psyching themselves up to do pull requests. I open my terminal emulator and start writing a for loop. Continue reading
I’ve decided to give Wakatime a second try. It’s a tool that tracks the time you spend programming on different projects by integrating into your IDE. This works well for typical development work where you open your IDE in the morning and type code in it, do commits with it, and everything else related to the project and Wakatime will track that.
I don’t work like that though, so I had two issues with it last time, both resulting in a lower reported time spent working:
This time it’s different because nowadays I virtualise most of the services I work with, using Docker on my local machine, and I’m hoping that using the Wakatime Z Shell integration will give a better record of time spent working on a project. Continue reading