This is a cautionary tale about ignoring deprecation errors in infrastructure. On April 30th MySQL 8.4.0 came out and I managed to get caught with my digital pants down on the 2nd of May when I upgraded a group of servers running MySQL under docker that were the back end for a number of websites. To add to the pain I …

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A while back I found a model on Thingiverse for an Anderson Power Pole adaptor for the back of my Yaesu FT-817. Power Poles are almost the standard in the Ham Radio world for hooking up power to radios and accessories and they're really handy. The adaptor I made from Thingiverse has the power poles pointing towards the …

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It doesn’t seem like like six years ago when I shifted from MODX to Wordpress but some spare time over the holiday season and a bit of soul searching means time for a change. I’ve dropped almost all of the IT / Web / Dev content and only kept the stuff that was relevant or valuable to me personally. I’ve shifted to a …

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A bit of mountain biking along the port hills in Christchurch, NZ We're really lucky in Christchurch to have a good number of quite well maintained tracks right on the back doorstep of the city. A couple of weeks ago I took on my first decent sized mountain bike ride after suffering a ruptured Achilles tendon in my …

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It seems I celebrated a little too soon after figuring out how to add extra archives into the whisper DB files behind graphite for icinga2. This blog post is a bit of a ramble and may not make 100% sense if you didn’t read my other icinga2 graphite post first. Check that out here. The flaw in my plan wasn’t apparent …

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Technically not really SOTA, because that would require a summit, but testing an Antenna I built for the purpose at least 18 months ago. SOTA, Summits on the air is a slightly crazy pursuit within the larger sphere of amateur radio involving lugging radio gear, including batteries and antennas, up a mountain or random …

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Ever since a near miss with a glow starter getting caught in a prop back in the nineties I’ve used on-board glow drivers in any model big enough to carry an extra ‘C’ cell around. As well as the safety aspect, not having to play with a glow starter around spinning props, most glow motors idle more reliably with the …

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The Kiwi DX group was, and now even more so is, an un-group. In the same way that some IT cliques have un-cons instead of conferences. The premise is that you have more of the social and less of the conference with a strong focus on community and learning. The Kiwi DX group was for the most part just a mailing list run …

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