Well, actually, I’m writing this on Saturday 24th. I tend to write blog posts in bulk at the weekends, and then schedule them to go live every other day over the week. In any case, I’m unlikely to have time to write much today, as this morning I’m at work and then we’re off to London tonight for a long weekend.
But as the opportunity to publish a blog post on the 29th only comes around once every four years, here you go. And I missed 2020 as I wasn’t blogging then. Had I been, I’d have probably said something about the-then looming pandemic. Ironically, I wrote this on the 29th February 2016:
Maybe something interesting will happen on this day in 2020, but you’ll have to wait another four years to find out, I’m afraid.
Time for the fourth instalment of my Playlist of the Month, and this month, it’s all about alcohol and drinking seeing as Dry January is over. Unlike last month, this was a relatively easy topic to come up with.
Here’s the Spotify playlist if you want to listen along.
Drink – Alestorm. As you’d expect from a band called Alestorm, they’ve written a lot of songs about drinking over their seven (soon to be eight) albums. This was the first single from the fourth (and in my view best) album. Indeed it’s about 11 years ago since I saw them in Leeds.
Cigarettes and Alcohol – Oasis. I’m not a big Oasis fan but any playlist about alcohol would be remiss without this.
Vodka – Korpiklaani. This Finnish folk metal band has several songs about alcohol, with others including ‘Happy Little Boozer’ and ‘Bring Us Pints Of Beer’. ‘Vodka’ is probably their best.
Whiskey in the Jar – Metallica. It’s a traditional Irish folk song but this version by Metallica is probably its best known recording. A staple at any ceilidh.
Love Drunk – Boys Like Girls. You can be drunk, and indeed hungover, on love as well as alcohol, and this is one of my favourite songs in this genre.
Drinking in LA – Bran Van 3000. Quite the one-hit wonder from 1997.
Tequila – Terrorvision. A local band coming from just up the road from me in Keighley; this was probably their biggest hit thanks to a remix by Mint Royale.
Tubthumping – Chumbawumba. Another big song from the 1990s. Whilst Chumbawumba have released 16 albums to date, this is by far their most well-known song.
Drunken Lullabies – Flogging Molly. Another Irish-themed song; again, Flogging Molly have no shortage of songs about drinking but this is their most well-known song.
Beer – Reel Big Fish. And finally, a bit of ska to finish off.
Last week, we cancelled Disney+. Our annual subscription was due to renew, and at over £100 for the year, we could no longer justify it.
We’ve had a subscription ever since Disney+ launched in the UK, in the early days of lockdown in 2020. In fact, before then we had a subscription to DisneyLife, which was Disney’s UK-only streaming service for video and music, and used to cost £5 per month. Over time, Disney+ has got better, especially now that content from 20th Century Fox is on there.
But we just don’t watch enough of it. When we signed up to Disney+, there was only one price tier at £7.99 per month or £79 per year. Whilst that was more expensive than DisneyLife, there was more content available so it was worth it. Now there are three price tiers, and the most expensive is £10.99 per month, or £109 per year. That’s more than double what we were paying just five years ago. Whilst there is once again a £5 per month tier, it’s with adverts, and we don’t want those.
Like many kids, our eight-year-old seems to just want to watch YouTube Kids now. It’s something we’ve tried to resist for years, but apparently watching home-made videos and Minecraft walk-throughs is far more interesting than the professionally-produced content that we were paying for. We’ll keep paying for Netflix, as you can download content onto an iPad to watch offline. We tend to clip our eight-year-old’s iPad into a stand fixed to the back of the front passenger seat for long car journeys.
We’ve had Amazon Prime in the past, shared using Amazon Household with another family member, but we don’t have this now. Again, it’s getting more expensive, and we’d rather avoid the adverts. And whilst we’ve had free trials of Apple TV+ and Now TV, we’ve never paid for these beyond the trial period. We also don’t pay for a TV package, and just have Freeview and Freesat for live television.
I guess we’ll just re-subscribe to these from time-to-time when there’s something we actually want to watch.
I do find it odd comparing streaming video with streaming music. There’s a handful of music streaming services – Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Deezer and so forth – and for the most part, they all have the same music. Yet with streaming video services, most shows are on one or two at best, and many or exclusive to one service.
I’ve recently started using AdGuard Home as a way of blocking advertising and tracking on my iPhone and iPad, when on wifi at home. It works as a replacement DNS server, and re-routes requests to domains known for advertising and traffic to a DNS Sinkhole.
Unlike a browser-based ad blocking extension, such as uBlock Origin or Firefox Focus, by intercepting DNS requests AdGuard Home can stop tracking in all apps. That includes built-in browsers in apps, such as the Facebook app, as well as any app analytics tools. As I have an almost 6 year old 6th generation iPad that is getting rather slow, not having to load additional advertising and tracking scripts has boosted its performance and battery life.
Installing AdGuard
To run AdGuard Home, you’ll need a spare computer that can run all the time. A Raspberry Pi is ideal for this, as it’s small, low energy and can be run without a keyboard and mouse. You can also use Docker, Snap, or do as I do and run it as a Home Assistant addon. Indeed, once it’s set up, Home Assistant will detect it and offer to install an integration.
You can then adjust your router’s DNS settings, so that every device in your home uses your new AdGuard DNS server. This will block adverts and tracking across all of your devices if you want it to. I’ve chosen not to do this; whilst many tracking sites are a privacy nightmare, I also use sites like Quidco to get cashback. I use Google Chrome with no privacy features turned on when making purchases that could be eligible for cashback; this earned me over £80 when we switched our broadband supplier to Vodafone recently.
For me, just having it running on my mobile devices when at home on wifi is enough.
Whilst AdGuard offers other tools that are paid-for, AdGuard Home is free and open source.
Pi-hole
Pi-hole is similar to AdGuard, in that it is also a DNS-based ad blocker. As the name suggests, it was intended for use on Raspberry Pi computers, but can be installed on other devices. I had investigated installing this, but came across AdGuard as an easier alternative. Pi-hole is also open source, but development seems less active.
Advanced features
For the most part, once you’ve installed AdGuard Home and set it as your DNS server, you don’t need to do much else. However, you can enable DNS Encryption if you want – especially if you want to access your AdGuard server from outside the home. You can also use AdGuard Home to block adult content, or access to certain web sites, and configure this for individual devices. So, I could enable parental controls on our eight-year-old’s tablet using AdGuard without restricting my devices.
When it comes to reading magazines on a computer or tablet, you may well have heard of Readly, seeing as it’s widely advertised. But there’s a competitor, PressReader, that’s also worth considering. I’ve used both, and so here’s a comparison of the two.
Fundamentally, both services let you read as many digital magazines (and some newspapers) as you like, for a flat monthly fee. Both claim to offer thousands of titles.
Readly
As mentioned, Readly is probably the best known, as it’s advertised in lots of podcasts and through other third parties. Indeed, if you fancy trying it, you may find that a two or even three month free trial is available with a bit of searching (as opposed to the standard one month free trial). Normally, it costs £9.99 per month and claims to offer over 7000 titles to read.
You can be notified of new issues, and have these automatically download when you’re on wifi for offline reading. Pages in magazines can be bookmarked, and there’s a ‘mobile view’ which reformats pages for easier reading on smaller screens. I use this a lot; though I read magazines on an iPad, it simplifies the formatting and reduces the amount of pinch zooming needed.
PressReader
I hadn’t heard of PressReader until a couple of months ago. It claims to offer over 8000 titles to read; many of these seem to be the same as Readly but it also includes some additional magazines like The Economist. There’s also some non-UK newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
Like with Readly, magazines can be downloaded for offline reading, and it’ll reformat pages too. Indeed, on the whole it does this better than Readly, although sometimes it cut articles short. It also handles light and dark mode better on iOS.
Pricing is where things get a little more complicated. There is a free tier available, with around 500 magazines available to read. The ‘premium’ subscription, with unlimited access to all of its titles, is much more expensive than Readly – £27.49 per month, with only a 7 day free trial. So, in a nutshell, PressReader is almost three times more expensive than Readly.
But it’s not quite that simple. Many local libraries offer free access to PressReader through its HotSpot system. Indeed, this is how I found out about it. In West Yorkshire, Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees and Wakefield libraries all offer complementary access, as long as you have a library card with one of them. Sorry Leeds residents, but your council doesn’t offer this, although it is available for Leeds Beckett University students and The Leeds Library members. Some hotel chains like Marriott offer this too.
The catch is that you may need to re-authenticate with your library on a regular basis. Where I am in Calderdale, this is every 30 days but could be as little as 24 hours in some places.
So do I use Readly or PressReader?
If it wasn’t already obvious, I used Readly for quite some time. However, when I found out that PressReader was available for free, I switched last month and cancelled my Readly subscription.
I had been contemplating cancelling Readly in any case. When I first subscribed, I was regularly reading both Rail and Modern Railways, and previously had subscriptions for each. Readly was slightly more expensive per month, but offered a better reading experience. However, Modern Railways hasn’t been available from Readly since the beginning of last year, or indeed any other unlimited magazine platform.
Something to consider is that, when you cancel Readly, you’ll get a special offer to try to keep you as a customer. In my case, this was a 40% discount for three months, if I remember correctly. So if you do subscribe to Readly, maybe try cancelling it once a year to see if they offer you a discount.
Pocketmags Plus+
I thought it would also be worth mentioning Pocketmags Plus+ here as a third alternative. Pocketmags Plus+ doesn’t offer nearly as many magazines – around 600, rather than thousands – but it does have a few that aren’t available on the other platforms. There’s no free trial but the first month is 99p, and then £9.99 thereafter.
On Friday, I found a bat on the floor of our cellar. There’s a photo of it above.
This was a problem. Bats are well-known for being mammals that can fly, and when they’re not flying, they hang upside down to rest. A ‘grounded’ bat lying on the floor is not a sign of a healthy bat.
A quick search led me to the ‘Help! I’ve found a bat‘ page on the Bat Conservation Trust web site. I gave the National Bat Helpline a call, and contained the bat in a shoebox with a small dish of water until a volunteer could arrive to rescue it.
Although it took a while, a lovely volunteer came on Friday evening to collect the bat and take it to a place of safety, where it could be fed and then (hopefully) be released back into the wild. By this time, my wife and eight-year-old got to see the bat, which was nice as my wife loves bats. And it’ll be an interesting story to tell at school this week.
We also found out that it was a male common pipistrelle bat, one of the more common UK bat species. Whilst the IUCN considers them to be ‘least concern’, all bat species in the UK are protected by law. Hopefully, the little guy will get better now that he’s being looked after, and we’ve donated some money to the charity.
However, we’re still not sure how the little bat got into our cellar in the first place. Though the cellar was partly open to the elements as recently as the end of 2022, we’ve since had a new window fitted and a hole fitted in, partly due to a couple of other furry rodents getting in. I suppose it could have been down there all that time and had finally run out of insects to eat. At least he’s in a better place now.
I’ve recently started using Nginx Proxy Manager to act as a reverse proxy for the various web services that I have running on my Raspberry Pi. It’s a frontend to the nginx web server and makes setting up reverse proxies and SSL access really easy.
You may remember that I’ve used SWAG for this before, to enable HTTPS access to my Home Assistant installation. SWAG is find if you’re using Home Assistant Core or Container, but having switched to Home Assistant Supervised recently, I needed a new solution. Like SWAG, Nginx Proxy Manager can be run in Docker, but it’s also available as a Home Assistant addon.
The main benefit of Nginx Proxy Manager over SWAG is that it has a web-based UI, shown in the screenshot above. This makes setting up new proxy hosts really easy, as it has a nice and simple interface. Whilst SWAG includes pre-built configuration files for many services, there’s no interface available other than editing text files.
Nginx Proxy Manager will also manage SSL certificates. You can either import ones that you purchase yourself, or it will manage the process of acquiring and renewing Let’s Encrypt certificates.
As well as managing Home Assistant, I have Nginx Proxy Manager looking after Calibre-web and Nextcloud.
A brief explanation of reverse proxies
Apparently, you’re supposed to ensure that blog posts are at least 300 words nowadays, otherwise Google ignores it. So, here’s an explanation of why you should set up a reverse proxy server if you’re hosting services like Home Assistant at home:
No port numbers. When you set up something like Home Assistant, you’ll end up with an address like http://192.168.0.1:8123. A reverse proxy will allow web browsers to connect on the standard web ports (80 for HTTP, 443 for HTTPS), which looks nicer and is more predictable. It also means you don’t have to forward lots of arbitrary ports on your router.
SSL certificates. If you’re running a device on your home network, then ideally you only want to allow secure connections to reduce the risk of your personal data being intercepted. Self-signed SSL certificates are not ideal, as most web browsers issue dire warnings for web sites that use them. As not all web applications support SSL certificates natively, a reverse proxy can handle this for you.
Web application firewall. By making all requests go via a proxy, the proxy server can filter out malicious traffic. Nginx Proxy Manager includes a ‘block common exploits’ mode, and you can also filter IP addresses. For example, you may wish to only allow access to certain IP addresses.
Installing in Home Assistant
If you’re running Home Assistant Supervised or Operating System, then you’ll need to install the Nginx Proxy Manager addon. It’s available from the Community Addons repository, which should already be available to you – you won’t need to add it separately. It’s not to be confused with the official ‘NGINX Home Assistant SSL proxy’ addon; this doesn’t include an interface and only enables a proxy for Home Assistant, and not for any other services. Indeed, if you’re already using this official addon, you’ll need to stop it from running first, as otherwise you’ll have a port conflict.
Once set up, you can access the web interface at http://[your IP]:81 . I suppose I could probably set up a reverse proxy host to get rid of the port number, but I don’t see a good reason to enable remote access to it.
One final thing to add is that the user guide for Nginx Proxy Manager isn’t great. It covers setup, but there’s very little help for configuring proxy hosts. The web interface is pretty straightforward so arguably detailed instructions aren’t necessary, but a little more help would be good.
If you sometimes find doing things overwhelming, or need help converting some disparate thoughts into something coherent, then GoblinTools may help you. It was recommended to me by someone on Mastodon some time ago; sadly I’ve lost track of who tooted or boosted it onto my timeline because it was a while ago and I’ve been procrastinating about writing about it. Which is highly ironic for a productivity tool that is designed for neurospicy people.
GoblinTools is an AI-powered tool. The web version is free, with no ads, or you can pay a single solitary US dollar for the apps on iOS and Android. The tools it offers are:
Magic To-do
This is the first tool that appears on the home page. Type in a task, and the AI will try to break it down into smaller sub-tasks. In the screenshot, I’ve written ‘write a shopping list’, and it’s been split into 11 more simple tasks. These include ‘gather a pen and a piece of paper’, ‘checking your fridge’ and ‘asking housemates for anything they need’. The idea is that you put in a task that you know you must do, but are finding overwhelming. There’s also a slider for ‘spiciness level’ – if you are having big issues with executive function, then you can push this up further to break down tasks even more.
Formaliser and Judge
The Formaliser tool takes some text that you write, and tries to re-format it in a more formal way. For example, it can take the text ‘tell the boss to go fellate himself if he thinks I’m coming in tomorrow’, and replace it with ‘Please inform the boss that I will not be able to come in tomorrow.’. You can also make text less formal, more passionate, more sarcastic and so forth. As someone who tends to write very concise emails, the ‘more sociable’ option may be helpful for me to sound less cold.
The Judge tool is a tone analyser. Type in some text, for example from an email, and it’ll give you an interpretation of the tone. Here’s an example
Based on the given text, “No, I regret that this would not be possible,” it appears to come across as straightforward and polite. The tone seems slightly regretful or apologetic due to the use of the word “regret.” It suggests that the speaker is declining a request or denying a possibility in a respectful and considerate manner. Overall, the emotional tone is one of reservation and disappointment about the situation.
Estimator and Compiler
Estimator is a tool which offers an estimate of how long a given task will take. Although the example I offered was ‘Write a 300 word blog post whilst feeling very tired and with very little inspiration’ which it suggested 1-2 hours, which for me is overly pessimistic. This blog post took about half an hour with breaks to write.
Compiler is designed to accept an unordered brain dump and convert this into a list of tasks, which can then go into GoblinTools’ Magic To-do tool.
Chef
The Chef tool is designed to take a list of ingredients and cooking utensils that you have, and come up with a recipe that you can cook. It gave me this based on some random ingredients that I provided:
Dish: Cheesy Peanut Butter Pasta Salad Serving Size: 2
Ingredients:
200g pasta (7oz)
1 cup rice, cooked (195g)
4 tablespoons peanut butter
1 cup cheddar cheese, grated (115g)
1/4 cup sundried tomatoes, sliced (30g)
Salad greens (lettuce, spinach, or your choice)
Salt and pepper to taste
Instructions:
Cook the pasta according to the package instructions until al dente. Once cooked, drain and set aside to cool.
In a large mixing bowl, combine the cooked rice, peanut butter, cheddar cheese, and sundried tomatoes.
Add the cooled pasta to the mixing bowl, and toss everything together until well combined.
Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Serve over a bed of fresh salad greens.
Enjoy your Cheesy Peanut Butter Pasta Salad meal for two!
I’m not sure how edible this would be, although it looks like GolbinTools avoids the issue that a previous AI recipe generator had where it suggested making chlorine gas; adding ‘bleach’ to the ingredients resulted in a note at the end saying ‘Ensure that the bleach ingredient is excluded from any food preparation due to its toxicity.’
To me, this seems like a responsible and genuinely useful use of artificial intelligence. AI should be a benefit to society, and helping people do things better can only be a good thing. A lot of AI is misused, but I can see myself using GoblinTools at times when my executive function is at its lowest.
One of the biggest benefits of running Home Assistant in your home is its powerful automation tools for controlling your smart devices. In this example, I have a smart plug socket which I want to run for 18 hours, and then automatically switch off. This is the smart plug that we use for our heated drying rack, and it ensures that the rack doesn’t continue heating for longer than necessary, to save energy. As I run Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 4, it only uses 15 watts of power, compared to the few hundred watts that the drying rack requires.
Automations in Home Assistant have become much easier in recent releases. In times gone by, you’d have to write YAML scripts to automate your devices, but now there’s a relatively straightforward interface. Generally, automations work on the principal of ‘if this, then that’ – a bit like IFTTT, but it runs in your own home.
Tuya me, to you
For my automation, I use the trigger of the smart socket being turned on. In my case, this is a Tuya wifi-enabled smart plug, which I’ve called ‘Cuthbert’. We have four Tuya plugs, all with silly names like Cuthbert, just because. Tuya are a white label manufacturer, and so the brand names on the plugs vary despite them being exactly the same. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend them, as presumably every time you turn them on and off, your request goes via Chinese-controlled servers. I would probably buy Matter-enabled plugs instead now but they work fine. Plus, the recent 2024.02 release of Home Assistant massively improves Tuya support and no longer requires you to create a developer account, which is nice.
Automation actions
Anyway, having selected the ‘When’ event, we now need to specify the ‘Then do’ actions to take. First of all, we need a time delay, otherwise as soon as the socket is turned on, Home Assistant will turn it off again. The ordering of actions is important, as I found out the hard way; I originally had the delay after the command which meant that the socket just turned off straight-away. So, we specify a delay and then the action to turn the socket off.
The third action is optional, but it just sends a notification to my phone to tell me that the automation has completed. I’m using the Home Assistant Companion app but you could use an app like Pushover, or trigger an email.
This is a really simple automation, but you can create more complex ones. I’m hoping that, at some point in the future, we’ll have some smart blinds in our kitchen, and I’ll be able to use Home Assistant’s sun integration to open and close them at sunrise and sunset.
This is in addition to the existing text-based and audio announcements, and is designed to increase the accessibility of the railways for people with disabilities. Elsewhere in the north, Transpennine Express is rolling out BSL screens at stations.
When I shared this photo on Facebook, it got the usual likes and hearts from friends. But, predictably, there were some comments on the lines of ‘can’t they just read?’. And, recently, over at X/Twitter, its overly impulsive edgelord owner recently asked the same question in a tweet.
I too would have probably asked the same question until recently. However, over Christmas, I read Samantha Baines’ brilliant book ‘Living with Hearing Loss and Deafness’(sponsored link). Baines’ book helpfully explains that British Sign Language is, well, a language – and it’s distinct from English. Furthermore, some deaf people who have always been deaf will have BSL as their first language and English as their second. If you ever go abroad, to France for example, and have to constantly translate signs into English, it can get tiring after a while. Now imagine that your first language is sign language, and you have to translate written English into the signs that you have learned, all the time.
As someone who wears hearing aids, learning British Sign Language is something that I plan to do in time. This is because my hearing could continue to deteriorate to the point where hearing aids can’t compensate. Being able to understand BSL may still allow me to communicate with some people should that happen. So whilst these BSL announcements won’t necessarily help me, they will hopefully make trains more accessible for BSL users.
