iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Honestly the Russians leaking bioweapons on their own population wasn't featured on my bingo card.

garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Cloudy here in Melbourne managed about 5 mins of viewing Saturn before the clouds rolled over. Great viewing. I'll try again before bed but damn the 8" inch dob is a lot to move.

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Every now and again I obsess about getting an API or interface perfect. Then I think about Ruby endless methods and realize that borked is sometimes good enough

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

That is a sticky snake on the ceiling. My partner told the kid that he "couldn't get the snake to stick to the ceiling". Which he took as a challenge. Pretty funny, deceptively high though so I expect it'll be there a while

Photo of a ceiling, with an orange sticky snake stuck to it

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I've been fighting a cold for a few days and last night during broken sleep I dreamt that I was talking shit with Danny John-Jules and Craig Charles. Honestly Red Dwarf is amazing, actually happy that my addled brain still goes there

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Honestly I'd pay new game prices for a narrative Battletech expansion. Totally aware of BTA3062 and it is awesome but also played to death

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Fuck this new LLM world. I build and maintain a system, valuable to customers. Humans still write the code. I can prove it is correct and coherently discuss what it does and how. Now I'm feeling pressure to keep with the new use LLMs to gen code. Is my intransigence hurting the company?

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Fun fact, Google allows admin users to add calendar items to anyone's calendar. A new accepted meeting drops without notification to the recipient! Rude IMO but not usually much of a problem. But sometimes totes fucked! Some people should NOT have admin access in any system!

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"when people feel their votes have little impact and elites always get their way, the difference between democracy and authoritarianism begins to blur. It is then that things become truly dangerous." Much truth in this statement

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

canonical.com/blog/acceler... I run docker locally and deploy images to production AND I still lock my images to a SHA but "more CVEs being found so you have to update faster" is kinda pervasive at the moment.

canonical.com

Accelerating delivery of CVE fixes with a new Kernel release strategy | Canonical

To combat the exponential growth of AI-driven CVEs, Canonical is shifting to a rapid 2-week Linux kernel SRU cycle published weekly. Read about the update.

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I had manage to stay ignorant of the Aella and AI sex parties thing. I'd seen some references but no details. Honestly gross

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Reposted by @garden-gnome.bsky.social

The Chaser @chaser.com.au · 24/09/2026

The moment the robot started interacting with myGov systems, it understood the human feeling almost too well. chaser.com.au/general-news...

ChatGPT understands wanting sweet relief of death after interacting with myGov - The Chaser

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I use Miro.com maybe a couple of times per week to annotate screenshots for work. They have recently made some choices and I'll be honest I'm immediately thinking of ditching it

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I really wanted Hawthorne to win tonight. What a game, didn't go the way I'd hoped but the Lions were great. I do think the umpire had an outsized role in the outcome

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Honestly this is the AI path that gets us killed.

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Me: "So we are going to replace our asset pipeline with something modern." Brain: huh, sprockets has been continuously maintained for 18 years. Why is the next shiny shit more 'modern'

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Github Actions for CI / CD pipeline is slow but almost free. Like < $USD10 per month and most months it's free. That said the price is speed. On decent hardware we can run CI part in about 10 minutes (still too slow) but on github it's closer to 24 mins... Honestly cheap isn't good enough

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I'll be very happy never to hear about the hyrox shit again

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Managed to see Saturn and it's glorious rings last night using my 8inch dob. The sky was great, even the 6.3mm eyepiece was usable. I kinda knew it would be possible from my backyard, but seeing it sure is something

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

There is a new building regulation being applied to my property. BR153 However it is not public. Melbourne Water tells me to talk to council, council Melbourne Water... FOI my council and the officer is having the same trouble. We both know it exists, neither of us can find details...

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

"Like a fire drill for the grid": Rooftop solar systems to be switched off to test backstop system reneweconomy.com.au/like-a-fire-... I worked on the software that SAPN is using to run this. Should have ended up being a valuable bit of infrastructure but the company couldn't get a deal...

reneweconomy.com.au

"Like a fire drill for the grid": Rooftop solar systems to be switched off to test backstop system

Shutting off rooftop solar is considered a blunt instrument, but a necessary option as household PV increasingly dominates the daytime energy mix.

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Sometimes when a post doesn't make sense I look at the comments. Very rarely that elucidates what the original post is about.

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Yesterday we started deleting customer data! I've worked at a LOT of places and it's always been accepted that we SHOULD delete data. Actually deleting data! That always gets road blocked. Always. So it's a big deal for me that at this company we are being responsible.

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Spend 30 mins at the Fisher and Paykel website looking for a replacement part. Chat bot gives up after I confirm the original manual does NOT in fact list replacement part numbers. Tries to send me to a human... can't. Tells me to call. Every 2 mins I'm told to use the website.

static.klipy.com

Elderly Man Deletes My Computer, Calls Linda

Alt: Elderly Man Deletes My Computer, Calls out to a person called Linda

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Occasionally I let a junior developer bite off more than they can chew. Usually I notice and gently suggest that the work gets broken down some more. People need the opportunity to fail.

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I've watched a little bit of Alone Australia season 4. Did they select for contestants that have mental health problems? Are they editing it to highlight that this is a fucked situation that breaks people willing to do weird shit for $250k? gruesome TV, won't watch anymore

Screenshot of the SBS Alone Australia webviewer masthead. Aussies can watch online at https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-series/alone-australia

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I really wish www.teamretro.com/plans/ had an ad-hoc option. We only run retros every 3 ish months and paying monthly... However if they charged $USD 30 for single ad-hoc retro I'd be all over that

teamretro.com

Plans and pricing | TeamRetro

Enjoy the flexibility to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time. TeamRetro offers both monthly and annual subscription options, with a free 30-day trial to get started.

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Finally won a campaign of Terra Invicta! (Resistance) Now I can delete the fucking thing and check myself into rehab. Damn game is a 'just one more turn' fiend. 400.7 hours total and the last attempt at least 100 of that. Recommended? No. The rest of your life is more important.

Headline image for the game Terra Invicta.

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

[Conspiracy theory] Chrome is deliberately being borked so that clicking on a website in search results is slow and painful even with Ad-blockers on. So that you just read the AI snippet

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

"Adds complexity for what might be an infrequent problem (or the shape changes next time). Business decision ballpark 1 week, carry the complexity forever" Context: customer has hardware installed wrong. Plant shutdown to fix so awkward and costly, wants us to solve!

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Another day and ANOTHER customer sending timeseries data whose tz info is wrong. This is for regulator compliance monitoring of power plants. Bread and butter stuff `2026-07-06T01:00:00.000000+1000` That unequivocally indicates GMT+10... I'm still being straight faced told that it is GMT+9:30 🤦

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Whoa I haven't needed to boot from a recovery USB for years! But now I have a need. Only to find booting from a USB on my Dell is... Not straight forward and may not in fact be possible.

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

I'm really not looking forward to when AWS ups the price of RAM on their systems. I'm currently being charged $USD 0.00532 per GB per hour. That hasn't changed for a long while...

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

I cannot believe that the 2nd edition of "Designing Data- Intensive" got rid of the maps!

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Me to slack help-desk: Being able to disable or remap keyboard shortcuts would help immensely. Slack help-desk: .... .... .... Here are some whacky new background themes and out of office emoji's

Snippet from slack with the message "Take a look at Slack's new out-of-office emoji pack".

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

I get customers to upload CSV files to an AWS S3 bucket. Electrical timeseries data, no transformation on the files required! Most customers are fine they get there eventually. One company though... they just sent an email saying the process is maxing out 8vCPUs and 32 GB of RAM.

static.klipy.com

Oh Really Hmph

Alt: Oh Really Hmph by Samuel l Jackson as the avenger guy. This was definitely my face after reading a customer email

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Weird things pop up in Facebook market place. Take this kei car. The woman has been photoshopped (or AI'd) in. But the katana gear changer, that, that I want to exist

Photo of a car with a katana for a gear stick

Photo of a Kei car called 'carry' with photo shopped person for probably false scale

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Being the on-call person gives you a perspective. Dev who refuses on-call: "lets run this critical service during the middle of the night" Me: "Yeah nah, run it during business hours or close to it"

Slack message saying

"The AEMO services publish around 4am +- several minutes. We don't need to retrieve data that soon and I'd rather bias for 2 things

1 - Not getting alerts when AEMO systems run late
2 - Not getting alerts out of business hours unless necessary

So scheduled it for 8am GMT+10 that is close enough to business hours. I really don't like waking up to alerts"

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

We had an email outage at work because "premium dns" was not set to automatic renewal in crazy domains and they consider txt records as "premium". I don't manage the DNS records because if they hand me the keys I'm porting to AWS... apparently spending an afternoon on that isn't worth my time!

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

I'm so old I remember when Github was reliable for weeks at a time!

Github status page showing a bunch of services being down / degraded.

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

I manage several developers day-to-day. Agentic software development feels a lot like managing a team of really confused juniors asking a lot of questions. That also periodically suffer from memory loss. Has anyone found a way to make this fun? or does it just require a certain mental condition

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Car registration has gone up 15% year on year. No justification in the renewal notice! Totally sustainable.

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

I work with grid scale electric generators. Server equipment is possible to source. Dell quotes January 2027, Lenovo says 4+weeks (narrator "it is nothing like 4 weeks") Custom is just as bad.

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Fuck it, I'm buying "Designing data-intensive applications volume 2" by Martin Kleppmann. The first edition was amazing. I'll ignore the soylent version of system development for a few more weeks.

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garden-gnome.bsky.social @garden-gnome.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Getting good at something requires excitement, passion. Mustering focus and maintaining dedication without that is a lost cause. To maintain my career I will need to use AI, I accept that. I also accept that I have no passion for agentic software development. I must resolve this

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