iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 14h

My washing machine has stopped working. I’m no expert, but I think this might be why… Going to see if a new plug does the job, otherwise I’m looking at a new unit.

The inside of a UK plug, showing significant signs of damage:

- The 13A fuse has blown
- The brown Live wire is kinked, charred and black.
- The copper conductor for the Live wire has melted free of the terminal
- The plastic housing has melted and is shiny in places.
- The fuse clips are covered in black sooting.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 19h

Apparently these are microwavable single portion puddings. I swear, M&S are going to ruin me.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 17/10/2026

when editing config files, there's a world of difference between: data_directory and data-directory especially when the device won't even start if the config file can't be parsed...

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 17/10/2026

Morning all! Getting some maintenance work done on the Mastodon server today. Mostly just database tuning etc. If all goes well, we might attempt the big move tomorrow!

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

Oh hello ocular migraine Guess I’ll be having a nap then.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

Right. Fingers crossed, everything is now stable. I'll keep monitoring it throughout the day, but I'm planning some maintenance work this weekend to address some of the fundamental issues.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

After careful consideration, my wife and I are skipping on the recently announced Apple devices: - The HomeView seems best suited to the kitchen, but ours is waiting on a badly needed refit that is more urgent. - The HomePod Mini 2 and new TV are not big enough upgrades for our needs. - We […]

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

Is it me, or is the new Apple HomeView just the screen from a very large Apple Watch?

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

Evening all! Long day today, helping out my son’s school with a trip to Stonehenge! Amazing to think that this site is over 4500 years old.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026

Morning all! So, we all survived the theme park! But I was so exhausted, yesterday was a complete write-off. On the upside, I completed the main story in Minecraft Dungeons 2 and am now on the post-story content. Still working towards level cap (100), but there’s been some clear thought about […]

gamepad.club

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 10/10/2026

Afternoon all! Been a busy week travelling for work, followed by a busy weekend with the local Beavers group at Poultons Park (a local theme park). I am now absolutely shattered and thinking about ordering take-out for dinner.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

Based on current estimates, we’re probably looking at 3-4 hours of downtime to migrate the Postgres database to the new server, but there will undoubtedly be a performance improvement as a result. - 1 hour to generate the backup - 30 minutes to transfer 30GB of compressed (gzip) data to the […]

gamepad.club

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Pixel One @pixelone.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

@stargrace Dude! Imma turn my house into a pumpkin for Halloween. www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5eDdz4irUs

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

Oh, forgot to mention, but OVH (our planned new host) just pushed their server pricing up 70%. This is going to require some careful replanning to make sure we don't end up crippled by pricing during the migration. I'm going to reconfigure some of the infrastructure to use a greater number of […]

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026

Morning all. Today I'm feeling the after-effects of having a flu vaccination. Very lethargic with aching joints. On the flip side, I managed to get the remaining S3 content deleted, the buckets closed, and the service cancelled. Yay for saving money! I'm doing some Postgres migration tests at […]

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

Morning all! It's the end of the week, which means a morning of training followed by an afternoon of reports. Yay me!

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

I’ve been gradually collecting these #Lego Technic pocket kits. They all have a little mechanical feature based on building construction, and I love the design consistency across the range.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

Clearing out the old S3 buckets with the old host so that I can delete them. Yes, I figured that running s3cmd rm was going to be quicker than setting a lifecycle expiration and hoping I got my XML syntax right...

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

We've had about 30 minutes of downtime earlier today, after the platform monitoring tool alerted me of an outage - so at least that's working! Unfortunately the server itself needed to be rebooted (not just the docker containers), which caused issues of its own when trying to restore service.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

Afternoon all! I’ve spent the last couple of days playing Minecraft Dungeons II, and my first impressions are mixed. This is definitely a sequel, but the pivot is interesting. It’s become more like Diablo, with a fixed Overworld and procedurally generated dungeons. It’s also much more linear […]

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

I’ve decided that I’m not going to play the Warcraft Forever beta. Not because I’m not interested. But because I don’t want to burn out before the full game launches.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

In good news, I’m recovering from the fever that wiped me out at the start of the week and I’m now a semi-functioning adult. In not so great news, my wife is now bedridden with the same bug.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026

Feeling a little better today! I feel like I’m through the worst of this bug :)

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

Update: still sick. Had to call in sick at work too.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2026

Evening all! Database migration is on hold at the moment, mainly because my health tanked last night and I ended up with a fever before bedtime. I’ve been super tired and had a low-grade headache all day, so my ability to concentrate on anything other than sleeping has been toast.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026

The database migration just became a little more urgent: the docker image I used to set up Gamepad.club is on Postgres14, which goes out of support in November. So the plan is now: - create new server on Postgres16 with extra block storage for DB and backup. - copy schema and creds from old to […]

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

RE: martianbase.net/@mackuba/1172929620… I was wondering what that recent security update was about. Guess now I know … #MastoAdmin

martianbase.net

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

So far, my small town (120,000 people has) - KFC x2 - Popeyes - Slim Chickens - Dixy Chicken and soon a Wing Stop. And that's not counting the other fast food places with chicken on the menu. How much poultry can one town eat?

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

Running savepoint processes ready for Mastodon 4.7.2 update

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

Saw this rainbow on the way home, so I snapped a pic. I also used it to test the iPhone’s image editing tools such as object removal. See if you can spot all the differences.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

Your food scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

A jar of Custard cream spread, based on the filling from the biscuit with the same name.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

On my iPhone, # Google started asking for a catchpa every time I searched. This was regardless of network, VPN status etc. So I’ve switched to #duckduckgo as my default search engine. It definitely feels like Google is doing whatever it can to reduce its involvement in my life. And that might […]

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Stacey @vidyala.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

Finished this painting of my best friend’s dog Elphie! Turned it into a reel on other socials in an attempt to be seen. It’s been great to create again. #painting #art #pets

A small acrylic painting on canvas hanging on a grey wall. It’s a black dog licking her nose. She has some grey and white in her fur. Her eyes are brown and look softly sweet because she is the best girl. There’s stripes of colours comprising a rainbow flag behind her, starting with blue at the top, then green, yellow, orange, and red.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

It’s been 12 hours since moving S3 provider, and everything looks great! I’m going to keep monitoring things for a week before deleting the old bucket and decommissioning the old service.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

Just visited The Verge to catch up on some tech news and well... that's impossible now. Also, them and Polygon have different owners now? I *have* been living under a rock for the past few years...

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

OK, all member submitted media and avatars over the last couple of days has transferred over. All is good! Just refreshing the cached content we have from other Mastodon servers on the network, and this step of the migration is done!

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

Currently checking to see if there's any member-submitted media that didn't get transferred over in the previous wave and syncing it over. I'm seeing some temporary odd behaviour with some 'cards' - the preview images that accompany a hyperlink. I hope to have that resolved soon.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

testing image uploads to the new S3 storage.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

Bought some pins from a local indie creator. I normally catch her at London shows like MCM Comic Con or Hyper Japan, but I’m skipping them this year to try and save money. Still trying to support small artists though! Btw, the photo really doesn’t do the pastel colours justice.

A collection of enamel pin badges from Indigo Abbie. It includes some Minecraft blocks, an Xbox 360 and Sega Dreamcast console, and two Switch 2 joycons.

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

Today, we're mostly learning about how to optimise rclone for small file sync speed by using --checkers and --transfers

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Reposted by Gareth Harmer

Anna Haunthro @annaanthro.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

Two teen boys -Overheard on metro: Teen A: My mom said I gotta choose between gaming and my future… Teen B: The future seems pretty bleak… Teen A: Exactly! Gaming is the only good choice!

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

There are a lot more Toot Control commands compared to when I last looked at them, and the biggest are about managing the cache. For reference, Mastadon stores a local cache of every user avatar and image that crops up on someone's timeline, even if they're not followed. To reduce the amount […]

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

I’ve just realised - WoW Forever is getting these things: - Refresh visuals - Gamepad support This may make it ideal for bringing to consoles… #warcraft

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

Just catching up on all the news from last night's #Blizzcon, and I'm confused. - Does Warcraft Forever now mean there's three variants of WoW to play - Classic, Forever, and Retail? - Isn't the new Starcraft FPS their third attempt at this kind of thing? - Diablo IV on Switch 2 sounds great […]

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

Soo.. Diablo IV is coming to Switch 2 *next week*. It's a 78GB download, so I'm going to have to carve out some space on my SD card if I want to play this full-price bonanza. Alas, there's no physical release from what I've read. Alternatively, Diablo III is on sale on the Nintendo eStore at […]

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Gareth Harmer @gazimoff.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

Moving roughly a terabyte of media from the old host to the new. This might take a while...

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