iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

Okay, Silly mastodon spammers targeting Eugen is just amazing 😂

Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

LOL. Looking at the storage on my macbook today, and now I do have to ask: Why on earth would Word, Outlook, and Excel need 2.5 GB each?! That's ridiculous even in 2026 😂

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

@jenbanim You may have figured this out by now, but if I click ‘create account’ on your instance I get this screen.

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

@barbapulpe No, can't say I noticed. looking at my grafana graphs maybe the CPU usage is very marginally up since the RC1, but that hardly seems significant. (To give some context to these graphshs: I installed RC1 on 14 August, 4.7.0 on 20 August, and 4.7.1 […] [Original post on mstdn.thms.uk]

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

My little kid is about to grow up 😢

Email about my child's Google account update in 30 days, with details on changes and parental controls.

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026

Yikes! This wouldn't be half as bad if Taylor wasn't absolutely famous for closing PRs without any feedback. #Laravel #PHP

Taylor Otwell's tweet:

Last week I disabled GitHub Issues on most Laravel open-source packages.

If you hit a bug, describe it to a coding agent and open a PR. Even if the code isn't great, that's fine - code can be iterated on. The PR still documents the problem, and a proper fix can follow.

I suspect this will soon be how most open-source libraries operate.

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 29/08/2026

Just come back from a week in Norfolk which was amazing! Less amazing that a fuse tripped while we were away, so my mastodon instance - and everything else I self host - has been down for ~ 2.5 days. I guess that’s just the risk of self hosting… On the plus […] [Original post on mstdn.thms.uk]

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026

Well, that was a bit startling! Scared my kids senseless. Little one was crying for fear for a good 10 min 😩

Screenshot of emergency alert:

There is a very high risk of wildfires nationally. Residents, landowners and visitors should not undertake any activity that could start a fire, including disposable barbecues, firepits, garden incinerators or fireworks. Even a small flame can rapidly develop into a major wildfire placing lives, homes, businesses and emergency responders at risk.
Follow official updates and report signs of fire immediately by calling 999. Search gov.uk/alerts for more information.

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

TIL: #Apple can add a number row to their keyboard if they want to. Why are they refusing to do this on the English keyboard layout??

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026

My kid made himself a pinhole projector rather than a pinhole camera. A fun little impromptu viewing party with the neighbours ensued who all admired his ingenuity. Great fun to watch!

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 31/07/2026

@craftxbox probably depends a bit on the size of the instance. FWIW on my single user instance I got about 1k per day (this is as reported by postgres - I don't know how you arrived at your figures? SELECT date_trunc('day', created_at)::date AS day […] [Original post on mstdn.thms.uk]

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

I've given my blog a bit of a re-skin. It's quite subtle, but I think it's smarter and more modern. What do you think?

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 25/07/2026

You know you've messed up when notoriously sycophantic Claude tells you: > “the raw material is all here, it's just badly undersold”

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 20/07/2026

Since my wife is mad about the World Cup, and I desperately wanted to try and change the subject slightly I was researching the history of sports. As the crowning end point of my research I present a photo of the British football team for the 1908 Olympics […] [Original post on mstdn.thms.uk]

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 17/07/2026

😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 Liz having the self awarenss of a lettuce!

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 16/07/2026

The impact of the World Cup semi final as measured by the PING on my home internet connection - clearly the whole street was watching!

Graph of ping measured from my home internet showing a baseline of about 5-10ms, ramping up to about 50-100 ms between 19:30 and 22:30 local time, falling back down to its base line afterwards (the match started at 20:00 local time and finished around 22:15)

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 09/07/2026

If you were wondering why English heatwaves are so mad: These are the indoors temperatures in my kid's bedrooms over the last 24 hours. Consistently 25C+. Even when I opened the window early this morning around 6 (you can see that dip) it barely hit 25C […] [Original post on mstdn.thms.uk]

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2026

The tough choice soon to face the people of Clacton. I know who’d get my vote! In all seriousness, Count Binface voting Farage would be amazing - and give ‘Putting the trash out' a whole new meaning 😂.

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 04/07/2026

My homeland now contains around 17 services that I host for myself and family - not counting reverse proxies and similar helpers that exist solely to ‘support the operation’. #selfhost #selfhosting #HomeLab

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 29/06/2026

After a week of35C + it’s just so amazing to sit with window and blinds open and just be comfortably warm! ☺️

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 25/06/2026

github.com/mnapoli/vibephp > “VibePHP is a next-generation PHP runtime and web server that runs PHP faster* and better*. > “There is no interpreter. There is no compiler. When a request comes in, your PHP source is handed to an AI that reads it, runs […] [Original post on mstdn.thms.uk]

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 21/06/2026

So my kid’s school is having sports day on Monday and Tuesday afternoon where they’ll spend the whole afternoon in the sun on the field. They won’t budge. Even on Monday I have to question the wisdom of doing this , but on Tuesday? I suspect a lot of children […] [Original post on mstdn.thms.uk]

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 20/06/2026

Spent the day cutting the hedge in the garden, and boy I’m not getting any younger …

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 17/06/2026

So mastodon now has email subscriptions which I think can be pretty neat. The email looks good (shame media is linked and not embedded though, but understandable). There is also a nice ‘create a mastodon account’ button. I do think it’s a big shame that the […] [Original post on mstdn.thms.uk]

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 17/06/2026

Classic US: they blow everything up, the rest of the world has to pay the price 🙄

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 16/06/2026

What on earth is happening to home insurance in the UK? That is insane!

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 01/05/2026

Claude, you are drunk! Go home! (This is Claude suggesting it should implement pagination in a Laravel Livewire component with … a horribly over-engineered mess.)

I don’t even really understand what it wants to do …

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 29/04/2026

That guy has totally lost the plot, hasn’t he?! Which other country has a picture of their current head of state in it? Anyone?

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 31/03/2026

@derickr That's honestly what I had assumed. This is what threw me off: weird …

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 26/03/2026

My home feed is so full of spam lately it really isn’t fun anymore. Posts like these from random accounts from random instances. Sometimes dozens at a time. I’m not really sure what to do about it. I feel reporting is gonna be a waste of time, and […] [Original post on mstdn.thms.uk]

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 25/03/2026

Can someone with experience in #proxmox or #virtualisation more generally help me wrap my head around how virtual processors work? With RAM it's all fairly obvious: If my host has x GB, once they are allocated to VMs they are gone. But processors obviously […] [Original post on mstdn.thms.uk]

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 24/03/2026

> The new feature is now available to Claude Pro and Max subscribers using MacOS in what Anthropic calls a “research preview.” That means the system “won’t always work perfectly” and will sometimes require a “second try” for complex tasks, Anthropic warns […] [Original post on mstdn.thms.uk]

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 24/03/2026

LOL, the family dog is dead scared of the toddler’s new rocking deer. Doesn't it look scary?

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 23/03/2026

Here are the changes I made. Very minor, but it does look a lot neater, in my opinion: blog.thms.uk/2026/03/freshrss-mobil… #FreshRSS #RSS #SelfHosting

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 16/03/2026

And just like that my last #hetzner server is gone, and the migration to my home server is officially complete 🥳 #SelfHosting #proxmox

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 12/03/2026

@daniel Following advice from @spiezmaestro I got a HP Elitedesk. I had ordered one with 4 cores and 16 GB RAM thinking it’d be mow than plenty. Imagine my surprise when I booted up proxmox and was greeted by this: I guess I got plenty of spare capacity now 😁

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 05/03/2026

Does anyone know how #fastmail gets the avatars for email senders? I know it's not BIMI as neither `news.philips-hue.com` nor `philips-hue.com` have BIMI records. I know it's not Gravatar as neither of the two email addresses returns anything from Gravatar […] [Original post on mstdn.thms.uk]

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Michael Thomas @michael.mstdn.thms.uk.ap.brid.gy · 03/03/2026

Hm. I've just seen that they are fare more than those two sub domains: I'm more and more tempted to just block the argyle.social domain as a whole 🤔 #mastoadmin

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