Well I’ve been thinking I’m boxing myself into a corner with this website of mine focusing primarily on tech stuff. That’s not all I do! So for a change I’m going to write about some of my favourite albums because why not.

Now I’m no music journalist, this is totally subjective and personal. So go easy on me!

A lot of these albums have links to Bandcamp by default as I reckon it’s the best way to support the artists. For those not on Bandcamp, I have links to Deezer instead (see my post on why Deezer?)

I was looking into alternatives to Docker Compose for Podman (yes, there is a podman-compose wrapper that brings similar functionality to Podman), and stumbled across the concept of Quadlets. Well, turns out they’re nothing like Docker Compose, perhaps more like Kubernetes or one of them fellas. Indeed, the name Quadlet was supposedly named after a squashed Kubelet. Geddit? Squashed kube? A quad? Ah, never mind.

The world is always changing, there’s no denying that. But the latest haps have many of us quite worried. Society at large seems to be hurtling towards fascism, a vocal minority of affluent and angry men propped up by big tech dragging us all deeper into the ugliest depths of humanity.

I singled out Big Tech there because it’s something that probably the majority of us are actively participating in. But it doesn’t have to be this way! In this post I will outline some of the alternatives available to the big social network platforms, hopefully giving you some inspiration to step away from these increasingly toxic places.

I like that Godot has its own, simple scripting language in GDScript, but I’m a .NET tragic so it’s C# for me. Interoperability between the two is possible, but not always obvious. Case in point, how do you await an async GDScript method? Well, it depends…

As part of an upcoming piece of work, it was suggested to me that I spend some time getting familiar with Tailwind CSS. I’d heard good things from colleagues, one comment in particular suggesting it doesn’t hold you back like other CSS frameworks. So I was quite keen to dig in and see what was so special about it.

Gnome is a great, low-distraction desktop environment but it’s certainly not perfect out of the box. Fortunately it’s easy to spruce up. Here are some of my favourite extensions!

Are you still downloading .exe files like some kinda chump? Check out Scoop, a package manager for Windows not too dissimilar to Chocolatey which ought to be very familiar to any Linux enthusiast. It’s fast, it’s easy to use, and it’s open source. Yes, Scoop is great but this article is not about extolling the virtues of the package management tool.

I took some time to investigate developing a MAUI mobile app that shares business logic with a Blazor web app by way of ViewModels and the like. What I discovered was that MAUI and XAML is a pretty cumbersome framework. My colleague Kael gave me some insight on the possibility of building a Blazor app and running that as a MAUI app. After looking into it in more detail I came to the conclusion that having a single application with multiple deployment targets is a more practical approach to cross-platform development. This article serves as a guide to developing a single application that can be deployed as both a website and an Android app. Of course there are a few platform specific things to look out for but they’re easily handled as I will demonstrate in this post.

This guide is mostly a reference for myself as it’s a workflow that I find myself following whenever I set up a new Linux machine. I’m sharing it here as I’m sure many will find this useful, and it will save me from looking up each distinct step in the future.

I also took the opportunity to add some bonus network configuration tips to get the most out of the setup.

I recently installed Fedora on my personal laptop to replace Manjaro as I found Manjaro to be a just a little too flaky for my liking and I know Fedora to be a solid alternative. During installation I was asked if I wanted to encrypt my drives. Now I’m not harbouring anything particularly sensitive but I thought it was worth doing, security first and all that; after all, we expect every website to support HTTPS these days so why not?

Well there is the matter of that mildly pesky login prompt on every boot…