Archives

Here's the archive of all my previous posts, enjoy!

The Amerigo Vespucci Returns

posted on 28 February, 2025 in personal, travel

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Amerigo Vespucci being towed back into port.

I was returning to Triest on the coach, when overhead a troupe of fighter jets flew right over us, emanating smoke trails in the colours of the Italian flag behind them. Needless to say this was quite a surprise! It was because there turned out to be a major event occurring in Triest on that weekend: the return of the Amerigo Vespucci to Italy after a two-year long tour around the world.

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Escaping the Tourist Hordes of Venice

posted on 27 February, 2025 in travel, personal

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The gloomy weather in February keeps all but the most keen tourists away.

I’ve long been putting off visiting Venice as it has a reputation of being one of the most touristy places on Earth, where the streets are clogged with Chinese and American group tours and everything is absurdly expensive to match. And then there’s the government’s response to the overtourism–fleece the tourists even more. Nope, neither of those sound particularly appealing. However, now that I live in Munich, it’s pretty easy to get a coach there and it’s not only cheap, but traverses some of the most beautiful countryside in Europe on the way there–it going directly the Alps over the Brenner Pass. So it was finally time to make the plunge and visit.

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Notes on Cloud OLTP

posted on 8 February, 2025 in tech, databases

I previously (probably like many “old-skool” C++ devs) thought of cloud computing primarily as renting other peoples’ machines at a high mark-up. However, I’ve been reading up on papers in the databases research field and so thought I would share some of my findings. The use-case I will be talking about here is how modern OLTP databases are designed for the cloud and their corresponding advantages.

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Soviet Mandolin Review

posted on 9 January, 2025 in music

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My Soviet mandolin after a bit of TLC.

Over Christmas, I was browsing eBay for mandolins and came across this beauty and my better senses did not prevail–so I bought it for €45. It’s a flat-top mandolin that was made in Leningrad in the mid 1980s.

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Stratocaster Body Swap

posted on 20 September, 2024 in music

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The new Alder body with all of the gear attached.

After a year’s hiatus from playing electric guitar (I usually play fingerstyle pieces on my acoustic nowadays), I had rediscovered my baby blue Tanglewood Stratocaster, which was my first guitar. I had already modded it to the stage where not much of the original guitar remained. The bridge was replaced by a MiM Fender one, the tuners are now retro-style Washburn tuners, and similarly the pickups have also been long since replaced by some nice “Warman” pickups made by a bloke in Wales.

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A Day in Nizwa

posted on 1 November, 2023 in travel, personal

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A relaxing shot from the garden of Nizwa castle.

Despite Oman having a long history, there wasn’t much evident of it in the capital city Muscat, which is a city caught between being a hectic middle-eastern metropolis and a resort town for rich oil-sheiks, depending on where you are and your station in life. Therefore, in search of some history, I took a coach out to Nizwa, a major city and oasis town in the desert interior of the country.

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The Delightfully Direct Shop Signs of Muscat

posted on 19 October, 2023 in travel, personal

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The Sale of Drinking Water shop

Mustcat, Oman, is a busy city of about one and a half million people. In districts like Al-Gubrah, it has wide, traffic-jammed boulevards lined with tall concrete buildings. There often isn’t any pavement but instead the side of the road is a car park for the shops on the ground floor. The sun was scorching when I visited in October and the temperature around 39c. Therefore, I wanted to stay in the shade as much as possible and that meant keeping close to the shop fronts. However, the more I walked around, the more amusing I found the names of the shops!

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On Tour with the UAZ

posted on 3 October, 2023 in travel, personal

You are cruising the pacific coast of California in your Mustang, the wind flows through your hair and the engine purrs as you thread the car through the gentle turns along the coastal highway. What could be better? How about trundling along in a UAZ!

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Our UAZ parked in front of some laundry.

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Barskoon Valley

posted on 2 October, 2023 in personal, travel

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The smooth and fast road leading into Barskoon Valley.

On my recent trip to Kyrgyzstan, one of the highlights was the beautiful Barskoon Valley. On the south shore of Lake Issyk-Kul, sits the town of Barskoon and this road brings you up into the Tien-Shan mountains and beyond. Somewhat unusual for Kyrgyzstan, is that this road doesn’t totally suck! We managed to do about 90 km/h in our UAZ on this dirt track, while we could only manage about 20 km/h when we were travelling in the south of the country around Naryn.

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Adding a Lightbox Library to Hakyll

posted on 21 June, 2023 in haskell, tech

Often when I am blogging, I am describing past events such as holidays and one of my hobbies during those times is to take some snaps. Hakyll, my static site generator, lets you write these articles in markdown format, insert image tags and have them rendered by pandoc into HTML.

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Impressions of Morocco

posted on 16 June, 2023 in personal, travel

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The dunes of the pre-sahara, located in Merzouga, in the eastern extremities of the country, meld into the surf of the Atlantic beach of Essaouira. Double exposure on Kodak Gold film.

After a long winter and a damp spring, by April, it was finally time for a holiday and the chosen venue this time was Morocco. For me, there is a particular allure to leaving Europe and vacationing in a new continent and I have barely scratched the surface of Africa so far in my life. Furthermore, the decision to travel to Morocco was further spurred on by the fact that Ryanair flew to several destinations in the country for less than $40, which is certainly a price that can’t be argued with! Amongst those options, my friend and I chose to fly to Essaouira, a small fishing town on the Atlantic coast, about midway down the length of the country.

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A Summer in Berlin on Film

posted on 5 April, 2023 in personal, travel

In August 2022, I spent a couple of weeks visiting the office in Berlin and decided to take my Zorki-4K camera with me. I found a couple of rolls of Kodak ColorPlus in DM, so decided to use that to capture my explorations of the city in my free-time. Although ColorPlus is known as a cheap film, I was pleased with the results and although it doesn’t have the fine detail of Kodak Portra, I think the colour reproduction is very near as good. The following blog entry describes a bit of the back-story behind these photos.

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Sunrise over Mono Lake

posted on 17 March, 2023 in personal, travel

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At about 5:30, half-asleep and emerging from a tent smelling of maple-bacon, I caught this view.

The best photo I have taken has to be the one shown above, which I took in September 2019. I was travelling with a friend from San Francisco, down to L.A. and then back up again. We had rented a Nissan pick-up truck, or really I should, as a self-respecting Aussie, say Ute, which was of course a novelty for us compared to the “euro shitboxes” one mostly sees back at home. We were around the Yosemite / Death Valley area and had found a lay-by off a forest road which was in an isolated spot, perched up on the gentle gradient leading down to Mono Lake in the distance.

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The Strangeness of Armenia

posted on 3 March, 2023 in personal, travel

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The peaks of Mount Ararat, the symbol of Armenia, float off in the horizon. On a clear day they can be seen from the capital, Yerevan. Though look carefully and you will see the border fence which now places it in Turkey.

Already preceding my entry into Armenia, had I heard accusations and assertions about this place. It was on the train journey to Kars, a town in Turkey, near to the border with Armenia, had we been conversing with a Turkish man who, when we told him we were going to Armenia, made sure to explain that we would hear much about the Armenian genocide, but that it simply wasn’t true. After all, the Ottoman Empire was a powerful entity, he stressed to us, surely if they wanted to exterminate the Armenian people, they would have done so thoroughly and without any half-measures?

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The Snows of Stepantsminda

posted on 13 January, 2023 in personal, travel

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Horses hanging out while it snows in the wintry valley.

Georgia is a land of stunning geography but one of the highlights for me was our tour starting in the capital and driving the Military Highway through the Caucuses mountains up to Gudauri, which is a ski resort town. This road is steeped in the history of the region, having been used by invaders and merchants since at least the first century BC.

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The Perfect Desktop Environment (for me)

posted on 15 December, 2022 in tech

Many Linux users settle on whatever their desktop environment their distro provides. Then there are others are endlessly tinkering–that was me. However, for the last couple of years, I’ve settled on what I think is a happy middle-ground between the flexibility of a tiling WM like sway and the usability of GNOME or KDE.

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On the Dogu Express

posted on 11 December, 2022 in personal, travel

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The Dogu Express reaches its penultimate stop, leaving enough time to buy and drink a quick Turkish coffee on the platform.

In November of 2022, I headed to Ankara for a two-week adventure through Turkey and the Caucuses with a friend that I have known for many years. It had been a trip months in the making, though it started with a humble suggestion during a Discord chat one evening. Both being relatively early into our careers, we did not have the luxury of spending money on long-haul flights to the U.S., a week’s worth of hotels in an expensive state as well as the petrol needed to get us around. Nor did the idea of staying in Europe and going to museums sound all that excited to us adventure-seekers. So instead, it was more a question of how far we could go for the least money and luckily, through browsing on Google Flights, we found short-haul flights to Ankara that fit the description well. So our destination had now become Ankara. But ask any Turk and they will tell you that there isn’t much to see in this city. Therefore, we decided to take the night train across the country and continue this journey into the Caucuses, which I’ll probably describe in a further blog post.

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