As mentioned about a week back, my first show booked for this year's Edinburgh Fringe was to see Nick Harper. It's been a long time since I've seen him; far too long. As best as I can tell the last gig I made it to was in 2009.

Fourteen years. Shit's changed in that time, for me, for the world. O_o

On first getting into town it was warm and crowded, with that fun "town is doing festival shit" vibe that I like, so I went and grabbed an ice cream to kill some time until the venue opened. I knew I was in the right spot when, as I stood on Chambers Street, enjoying the cooldown, the man himself dashed passed, guitar case in hand!

When I got into the venue I grabbed a drink and tried to find a seat; most were taken; except for one right at the front and off to the side. So I grabbed it. Moments later Nick himself came over to say hello to the folk sat in this spot. We had a wee chat about how long it was since I'd last seen him, nattered about general stuff, and he said very nice things about my hat.

The gig itself was fantastic. While I love his recorded work anyway, Nick's always been one of those artists who I enjoy most live. He's got this way of singing and playing guitar that fills whatever time he's got to play; never once have I ever found myself looking at my watch, wondering if it's near the end; or if I have it's because I'm worried it'll be over soon.

A good number of the tracks he played I didn't recognise; at least two of them I know are from a new album that's coming, and I have to admit that when I do listen to his stuff it's the earlier works that tend to go into heavy rotation (I think the last album of his I bought was The Last Guitar). But I loved everything I got to hear. I'll be diving back into his catalogue and also keeping an eye out for the new release.

While there was only an hour for his slot, he did manage to get a couple of old favourites of mine in; I was delighted when he launched into By My Rocket Comes Fire, did a wonderful She Rules My World, and even squeezed in a quick Galaxy Song.

All too quickly though, the hour was up. It was kind of fitting that many of the songs he did have on the set list were all about time (on purpose, I'm sure). I'm happy to say I got to say a quick thank you and goodbye and then it was time for me to head out of town again.

Seeing Nick brought back a lot of good memories, and reminded me that I need to catch up on his more recent works. While most of his stuff doesn't seem to be on Apple Music (what can I say, I'm very online these days when it comes to music), I'm glad to see he's got a full Bandcamp, so I'll be paying that a visit!

I hope he swings back this way some time soon, not during the Fringe, and with a proper long set. It's been too long since I got to enjoy him really going for it and having a ton of fun.

A couple of weeks back I mentioned home my main HomePod had got stuck installing 16.6 of the software that runs it. This situation persisted for days after writing that post and I kept promising myself that I was going to see if I could unstick it by removing it from the Home, doing a factory reset and adding it back again.

Of course, during the week that followed, I never got round to that. You can imagine what it's like: no time in the morning, and by the time I get home in the evening I want to watch TV and use the HomePod as the speaker for the Apple TV, I don't want to be doing tech support shit.

The following weekend... yeah, I kinda forgot.

So, here I am, a couple of Saturdays on, it's early morning, I've had breakfast and I'm having coffee and I think it's the perfect time to do this. I hope the Home app my on iPad and... it's sorted!

So, yeah, it looks like it somehow managed to unstick itself in the end. A quick test of some of the issues I was seeing suggested there was still an issue, for example asking for the temperature in the bedroom would still result in a "working on it" reply followed by it telling me it wasn't responding. A quick reset seems to have fixed that.

I guess it's good to know: if it happens again, it'll keep on working as the speaker for my Apple TV, and it'll eventually sort itself out even if I don't muck about with a hard reset.

And I'm off! This morning I spent a good amount of time going through the sources for the old version of davep.org and removing everything that won't be needed any more, and also building up a rough TODO list of things I may want to recreate as content.

With that done, as mentioned earlier today, I started work on building the site around Pelican. Pretty quickly though I started to feel that that was going to be a bad choice. While Pelican felt like a perfect fit for this blog -- mainly because it seems to be very blog-oriented -- it was feeling a bit clunky for a general website that would have a handful of static pages at best; likely something I wouldn't be updating too often.

So I put it aside and went on with my morning, doing normal Friday domestic stuff like the weekly supermarket shop. It was while I was out doing that that I realised the obvious answer: use what we use for the Textual docs and what's been used for label.dev: Material for MkDocs!

I've just spent about 40 minutes after lunch kicking that off and it was really straightforward. Of course the result is horrifically cookie-cutter in terms of its look -- such is the way that mkdocs-material sites end up looking out of the box -- but I don't much care about that; what's important is that I've got a placeholder page in place, and I've quickly built a framework for writing and publishing the content.

So that's the plan: now that the welcome page is in place and there's something on my domain that looks like a working website again I can start to slowly drag in old content in a new format. Heck, if I'm careful I might even be able to retain some of the old URLs!

Longer-term plans might involve finally sorting out https support (yes, even today, my site is http-only), and perhaps adding some sort of RSS feed so there's a record of when changes are made.

After that... hopefully that'll be about it and perhaps the website will last another 22 years running on top of the same engine (actually that part should be easier because the "engine" is now local and it generates a static site).

The question then becomes who'll last longer, the site or me?

I've had davep.org since very late 1999. Initially it started as a domain used just for email; while I did have a website, around that time it was still hosted on my then-ISPs hosting service, with a mirror on a friend's web server.

A year or so later I finally did a proper revamp of my website and finally settled on www.davep.org as the place to point people to. I think, when I made that move, that's when I decided to write my own website engine in php. It was fun. It worked. I didn't want to code backend stuff (I don't think the backend vs frontend distinction was even a thing we were talking about then) so hacking it together in an unholy mix of ruby to generate various static files that live in the filesystem and then php to turn them into actual HTML made sense.

And it worked.

I heavily maintained the site for many years; keeping the same engine, tweaking the styles, adding features and content. I figure some time around 2013 or 2014 I probably stopped being quite so active in messing with it, and then in the last 5 or 6 years I've pretty much neglected it.

The neglect shows.

Meanwhile... php has changed. Quiet a lot. It's one of those languages I used back in the day and pay no attention to. Then earlier this week I noticed that there must have been an update on the host and huge parts of my site broke, lots of content missing, pretty much useless and dead in the water.

I did briefly think about breaking out the latest and greatest php locally, setting things up to investigate what's going on, and seeing if I could breathe some more life into it; but really what's the point?

So after all these years I'm finally admitting defeat.

Right now, on the home page, I've just got a placeholder saying that bitrot finally ate my website and that I'm going to start again from scratch. That's my plan: given that I had a good experience moving this blog over to Pelican I think I'm going to build a new www.davep.org with Pelican. Where possible I'll try and drag some of the old content over, but I'm also going to use this opportunity to have a proper digital spring clean.

There's no planned timescale for this, but this morning I've spent an hour or so over coffee, branching the repo for the site and pruning out all the stuff I know I won't need and don't want.

I'll try and drop the odd update in here as things progress.

I almost feel bad admitting this. For someone my age it feels like a thing you should not really admit, but here goes... I only saw Little Shop of Horrors for the first time back in 2020. Don't ask me why. I just... never got round to it. I've known plenty of people who have seen it and loved it. I had a girlfriend for a while in the late 80s who was obsessed with it. She, like plenty of people I know, would quote all the quotes from it.

And yet... yeah, I never got round to seeing it.

Until 2020. On first viewing it became really bloody obvious why so many people seem to love it.

So you can imagine my delight when, earlier this week, I was fighting through the Edinburgh crowds to get to my bus home and I saw this:

Oh yes please! Oh so yes please! Given my desire to try and take in a few more Fringe shows that I normally would, this year, this seemed like a perfect fit. It also solved the choice paralysis problem for at least one week (really, have you seen how much there is on offer?).

So today I booked some tickets for myself and a couple of friends. Next week's "try and see at least one Fringe show" problem is solved: I'm going to go and see a performance of Little Shop of Horrors.

Following on from the previous entry, where I outlined a weird problem I'd started having with syncing Obsidian via iCloud, I finally decided to sit down and try and work out the exact flow of the problem. Today, for example, I'd created an entry in two different vaults on my phone while on the bus into work, and when I got to my desk the vault I use on my work machine had updated.

However, when I got home this evening, the vault for my personal stuff hadn't updated on my home Mac Mini. I tried a few edits, in both vaults, on the iPhone, and nothing came through to the Mac.

So... before I started really diving into things I decided to "turn it off and on again" -- the iPhone that is -- and when it came back I ran up Obsidian, which told me it wasn't allowed to access my iCloud drive!

I took a moment to go into the settings to try and figure it out, didn't find what I wanted right away, then got to thinking that perhaps some of the phone's services were still spinning up, so I ran Obsidian up again (after killing it).

Sure enough, this time, it saw my vaults. With both vaults open on my Mac I made edits to open entries and the edits started to flow.

So, yup, looks like it was a simple case of "turn it off and on again".

Apple: #ItJustWorks.

Since October last year I've been getting into using Obsidian. Not that heavily, not to the extent some people do, but just as a way to keep a daily journal of work-related things. Each day at Textual HQ we finish off with a chat about how our day has gone, stuff we're wondering about, etc, etc... So I don't lose tack of what I've been up to I keep notes and Obsidian is how I do that.

One of the things I really like about it is how I can have iPhone, iPad and macOS versions on the go and have it all sync via iCloud. It generally works well.

But in the last couple of days I've noted the oddest problem, and I've yet to pin down the exact flow. But it seems to be this:

• If I create or edit a note on my iPhone, it doesn't turn up on my Mac.
• If I create or edit a note on my Mac, it turns up on my iPhone.

I think I might have seen variations on that theme but I've not made careful note -- normally I'm made aware of it when I'm trying to get something done.

What's super weird is this: on the iPhone, if I create a note, and then go into the Files app and look at the iCloud folders for Obsidian, the file isn't there! It's there in Obsidian itself, I can move it about, edit it, etc, etc... but it's not in the "vault" as seen from the Files app.

It's the last part that has be really puzzled.

If I get to the bottom of this I'll try and remember to write up what I find. I suspect I'm going to need some proper clear time, without other distractions, and experiment with all the edit and sync options and see what works and what fails.

I've lived near Edinburgh for getting on well over 6 years now and, aside form the odd show here and there, I've never really done the Fringe. As in, really dived in. Since moving up here my life situation didn't quite allow for it and then the pandemic hit and... well, you can imagine. Every year I've been up here I've managed one show, at least, but this year I want to try and make myself get to a few.

Maybe one per week. Possibly.

Might not happen, but I'm going to try. What can I say? I don't live in Edinburgh, I'm not a big "be out amongst people" kind of person, and the activation energy to get on a bus into town vs what I can do in my little part of Scotland is a constant battle.

But this year I'm going to try my best.

This evening I've booked a ticket for an artist I've been a fan of since the 1990s: Nick Harper. I saw Nick quite a few times in the 200xs (see the image above, I think 2009 might be the last time I saw him!) and then my going to gigs tailed off somewhat (again, life stuff). So seeing that he's playing here for a few days was something I could not ignore.

This weekend me can thank Monday me for committing him to doing something kinda sociable. I'm sure he'll be mad at me most of the day it's happening, but once it all kicks off and the music is flowing he'll be thankful.

Right now, at this moment... I'm rather looking forward to it.

I have three HomePods. I have a Mini in the kitchen and one in the bedroom. I then have one of the newer-gen "big" HomePods in the living room, which amongst other things is the speaker for my Apple TV device (yeah, I'm kinda Apple all over the place these days).

This week there was an update to the software, updating to 16.6. The two Minis updated just fine. The big one, however, days later...

It's been like this all the time since the update turned up. I've tried a reboot from the Home app. I've tried pulling the plug and plugging it in again. Nope. It just keeps sitting there like this.

Meanwhile... it's working (more or less) fine. It's still playing music. It's still being the speaker for the Apple TV. It still answers most questions and performs most commands (most of the commands I give it are to add stuff to my Reminders).

On occasion if I ask it questions about other devices in the apartment ("hey siri, what's the temperature in the bedroom?") it'll do the "working on it" thing and then give up saying the thing wasn't responding. That seems to be about the worst of it.

Having checked this online it looks like, annoyingly, the one option I have left is to do a full reset, removing it from my Home, doing a factory reset, and then setting it up again. I'm sure it's something that'll take 10 minutes or so; but it's an annoyance.

Apple: #ItJustWorks.

I can't quite remember where I found this this week, I think it might have been via a comment on some article on the orange site¹, but I stumbled on a really handy bit of free (as in beer) software called Quiche Reader.

It's really simple and I feel exactly the sort of thing I need. Over the years I've tried all sorts of "save to read later" tools and systems; be it things like Pocket, or tools now built into the browser these days, even adding URLs to Remember the Milk (back when I used that) or (these days) Apple Reminders.

Nothing ever quite stuck. Normally I'd end up slapping stuff to read into these systems and then never reading them.

Quiche Reader, so far, feels like the perfect approach.

It's quite simple: if I see something I want to read a bit later I save it into the application (which will sync to my other devices via iCloud). Then, when I go to Quiche Reader, I have to read the article or delete it and move on. This is sort of what I'd do anyway, saving stuff up for months on end until one day I'd declare saved reading bankruptcy and then start the whole cycle again.

Now I can look at the saved article stack and I'm forced to either read the thing, or be honest with myself that if I'm not gonna read it now, I'm probably never going to.

It does have a "pause" facility (or something like that, I forget the name) where you can throw an article to the back of the queue; but even then that means it'll keep popping back to the top again.

I'll see how it goes; but so far I feel like this is the best "I'll save this to read later" tool I've found yet.