Practical.li provides free online books covering practical guides to Clojure programming and development workflows. Practicalli Engineering Playbook contains specific guides across the full spectrum of software development.
All sponsorship funds are used to support the continued development of Practicalli series of books and videos, although most work is done at personal expense and time.
OpenAI gives a curl command to initially test the account setup, then its nothing until a credit card is added to the account. So is it actually worth spending money on something I cannot try out first?
Watching Beacon 23 again and enjoying it even more a second time around. The first viewing I was a bit confused with the storyline jumps, but it makes a lot more sense now.
I tried using Hyprland with Debian Linux a few months ago but the packages are a little out of date even when using the unstable (SID) distribution. As I had been using SID packages, then the Debian Linux system had become a little too unstable for day to day use. Interestingly I installed the KDE desktop and that worked very nicely before I started again from scratch.
Hyperland is kept up to date in Arch Linux although there is a lot more work to learn and maintain arch linux compared to Debian Linux. pacman command options are quite cryptic and I found them hard to memorise. Its also easy to break things doing an update (the downside of a rolling release based distribution).
Garuda Linux adds some nice tools on top of Arch Linux (and can also used the Nix sub-system) to simplify overall package upgrades and a range of other maintenance tools.
Health and fitness continues to improve and the number of cycle rides and distance continues to increase. In July I completed 800km distance from 11 distinct rides, totalling around 35 hours of riding across the month (not including stoppage time).
Cycling maintenance seems to be complete for both the Ribble SL Disc and Bianchi 928 RC road bikes.
Aims:
DONE: new cleats for the black & red Lake shoes (and readjust cleats on white lake shoes)
Surprisingly, GitHub started showing a message about a billing problem. As I shouldn't be billed for anything I am aware of, further investigation was required. The issue was resolved really quickly by GitHub support, so I can continue with describing how I run Practicalli on a minimal budget.
Movies:
Arrival is a beautiful film with an engaging story, breathtaking cinematography and a very powerful message about the importance of language and communicating. The film opens and closes with the moving "On the Nature of Daylight" composition from The Blue Notebooks by Max Richter.
The week started slow as I was a little tired from the weekend riding. Blender was fired up to edit the videos from the Isle of Wight and Red Barn rides.
Fingers crossed I finished all the maintenance on my Bianchi 928 RC road bike, which I have had since 2006. The Bianchi is still in excellent condition after a great many journeys and Audax events.
I was hit by a large vehicle on the way back from collecting the new cycle computer. I was a bit shook up for a day or two but apart from some bruising I seem to be in one piece.
Transcendence - an excellent film about a technological singularity and how humans struggle to understand or trust an intelligence that doesn't look like them. Small minded people end up ruining the world because of something they feared rather than tried to understand.
Twin Peaks is a very quirky TV show that was hugely popular when I was in my early 20s. The show has many rich characters and a few very silly ones (depending on your point of view). The storyline is based around a tragic crime that is being investigated by Agent Dale Cooper. Agent Cooper is not your typical FBI agent and really makes the show worth watching all by themselves 😃
Bicycle maintenance and a few final ride this week in preparation for the ride around the Isle of Wight. There were more replacements than I first thought, brake pads, cleats, pedals. I have done lots of long distance riding for most of the last 6 years (except the COVID years) so I shouldn't have been surprised.
I have been looking at more products from AliExpress and revisited the Trace Velo video about Ali Express and if its worth it for tips on getting the most out of this website. If you know exactly what you are looking for and buy from established companies, then it is as good as using services like Amazon.
Panda Podium is a company that makes it easy to find quality products from China based manufactures, greatly reducing the risk. They also have some good reviews of products too.
Investigating the Rust language again this week, in between the cycle training, maintenance and heatwave 🤣 There is a great looking deployment platform called Shuttle for Rust apps, feels like the same enjoyable experience as Heroku.
Tv & Movies this week:
Blade Runner: The Final Cut - one of my favourite films of all time, I never get tired of watching.
Flow a wonderful movie (especially if you love cats, which I do). Animation and music were very moving.
The United Kingdom is heading for another heatwave.
Continuing to train for a cycling trip at the end of the month. Lots of Yoga and a long ride at the weekend. Finding some interesting routes for training.
GitHub sent an email about charging the Practicalli Org. Investigation revealed a change in that GitHub started to meter usage of user accounts and Organisations since March/April 2025.
I am starting to collect my thoughts about AI (and dig up information about software agents I researched back in 1997). An interesting aspect of AI is the relationship that people are building with AI, both positive and in some cases a little disturbing.
The toppling of US-aligned governments in Iran and Nicaragua and the Soviet-Afghan war drove a significant increase of tension in the cold war, as make prevalent in the UK by the government's protect and survive public information campaign.
I remember watching the file Threads, an apocalyptic nuclear war drama which they actually showed us as school. The family in the film was very similar to my own when they were younger, so it did have a significant impact. After watching the film I realised how ineffectually the protect and survive information was.
The current near term risk to nuclear war being the violence over the continued land grab in the middle east, driven and masked by fear and hatred that has been there longer than everyone currently alive today. All this propped up with certain people using the politics of popularism to their own financial advantage.
The longer term risk of nuclear war of course being countries fighting over ever dwindling resources, e.g. food and clean water & air, due to disastrous changes to the climate of planet Earth driven by unsustainable human activities.
The 1980's had many songs that covered the darker part of humanity, often in a subtle way that people listening to the songs didn't realise (or want to realise). Here are a few examples I remembered:
Every breath you take by The Police which is often though of as a love song and was in part about stalking and part authoritarian 'Big Brother' control of the people
Russians by Sting was a commentary on the dangers of the 'Mutually Assured Destruction' doctrine pushed by the governments of the USA and Soviet Union. The song also inspired in part the nuclear war story of the Terminator movies.
Everybody wants to run the world decries peoples desire for control and power, often at the expense of others. The song originally titled 'Everybody wants to go to war' so reflecting aspects of the cold-war. The song also hints at humanities lack of respect for the environment.
In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins venting the frustration, anger and despair that so often accompanies divorce. A very poignant song personally as my parents had a very tumultuous divorce at that time that greatly affected me for many years.
I had an interview for a new role last week and it seems a very interesting company. The seem very organised and clear in their communication and I am on to the next step
Putting the finishing touches to the Debian Linux install on the Lenovo Extreme laptop. Reviewed the Debian Linux mirrors work as its been a while. deb.debian.org contains the SRV records in DNS that manages the routing to the most appropriate package archive, so I dont need to do anything to have the best mirror.
Testing out 1Password password manager as a replacement for NordPass which was used for the last couple of years. :crossed_fingers:
Update: 1Password is so much nicer experience getting setup so I will definitely switch. An interesting thing I saw when signing up for an account was that 1Password first did a credit card check by trying to take 1 USD from my account. As the account was empty then my bank refused the withdrawal. So 1Password asked for $0 dollars instead, which my bank app prompted me to accept. I have 7 days trial to change my mind before they take the annual payment (32 Euros).
Started the Practicalli Rust book although this is only the structure of the book and the CI publishing workflow for the moment. It does provide a central place to capture all my experiences with Rust and hopefully it will become useful to others in the near future.
TV & Movies this week:
Evil Dead III - Army of Darkness: my favorite movie of the series, I've watched this dozens of times and always enjoy.
Paradise - an interesting show with good characters
Rich and Morty season 8 on Channel 4: first two episodes have been very enjoyable.
Started the week with a much stronger ride than I have been able to do this year. I had the energy and motivation to push myself, especially on ascents.
Finally finished backing up the Lenovo Extreme laptop. Tried out Garuda Linux Hyprland version which was nicely organised with lots of neat desktop tools.
Installed Debian Linux as Garuda Linux had issues installing on the Software RAID partitions that the laptop had (two 512 GB drives in RAID 0). I recreated the Software RAID with the Debian installer anyway, so maybe Garuda Linux would install on the recreated array. I am not ready to switch to Wayland yet as there are a few key applications that are not yet supported.
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