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End of a good year, start of an even better one

The last week of 2025 and the start of 2026.

Started 2026 with a Park Run (jog) with a Strava time of 27 minutes 46 seconds, but that doesn't seem right as I think my fitness tracker got confused. My Park Run recorded time was 35 minutes and 25 seconds, which isn't bad considering I was a minute late to the start 🤣

My injuries continue to recover. I have some exercises to help with 'tennis elbow' and 'trigger finger' in my left arm and hand. An icy walk to the Podiatrist on Friday confirms that the diabetic ulcer has pretty much gone, so now I can start testing activities to see if any of them stop the ulcer from completely healing or getting worse.

Preparing for a lot of cycing in the new year with some shopping for bicycle and general winter items.

  • Shimano R8000 Cassette, 11-32
  • Shimano HG701 Chain
  • Cospo Cadence sensor (a garmin sensor got lost some where)
  • Insulated stainless steel water bottles - stop my water getting even colder during the winter months
  • neck warmers, with breathable mesh around mouth (stop the warmer getting too damp)
  • mini bike chain pliers - small enough to carry in top bag in case of issues with chain
  • XOSS XL400 light - a lighter weight light for shorter rides (up to 4 hours)
  • mini cycle saddle bag - a compact bag for TPU inner tubes which should not obstruct the rear light mounted on the seat post

Testing out the reliability of the NAS raid array by watching some classic movies via the DNLP server.

Pagan festival parties

The winter holiday season is usually a quiet affair for me as friends and family are dispersed all over the planet. I do not follow a religion although I do appreciate the sun rising every day. I have cats to keep me company and I also look after my neighbours cat for a few days.

Winter is when I do less cycling outside, especially when there is a risk of ice. Instead I work on my core muscles with yoga and occasional brave the outside for a Park Run. I have had an injury on my foot which has taken a few months to heal (as I have been very active), so Park Run events for me will be a brisk part walk (maybe running for the last 50 meters).

Started to consider what this year has meant for me by looking at other peoples 2025 round-ups. The most enjoyable roundup so far is Kermod & Mayo's Best and Worst Films of the Year, which also included best TV shows (that Mark Kermod has watched) of the year.

I have a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device at home as a convenient central backup for work and media files. The NAS was configured with a RAID6 array, but unfortunately two disks in the RAID 6 array had failed. I discovered that changing 2 disks on the RAID array was not necessarily a safe option, especially if yet another disk became faulty during the rebuild (which can take many hours).

I am attempting again to recover the RAID array. If that fails, I will rebuild the NAS with 2 separate RAID6 arrays, increasing further the resilience of the storage in case of hardware issues.

Eventually I will replace the 'disk' drives with solid state storage devices (SSD), especially as a 4TB SSD can be found for around 160 GBP. Using SSD rather than spinning 'disks' also makes the NAS device really quite.

NOTE: I have other backup mechanisms as RAID should not be used as a permanent backup solution.

Entertainment this week included

  • Blakes 7 season 3 (usually watched as I fall asleep)
  • Slow Horses season 5 - excellent show that keeps my gripped (watched the first 4 episodes in one night)
  • Pol1bus - wonderfully funny and quirky show (I am not sure if I am rooting for the right protagonists)
  • Foundation season 1 & 2 - watched again in preparation for season 3 this week
  • Dr Who - watching Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth doctor and really enjoying the depth of stories that are portrait

Winding down for 2025

I have completed my 6,000 km distance goal for cycling, so I will focus on other activities such as walking and yoga. I aim to get into a rhythm of 3 yoga sessions a week, which will stretch my muscles and help with my breathing.

Something a foot

Completed 6,000 km distance for cycle riding this year, a very satisfying number as I wasnt able to do much cycling before May.

A new month means its time to update dependencies across all projects. Although antq has proven very good at reporting outdated dependencies for Clojure projects and GitHub actions, it is quite a niche tool and something extra to learn or maintain a config for.

When reviewing options for liquida/antq there was a link to ... GitHub workflow that generates a PR with all the dependency updates. This project is now in maintenance mode and recommends looking at the Renovate GitHub action.

So I decided to create a CI workflow using Renovate that generates a pull request to update Clojure library dependencies and GitHub actions.

Rather than write this myself, I felt it was a useful task to ask an LLM tool to tackle. I felt confident I knew how to write a clear question (prompt) for the LLM tool. It was also a small enough task that I wouldnt blow all my 'free' tokens. I also hoped that it was a simple enough task that I wouldnt have to keep refining the question to get the response I needed.

The reply should be simple enough that I can understand, as I already have plenty of experience writing GitHub workflows and configurations for the tools used by a workflow (e.g. Megalinter).

Unfortunately the resulting Renovate.json configuration doesnt like Clojure, so AI seems to have failed quite badly (or was too optimistic).

Taking my usual approach of an Internet search, I discovered the Mend App, which is described in more detail in the Mend for GitHub.com docs.

The Mend app kind of works but still seems to require some manual intervention (pressing buttons on developer.mend.io app) and only supports (or only configured for) maven dependencies and not git updates, e.g. seancorfield/deps-new.

The results of the discussion with the LLM are documented in this post and the results were also published to the web:

Create GitHub workflow with Renovate for Clojure projects

Hello darkness my old friend

It is getting noticeably darker now, before I finish 'working' on Practicalli content and other computer things.

At the end of last week I contributed questions to the next Clojure Survey, which I assume will be out in early January 2026. I also shared some thoughts about why this information was useful to capture.

Earlier this week I ran through the draft survey and provided feedback directly to Christoph. It was mostly nitpicks (I used 🌐 conventional comments style for the feedback).

Getting close to a total of 6,000 km in distance for 2025. Only 146 km to ride and I've hit my target.

NOTE: the title is taken from the song "Sound of Silence" by "Simon and Garfunkel"

First taste of Winter

The days are very cold now, especially when the day is not sunny. I am determined to get out on the bicycle for several rides each week.

Previously I've have added SSH keys to my GitHub account via the GitHub website. The GitHub CLI can add SSH keys, which is more convenient that copying the contents of the public SSH key into the website. I still need to figure out a good way to cache an SSH passphrase in a key ring when not using Gnome desktop. I use the SSH key for signing a commit, so need to enter the passphrase for each commit.

Friday was house maintenance, replacing the valves for the heating system top-up loop. Now I can top up the water pressure for the heaters when ever needed (which shouldn't be very often). My neighbors boiler started making a huge banging noise when the pressure was very low, so I can avoid this situation myself (I've heard at least one other neibour have the banging boiler problem this week, but couldnt figure out where exactly it came from as its a base sound and travels).

For a distraction this week, I am continuing to watch Blakes 7, Doctor Who (Matt Smith, Jenna Coleman) and Battle of the Planets (possibly the first Americanised Anime).

Debian Linux returns

Discovered Neovim GitSigns plugin could be used to stage specific lines, as well as hunks.

Material for MkDocs is the static site generator tool used to create all the Practical.li websites. This project is now in maintenance mode and a project called Zensical is under active development. It seems that there should be a fairly smooth migration of existing projects to the new tool :crossed_fingers:

This summer has been an adventure with the new shiny Hyprland wayland compositor and tiling window manager. Whist Hyprland (and associated tools) can be made very beautiful, I find it has some major productivity limitations compared to i3 tiling window manager.

I've switched back my main laptop to using Debian Linux, using Sway Wayland Compositor via Regoligh Desktop as Sway works the same way as i3 (at least from a user perspective).

The evaluation of Terminal UI tools is proving much more successful and I have found some nice system tools to use (better than the GUI tools that come with Gnome desktop).

I use the keyboard for everything except graphics & video editing work, and the occasional link in the browser if its a busy page. Using a tiling window manager has helped me keep my fingers on the keyboard where they work the fastest.

I common keyboard combination I used is to copy the URL from a browser window into one of the Practicalli books, or this very journal.

  • Super and one of h j k l keys to navigate to the browser window (SPC followed by a number if the browser is on a different desktop)
  • Ctrl+l to highlight the current page URL in location bar.
  • Ctrl + c to copy the URL into the clip board
  • Super and one of h j k l keys to navigate to the Neovim window
  • p to paste the URL into the Neovim buffer

Peddle Peddle

Lots of cycling this week with 4 consecutive rides, Thursday to Saturday. The Cafe at East Peckham was closing, so we took a trip as a last farewell. It turns out there is a new buyer, so it should be back open before we know it.

I continue to look for the most effective way of adding data overlays to the videos captured on cycling routes.

Continuing to evaluate Terminal UI tools and finding very useful tools to understand what is going on under the hood of the operating system.

Another Arch Linux disaster

After a kernel panic with Arch Linux after a package upgrade (and many other issues), I will switch my main machine back to Debian Linux.

I did have a small issue starting Regolith on Debian after an update, but there was a fix already defined that was quick to apply successfully.

I can still choose to use Wayland compositor with the Sway tiling window manager, the Wayland equivalent of i3 for Xorg.

Terminal User Interface tools are on the rise, so I have started evaluating them to see which ones I want to adopt.