calum.org:~#

Magnesium is a natural substance that is required by humans, and that is used in over 300 processes in the human body. It's used in a few main areas: Energy production and metabolism - it is required to unlock the energy we get from food (ATP, gluc...

I had my old TV for about 13 years, but a year ago, dark shadows appeared on the screen, and I knew its time was up. Finally one day, it turned off, and wouldn't come back on, and it was time to get a new one. After some investigation about the va...

I have been carting around some old audio cassettes with me for decades now, and I recently thought I should try and listen to them before they totally degrade. I couldn't find anyone who had a working cassette player, so I paid for someone to conver...

AI image generation is not new any more, and produces some pretty good results. I thought I'd try and get it running locally. However, I don't have an expensive GPU, so when I say locally, I mean in AWS. These are the steps I took. Create an accou...

You're in a health food shop and you see a can of Whole Earth "Organic Cranberry". Naturally you assume it's full of cranberry. But when you get it home, and look at the ingredients, they look like this: Grape juice (54%), cranberry juice (4%),...

How much code do you think it takes to calculate the power of a number? Say 6^3? (216) Can't be hard. Just loop around twice, multiplying 6 by 6, right? OK, it might be harder with negative numbers - 6 ^ -4 Oh, and with decimals - 6 ^ 2.7 And n...

A friend of mine's son is soon starting at university, and he sent me the following message: I'm getting together a list of life lessons or things people wish they had been told earlier. If you two have anytime have a think about what has helped sh...

When a new template is installed in Qubes, the following commands will create a disposable VM, which can then be used for opening untrusted attachments in emails, trying out new software, etc. As new Fedora releases don't come that often, I forget th...

I have been trying to make long-lived presigned links to S3 resources, and it's been surprisingly awkward. The longest you can make the links for is one week - 604800 seconds. I would have liked them to be even longer but this is a hard maximum. F...

We are fortunate in the UK that most of our power distribution is underground. This means that power cuts are very rare. I can remember maybe one in the last 10 years. However, with the move towards greater electrification of modern life, and the var...