I always thought I was good at making pasta, I cooked until al-dente and ‘finished’ in a pan. But I was wrong, my sauces tasted good but never stuck to the pasta. Until now anyway, I’ve been delving into food youtube which I’d mostly written off for reasons that I don’t quite understand and found NOT ANOTHER COOKING SHOW.

It’s time for me to add to the vast pile of posts about life under the COVID-19 lockdown. So far in terms of day to day living it hasn’t been too bad. After the initial panic buying slowed down and people accepted the measures locally it’s been easy to get hold of food and other essentials and we never went short of anything we needed.

It’s been a while since I wrote about skating. I took it up because I wanted a physical activity that was rewarding, fun and physically demanding. Skateboarding delivered on all three counts and saved me from the horrors of gym membership.

I’ve been a Linux user on and off for over a decade now, sometimes I even get paid to use it. If you’ve never used Linux the terminology around it can be quite confusing, Linux isn’t an operating system like Windows or MacOS but can be better thought of as a platform for building operating systems. In Linux land (population nerds) these operating systems are called distributions and the differences between them can make a huge difference to the way you use your computer. I’ve been a long term user of the Ubuntu distribution only recently switching to Fedora because of its relationship with Red Hat.

Both Fedora and Ubuntu are designed to be easy to use and largely get out of the way of the user. Arch is not designed to do that, it is for the hardcore. Arch's software is bleeding edge, you will get the latest Linux Kernel whether it works or not. And most of all it is known to be an unbelievable pain to install.

I’ve recently had to brush up on Kubernetes rapidly and that’s meant figuring out how Helm works. This has not been helped by the recent release of Helm 3 but I think I’ve got a handle on what Helm is and thought I’d share my thoughts.

A few months ago I noticed that Destiny 2 had gone free to play and boy have I fallen for that trap. It is sublime, Bungie really knows how to make an engaging video game and Destiny 2 absolutely nails much of what made the Halo series so engaging.

The end of year lists return, these are my favourite Albums of 2019.