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Chris McLeod's blog — Blog Posts — JSON Feed

Chris McLeod · chrismcleod.dev · English

Chris McLeod is a software developer with over 20 years of experience. Sometimes he writes about it.

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Jul 6, 2026
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  1. Installing the UGREEN BE6500 WiFi 7 USB Dongle on Arch Linux
    Jul 6, 2026 · original
    I had a problem where the integrated WiFi 7 adapter on my MSI motherboard would randomly just… disappear… from the system. As in, completely drop off the PCI bus and not show up again until I’d completed a couple of rounds of clearing the CMOS, and even then, it was a bit temperamental as to how many times I’d need to go through the dance. Annoyingly there was no rhyme or reason as to when this would happen. Could be 6 days between episodes, could be 6 weeks or more. Thankfully there was a dedicated button on the back of the motherboard and I didn’t have to open up the case and mess with jumpers every time, but it was still a faff. After losing a couple of hours to the latest failure, I broke and bought a USB WiFi dongle, specifically, this UGREEN dongle (affiliate link). Now, I admit, I didn’t do as much research as I might normally do if I was less annoyed, but I trusted in the modern
  2. My Changing Media Landscape
    Feb 1, 2026 · original
    I cancelled Disney Plus in September (though my annual sub runs until March). A year ago, I downloaded my entire Kindle library and stopped buying from their store. Netflix was cancelled in December. Audible went bye-bye sometime last summer. None of this was planned, exactly - more like a series of small decisions that eventually accumulated into something larger. The reasons are varied but overlapping. Streaming services have kept raising prices while the parts of their libraries I cared about shrank or became stagnant. Movies I wanted to watch would vanish without warning, or arrive in the UK months later. At various times my partner and I complained about catching ourselves scrolling endlessly through recommendations we didn’t want, looking for the handful of things we actually cared about. Often we’d spend more time trying to find something to watch than actually watching something.
  3. Default Apps for 2025
    Nov 25, 2025 · original
    It’s that time of year again . I’ve been seeing people’s update posts pop up in my feed reader this morning, so it’s time to look at my default apps for this year. There are a few changes this year, as I’ve started a long plan of detangling from major centralised services and moving to more self-hosting and smaller platforms. As before I’ve marked updates with a ✨ emoji. 📨 Mail Client: Apple Mail + web 📮 Mail Server: Fastmail 📝 ✨ Notes: Obsidian LogSeq Obsidian ✅ To-Do: Apple Reminders 📷 iPhone Photo Shooting: Apple Camera 🌅 ✨ Photo Management: Apple Photos, Immich 📆 Calendar: Apple Calendar linked to Fastmail 📁 ✨ Cloud File Storage: iCloud + OneDrive none 📖 ✨ RSS: Inoreader 🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: Apple Contacts 🌐 Browser: Edge at work, Vivaldi at home, Safari on Mobile 💬 Chat: Work only - Teams; iMessage + WhatsApp, if they count 🔖 Bookmarks: Bookmarks on my blog 📑 Read It Later:
  4. Installing Arch Linux with Secure Boot on a Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio
    Aug 26, 2025 · original
    Important This post originally mentioned another linux installation that is based on Arch. I’ve removed references to it from the instructions because I should have known better . Thankfully it was one very optional step, and the remaining guide holds up with base Arch. My Surface is now on a vanilla Arch install. My three year-old Surface Laptop Studio (first generation) has been starting to feel a bit long in the tooth as Windows 11 has continued to grow fatter. It’s that slow, creeping, feeling you get when a device isn’t quite “good enough” anymore. You probably know what I mean; things take longer to open than you remember, and there’s just a little bit more “friction” using the device than you’d like. It’s small things - a few extra seconds here, a loading spinner there. Even though I don’t use the Surface all that much now, I didn’t want to leave it in it’s current state. In my ex
  5. Migrating An Eleventy Site to Bunny.Net
    Jul 25, 2025 · original
    I wrote a while back that I was hosting the images for this blog on Azure . After I wrote that post I moved the site wholesale over to Azure Static Web Apps (SWA), and the site has been running pretty smoothly since. Unfortunately, Azure are deprecating the particular CDN service I was using, and the alternatives looked Enterprise-grade expensive. The actual switch-off wasn’t happening until 2027, but I know what I’m like: I’d forget and then have to rush to fix my broken site all of a sudden. So moving sooner rather than later seemed the best idea. I also took it as an opportunity to reduce my reliance on US Tech firms and diversify out a bit. I’m not exactly “Anti Big Tech”, but trust has been eroding for a while and I like to be pragmatic about these things. I recently switched my primary desktop to Linux, but that’s a story for another day. But anyway, to cut a long story much shorte
  6. New Paint, Same Blog
    Feb 4, 2025 · original
    I’ve been wanting to redo the theme of this site for a while. I had some specific ideas in mind, but no cohesive vision. Then I thought to myself - “why don’t I base it on the editor theme I enjoy using so much and spend most of my day looking at?” Or something like that. And so, after a couple of evenings hacking away at the CSS, https://chrismcleod.dev has a new, fresh coat of paint. The colour pallete is Catppuccin . In light mode, the Latté style is used, and in dark mode, Machiatto. You can use the theme switcher in the footer to try them out, if you want. It’s all made possible with CSS variables. I knew I wanted to inject more colour across the site than I used previously, so I’ve made use of several in the predefined sets. Where there are UI items which repeat several times - the navbar link, tags in the archive, etc. - I cycle through the colours to approximate a rainbow. The co
  7. Follower Count
    Jan 30, 2025 · original
    For the last 2-3 months I’ve been running an experiment on my use of social media. I wanted to see what works best for me now, compared to assumptions I’ve carried for the last few years. For the last several years (since around 2017 or so…) I’ve been conservative on the number of accounts I follow on any given platform. “Carefully curated”, you might say. Mainly this was so I didn’t feel overwhelmed trying to keep up with every update in a busy feed. As the social media landscape got progressively worse, it seemed a prescient choice. It’s worked well for me, but it’s always good to see if another way could be better. The rise of Bluesky gave me the opportunity to try something different. On Mastodon , I kept to my usual “follow only select accounts you know and enjoy, adding new follows rarely” approach. Meanwhile, over on Bluesky , I threw some of that caution to the wind and followed
  8. Visual Studio Code Snippet for Markdown Frontmatter
    Jan 27, 2025 · original
    I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to setup, but I finally added a snippet to VSCode for inserting Frontmatter into a Markdown file - handy for e.g, adding a new post to an Eleventy -powered blog. To add a snippet, press Ctrl-Shift-P or F1 , then select “Configure Snippetts”. Decide where you want to create the snippit - it can be at the project-level, language-level, or global. I chose language, so selected Markdown. Next, define your snippet in the JSON file. For me, this was: { "post frontmatter" : { "prefix" : "fm" , "body" : [ "---" , "title: $1" , "date: $CURRENT_YEAR-$CURRENT_MONTH-${CURRENT_DATE}T$CURRENT_HOUR:$CURRENT_MINUTE:$CURRENT_SECOND$CURRENT_TIMEZONE_OFFSET" , "id: $UUID" , "tags:" , " - $2" , "---" , "$0" ] , "description" : "Post frontmatter" } } What this does, is generate some frontmatter data whenever I type fm in a markdown document and then tab to insert the s
  9. Sometimes, Whimsy is Enough
    Jan 24, 2025 · original
    I’ve been a bit in the doldrums this week. It’s never fun when your health suddenly changes, especially when it decides to do it in a terrifying manner. But that’s for another day. As part of all this kerfuffle, I’ve been sat at home most of the week “to rest”. Rest, for me, takes a few different forms; if I’m in the mood, I’ll maybe play a video game, or I’ll work on a hobby project, or I’ll tinker around on a coding project — which, to the outside observer doesn’t really look any different to “work”. Guess where my head landed this week? But whatever keeps us occupied, eh? I’ve spent the last several hours faffing around with Rust, and GitHub Actions (mostly on the Actions part, TBH) to create a command line utility with it’s own CI/CD pipeline for building and releases. And what does this utility do? Is it anything useful? Or groundbreaking? You read the title of this post, didn’t you
  10. Bridge Your Fediverse Accounts to Bluesky with a Custom Domain Handle
    Jan 19, 2025 · original
    A few days ago I came across a blog post that reminded me that I had intended to bridge my fediverse accounts to Bluesky using Bridgy Fed. I tend to cross-post most “micro blog” text posts to both Mastodon and Bluesky anyway, but occaisionally I post something to one place or the other. Plus, I’ve just setup a Pixelfed account for photo sharing and it turns out you can bridge that in the exact same way. The downside is the default bridged user handles are really long and unweildy, which makes them a pain to share. But after digging through the Bridgy Fed documentation , it turns out you can still use a custom domain handle for these bridged accounts, which makes them much easier to share. My fediverse accounts are now bridged as: masto.chrismcleod.social for Mastodon posts pixelfed.chrismcleod.social for Pixelfed posts Things you’ll need, if you want to do this for your own accounts: one
  11. Default Apps for 2024
    Dec 23, 2024 · original
    It’s been over a year since I last wrote about what I use, and I’ve been seeing plenty people’s update posts pop up in my feed reader this week, so it’s time to look at my default apps again. There are quite a few changes this year, nothing terribly exciting - I’ve marked these updates with a ✨ emoji. 📨 Mail Client: Apple Mail + web 📮 Mail Server: Fastmail 📝 ✨ Notes: Obsidian LogSeq ✅ To-Do: Apple Reminders 📷 iPhone Photo Shooting: Apple Camera 🌅 Photo Management: Apple Photos 📆 ✨ Calendar: Apple Calendar linked to Google Fastmail 📁 Cloud File Storage: iCloud + OneDrive 📖 ✨ RSS: NetNewsWire and Feedbin Inoreader 🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: Apple Contacts 🌐 ✨ Browser: Edge at work, Vivaldi at home, Safari on Mobile 💬 Chat: Work only - Teams; iMessage + WhatsApp, if they count 🔖 ✨ Bookmarks: Micro.blog Bookmarks on my blog 📑 ✨ Read It Later: Micro.blog Bookmarks on my blog 📜 Word Proces
  12. How I'm Doing Advent Of Code in 2024
    Dec 8, 2024 · original
    Advent Of Code has been around for ages. It’s one of those things that I’ve always wanted to do, but never managed to get into the groove of. I’d maybe do the first puzzle, maybe even a couple of days, but eventually the time of year would overtake me and it would fall by the wayside. This year is a little different. We’re currently eight days through, and I’m fully up-to-date with all of the challenges. Full gold stars and everything. This is after coming into it five days late and needing to catch up. The difference has been that I’m not the only person I know who is taking part. AOC has caught on at work and there are people in my immediate network - on my direct team, even - all taking part and talking about it. We even have a private leaderboard [1] . Turns out that friendly competition can be a decent motivator for me! But how am I actually completing the challenges? This is the “s
  13. Next steps with Bluesky - hosting your own data and more on the API
    Nov 10, 2024 · original
    It’s been a while since I wrote about Bluesky. My previous “Hello World” for Bluesky was a quick overview of using the APIs to authenticate and post to Bluesky. It remains a popular post all these months later, and several people have let me know it helped get up and running with integrating with the AT protocol (ATproto) network [1] , which includes the Bluesky service. The thing is, ATproto/Bluesky have been growing a lot lately, and things have moved on very fast. Everything in that previous post still holds up and works, but there have been some interesting developments that warrant an update, namely: you can now host your own data. It’s pretty straightforward too. It does have some implications for working with the APIs, which I’ll get to shortly. Hosting your own ATproto/Bluesky data, and why you might want to One of the big gripes against Bluesky is that it looks like another corp
  14. Positive (but Unsatisfactory) Resolutions
    Oct 23, 2024 · original
    Yesterday was stressful , not going to lie. I had a lot of questions about how I’d found myself in the predicament. I was being chased for a debt that wasn’t mine, where I was specifically told someone had talked to a debt agency, given my details, and “passed security validation” with them. It was now on me to prove I wasn’t related to the debt in question. As the facts I’d been given and questions started to roll around me head, it seemed more and more likely I was the victim of identity theft/fraud. So first thing this morning - after sending off the “proof” the debt agency had requested - I phoned up Police Scotland’s 101 phone line. The person I spoke to was lovely, and understanding, as I explained the situation and what I’d been told, gave me an incident reference, and scheduled a time for a dedicated officer to give me a call later in the week. I then shot off another email to th
  15. Well, F*ck
    Oct 22, 2024 · original
    Picture the scene, Dear Reader; it’s just after 10am, and you take a moment to open the just-delivered mail over the remains of your morning coffee. Among the deliveries of small paint pots for your latest hobby project, is a non-descript envelope marked “private and confidential” but not bearing the usual hallmarks of being from your bank. Intrigued, you open it up, and nearly spit your coffee across the room. Inside is a letter. From a debt collection agency you’ve never heard of, on behalf of another company you’ve never heard of. It’s relating to a debt amount you don’t recognise, and says you’ve defaulted on a repayment schedule you know nothing about. You must contact them within 7 days of the date of the letter - which is dated 10 days ago. Initially you think “oh ho, it must be some sort of sophisticated, quaintly offline, scam?” But some quick research reveals all the companies
  16. New Home Screen for iOS 18 Beta
    Jul 20, 2024 · original
    I’ve been playing around with the new ios 18 beta, now it’s available to the public. While I have found it a pretty dull update so far, I particularly wanted to try some some of the new customisation options. I haven’t found a colourful tint that works for me, but I am loving this kinda Brutalist black-and-white scheme I stumbled into:
  17. Adding the New Mastodon Link Attribution Meta Tag
    Jul 3, 2024 · original
    I just added [1] the new Mastodon/Fediverse link attribution meta tag to this site, partly because I think it’s a neat idea, but also because it took ~2 minutes to do and I’m all for quick wins at the moment. Adding the tag is straightforward, if you’re familiar with HTML. Put the following in the head.../head section of your web page HTML, replacing the value of content with your @-able profile name: meta name = " fediverse:creator " content = " @yourprofile@yourmastodon.server " / So mine would be: meta name = " fediverse:creator " content = " @chrisplusplus@social.lol " / Most people can stop there. Because I wanted to pull the value from a config file and output it in my Eleventy templates, I had slightly more work to do. Just in case I switch instances again. I changed my _data/meta.js to include: meta_data : { // other stuff removed for clarity... fediverseCreator : '@chrisplusplus
  18. Dragonriding in Jade Forest
    Jun 9, 2024 · original
    I mentioned in the last post I was really enjoying dragonriding in the Pandaria: Remix event that’s going on in World of Warcraft right now. I took a break from the game for a couple of years, so this is my first time trying the new “dynamic flying”, and it is by far my favourite feature added to the game. I can easily loose 10-15 minutes at a time just swooping around the zones, and right now, Jade Forest is my favourite due to the size and verticality. I’ve yet to play Dragonflight itself - the expansion that was built for dragonriding and gave us the feature - but I figure I’ve got a couple of months to get around to it… In the meantime, here’s a capture I made of a couple of loops around the forest:
  19. Early Riser
    Jun 9, 2024 · original
    I was planning to write a blog post about getting up early in the near future, but Johnny Decimal went and beat me to it , so that spurred me to write it sooner. For the last four months or so we’ve made a point of waking up at 5am. Prior to that I’d found myself getting up later and later. Some days I was essentially going straight from bed to desk (by way of the shower), having breakfast as I read through morning emails. It wasn’t good or sustainable. The drift started during the lockdown phase of the pandemic; initially I’d kept to my 6:10am “going to the office” routine, but eventually it started to give way to the stress of the situation. 5 minutes here, 20 there… before I knew it I effectively had no alarm or routine. I can’t remember what spurred the idea to enforce this new 5am alarm. We did it for a week last year, as my partner wanted to film a video for her YouTube channel , b
  20. Brunch at The Craftsman
    Jun 8, 2024 · original
    The Craftsman is a Coffee and Alehouse in Aberdeen . Wanting to visit somewhere outwith the quarter of the city we normally stick to, it’s located just next to the harbour, and in my youth used to be the Schooner Bar - famed for its 7am opening times and being one of the roughest pubs in Aberdeen. Times have changed though, and The Craftsman is much more welcoming and modern. It was much more lively than Second Home , in part due to the location near the travel hubs and major shopping centre, and also because it’s been around longer is better established. The music was eclectic, seemingly jumping around eras and genres. It had that slightly hipster-ish feeling I get with a lot of the new places springing up around Aberdeen. Not in a pretentious way, more in the “hand-crafted” vibe and use of reclaimed/recycled fixtures and fittings. I had a coffee and pancakes with bacon and maple syrup

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