Moving
I was off work this week to move, which turned out to be a week-long affair:
Monday: I had a removals company move all my stuff. While that was happening, some men arrived to replace the fridge/freezer in the new flat.
Tuesday: I had an IKEA delivery, someone round to set up the internet, and the letting agency’s maintenance guy to finish off some tasks which didn’t get done previously. I spent the rest of the day putting furniture together. And then the maintenance guy came over again in the evening as there was one more thing he forgot.
Wednesday: I had a large Morrisons delivery (“starting from scratch” with food is pretty expensive). I then went back to the old flat to clean it and to return the keys. Back in the new flat I put the rest of the furniture together (other than the dining table and bookcase, which were too big for me to do alone) and started tearing up and disposing of the huge amounts of cardboard I now have.
Thursday: I called up a handyman to put together my dining table and bookcase, and to put my whiteboards on the walls. But he arrived half an hour late (the office gave him the wrong address), didn’t know what I needed doing (the office hadn’t shared any of my explanation with him) and, when I explained, said it would need two people and he disappeared for 15 minutes to fetch someone else. Given that bad first impression I didn’t really trust this company with my walls, so I just had the two of them put the furniture together…
Friday: I went to the post office to collect an ethernet cable, which turned out to be far too long, so I could get internet in the second bedroom, which I’ve turned into an office. I then spent the rest of the day waiting for a FedEx delivery which was supposed to come by 6pm (and had also been scheduled to arrive on Thursday by 6pm) but which didn’t show up. After it was obvious the FedEx delivery wasn’t coming, I went to find the local Tesco superstore and buy some fresh ingredients. I then cooked for the first time, having been living off takeaways so far.
Saturday: New curtains arrived, 4 days ahead of schedule (there’s a lesson there for FedEx), I put those up and spent the rest of the day relaxing.
So now everything is just about done.
Miscellaneous
Advent of Code started last Sunday, and once again I’m taking part and putting my solutions online. Last year I planned to write up my solutions to some of the more interesting puzzles, but never got around to it. Maybe this year I will.
I figured out how to serve custom CNAME records with Pi-hole. As it uses dnsmasq (well, a dnsmasq-derived thing), you can stick an extra config file in
/etc/dnsmasq.d. For example, adding some CNAME records to point tonyarlathotep, which is the hostname of a DHCP-managed machine:pi@raspberrypi:/etc/dnsmasq.d $ cat 99-cnames.conf cname=bookdb.nyarlathotep,nyarlathotep cname=flood.nyarlathotep,nyarlathotep cname=grafana.nyarlathotep,nyarlathotep cname=finder.nyarlathotep,nyarlathotep
This is neat because it means I can get subdomains on my LAN without giving them public DNS records, which is what I was doing previously.