last week

Technology

The joy of Unicode with MySQL and Django - make sure you change at the table level, otherwise future column migrations will try to reset away from UTF8.

An interesting read on fork()-ing in Python and how it relates to multiprocess.Pool.

Since when could you get 14TB hard disks?!

Reading up on possible Python executable distribution file formats, of course remembering pyinstaller too.

Property

How landlords can end a tenancy flow chart from OpenRent, although I'm not totally convinced by the simplicity or in fact all of their conclusions. Perhaps I'll try to make my own at some point.

Some good financial rules with a property theme but the principles apply to anything.

The Property Hub podcast this week is so good I've listened to it twice - it's full of fantastic productivity tips for anyone, not just property people.

Browser tabs clearing

I spent another couple of hours closing browser tabs! This time I start with 714, here are some of the interesting ones I closed:

• Goolge featured snippets/answers and how to get your content to feature.
• I quite like this summary of founder skills for software companies.
• Strategies for guest posting - for slightly larger companies than me but still some really useful information.
• Section 21 changes from October 1st 2018 - largely relevant for those with older (pre 1st Oct 2015) tenancies.
• Some interesting stats on rental prices in August 2018 and before.
• Quite an interesting read (including the comments) and video on the future of BTL.
• B2B content marketing - first item is "hire a full time writer", might be a while before I get there.
• Some tenant referencing options - that last one taking a slightly different approach.
• Electronic signatures are definitely valid
• Fish shell plugin manager.
• A great looking fish shell command prompt - only trouble is how slow it makes the prompt refresh.
• Use virtualenvs automatically in Fish with virtualfish - I've been using this for ages and it works well.
• Fall asleep in 120 seconds - pretty sure I could beat that before reading the article, but I still thought it was interesting.
• Developing pillar content.
• Zabbix metrics for Prometheus.
• Directory to find people to record video voice overs.

Tab count when I stopped was down to 583.

Roasting

This weekend, with the help of more skilful friends, I starting learning how to prepare and cook a roast dinner from scratch! Liz likes eating roast (as do I) but not cooking them, so I thought I'd try to. I've managed OK with pre-prepared cook-by-numbers type Christmas roasts from M&S and Sainsbury's for the last few years so I did already have experience with moving things into and out of the oven.

My (foolhardy) guide offered a menu of potential dishes to select a few from, so based purely on expected eating enjoyment I chose:

• Roast chicken
• Roast potatoes
• Honey roasted parsnips
• Cauliflower cheese
• Braised red cabbage
• Carrots

In hindsight I should have enquired about the relative complexity of preparing each dish before making such decisions!

However, thanks entirely the skill of my guide and a some extra help, the meal turned out fantastically. The children even ate some of it too. Although it was exhausting - cooking for three hours is really hard work.

Now I just need to remember enough to repeat it with less guidance. I think we may eat more boiled vegetables next time!