Pete Johns - Blog entries of the highest uptodateness

# This post is about post

One of the things that my career break has taught me is that I’m not yet ready to retire. This is good because the kids still need educating and that still needs financing. I also still enjoy playing with computers, much as I did when Dad first brought home a Philips G7000 and then a Commodore 16 with a spiral-bound manual when I was much younger and slightly more impressionable.

I run an Arlo-based home security setup, and most of the time it behaves as expected. A few months ago, Arlo shipped a major app update that broke the automations we depended on. I reconstructed them, only to encounter a new problem: whenever we came home, our phones would hound us with alerts that somebody was in the house. Yes. We know!

When Google killed Google Reader, I didn’t look for a replacement feed reader. Most of the blogs I followed since the early 2000s had died and their authors had switched to social media platforms. Posting to social media is a lot easier for most people than blogging, I suppose. And there’s that wonderful dopamine hit of incoming likes, comments, and subscriptions.

Last month, when two of Melbourne’s larger parkrun events were closed for the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix 2026 and associated works in Albert Park, I was asked, “How many parkruns can you get to in Victoria by public transport?”

I recently received an email from a travel-related service announcing a “new login experience”:

This post started off life as a note in Obsidian but I figure it may be useful to others, and sharing is caring.

On this week’s Merri Monday Run I was chatting with a fellow nerd about software development, and the topic of GitHub pull requests (PRs) came up; particularly the importance of including a meaningful description in a PR.

During the pandemic, when our home became a classroom and an office as well as all its usual functions, and we were all glued to computers to get stuff done, it became apparent that more than one member of the Johns Household could be easily distracted by the other things that always-on internet connectivity could afford.