Pete Johns - Blog entries of the highest uptodateness

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.

Today I found a single right AirPod in the grass near a skate park where one of the kids was having fun. Between this little bud, the iPhone in my bag, and the worldwide Apple network, surely we should be able to get it back to its owner without compromising anyone’s privacy. Doing that would be good for the person who lost it and for the planet.

Two Bays Trail Run is my favourite annual running event. The 28km trail run from Dromana to Cape Schanck on the Mornington Peninsula is just spectacular. The 56km from Cape Schanck to Cape Schanck via Dromana is… a little beyond me right now. Each time I participate, either as a runner or as a volunteer, I am more than impressed by the smoothness of the organisation and by the superb positive vibe that seems to fill the entire peninsula. It feels less like a race than you might imagine, and more like a day in the bush with your mates. Some of the views are breathtaking, and some of the steps, if you try to run up them, are also breathtaking. In a different way.