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Running a Digital Office

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Back in 1999 I decided to go paperless. This was a significant challenge then as many bills were still being sent via post, and few offered digital alternatives. The challenge was doubly hard as I was (and am still) running Linux as my only operating system. These are a few of the things I had to do to make a digital office work and how things have evolved since then. The Early Days The choice of a Linux desktop meant that I had to find tools that were compatible with my operating system. This limited my options, but I was able to find open-source tools that met my needs. I used GIMP for image editing, LibreOffice for document editing, and PDFtk for PDF manipulation. My Canon printer had a built-in scanner, which I used to digitise paper documents. Canon printers and scanners are well supported by Linux. I used XSane for scanning documents. I also used rsync to maintain a continuous backup of my digital files. Saving these scanned documents and bills as PDFs on my computer w...
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The End of Effective Antibiotics

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Imagine a future where a routine surgery or a simple infection becomes life-threatening—that is the risk antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses. Informed by warnings that antimicrobial resistance could become the next major global health crisis, I dug into WHO and Scientific American reporting to understand more... Introduction: The Shift in Modern Medicine Since the clinical debut of penicillin in the 1940s, modern medicine has operated under a luxury: the "guaranteed" cure. For nearly a hundred years, antibiotics have underpinned the risky work of routine surgeries, cancer therapies, and transplants. We have lived in an era where the primary risk of an infection was a week of discomfort, not a death sentence. However, we are now witnessing a fundamental collapse of these defences. As the historical record shows, there has always been a delicate "seesawing" balance between the drugs humans develop and the bugs that evolve to survive them. For decades, medical in...
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Why I Still Maintain a Private Wiki in the Age of AI

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For a consultant, the most valuable asset isn’t the hardware or certifications —it’s the knowledge. Too often, that knowledge is left behind when you move between clients. You hand back the hardware, lose access to the Jira tickets, and the internal documentation you wrote becomes a ghost in someone else's machine. Years ago I adopted a private DokuWiki that travelled with me through firewalls, tech changes, and career moves. Here is why, even in the age of LLMs, it remains an important tool. The Consultant’s Dilemma: Firewalls and "Fading" Skills Consulting is a nomadic life. You spend months deep in a client’s infrastructure, often behind restrictive firewalls where online resources are a luxury, not a guarantee. I realised early on that I couldn't rely on the client’s internal systems to store my personal breakthroughs. I needed a knowledge base that moved with me. Whether I was troubleshooting a niche Git conflict or configuring a Linux environment on a lock...
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Running Code in the Cloud: Comparing GitHub and GitLab

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Building a specialised tool such as a word-puzzle solver needs more than automated builds. The real value is letting users run the solver from their browser—enter letters, press a button, and get results without a command line. For example, given letters like "mitncao", users should find every valid word without leaving the UI. That requires a simple run method: press a button, type the letters, and receive results quickly. By implementing this on both GitHub and GitLab I learned how each platform compares in setup effort, input sanitisation, and user experience. Takeaway 1: GitHub is Fast and Simple An Easy Start: GitHub's Straightforward Setup For those who want to move from an idea to a working tool in minutes, GitHub is a strong choice. Setting up a manual start button for the solver was straightforward, largely due to the integration between the platform and AI tools like GitHub Copilot. Instead of digging through manuals, I could describe the required inputs (...
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Base Rate: COVID-19 Hospitalisations

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COVID-19 Hospitalisations COVID-19 hospitalisation data are openly reported but the information provided is being misrepresented. Take, for example, the following Facebook post: Facebook 24 Jan 2022 While accurate with regard to the numbers, Peter is implying that vaccination does not work as more vaccinated people are in hospital than unvaccinated people. This is a misrepresentation because the emphasis Peter makes is on the absolute number rather than the rate of hospitalisations among vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals. For example, let’s use data approximately based on the figures available from the same source as Peter’s, namely NSW Health data. # Population data (per 1,000 people for rate calculation) total_population <- 1000 vaccination_rate <- 0.929 # 92.9% vaccination rate in NSW, Jan 2022 vaccinated_population <- vaccination_rate * total_population unvaccinated_population <- (1 - vaccination_rate) * total_population # Hospitalisation numbers fr...
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Automate Your Technical Blog

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This article is a companion piece to From Code to Content: Automating Your Blogger Workflow with GitHub which focused on the Blogger API and The Art of the Repeatable Post: Why Structure Matters , which focuses on the importance of structure for a consistent and high-quality blogging workflow. This article ties together the concepts of automation and structure, showing how to build a CI/CD pipeline for your technical blog using GitHub Actions and Docker. The Hook: Escaping the Manual Blogging Loop For the modern developer, the desire to share technical insights is often hindered by administrative overhead. We spend our professional lives in code editors and terminal sessions, yet sharing those insights on platforms like Blogger often requires a return to manual labour. We find ourselves copy-pasting HTML, struggling with clunky web-based editors, and manually managing assets. This friction discourages regular contributions, often leading to stale repositories and abandoned drafts....
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The Art of the Repeatable Post: Why Structure Matters

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In my previous article , I explored the technical "plumbing" required to connect GitHub to Blogger.  It is  a powerful setup - especially once the heavy lifting is automated. But  automation can’t fix disorder.  If every blog post starts as a chaotic scramble of files and mismatched formats, you are still working harder than you should. The real magic happens when you move beyond just "automation" and start embracing a consistent project structure . Consistency is a Writer's Best Friend When you use a standardised repository structure—like the one found in the article-markdown repository—you are not just organising files; you are creating a mental shortcut. Because every post has the same folder layout, you never have to wonder where your images go or how to name your source files. Professional Rigour for Every Paragraph We often hear that we should treat "content as code". In practice, this means your blog benefits from the same discipline as a...
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