In a possibly not unexpected turn of events, I have been completely terrible at writing anything here. I did have a set of notes from last years holiday, but unfortunately only stored on my phone, which subsequently died.

It’s reached that time of year again where I have to use up my holiday days and so I’ve booked a bunch of days off across the remaining weeks of the holiday year. This year I am also participating in the Virgin Pulse Global Challenge at work - basically strapping a pedometer on and monitoring the amount of steps I do each day. It’s team-based and has little virtual badges for various achievements, with the idea that it’s promoting a more healthy and active lifestyle.

For some reason renewal of Dreamhost[1] Let’s Encrypt certificates (as detailed here) have started to fail on my setup. Support reckon this is something to do with Cloudflare and IPv6 and asked me to disable Cloudflare for the domain in order to process the renewal. Obviously this isn’t great and so I’ve switched out my domains to self-signed certificates instead. Obviously this means having to switch Cloudflare’s SSL settings for the domain to Full rather than Full (Strict).

A couple of months ago I went on holiday and whilst there I kept a bit of a diary, but unfortunately events overtook me and I didn’t manage to get it published here (somewhat the story of my life). Day 1 In the manner of a 1970s dad, Louisa insisted on a 04:30 set off to ‘avoid the traffic’. It didn’t​ work. The car was packed up the night before, truly redefining the rules on how much stuff can fit in a small car, and after an insufficient amount of caffeine we hit the road.

This bank holiday weekend I am very much looking forward to taking a break from chopping down trees in my back garden. This activity has pretty much occupied all of my time during the previous two weekends. It needed doing desperately though. I don’t know why anyone plants Leylandii other than to piss off their neighbours - in all honesty I suspect that is the reason that they were in my garden (from previous owners of the house).

I’ve been a long time user of Dreamhost[1] although have, over time, let most of the various projects I host there fall into neglect. On coming back to starting this blog I decided to check out what new things were available along with the standard hosting account. I was quite happy to learn that Dreamhost support Cloudflare® and Let’s Encrypt so I decided to have a bit of an experiment with them.