Faith and Tech Bible Apps: A Blessing or a Distraction? Or, perhaps a better way to phrase this could be, "When is it appropriate to use a Bible app on our phone?" My simple answer to this is: yes, we should absolutely have Bible apps installed on our phones. As Christians, it's essential for us to
2025 My Outlook for 2025 A Reflection on 2024 and a Look Ahead to 2025 Way back in 2023, I made a post setting out my outlook for 2024. Feel free to check back and see what I set out. I covered some of my personal achievements as well as what I would like to
Faith and Tech Using LLMs for Good: How Should Christians Use Large Language Models such as ChatGPT? How many times have you seen the letters "AI" recently? If you’ve been on the hunt for a new laptop or smartphone, you’ve almost certainly come across a mention of AI at some point. This is largely thanks to a technology known as "LLMs."
Faith and Tech Guard Your Heart: Navigating Social Media as a Christian Social media has become an integral part of our lives, demanding so much of our attention. Having all your connections and friends at your fingertips feels empowering and encouraging. It’s wonderful to be able to reach out to your Christian friends and stay connected. While this is true, there
Update Time for a New Blog? Exploring Faith and Technology This is just a small update, but I wanted to share some thoughts. Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking about setting up a new blog (separate from this one) dedicated to helping Christians understand the role of technology and how it impacts our lives. Navigating the world
Social Media Are We Seeing the Slow Death of Mastodon? A few days ago, I received an email from the administrator of my current Mastodon instance (moth.social) informing me that the instance is shutting down, and I have until March to migrate my account, or all my data will be deleted. I’ve been slowly drifting away from Mastodon
Social Media What Is the Network Effect and Why It Matters to Social Media I read an excellent article the other day called "The End of the Twitter Era" and the author made an excellent point about how the network effect impacts the life and death of social media platforms (both past and present). I've been thinking a lot about
Notes Refining My Note-Taking Process: From Pen and Paper to Blog In this post, I share my journey of refining my note-taking process. From handwritten notes to a private Hugo site, I’m simplifying my approach to better capture and refine my thoughts. Eventually, everything I learn will make its way to this blog and my social media profiles.
Social Media Featured The Real Reason I Prefer Bluesky to X (and It’s Not Just About Elon) Bluesky isn’t just a "left-wing echo chamber"—it’s a step towards sustainable, decentralised social media. While platforms like X face criticism for invasive policies and centralised control, Bluesky offers a future inspired by the open Web, driven by protocols like ATProto.
Social Media Why Bluesky Feels Like the Future of Social Media I'm a huge supporter of decentralized social media, and after almost a week on Bluesky, and I love it! It feels like the future of microblogging—fresh, innovative, and better than Mastodon. Features like starter packs, custom feeds, and an open API make it a standout in the space.
Social Media Featured My Thoughts on GoToSocial I'm passionate about self-hosting and want to run my own ActivityPub-powered network without relying on others. After struggling with Mastodon, I found GoToSocial—a lightweight, privacy-focused alternative. It’s easy to set up and shows promise for those wanting more control on the Fediverse.
Projects Experimenting with Thermal Printing: My Setup, Mishaps, and Tips After some trial and error, I set up my thermal printer using Node-RED, ditching CUPS for easier control. Using Node.js packages like readability and wkhtmltoimage, I convert articles into clean PNGs, making print layout adjustments simpler and manageable through a web UI—no SSH needed!
Projects Raspberry Pi + Receipt Printer = Hours of Fun About a week or so ago now, I came across a compelling post from Hacker News about a guy who has configured a dot matrix printer to deliver his daily news. At first, I thought that this was a bit of a backwards idea considering we have smartphones for this
Work-Life Is a Four-Day Compressed Work Week Really Worth It? Considering a four-day compressed work week? After a year of experience, I’ve found it boosts productivity, improves work-life balance, and offers environmental benefits. While it’s not for everyone, if you get the chance, it might just be worth it!
Social Media Featured The Challenges of the Fediverse. What No One Is Prepared to Talk About. For what it's worth, Mastodon is a great platform and my general experience of it has been positive. Yes, I've experienced a lot of teething issues with self-hosting but overall, I much prefer it to Twitter/X. But, there are bigger problems at play which I
fediverse I Broke Mastodon, Playing with GoToSocial and More Fediverse Updates As you may have seen from one of my previous posts, I tried to set up my on Mastodon server. While it worked for a short while, due to factors such as not knowing Ruby very well (the programming language used to build Mastodon) and trying to maintain work-life balance.
Academia Leadership Is More Than Just Leading I had the privilege of attending a leadership conference a few weeks ago now designed for early career researchers such as myself. The topic was about what it means to be a future leader in my area of research. If I’m honest, I went into this event thinking that
Book Review Quick Book Review: 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You Me being the true millennial like I am, I think it’s fair to say that my phone gets a lot of use throughout the day. From reading emails in the morning to browsing Hacker News and Reddit in the evening, I dread to think how many times I would
Introducing My New Website and Site Updates This is just a quick post describing some of the changes to this site. Nothing major to report, although it involves a few changes in this site. 1) I have finally managed to get round to buying my very own .phd TLD domain. I thought I would do my best
Book Review Book Review: Where Is God in All the Suffering? It’s been a while since I have last done a book review, so I thought I would write up my thoughts on a book I read fairly recently, as I feel that this topic is worth discussing. Have you ever heard someone say “Why would a good God allow
crawling Notes on Crawling Instances on the Known Fediverse One of my favourite features of Fediverse is how different instances (whether it be Mastodon, Lemmy or Pixelfed) cooperate with each other over using the ActivityPub protocol. This is a fundamental feature of decentralised social media. For instance (pun unintended), users of mastodon.social can communicate with mastodonapp.uk, and
Book Review Book Review: Surrounded by Idiots In our day-to-day lives, whether this is at home with family or at work with collages, we all know what it’s like to engage with people with different personalities. Some you may get on with, others not so. I’ve always had a fascination about understanding why people behave
2023 My Outlook for 2024 To me, it certainly feels like 2023 has gone by so fast. I distinctly remember that around this time last year, I was in the process of submitting my PhD for my viva. 2023 has been a big year for me. By far, the two most important events of 2023
PhD What are the Benefits of Doing a PhD Doing a PhD is a lot of work (trust me, I know) and it’s often poorly understood by those who haven’t spent enough time in academic (post-graduate and beyond). That being said, there are many benefits to doing one – not least for being called “Dr so-and-so”. Even outside
mastodon What I’ve Learnt From Setting up My Own Mastodon Instance I’ve been on Mastodon for over a year now, and I felt like it was time to move on. What do I mean by move on? Well, until recently, I’ve been hanging out on mastodonapp.uk as my “home” instance but, me being the self-hosting nerd that I