Around this time last year I was gifted a Fitbit Charge HR. Since then it unfortunately needed to be replaced (now with a new Fitbit Charge 2!) but I thought it would be interesting to take a look at my stats for the year. Now obviously December isn’t over yet so some of the stats for that month will be low but all the same I think these graphs are pretty neat to look at.

The next version of CoreGTK, version 3.18.0, has been tagged for release! This is the first version of CoreGTK to support GTK+ 3.18. Highlights for this release: Rebased on GTK+ 3.18 New supported GtkWidgets in this release: GtkActionBar GtkFlowBox GtkFlowBoxChild GtkGLArea GtkModelButton GtkPopover GtkPopoverMenu GtkStackSidebar Reverted to using GCC as the default compiler (but clang can still be used) CoreGTK is an Objective-C language binding for the GTK+ widget toolkit.

As you may recall I was gifted a Fitbit Charge HR last year and have quite enjoyed using it as my fitness tracker. Unfortunately it seems my time with it is coming to an end as the band has started to peel away from the face of the device. The band is separating from the face in two spots. One on the side… Checking out this issue online seems to indicate that this is a somewhat common problem and because the band is not replaceable the only solution is to get a new device.

My good friend Phil has made a brand new website! This is Phil. Drawn by Phil. You can find it in all of its glory over here: http://phildowney.com/. Check it out!

The Wealthy Barber Returns is the follow up (sequel?) to the original best selling book The Wealthy Barber by former Dragons Den dragon David Chilton. Incidentally he’s also from my home town In it Chilton covers a wide range of financial scenarios and offers sound advice while cracking the occasional, actually more like frequent, terrible dad joke. Overall it’s a very quick and easy read that doesn’t get bogged down in too much of the financial jargon that you find in a lot of other reads.

Here are some of my recent posts from over at The Linux Experiment: Trying out KeePassX Removing old Kernels in Ubuntu 16.04/Linux Mint 18 Alternative software: Konqueror Browser Alternative software: Midori Browser

My Xbox One Kinect has been acting strangely for a very long time. When the console first starts up from a cold boot the Kinect would work fine but shortly afterwards it would simply turn off, never to turn back on again (until the next full reboot). This appears to be a common problem online and seems to be related to the Kinect itself overheating. There are a number of theories as to why but most commonly this overheating seems to be caused by one of three things:

I have an older, late 2012 model, Mac Mini that has gone through quite a few operating system (OS) upgrades over the years and has gotten progressively slower each time. In an attempt to regain some of this lost speed I decided that I would erase the drive and do a clean re-install of the OS. My plan of attack was as follows: Do one final upgrade OS upgrade in order to move from the installed OS X El Capitan to the newly released macOS Sierra.

Here are some of my recent posts from over at The Linux Experiment: Extract album art from MP3 files Fix: trying to overwrite ‘/usr/share/accounts/services/google-im.service’ installing kubuntu-desktop Surviving systemd – a quick look at a few alternatives… KWLUG: Sound in Linux, Part 2 (2016-05) KWLUG: Raspberry Pi Projects (2016-06) RetroPie – turning your Raspberry Pi into a retro-gaming console! KWLUG: Personal Information Manager Synchronization (2016-07) KWLUG: Summer Smorgasboard (2016-08) How To Set Up An OpenVPN Client On Linux Ubuntu 16.

Before getting started, on what I’m sure will come across as a very ranty post, I think it’s important to point out that I have no problems with the content or pricing structure of Google Play Music (GPM). The music library is quite good and the price is extremely competitive, especially with the Family Plan. That said as someone who uses the service almost every single day I’ve collected quite a list of annoyances that I feel I must write about (for no other reason than it’s cathartic to get it all out 🙂 )