I’m Neil Turner, a UK-based queer higher education professional with interests in technology, social media and photography, and this is my presence on the web. I have a blog (here), and I am also on the usual social media platforms (and a few obscure ones). Latest blog posts:# More about me# I’m experimenting with Bluesky ... Read more
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Recently, my Facebook feed has been full of adverts for male shapewear – essentially vests which push your tummy in. The idea being that you can hide a beer belly and look more confident. Of course, the adverts have lots of before and after videos of men who have squeezed themselves into one of these ... Read more
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15.3.2025 10:00Shapewear: is it worth it?Last weekend, I took our nine-year-old to the Abbey House Museum in Kirkstall, near Leeds. We’ve been a couple of times before, and it’s a nice little museum to visit for half a day. It’s also recently been reprieved from closure, but in the long term it needs more people visiting it to be viable. ... Read more
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13.3.2025 10:00Abbey House MuseumI now have two dongles – both Sonoff ZBDongle E devices – connected to the Raspberry Pi which runs my Home Assistant instance. One is for Zigbee, and the other one is for Thread. Last January, I wrote about how I was using both Zigbee and Thread on the same dongle. This uses ‘multi-protocol’ mode, ... Read more
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11.3.2025 10:00A tale of two donglesNow that the weather is improving a bit, and the days are getting longer, we’ll be planning to make the most of our National Trust membership by getting out and visiting places. In this blog post, I’m going to detail all the National Trust properties that we can get to from our home in Sowerby ... Read more
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9.3.2025 10:00National Trust properties reachable from West YorkshireTypically every other week, we have a slow-cooked meal at home. Along with sous vide cooking, which I wrote about last month, slow cooking a form of low temperature cooking where the food isn’t heated as much, but cooked for longer. We use our Instant Pot as a slow cooker. During my blogging hiatus, I ... Read more
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7.3.2025 10:00Cooking with a slow cookerI had an idle though recently about the number of people who have been British Prime Minister in my lifetime, and how that compares to people older or younger than me. I was born in 1984, when Margaret Thatcher (urgh) was Prime Minister. She was first elected in 1979, and was around until 1990, when ... Read more
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5.3.2025 10:00How many British Prime Ministers have you lived through?Considering the millions of people who already use it, I probably don’t need to tell you about Duolingo. It’s arguably the most popular app for learning a new language, and I’ve been using it daily for over three years now. Until now, I’ve been learning French. Now, I studied French for seven years at school ... Read more
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3.3.2025 10:00Learning French and Welsh with DuolingoSpring is here – probably. A time for getting out and poisoning pigeons in the park. Or not. Hopefully, the arrival of Spring means that the weather will be nicer, and we can get out and have some more days out. Last month, we only managed a visit to Magna. We’d hoped to go to ... Read more
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1.3.2025 10:00Springing into MarchIf you have several devices of the same type, and want to be able to control them all together, then it’s possible to group them together in Home Assistant. The integration is simply called ‘Group‘, and once configured, it creates a helper entity that will perform the same action on all grouped devices. Last year, ... Read more
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27.2.2025 10:00Grouping devices together in Home AssistantIt was almost 11 years ago that I asked my blog readers to help save the Bradford Playhouse. The good news is that it was saved, and is still open. Unfortunately, being as it is a theatre from the 1920s, it’s not accessible – but its management team want to change that. For anyone who ... Read more
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25.2.2025 10:00Let’s make the Bradford Playhouse accessible
