Chameth.com - posts like debugging-beyond-the-debugger, how-i-get-things-done, why-you-should-be-using-https but not coming-around-on-llms

Monthly Meanderings: February 2026

2026-03-01T00:00:00Z

It doesn’t feel like a whole month has gone past since I wrote the last instalment of Monthly Meanderings, even allowing for how short a month February is. For more context on this series, you can check out the introduction to the first edition.

Website updates

I only wrote one new blog post this month: Just a nod, which is about the “nod” button I added to the bottom of most pages. I did a lot of other little bits and pieces, though:

My blog posts are now automatically posted to a dedicated Bluesky account, and posts now include syndication links at the bottom.
The site now tracks how long each request takes to generate along with how many SQL queries were used. You can see the details for the current request by hovering/tapping over the pi symbol at the bottom right of a page. To understand why it’s a pi symbol, you should watch The Net!
Speaking of films, I redid the star rating rendering so instead of unicode stars it uses some hand-drawn pixel art stickers. They’re somewhat randomised, so they don’t look repetitive. This is what it now looks like: .
I spent some time tweaking various styles and layouts so everything works nicely on smaller screens. I try to make sure these things work when I make them, but it’s easy to miss a particular interaction, or make an innocent-seeming change that breaks tiny screens.
I added a new page that shows stats about my walks, based on my Apple Health data. I had a private view of this for a while, but decided there’s no reason it couldn’t be more public.
The films page has gained a search box, to directly find my review of a particular film. I used CSS anchor positioning for the results panel. Modern CSS is fun!
I fixed the 3D prints page being utterly broken in numerous ways. It showed up on my shiny new “how many SQL queries does each page do?” dashboard, as it was doing multiple queries for each individual print instead of just getting all the data in one go. Then I noticed a badly written redirect rule had broken all the images and download links. Whoops!
I did a lot of under-the-hood cleaning, most of which won’t be visible. Besides just making me happy, this means the contact form and nod buttons now work with Javascript disabled.
Finally, I added a page that shows my board game plays. The data comes from exports from bgstats. I have a bunch of ideas for other things to do with that data, but haven’t got around to it yet.

Phew. After writing all that out it feels like a really long month, not a short one!

Other projects

Not much going on with my other projects. The only big thing was goplum, my self-hosted monitoring/alerting tool, getting a 1.0 release. It adds a reminder feature so you can get alerted repeatedly if a service is down. It also reworks how plugins work so they’re compile-time instead of trying to be clever and dynamic, as that never really gave any benefits.

I’m still continuing my migration of projects to a private Forgejo instance. All of my personal repos are now sourced there, and mirrored out to GitHub, except one: my Dockerfiles. I’m not sure how I want to approach that yet, as the action that does the updating is pretty involved. I also have some repositories split off into their own GitHub organisations which I haven’t got around to mirroring yet.

Entertainment

Unlike the past few months, I didn’t touch many video games in February. The ones I’d been dabbling with didn’t really hook me enough to make me keep going back. I made up for it with lots of other media forms though. First up, a whole bunch of films:

I won’t write too much about them here — you can click through to read my reviews if you want — other than to call out the three excellent horror films I hadn’t seen before: Black Swan, The Cabin in the Woods, and Get Out. Not so long ago I would’ve said that I didn’t enjoy horror films, now they’re some my favourites.

I don’t have any TV show tracking on my website (yet?), as I haven’t really watched much recently. This month I started watching The Pitt though, and it rapidly become one of my favourite shows. By “started watching” I mean “watched every aired episode of both season 1 and season 2”. I highly recommend it. The only problem is that it’s hard to find anything to watch afterwards, as nothing else can quite measure up.

I’ve also been binging a book series: Beneath the Dragoneye Moons. It’s a LitRPG series: basically a fantasy setting that borrows systems from an RPG, like classes and levelling. Something about the genre really works for me, and Beneath the Dragoneye Moons is one of the more interesting series I’ve come across in the genre. I’ve been going through the series at the rate of about a book a day.

Finally, board games! Nothing particularly notable, but now I can embed a pretty display of what I actually played:

6 plays
4 plays
4 plays
4 plays
2 plays
2 plays
2 plays
2 plays
2 plays
2 plays
1 play
1 play
1 play
1 play
1 play
1 play
1 play
1 play
1 play
1 play
1 play

All of these were online via Board Game Arena. I haven’t really had time for in-person games with all the TV, films and reading!

Around the web

Start all of your commands with a comma

An old post that was doing the rounds again on Hacker News. It’s an interesting idea. I recently aliased cc to launch Claude Code with some custom parameters, and it horribly backfired when I tried to compile a C program and remembered that cc was part of GCC. I haven’t transitioned all my personal commands to use a prefix yet, but I might.

Tactical tornado is the new default

An interesting post about software developers who act as “tactical tornadoes”, and how that’s basically the role that all LLMs fill. Whenever I use coding agents, I often find myself following behind them in my IDE cleaning up bits and pieces. It’s often faster than prompting them to do it. I definitely get the “cleaning up after a tornado” metaphor.

Amusingly, the agents will sometimes notice that you’re tidying up after them and ascribe it to an automated process, outputting something like “the automated linter hasn’t run yet” if you fall behind. There’s probably a deeper philosophical discussion about what it means when the agent thinks that the human is the automated part of the system…

My smart sleep mask broadcasts users’ brainwaves to an open MQTT broker

Another one for the “the ’s’ in ‘IoT’ stands for security” books. I find it hard to actually comprehend how these things get to market. Does nobody actually think about it, or do they know full well how bad it is and just launch it anyway?

The IndieWeb and Small web

Ask three people to define ‘IndieWeb’ and ‘Small web’ and you’ll get about 20 different answers. This post by Christiano almost exactly nails my own views on the terms, and explains them well. I think most personal sites (my own included) straddle both terms to some extent, but having the labels is useful in discussions.

Monthly Meanderings: January 2026

2026-02-01T00:00:00Z

Welcome to the second edition of my monthly meanderings. For a bit of context, you can check out the introduction to the first edition.

Website updates

It’s been a pretty busy month for chameth.com. Three blog posts: The Meaning of Life — an entry into the IndieWeb carnival where I mostly review a book on Stoicism — Surge Protectors: Marketing vs Reality which is a dump of a research rabbit hole I fell into, and An Interesting Tailscale + Docker Gotcha which documents a fun problem I encountered.

I’ve also made a new films section, which is basically my Letterboxd data but free range instead of cooped up in a silo. I imported my 200-odd reviews, and for the last few I wrote the review on my site and then copied it over to Letterboxd. That’s what the IndieWeb folks call POSSE: publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere. I like the idea that my website is the canonical source of truth for all the public things I generate. I want to expand this to some other areas in the future: music, video games, board games, etc.

I made most of the film components into “shortcodes”, so I can drop them into arbitrary pages or posts, like so:

Watched films ranked

Every film I’ve watched since I started logging, ranked.

Obviously super subjective, and subject to change often and arbitrarily.

264 films

Finally, I added a new widget to the bottom of most pages: a “nod” button. It’s effectively a “like” or “kudos” button but deliberately does not track how many times it’s been pressed, has no social network connotations, and won’t flood my inbox or hit rate limits if it gets spammed. If you click the button, it simply sends a message to a private IRC channel that says “Someone nodded at $URL”. I’ll probably write a bit more about it in a blog post in the future.

Other projects

I only have one small non-chameth.com update: a new project called pigeonhole which provides a really basic web service that lets you leave messages in a named cubby, and retrieve them at a later date. I’m using it to automate adding things to my Obsidian notes from my Apple Watch. There’s lots of reasons why that isn’t as simple as it sounds. I went through a bunch of iterations to try and make it work before just writing code to fix it.

I wanted to do this because I’m trying to replace Todoist with just having tasks in Obsidian. I already used Obsidian for longer form notes, but I’ve now also started using it for drafting blog posts (I’m typing this in Obsidian right now!), and trying to keep more useful day-to-day notes. I’ll probably write a blog post with more details once I’ve figured everything out.

Finally, I’ve been moving a bunch of projects to a private Forgejo instance, with the ultimate goal of having all of my projects live there. I’m going to mirror the contents out to GitHub and maybe other places, but Forgejo will be the single source of truth, and where all the workflows/dependency wrangling/etc happens. I’ve got Renovate configured to do dependency bumps, and I’m very much liking the whole setup so far. I’m saying it a lot but again: I’ll blog about it in more detail when it’s a bit further along.

Entertainment

I mentioned last month that I was playing Hogwarts: Legacy. I finished that off, and have been struggling to find something to scratch the same itch. I’ve tried a whole bunch of open world games, and basically none of them work for me. They have cumbersome control schemes (yay console ports), really awkward or sluggish movement, and so on. I think I’m just too fussy, but if I’m going to sink dozens of hours into a game it shouldn’t feel annoying or like a chore!

I did play through Thank Goodness You’re Here, which is delightfully funny but sadly only took 3.6 hours to finish with 100% of the achievements. Still highly recommend picking it up, especially when it’s on sale for under ‘10 bob’. I’ve also started playing through Control, and I’m enjoying the ambience. There’s an insanely sharp difficulty spike for the first boss, though, which nearly made me put it down.

In other entertainment, I’ve been playing a load of turn-based games on Board Game Arena , and I’ve watched a bunch of films after barely watching any last month. Here’s another of those shortcodes to show them off:

Around the web

Remotely unlocking an encrypted hard disk

A fun post documenting using Tailscale in a very weird way to solve a relatable problem. Very much my cup of tea.

I charged $18,000 for a static HTML page

This one’s actually from 2019, but it’s the first time I’ve come across it, and it’s a fun story. As a contractor, deciding what to bill for and what not to can be a bit messy. Downtime between meetings? The ten minutes in the shower you spent thinking through a bug? It’s a lot more clear cut if the client wants you to sit in an office, twiddling your thumbs, though.

Oxide RFD: Using LLMs at Oxide

A wonderfully well thought out piece about using LLMs in a respectful, sensible manner. I’d been thinking about writing something similar, but it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as well crafted as this. While I basically agree with it all, the part about LLM-generated text really resonates:

LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion.

Your app subscription is now my weekend project

Roberto points out that monthly SaaS subscriptions start looking even less appealing when you can just prompt an alternative into existence. I talked a bit about using LLMs for one-person software before, and it becomes even more appealing when the alternative is paying monthly for a service that keeps shoe-horning in features you don’t want, making you agree to share data with 329 “trusted partners”, and/or repeatedly ratcheting up the price.

Ekul’s Internet Space

I love the aesthetics of this personal site, and the data tracking that goes along with it. I’m also slightly aghast at the amount of Monster consumed! Makes me want to track more things and expose them on my own site.

Monthly Meanderings: December 2025

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

For a while I’ve been idly thinking about a way to get smaller bits of content onto my website without it being too annoying for me, or too hard to consume. Things like interesting links, small project updates, and so on.

I didn’t immediately come up with anything I was happy with, so just sat on it. Ignoring the problem seems to work surprisingly well for things like this. I’d been meaning to redesign the about page for a while, but wasn’t sure what to do with all the interests I wanted to list. After ignoring the problem for a while I came across the interests directory and realised I could just bundle all those things into their own page.

This seems amazingly obvious in hindsight, but I think I needed a bit of a push to accept that a page just about my interests was… well… interesting. Anyway, as the end of December rolled around, I got a similar dose of inspiration: a flurry of monthly round-up posts from various blogs I follow. If I bundle up all the small bits and bobs, it’ll make something vaguely blog post shaped, and writing and consuming those is already a solved problem. Again, pretty obvious in hindsight, and again I think I just needed a nudge to shut up the little voice in my head saying “but those people all have interesting things to say… do you, really?”

So without further ado, welcome to the inaugural post in my new monthly meanderings series. If you have any feedback on the format or contents, please drop me a note with the contact form at the bottom!

Website updates

As already mentioned, I reworked the about page and split out a new interests page. The old about page had a few lists of interests show up in thought bubbles when you hovered over things, which was a cool effect on desktop, but barely worked at all on mobile. The new page gives me a lot more room for waffle, and I do like waffling.

Only a single new blog post this month: exposing game servers over Tailscale. Just a quick how-to I wrote up, having not found it documented usefully anywhere before. I have a bunch of ideas for posts I want to write, but none of them have really sparked joy quite yet, so I’m once again employing the “sit on them for a bit and maybe inspiration will strike” approach.

Other projects

I created a small collection of Docker related projects this month: containuum is a go library that helps with listing containers, and keeping that list up-to-date. On top of that I built centauri-docker-confd which generates a config for centauri (my reverse proxy) based on running Docker containers. I already had a way of doing that, but containuum is designed to be a bit more robust, and I made it so the config can be passed over a network connection instead of having to write it to disk and then signal the proxy to reload.

The next project has a bit of backstory: after reading I got hacked, my server started mining Monero this morning [warning: the article is interesting but a bit LLM-sloppy] I realised that I, too, was running a vulnerable version of Umami. Luckily, as far as I can tell, it wasn’t exploited. But it got me looking into automated vulnerability scanning. I don’t put much stock into it normally, as you get so many false alerts, but this is one case where it would have definitely helped. There didn’t seem to be any good solution for my “middle-of-the-road” approach to containers (lots of containers, but not needing Kubernetes), so I wrote purser. It takes every image used by a running container, runs them through Trivy, and generates a combined report. I’ll add some form of active notifications to it in the future.

Entertainment

This month I’ve been playing a lot of Hogwarts: Legacy, after picking it up for free on Epic Games. I grew up with the Harry Potter books coming out, and while I’m not a super-fan, it still has a special appeal to me. Obviously she-who-must-not-be-named is doing her best to out-evil Voldemort, but I think you can still enjoy the universe despite that. Especially when you don’t have to contribute any money that might go towards her.

Anyway, the game is surprisingly fun. They did a really good job of making it feel like an open world. You want to walk around from place to place to see everything, find all the various collectables, and so on. Compared to Far Cry or Cyberpunk the world is a lot smaller but that means it’s far more densely packed with stuff to do. I initially didn’t vibe with the way combat works: it’s pretty heavily reliant on dodging or shielding against incoming attacks, which reminded me a lot of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Fortunately, it’s a lot more forgiving in Hogwarts: Legacy and I got used to it after not too long.

It’s been a relatively sedate month for other forms of entertainment. I saw Fackham Hall and Wicked: For Good at the cinema. The former was a funny romp, vaguely reminiscent of Airplane or The Naked Gun, as you’d expect from something penned by Jimmy Carr. Wicked was… fine? I wasn’t overly enamoured with part one, so it’s not a surprise I didn’t vibe with the follow-up. If you smushed them into a single normal-length feature I think they would have made a really good film, but two films both over two hours long is a bit much for what actually happens.

Around the web

Wikipedia: List of citogenesis incidents

A list of incidents where (often false) information on Wikipedia has ended up becoming its own source. That led to Mark Dominus’ blog post titled Imaginary Albanian eggplant festivals… IN SPACE where he discovers that a mountain on Ceres got named after a made-up festival (and then got it fixed!)

Not relying on Wikipedia as a source was drummed into us at school, but it feels like this sort of thing is only going to get worse and worse now LLMs are on the scene. I assume we’re already at the point where LLM hallucinations are prevalent enough that they’ll find their way into the training data for future iterations.

Simon Collison’s website

I really like the design here. Both the homepage and how well every journal entry is formatted. It makes me feel bad for the many walls of text that adorn this site. The archived v4 design is also wonderful.

My Dinner with Skinner

A 43-minute-long feature film that is “just” the Steamed Hams gag from The Simpsons done in the style of My Dinner with Andre. There’s a (much shorter) behind-the-scenes video that goes over the extreme amount of effort that was put into it, too.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around this. It’s… something.

Delete Spotify? Sure, But Don’t Just Replace it With Another Subscription

A similar take to my own escaping Spotify the hard way, but it avoids getting lost in the technical weeds like I did. (In my defence, they’re very fun weeds to get lost in.) Stephanie is also one of the people that does monthly wrap-ups, and I was pleasantly surprised when the latest one popped up in my RSS reader and I saw my own site linked.

Securing all the things with 1Password

2025-11-26T00:00:00Z

For many years I’ve been a keen user of Bitwarden. Recently I’ve had a lot of small paper-cut problems. The browser extension was redesigned and just doesn’t quite work how I expect any more. The prompt to save new login info misfired more than it worked. The mobile app stopped background refreshing properly. No one issue was enough to make me want to leave Bitwarden, but it definitely wasn’t sparking joy. Then there were rumblings about a price increase. I don’t think they’ve announced anything, but the numbers I saw were a jump from $10/year to $24/year. A nearly 2.5x price increase for a tool that was actively getting worse over time did not seem like a good deal to me¹.

I spent a while looking at alternatives, but there were very few that met my needs. Nordpass is highly praised but doesn’t support saving TOTP codes on personal plans². All the nice open-source/self-hosted solutions fall down when you want reliable synchronisation to an iOS device (which is fair enough). Proton Pass looked like it had all the features, but the pricing was asinine. Different pages showed different prices, the prices were introductory rates that jumped up on renewal, but that was hidden away in small print, etc. Yuck. The prices are also pretty high. More or less the same as 1Password, which I’d been discounting due to the cost, until now…

After eliminating basically every other option, I took a serious look at 1Password. It seemed to tick all the right boxes, I’d often heard good things about it, and it wouldn’t actually be much more expensive than Bitwarden if they went ahead with the rumoured price increase. I started a trial to give it a test.

Initial impressions

1Password is — as you’d expect for something that originated as a Mac app — very pretty. But it’s also highly functional. The looks don’t get in the way, they’re nice extras on top. When it’s locked, you get a large version of the 1Password logo, which is a front-on view of the barrel of a lock, next to the password input. When you authenticate, the barrel turns as though you’d put a key in and rotated it, and then the background splits in two and opens like a vault door. Does a password manager need to do that? No. Does it make me a little bit happy every time I see it? Yes. Look at it, it’s amazing!

The design philosophy carries through the rest of the app. Despite using Bitwarden daily, I often clicked on the wrong thing when I wanted to do anything other than autofill; in about a month of using 1Password I don’t think I’ve ever misclicked or been confused about the UI. The browser extension just feels snappier than Bitwarden, too. I’m not sure if it’s actually faster or if the design just makes it feel that way.

Functionality-wise, 1Password does everything Bitwarden did for me but slightly better. Bitwarden kicked you to its web interface for some operations (like checking compromised passwords); 1Password has that all built into the app. Instead of editing entries in a fiddly little browser popup, 1Password just summons forth the desktop app and you edit it there. It does a good job of detecting QR codes for TOTPs and offering to save them. I think the only small complaint I have is that the browser extension doesn’t have an autofill keybind. You can rig that up via the desktop app, but it feels like 1Password leans towards you using the UI it adds on login forms. To be fair, that UI works really well, and is very useful when you have multiple accounts on a site. My muscle memory for autofilling is strong, though.

Diving deeper

At this point I’d decided to switch fully to 1Password, so I started digging into what else it could do. The “Watchtower” feature combines a bunch of reporting about passwords (weak, breached, reused, and so on), but also lists sites where 1Password knows you can use passkeys or 2FA and don’t have them set up. I’d previously disabled passkey support in Bitwarden because it just appeared one day and got in the way of me trying to use a YubiKey, but decided to give them a go with 1Password. “Passkeys” is basically just a marketing term for FIDO2’s WebAuthn with automatic discovery bolted on top. The big problem is how you synchronise or export them. It’s all well and good letting your iPhone create a passkey when the Amazon app arbitrarily prompts it to, but what happens when you log in on a different device, or swap to Android, or whatever? Having 1Password deal with them fixes that³.

The passkey flow is very smooth: 1Password pops up an account selector, with obvious options to create a new account or pass the request through to another device like a YubiKey. It’s smart enough to guess the right account most times, even when you’ve got 17 different Google accounts for $reasons. Using them is equally simple: it just shows a popup and you tap to confirm you want to use the passkey. The Watchtower functionality made it really easy to go through and add passkeys everywhere that supports them. The thing I really appreciate is that they make the data that powers it public. It’s obviously partially a marketing thing for them, but it’s also a useful resource they could have kept proprietary.

Passkeys are a bit basic, though. 1Password has many more fun offerings. There’s an entire developer section with various goodies. At first I thought “that’s nice but I won’t use it”, but now I’m using basically everything it offers. The first thing to draw me in was the CLI. It’s pretty straightforward, but like the browser extensions it can nicely integrate with the desktop app so you unlock them all at once, deal with auth prompts in the GUI, and so forth. I have a couple of command-line tools that need passwords (e.g. for dealing with encrypted backups); now instead of prompting for the passwords, they shell out to op read and I authorise it via a popup in the 1Password app. Simple, but a nice quality of life improvement.

Next up there’s a beta feature called “Environments”. This lets you define groups of environment variables within 1Password, and have them exported automatically to certain destinations. At the minute it supports exporting to the AWS SecretsManager, and local .env files. When making a local file it actually makes a named pipe, so the credentials aren’t just sitting on disk (and won’t end up accidentally committed to anything). When the 1Password vault is locked, anything trying to read from the file will cause an authentication popup, much like with the CLI tool. I used to have the mentality that if something could read arbitrary files on disk, it was basically “game over” from a security point of view. Recent events made me realise there’s some value in defence-in-depth there, though, and 1Password provides a nice solution.

Fingerprints + Linux = Sadness

One feature of 1Password had me feeling a bit left out. Instead of entering your vault password to unlock it every time, you can have it invoke the system authentication library. On an iPhone this uses Face ID, on a Mac it can invoke Touch ID, and on Linux it uses Polkit. In the default configuration, Polkit just asks for your local user password, which is not much of an improvement. A fingerprint scanner seemed like the obvious solution here: it’s both a lot more convenient than typing a long password, and provides some assurance that it’s actually me doing the action⁴. Unfortunately, fingerprint readers on Linux seem to be a bit of a sorry affair.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s support. libfprint has a big list of supported devices, but I found it almost impossible to actually find a device I could buy that had one of the listed sensors. Most of them seem to be exclusively built into laptops. A lot of the cheaper devices just use whatever sensor they can get their hands on, so it’s pot luck if you receive a version that will work with libfprint or one that won’t. There’s also not a lot of information beyond that published by libfprint. I guess it makes sense: external fingerprint readers just aren’t a thing most people care about. While that makes me feel all special, it’s somewhat prohibitive to getting an actual working solution.

I’d given up on finding an answer to this when I stumbled upon an article by Scott Laird. He uses a YubiKey Bio to do it, via pam_u2f. The Bio isn’t actually a fingerprint reader: it just has an on-board reader to secure the credentials. The OS doesn’t get involved in the process. But because it can provide a fingerprint-secured U2F key, and pam_u2f can require that key to perform system operations, you basically get the same result. Maybe it’s actually even better than using a “real” fingerprint reader, as the data is secured on the hardware device…

The YubiKey Bio was a bit more pricey than I really wanted, coming in at around £90, but it felt like a worthy investment to add a bit of security and avoid typing a password dozens of times a day. The setup was simple: the official app that you use to enrol fingerprints is packaged in the Arch User Repository, and it worked perfectly. I already had pam_u2f set up as I used a (non-Bio) YubiKey to gate access to sudo, so I just generated a new key on the Bio, updated my config to use that, and added it to the Polkit policy. Now when I need to unlock 1Password or authenticate something, it prompts me to scan my fingerprint. Perfect!

Biometric all the things \o/

One of the other things Scott mentioned in that article was SSH keys. I’d seen 1Password supports acting as an SSH agent, but didn’t really see why I’d want it to. I used a resident key on my old YubiKey, so I didn’t have much to gain from a security point of view. Scott’s article made me realise I could have some big convenience gains, though. Currently every time I need to use the key, I enter a PIN and then physically touch it. I don’t mind this for the most part, but it turns out git-lfs does something like four different requests every time you do a git operation, none of which reuse the same SSH connection for some reason. That gets painful when each request involves a PIN and a touch. I also liked the idea of using pam_rssh for sudo authentication, but didn’t want to have to do the PIN-and-touch dance every time I used it.

You can probably see where this is going: I generated an SSH key in 1Password, and then… spent literal hours disabling all the other SSH agents that were running on my system, and trying to figure out where SSH_AUTH_SOCK was being populated. I didn’t manage to figure that out in the end⁵, and ended up just overriding it to point at 1Password’s agent socket. I added the new key to GitHub, and did the usual ssh git@github.com test, and it worked perfectly. 1Password prompts to allow access to the key, showing the process requesting access, and authorising it requires a fingerprint read:

can haz ssh key?

I’m not sure why Kitty doesn’t get an icon in the prompt; other applications do. You can expand the details section to see the key fingerprint being requested, as well as the exact process name and PID requesting the key. With the proof of concept done, I generated a couple more keys: one for normal SSH, and one for gaining root access using pam_rssh. Using different keys ensures I get prompted for them separately, and means a malicious app couldn’t sneakily ask for a Git key but actually pivot to SSH into a server. Not sure that’s ever likely to be a problem, but it’s basically no additional work for a bit more defence-in-depth, so why not?

I also took a moment to configure pam_u2f for both lightdm and xfce4-screensaver, so I can now log in and unlock my PC with my fingerprint. It’s not quite as smooth as Touch ID on a Mac, but it’s pretty close.

As an aside: this is not the first time I’ve been in this situation. Both Spotify and Todoist have focused on features I don’t want or need (including, but not limited to, pretty much everything branded “AI”), and then hiked the price up afterwards. It’s not quite standard enshittification, but it’s clear that our incentives no longer align properly. ↩︎
Or didn’t, at the time I looked. It now says “All plans” on the website but the docs only exist for business accounts, and there doesn’t seem to be any announcement explaining the change. ↩︎
Having Bitwarden deal with them would also have fixed that, but it got in my way instead of helping me, so… ↩︎
or it’s not me, but I’ll be busy dealing with the presumably-undesired removal of one of my digits, so probably won’t care about whatever is happening on the computer. ↩︎
Although I’m pretty sure the answer starts and ends with “systemd, somehow”. ↩︎

10 Weeks with an Apple Watch 10

2025-09-09T00:00:00Z

My watch. Yes, I am available for wrist modelling opportunities.

Around ten weeks ago¹ I picked up an Apple Watch 10, and have been wearing it almost constantly since. It’s not my first Apple Watch — I had a Series 5 for a bit back in 2020 — but it’s the first time I’ve actually stuck with it. Ten weeks seems like an apt time to reflect on it.

Firstly, why did I even bother? Well, for a couple of years I’d been wearing a Xiaomi Smart Band 7, mainly to monitor my sleep stats and set alarms that won’t wake up everyone else nearby. Its battery life was fantastic — with notifications and other things turned off, I got about a month of use between charges — but actually using it felt like trying to order food via the medium of interpretive dance.

My biggest gripe was the screen lock. If I didn’t have the screen locked then I’d periodically trigger it during the night when I moved around and it came in contact with my chest or leg. With the lock enabled you had to deliberately swipe up from bottom to top to enable interaction, but it didn’t work reliably. When I wanted to adjust an alarm, I’d be stood swiping repeatedly trying to get it to respond. When you finally get it unlocked, the whole interface is just fiddly.

The other issue was the data quality. There were some nights when I’d been woken up, sometimes even getting up and moving around, and it just didn’t show it in the data. If it can’t even get whether I’m asleep right, can I trust anything else it says?

I spent a while researching the best devices for sleep tracking. The Oura ring came highly recommended, but it was expensive and required a subscription to do anything useful. No thanks! The Apple Watch was consistently rated pretty well, and I reasoned I could pick up a refurbished older unit. I’ve been using an iPhone as my daily driver for a while, so it’d fit right into my begrudged walled garden.

The Series 10 has a significant advantage, though: it charges much quicker than all the previous generations. On a 30-minute charge, the Series 10 can go from 0 to 60%; the 9 can only make it to 40%, and my old 5 a measly 30%. Shorter charge times means I’m far less likely to leave it on charge and wander off without it. In some ways the daily charging is more convenient than monthly: the wireless charger sits on my desk, and I plop the watch on it for a little while in the evening; I don’t need to dig out the weird pogo-pin connector that has vanished sometime in the last four weeks, then carefully arrange it so it stays attached.

How a watch maybe saved my life

One of the big features of the Apple Watch, like many other wearable devices, is health and fitness tracking. I didn’t think much about this, beyond the sleep data I wanted, at first. I’ve never had a particularly good relationship with exercise², but I do like some good statistics. I started going for walks more often to get more data and see the graphs of VO2 max and HR recovery gradually inch up. That wasn’t the most profound effect on my health, though…

The recent versions of the Apple Watch have a feature that monitors for sleep apnea, a disorder where you don’t breathe properly during your sleep. I knew I wasn’t sleeping great — that’s why I was paying attention to sleep tracking data — but was still a bit surprised to get a notification from Apple Health after wearing the watch for 30 days. It gives you a graph to print and take to your doctor. So I diligently booked an appointment and a few weeks later went to see my GP.

The appointment went about as you’d expect: talking about referral to a sleep centre for a study, and so on. Towards the end, the doctor took my blood pressure (sleep apnea can be caused by, and can cause high blood pressure, in a lovely little vicious cycle). I don’t think either of us expected anything; it was just one of those standard checks for a related problem. After taking the reading, the doctor looked at me and said, “I can’t let you leave with a BP like this”. Yikes!

Blood pressure readings are split into stages: normal is under 120 mmHg³ over 80 mmHg⁴, stage 1 is up to 140/90, stage 2 is up to 180/120, and above is simply called “crisis”. Guess where I was? Also, fun fact: depending on how exactly you count and attribute things, hypertension comes out as the single largest cause of death in humans. It doesn’t kill you outright, but contributes to strokes, coronary artery disease, heart failure, and lots of other lovely things you don’t want on your CV.

After doing a few more readings, it settled down to just under the “crisis” stage and into the “holy crap, start treatment immediately” stage instead. I won’t labour on much more about this, but things are definitely moving in the right direction now⁵.

While the Apple Watch didn’t literally save my life, it triggered the chain of events that led to this diagnosis and treatment. Who knows what would have happened had it remained undetected? Probably nothing good. Also, go check your blood pressure! It’s simple to do and simple to treat if there is an issue, but so many people are walking around with hypertension and not even realising.

Building gates in the walled garden

Even though the watch is arguably a life-saver, not everything is rosy. It’s an Apple product, so you’re firmly locked in a walled garden, jealously guarded by people wearing black turtlenecks. Fortunately, there are a few ways to make it less painful.

All the health and fitness data is stored in Apple Health. You can export data as a big messy file, but it’s a very manual process to do so and the data format is gnarly. Luckily, there’s an app for that! Health Auto Export can, well, automatically export health data. It does what it says on the tin. It can send the data to Home Assistant, over MQTT, or dump it in some cloud file services, but I just have it post it all to a REST endpoint on a service I wrote. Then I dump it all in a database and can do whatever I want with it!⁶

Another tool that’s more useful on the watch itself is Apple Shortcuts. This is their no-code “if-this-then-that”-type thing. You can make automations or shortcuts that run a number of tasks. I have a whole slew of them I access via a complication⁷ on my watch face: one which prompts for input and adds an item to my to-do list (swiping to write letters is surprisingly not horrible), one which lets me select from a bunch of pre-written ones (“charge kindle”, “take laundry out in 1 hour”, type things), one to log my weight into Apple Health, one which can open and close the blinds in my room, and so on. It’s a surprisingly robust and easy-to-use system and offers just enough freedom that I’m not constantly grating on the edge of the walled garden.

Shortcuts being able to initiate arbitrary web requests is the real killer feature for me. Anything I can’t do on the watch itself, I can just farm off to a web server and connect it up with a shortcut. No need to learn Swift or pay Apple for the privilege of being a developer! For a lot of things, like controlling the blinds or adding to-do items, I already had a HTTP endpoint available and exposed over Tailscale⁸. Adding it to the watch was just a case of entering the right things in the Shortcuts app.

Daily nitty-gritty

There are lots of other little bits and pieces that come up when using the watch daily. I don’t think I can bundle them up into a pleasing narrative arc, so instead please enjoy some disjointed paragraphs of observations.

The Apple Watch has a lot of nagging abilities. It can notify you about your fitness “rings”, prompt you to stand up every hour, count how many seconds you wash your hands for, etc. I think I’d dislike these just on general principle, but the way it does them is so condescending it’s painful. I think there’s probably a cultural divide issue here, but there is no way in British English to say “Great job! You washed your hands for 30 seconds!” without it sounding like you’re being amazingly sarcastic or like you’re talking to a young child. So I turned all of that nonsense off. It’s meant to be a tool not a wannabe life coach.

You can access Maps directly on the watch and even do navigation. It works really well. The navigation mode has some nice haptic feedback: it does a short pulse as you’re approaching a turn, and then a long pulse at the actual turn. I like it a lot more than having to dig out my phone or have the directions read out. You get one pulse, glance down and see where you need to go, then it reminds you a little later when it’s time to do it. It’s a delightful user experience.

Watchfaces aren’t quite so delightful. There’s a limited number of built-in ones, and some are “exclusive” to the Ultra Series, and you can’t use them on a peasant watch like a Series 10. Annoyingly, there’s not one that does exactly what I want: a plain analogue clock with an inset date and four complication slots around the outside. Instead, I have to use one of the slots to show the date. There are third-party watchfaces, but they have issues. Firstly, there’s no actual API for making watchfaces⁹, so what they do is bodge it horribly by using a photo background that has fake widgets on it. On top of that they’re almost universally subscription-based. Again, no thanks¹⁰.

The issue I had with the Smart Band triggering when I was sleeping is solved trivially on an Apple Watch, by virtue of it having a physical button in the crown. When you put it in sleep mode, you have to double-press the crown to unlock it before it’ll do anything else. It hasn’t misfired once while I’ve been using it.

Sleep data; spot when I swapped devices!

Finally, a special mention for the gesture controls. If you raise the watch it reliably wakes up (switching from a low refresh rate, dimmed screen to an active, brighter one); you can then double-tap your index finger and thumb together and it will scroll down or page through whatever you’re looking at. The killer feature for this is navigating recipes: you can advance to the next step in a recipe while your hands are covered in flour. It’s also handy for reading notifications: when one pops up, you can double-tap to expand it, then, when it gets to the bottom, it’ll outline the default button (often “Dismiss”) and you can double-tap again to click it.

The verdict

I normally don’t like writing an actual labelled conclusion, but it feels like one is needed here! Overall, I’m happy with the watch. The daily charging doesn’t bother me, the data gathered seems reliable, the health monitoring has obviously paid dividends already, and the walled garden isn’t too chafing. It’s a straight upgrade over my old Smart Band, and I think it was worth the cost.

The original reason for getting the watch was better sleep tracking, though, so how well did it do? I’m much happier with the data: it seems to more accurately represent when I was awake in the night, and overall the sleep phases just seem to make more sense. You can see in the graph that the old data switched frequently between phases, and they didn’t quite line up for some reason; towards the right when the Apple Watch is supplying the data instead there’s a much more consistent pattern of sleep phases that repeat over the course of the night.

I’m not going to advocate that you go out and buy one, though. I know my requirements and usage aren’t typical, and I’ve also not got experience with any recent Android Wear alternatives or the new version of the Pebble watch that’s coming soon. You should definitely get your blood pressure checked, though!

OK, it’s more like 14 now, it’s taken a while for this post to make its way from my brain into text. ↩︎
Exercise for the sake of exercising just seems so overwhelmingly tedious and boring to me. And other types of exercise generally require social interaction, coordinating with people, and so on. ↩︎
Who decided to use “millimetres of mercury displaced” as a unit? You can’t just put random chemical symbols in units! That’s not how this works! ↩︎
Blood pressure readings have two parts: systolic (the pressure when the heart is beating) and diastolic (the pressure between those beats). They’re generally presented with the systolic reading on top and the diastolic reading below, and read as “X over Y”. Now you know what some of the random numbers they shout in medical shows mean! Yay learning! ↩︎
No thanks to how much salt is in everything. I’m pretty sure I’ve had at least twice the recommended daily amount of salt in a single serving before. Don’t even get me started on the things that are “low salt” but are still full of sodium from other sources. I don’t have a problem with ionic compounds, I have a problem with sodium! ↩︎
This mainly looks like drawing graphs that are slightly different to the graphs in the Apple Health graphs, for reasons I’m not sure I can explain. Making graphs is fun, OK? ↩︎
Complications are basically just home screen widgets, but with a fancy name because they’re on a watch. ↩︎
Tailscale actually causes me some problems here: everything works fine when the watch is connected to my phone, as the phone handles the Tailscale part, but if I’m not carrying my phone the watch will try to connect over WiFi directly and doesn’t understand anything about Tailscale. It happens infrequently enough that I’ll just live with it; it’s not much worse than having no signal on a phone. ↩︎
Yay walled gardens… ↩︎
I don’t object to subscribing to things in general, but it has to be something that’s worth the ongoing cost and offers something in return for the subscription. A watchface doesn’t need enough ongoing maintenance to justify subscribing to it, it’s just a cash grab. ↩︎