Author | Lightnews

Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · 23h

Tonights dinner from Deliveroo: £33
The exact same meal, ordered direct for collection: £23

#SupportLocalBusiness is one thing, but I'm saving 30% for a 5 minute drive too!

Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · 1d

DST is a lie when you have kids - they don't know you're meant to have an extra hour in bed. They just get up when they feel like it and demand you be ready for it

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · 3d

In April, Minio nerfed their web interface on the free version. Last week, they stopped building the free version entirely, requiring you to build it yourself: github.com/minio/minio/...

The very second Forgejo ships their Terraform backend, I'll be burning my Minio install with fire!

update README.md and other docs to point to source only releases · minio/minio@9e49d5e

github.com

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · 4d

Hetzner have some new pricing tiers, presumably corresponding to CPU refreshes.

So I get a CPU bump _and_ a price drop? Sign me up!

www.hetzner.com/news/new-clo...

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · 7d

After over 4 months of development, django-tasks 0.9.0 is out! 🥳

- Django 6.0 support
- RQ optimisations
- Dropped `enqueue_on_commit` support
- A number of renames and refactors to match upstream Django

A small set of changes, but one of the largest diffs to date!

github.com/RealOrangeOn...

Release 0.9.0 · RealOrangeOne/django-tasks

What's Changed fix: prevent IndexError: pop from empty list in RQ backend by @crgwbr in #183 Add support for Django 6.0 by @RealOrangeOne in #193 Add supports_priority feature Access RQ worker nam...

github.com

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · 7d

> Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1

IT WAS DNS!

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · 7d

#hugops to those `us-east-1` engineers having to deal with this lovely issue at 4am 🤗

Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · 7d

Despite self-hosting it, I can't access my Bluesky account through the browser, because bsky.app is hosted on AWS, and their PDS doesn't expose a typical web interface.

For a fully self-hosted (and decentralised) social media platform, Mastodon is the way to go.

theorangeone.net/posts/self-h...

Self-hosting Bluesky

Bluesky is quickly becoming the "hot new" social network, growing by almost 1.6 users every second. "Recent events" have lead to a fairly large Twitter exodus, and people looking elsewhere seem to all...

theorangeone.net

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · 7d

Happy Monday to everyone except `us-east-1` - everyone's favourite single point of failure.

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · 11d

The Smart Home must grow!

A selection of Xiaomi and ZigBee temperature sensors

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · 12d

On Sunday, I, and several of my @torchbox.com colleagues ran the Oxford Half Marathon to raise money for Breast Cancer Now 🏃

theorangeone.net/posts/oxford...

I ran a Half Marathon

I'm not a runner, not by any stretch of imagination. But yesterday, I (and several colleagues) ran a half marathon - the Oxford Half Marathon. 13.1 miles, or 20 kilometers in non-freedom units. I'm cu...

theorangeone.net

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · Sep 27

My @pyconuk.org talk is now available on YouTube! 🥳

theorangeone.net/talks/forcef...

Halt and Catch Fire: Forcefully Stopping Python

As developers, we're tasked with writing code, with the intention of running it. In most cases, we want to run said code for as long as possible - either until completion or until something external r...

theorangeone.net

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · Sep 20

My @pyconuk.org talk is done! 🥳 Now I can enjoy the rest of the conference!

(Slides and recording to follow)

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · Sep 18

You should never update firmware over hotel WiFi. But I did, and my travel router is alive again! 🥳

Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · Sep 18

On a packed train on the outskirts of London, heading to @pyconuk.org 🥳 Hopefully see some folks there tomorrow! 👋

Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · Sep 17

It's official - `django.tasks` exists! Coming soon to @djangoproject.com 6.0. 585 days later, the first step (of many) in Django's background tasks journey is finally complete! 🥳

theorangeone.net/posts/django...

django.tasks exists

As of today (well, technically yesterday), django.tasks is officially released upon the world! Mostly. <note> Note that django.tasks and django-tasks are in fact different, albeit by a single characte...

theorangeone.net

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · Sep 12

First draft of my @pyconuk.org slides finished this afternoon. Now just practising and polishing.

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · Sep 9

In my continuing journey to Terraform everything, my latest victim has been my home's DNS, using AdguardHome:

theorangeone.net/posts/terraf...

Terraforming AdGuardHome

I like to configure as much of I can on the things I host (of which there's a fair amount) using Infrastructure as code, especially if it's a critical service. I recently switched the DNS server in my...

theorangeone.net

Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · Sep 8

New house, and my server is back to running over powerline 😭
Might have to start taking a closer look at some of these walls...

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · Aug 24

It's been a long few weeks, with my spare time spent a very long way from a computer, and there's still more work to go.

But, as of last weekend: I'm a homeowner 🥳

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · Aug 3

I'm @djangoproject.com DSF member of the (last) month! 😱 🥰

www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2025/...

DSF member of the month - Jake Howard

Posted by Sarah Abderemane on Aug. 3, 2025

www.djangoproject.com

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · Jul 27

Life goal completed:

We bought a house! 🏡 Picked the keys up on Friday 🥳 Now the painting, decorating and cleaning starts... 🙈

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · Jul 24

My website, now brought to you over HTTP/3 🙌

A screenshot of the Firefox dev tools showing my website (theorangeone.net) being loaded over HTTP 3

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · Jul 17

Firewalls are great. Stateless firewalls are the work of the devil. 👿

2 hours of my life I'm not getting back...

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Jake Howard 🍊 @theorangeone.net · Jul 9

In the interest of stability and performance, I recently moved my Mastodon and Bluesky instances from my home server to their own VPS in "the cloud".

theorangeone.net/posts/social...

Deploying a Social Media server

I talk to a lot of people through some form of online platform - conventional social media, forums, chat etc. Given I work remotely, it's where a fair bit of conversation ends up. Since leaving Twitte...

theorangeone.net