The sort of program that once set up, just ticks along without fuss or bother forever.

For me, as I'm replacing the vms today which I set up five years ago and haven't needed to touch since;

• HAProxy
• KeepaliveD

Not easy to learn, but once they're running, they both go on forever.

I've heard this before, but haven't found it the case personally. I started work in manual jobs and messing around with computers was my evening hobby. Many years later, I now do IT as a job (partly from gaining skills from that hobby) but also have continued it as my primary thing to do when I'm not working. I was worried when I changed into this career that my hobby would become too much like work to be enjoyable, but I've not found that.

Is this the same for other people, or am I unusual in doing something in my off hours that's so close to my career? I'm genuinely curious to know if others have found the same or whether they found another hobby.

A well written article containing some well researched articles of "The good stuff". I certainly found the leading piece about trachoma genuinely inspiring - a horrible eye disease that's been plagueing humans since the ice age that's seen huge steps very recently in almost complete eradication.

Yet this went completely unreported all all major news outlets in 2025.

There is something wrong about that, I think.

1984, Jet Set Willy was released. A great game that every kid at school wanted. Of course we all wanted a copy, but it cost £8 here in the UK, which was several weeks' pocket money.

Copying games then involved finding a kid whose Dad was seriously into Hifi and had a stackable stereo system, then we'd copy it with their tape to tape system. But JSW had this as the cassette inlay.

How this works? When the game loaded after about 10-15 minutes, it would ask what colours were in Grid square A5, or H9 etc. Get it wrong twice and the game would exit and you'd need to start over.

(If you're wondering what happens if you're colour blind - you could write to the publishers and if they accepted your complaint, they would ask you to send them the game and would give you a cheque to cover the refund)

Of course, kids are determined and inventive, and this was well before photocopiers or digital cameras, so we would spend our lunchtimes with pencil and paper writing down every single combination...

It was a good game, with some great music, but really really hard.

(Credit to https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue45/2/1.html for the picture, and the page also goes into more depth)

I've really enjoyed working on and improving Taskpony and am pleased to be able to release another update in the hope that you'll also like it.

• Demo 1
• Demo 2
• More information
• Release Notes

Taskpony is a self-hosted tasks manager that runs from docker or as a linux service.

"Another tasks app? Seriously?"

I've been trying to de-google and, having used Google Tasks for many years, replacing it proved surprisingly complex for something that seemed so simple. I tried a number of other task managers, both paid and free which, whilst excellent at what they did, I found to be complex or packed with team and group features that I didn't need. So I wrote something for myself and, somewhere along the way, I thought it might be nice to share it with the FOSS community that I've benefited so much from.

It's the first "proper" FOSS app I've released, so please be kind.

Taskpony is over at https://github.com/digdilem/taskpony - it would be great if you could give it a try and let me know how it could be improved.