James's Weblog

KWGT is a very useful app for Android for those who like such things. It lets you design your own homescreen widgets. The designer tool takes a little bit of time to learn your way around, but it is very versatile once you get the hang of it. A pro licence is a one-off fee of £4.99, but honestly you can do so much without pro that most people won't need it. All you can't do is import widgets from an external save-file, which means you can’t import widgets you download from the web.

For many years, I have used backup software made called Retrospect Backup.

As an aside, backing up your computer files is very important. These days we store many things on computers – important documents, irreplaceable photographs, emails, software licences, and so on. The originals are increasingly in the cloud somewhere, but not always. You should always have a strategy for what to do if your laptop hard drive dies, you are infected with some ransomware that locks you out of your files, or whatever it is.

More from Peter Leithart (paid link) on 1 and 2 Kings, this time his comment on the torn and divided kingdom as recorded in 1 Kings 12. This is rich. Enjoy.

I recently wrote a post explaining how to set up lighttpd (a light-weight, simple web server) on a RHEL-derived OS (such as AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux), so it can use SSL, on multiple virtual hosts (i.e., individual domains), and to use PHP over fpm.

In that post, I said this:

Back in 2019, I wrote a couple of blog posts outlining how to set up a web server called lighttpd to run some simple websites. Those two posts were called Setting up Lighttpd for Simple Sites and Adding SSL / https to lighttpd.

This post updates those, for a few reasons:

I’ve just noticed something that I should have noticed before, and I’m sure is in all the commentaries etc., but somehow I have completely missed.

“On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee.” (John 2:1)

Having enjoyed episodes 2-10 of the BBC podcast presented by Jonny Dymond (“How did we get here?") on the historical background to the conflicts in Israel-Palestine, I look at the claims in episode 1 (featuring Simon Sebag Montefiore and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones) that the Bible is not a trusted historical source.

I’m enjoying reading Peter Leithart’s stimulating commentary (paid link) on 1 and 2 Kings.

He makes the point that, superficially, the book of Kings could reinforce Marcionite assumptions that the God of the Old Testament is harsh and vindictive, while we only meet his love and mercy in the New Testament.

I’m enjoying C S Lewis’ clever book The Screwtape Letters (paid link) again. I last read this as a teenager, and it's extremely smart, really pastorally insightful, and full of wisdom.

Over the past couple of years, I've used quite a few bottom-budget VPS providers (as in a few dollars per month for a completely unmanaged VPS). Some were successful and others not. Read my review of 8 such providers: AlphaVPS, BuyVM, DediRock, Hostbrr, InterServer, RamNode, RareCloud, Servarica