Yes, it’s a week into April, no, I’m not particularly upset about that. Taking into account that All This {he says, gesturing at ‘The World’} continues, and March was both month three of lockdown three in the UK, and the anniversary of my employer closing their office and sending us all to work from home (which I love, btw, with one caveat), I don’t feel too bad about having had a rough month, metal health wise, and letting some things slip somewhat.
I really need to up my markdown game to include more images, because this wall of text is borrrriiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnggggggg. Anyway, this was my March, and remember, we don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

Finicky
This month in ‘apps which would really upset the infosec team if I install it on my work laptop’, is Finicky, which is a browser proxy for your mac. Once set as your default browser, you can configure Finicky to open, for example, gmail in one browser, and facebook in another (hello there Firefox and your facebook container).
Or, even better, you can apply rewrite rules to clicked links, for example to rewrite http to https, or from www.amazon.co.uk to smile.amazon.co.uk for maximum charity givage (although, obviously, Amazon evil, buy from independent retailers if you are able). Finicky can even be configured to open up certain links directly in the appropriate app, see some of the user submitted examples at the Finicky examples page on the project wiki.
And yes, I’m still loving this app even though the configuration file is {shudder} javascript ;-)

PretendyDriving
Yup, I’m still spending free time driving in imaginary circles in cartoon cars, but you know what? It’s less hassle when they break, because you can just push a button and get a brand new car ;-) Anyway, iRacing’s Week 13 arrived, which I usually try to stick to unranked races due to it being carnage on track, but coming into Week 13 this time, my safety rating was below 2.0, which means, long story short, that I was at risk of being demoted one license level, which would exclude me from some of the sportscar/GT car races which I enjoy.

With a flash of galaxy brain, I noticed that in week 12, the Radical SR8 was at the Nurburgring Nordschleife. In a very smooth-brained moment, I only spotted this for the final race of the week. The significance of the circuit is that iracing calculates your safety rating based on incidents per corner, and the Nordschleife has over one hundred and fifty corners. A few laps of taking it relatively easy, and I gained a whole chunk of SR. Not quite enough for safety, so I ended up driving in the Ferrari GT3 Fixed series (not known for safe races) around the Charlotte Roval (not known for incident-free racing). I did manage to drag my SR back up above 2.0, kept my A license, and have not actually raced in any A license only series so far this season… Standard.

New Toys
I got sick of the combination of manufacturers trying to tell me “You shall not pass!” and my previous cheap screwdriver sets with only the wrong sized bits, which were also made of cheese, so I did the only logical thing, splurged on an iFixit Manta Precision Bit Set opening kit. A little spendy, but so much nicer than the cheap cheese-based sets (I’m looking at you, my maplin “professional grade” 18pc screwdriver set).

YouTube TimeSink
As well as my usual (incredibly nerdy) subscriptions, I have obviously spend some of March being overjoyed by the appearance of ‘The Secret Life of Machines - remastered’ on Tim Hunkin’s YouTube channel. As if this wasn’t wonderful enough, Tim has also been adding some new videos in the form of ‘The Secret Life of Components, a series of guides for designers and makers’. New Tim Hunkin content? You love to see it.