Eddie Lee

Ethan and myself have spent many evenings over the last few weeks assembling the LEGO® NASA Apollo Saturn V rocket. In short this is now one of my favourite Lego sets. I first heard of this set on Hello Internet episode 89. Then a few months later after rewatching Apollo 13 I decided I had to have it.

The box this set comes in is huge, but is nothing compared to the size of the built rocket. When complete it stands a meter high (1:110 scale of the real thing) and contains nearly 2000 bricks; making it pretty heavy. You don’t realise from looking at it, but it’s actually solid inside; this isn’t a hollow shell.

There are some great finishing touches to the set as well; like the Luna Lander, and a recreation of the command Module splashing down in the ocean. There really is a lot of detail in this set, and unlike most sets all details are printed onto the bricks; no stickers!!

The rocket fully separates into its first, second, and third stages; plus the Luna Lander and Command Module fit inside the Payload Fairing.

I’m really impressed with how easily Ethan managed to put this set together. The set places itself in the 14+ age range; but even while I was struggling to work out what parts of the instructions were saying Ethan was plowing ahead with the build.

Great fun; I can’t wait for our next build!

Well it’s just over a year and a half since I moved this blog from Tumblr to Ghost, and I’ve moved it again. Ghost is great; I like its web based editor and its super easy to use, but it has a lot of downsides for me.

• I much prefer to write in Bear than Ghost’s online editor
• Its a dynamic app which requires an expensive VPS to run on (I paid $5 a month from Digital Ocean)
• I had to handle backups myself
• Updating to new versions of Ghost is a painfully manual process
• Making changes to my theme involved editing handlebars files (which is no fun)

What I wanted was a way to host the site for free (preferably with SSL), be able to easily import markdown posts from Bear, not have to worry about backups, and be able to change the sites theme with ease.

Introducing Gatsby, a static site generator for React. Gatsby can take in my markdown files, run them through a build process using a template written in React (much easier for me to change), and outputs static html that I can host almost anywhere. Backups are also a thing of the past as the posts are now stored in GitHub.

Hosting the site for free was a breeze once I was dealing with static content. The site lives on GitHub pages (which is free) with CloudFlare sitting in front (for free) giving me a speed boost with their CDN, and providing free SSL.

In short: Gatsby is fantastic for static site generation, using GraphQL to query markdown files makes theme development so quick and easy. Hosting static content on GitHub Pages could not be easier, and CloudFlares free plan is a total no brainer.

Very happy with this setup, and with getting $5 back a month.

Following last years post, I've decided to do another year in review, and 2017 has been one crazy year!

Family

The overwhelming highlight of this year has been buying and moving into our first home. But this wasn’t the only crazy change or achievement the year had to offer. Ethan started School, Aurora started Nursery, and I got promoted.

Fun

With all this it's surprising we had any time for fun, but along with our summer holiday and numerous trips to Thomas Land we managed quite a lot. I even managed to see a whole load of my favourite bands; Blink 182, Green Day, Weezer and Good Charlotte - all in one year.

Apps

At the end of last year Glass Umbrella committed to release an app in 2017, well that didn’t happen. However, I can share what I’ve been working on for the last year. Drank is your personal window into understanding the makeup of your daily fluid intake; helping you keep a healthy balance of water, caffeine and alcohol. After a bit of a tidy up and some design work, the app should ship early in 2018. Until then there is a beta you can join via Twitter DM to @thedrankapp.

Here's looking forward to all 2018 brings, hopefully a bit less change, a lot more relaxing and family time.