Michael Mulqueen

How do I make sure Claude gets up-to-date information about my site?

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Up front: Anthropic pulls from a great many sources and any of this is liable to change. Take everything below as “this worked for me in mid-2026.”

Claude is both trained on the web and performs searches on demand. I’m talking about the on-demand searches – the ones it runs when you ask it about something current.

A bit of context. pyStrich is a Python barcode library I’ve maintained since 2015, when I ported it from the Python 2-only huBarcode. It wasn’t just a port, some features were expanded, but by 2016 it had hit the stable, useful, leave-it-alone phase. The only changes since then have been the bare minimum to keep it working through Python version bumps, dependency churn, change in CI etcetera. A couple of months ago, I decided to spend some time improving it and getting it to a more polished, complete and credible state: comprehensive docs; a fresh look at the feature set and old “won’t fix” calls – the lot. After the better part of a decade of quiet, there’s been a recent flurry of activity around the project.

Rudolph the Narc

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Every December, Codebar Brighton runs a Christmas show and tell – a chance to bring something you’ve made and demo it to the group. This year I made a small browser game with Phaser – Rudolph the Narc.

The North Pole has a white powder problem. Santa’s been overdoing the snow, the elves have followed his lead, and noses are starting to drop off. Rudolph – tediously straight-edged – has had enough and is taking it on himself to clean the place up. You play him, patrolling the workshop and intercepting contraband while trying not to lift the legitimate Christmas supplies.

Disabling Offloading on Ubuntu 18.04 with Netplan and/or systemd-networkd

Tue, 21 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0100

Why Disable Offloading?

Firstly, why not disable offloading? Offloading is a way for the operating system and your CPU to offload some of the work involved in transmitting packets (which can be significant, especially at higher speeds. The two main cases that I’ve come across for this are offloading the calculation of TCP checksums and handling fragmentation. Hardware offloading should be a good thing and it often is, I’ve only rarely found a need to disable it.

Reading a macOS (HFS+) Hard Disk on Linux

Thu, 01 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Occasionally we need to read external hard drives on our Ubuntu Linux servers. Some of our clients are heavy macOS users, so it’s not uncommon for us to see hard disks that are HFS+ formatted. Another name for HFS+ is Mac OS Extended.

To be clear, this isn’t an ideal situation. In many cases, it would be easier to format the hard disk as ExFAT (for large files) or FAT32 when cross platform use is desirable, but that doesn’t help when you receive a disk full of important data. If you’re working using a drive, rather than merely transfering it, ExFAT may not be the best idea because it’s unjournalled and so you’re losing some protection against data loss.

Using Pass to Store Secrets for Ansible

Thu, 22 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Inevitably, when you use a configuration management system like Ansible, you’ll need to supply it with secrets (like passwords). It’s generally considered a bad idea to keep secrets in plain text and it’s an even worse idea to store them in a remotely hosted git repository. There are various options here, but they basically boil down to encrypting them and keeping them in the repository or storing them somewhere else entirely. If you want to keep secrets in the repository, solutions include Ansible Vault and git-crypt.