Latest Posts (20 found)
Danny McClelland 5 months ago

The Endless Hunt for Productivity Nirvana

I’ve been chasing the perfect productivity setup for longer than I care to admit. The signs are all there: a Downloads folder cluttered with productivity apps, browser bookmarks organised by system acronyms, and that familiar feeling of starting fresh with yet another note-taking tool, convinced that this time will be different. My digital graveyard is extensive. NotePlan, Microsoft OneNote, Apple Notes, Google Keep, Notion, Airtable, Logseq, Google Docs, Obsidian, Simple Notes — I’ve installed them all, configured them meticulously, and abandoned them with the same predictable rhythm.

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Danny McClelland 5 months ago

2025 Privacy Reboot: Six Month Check-In

Six months ago, I wrote about my privacy reboot — a gradual shift toward tools that take both privacy and security seriously. It was never about perfection or digital purity, but about intentionality. About understanding which tools serve me, rather than the other way around. Here’s how it’s actually gone. The Wins Ente continues to impress. The family photo migration is complete, and the service has been rock solid. The facial recognition quirks I mentioned on Android have largely sorted themselves out, and the peace of mind knowing our family memories aren’t feeding Google’s advertising machine feels worth the subscription cost.

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Danny McClelland 6 months ago

Focus

We’ve all seen them: those productivity YouTubers with perfectly lit home offices explaining how they maintain “deep work” for 12+ hours a day. They sit there, looking impossibly serene, selling us a vision of superhuman concentration that I’ve come to believe is complete nonsense. I used to buy into this. I’d feel like a failure when my brain checked out after three solid hours of work. I’d push myself to match these claimed productivity marathons, only to end up exhausted and wondering what was wrong with me.

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Danny McClelland 7 months ago

Trust

We like to believe we’re in control. That privacy is something we can protect if we just check the right boxes, read the fine print, toggle the right settings. But that belief is crumbling. In 2025, privacy isn’t something we manage — it’s something we quietly surrender, one tap, click, and scroll at a time. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much I rely on Google. Not in an abstract way, but in a daily, tangible, everything-I-do-is-somehow-Google-enabled kind of way.

security Security
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Danny McClelland 7 months ago

Balance

Tucked away in a parenting book I read nearly two decades ago — title and author long lost to time — was a metaphor that lodged itself in my brain and never left. “Life is a balance, or rather, a juggle of balls. Some are glass. Some are plastic." The idea is simple but enduring: drop a plastic ball, and it bounces. Drop a glass one, and it shatters. The trick — the real tightrope act — is knowing which is which.

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Danny McClelland 7 months ago

100 Days of Writing

Is there some magic in writing every day for 100 days? Maybe. Maybe not. But that’s not quite the right question. A better one might be: What would I hope to get out of writing every day for 100 days? For starters, I’d get better at clarity — saying what I mean without losing the thread halfway through. I’d build speed: less dithering, more straight-from-brain-to-fingers. And maybe, just maybe, I’d find a rhythm.

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Danny McClelland 7 months ago

2025: My Privacy Reboot

Six Month Update Curious how this privacy reboot actually worked out? I wrote a detailed follow-up after six months of living with these changes — covering what worked, what didn't, and the pragmatic compromises along the way. Read the Six Month Check-In → The line between privacy and security isn’t always clear — and in tech, it’s often treated like they’re the same thing. But they’re not. Even the broader question of when to trust digital services with our data has become increasingly complex.

security Security
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Danny McClelland 10 months ago

Privacy

I believe privacy is a fundamental right, and I’ve designed this blog to respect yours. What I Track This blog uses Umami Analytics to collect minimal, anonymous page view data. I track this information solely to understand which content resonates with readers, helping me focus my design and writing efforts on what’s genuinely valuable to my audience. What I collect: Page views and basic navigation patterns General geographic regions (country level only) Referrer information (which site led you here) Device type (desktop, mobile, tablet) What I don’t collect:

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Danny McClelland 1 years ago

Replacing Google Photos with Immich

I have, for a long time, been looking for a better alternative to Google Photos. Although Google Photos does exactly what I want, and isn’t that expensive, I do often consider the fact that all of my photos are in Google’s hands. I did move to Synology Photos a few years ago. The move itself was straight forward enough, but the user experience leaves quite a lot to be desired.

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Danny McClelland 1 years ago

2024 macOS Dotfiles

It is the time of year again where I decide to update my local computer configuration, as well as any remote linux server(s) that I am maintaining. I really appreciate having a familiar prompt and alias setup whenever I login to any of my servers/workstations. As per usual, I cannot remember which specific packages and plugins I use; so I’ve am using this post for future me to discover how I actually configured my environments.

devops DevOps
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Danny McClelland 2 years ago

Running Powershell Script an Elevated User

When running a powershell script, I often find I need to run the script in an elevated prompt. The nature of my job is that often these scripts will be run by people that don’t really know what Powershell is. I have found it quite useful to first create a bash script that the user executes, which in turn calls the actual Powershell script as an elevated user. To keep this handy, I’m posting it here for future me.

Powershell Bash tutorial Tutorial
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Danny McClelland 2 years ago

Extending Unraid VM Storage

More and more I find myself quickly spinning up a new Windows VM on my unraid server. It is always a ‘temporary’ VM which, after setting up exactly how I like, I invariably then wish I’d set a much larger virtual disk size. The standard VM disk size is 30G and that always seems to be enough. Fast forward an hour or two and I really wish I had set something more realistic.

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Danny McClelland 5 years ago

Tmux exit current session, not Tmux itself

When accessing remote servers that I am responsible for, I always initiate a tmux session along with the SSH session. This means I am always in a tmux session and I will never forget to start a tmux session manually. There is something particurly frustrating about starting a process on a remote server only to realise that you I forgot to start a tmux session and the process is going to take > 1 hour.

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Danny McClelland 5 years ago

Hetzner Installimage & Ubuntu

I finally had chance to get a dedicated server at Hetzner for my own projects and use. No client requirements, no deadlines and no specification requirements. Seems like a simple thing but just about every ‘proper’ server I have ever worked on has been for a client or work project. Now that I had access to my own server, it was time to configure it exactly how I wanted. As usual, I decided to use Ubuntu - I’m familiar with it and I really don’t mind the bloat that could be avoided with the likes of CentOS or Arch.

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Danny McClelland 5 years ago

Tmux 3.0a Configuration Not Loading

The latest version of Ubuntu has recently been released (20.04 LTS) and along with it comes the latest version of tmux. Tmux is now at release 3.0a and this version is pre-installed with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. The problem is, when you want to import a tmux configuration file from tmux 2.9 or below, you get many errors. The fix for me was simple… tmux kill-server Once I killed all old sessions and stopped the tmux server the new tmux version loaded the existing configuration file without any issue or errors.

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Danny McClelland 5 years ago

Booting Raspberry Pi 4 From USB

I recently purchased another Raspberry Pi 4 but this time I wanted to use Ubuntu 20.04 and I wanted to use a USB 3 1TB external hard drive as the boot disk. The reason for using a large boot disk is mainly to avoid SD card corruptions in future as all read/writes (once booted) will be on the external USB drive not on the SD card. The first step is install Ubuntu 20.

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Danny McClelland 5 years ago

Starting Tmux Automagically When Connecting to SSH

I recently noted in a blog post that I use a short snippet to either connect to an existing tmux session when I start a new SSH connection, or create a new tmux session if an existing one doesn’t exist. The problem is, I have been using Termius more often than not recently and using the snippet feature as mentioned in the previous blog post. I needed to make this work within a normal terminal today and thought I would add the snippet as a blog post so I don’t forget for next time.

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Danny McClelland 5 years ago

Flash Teckin Smart Plug for Home Assistant

I have been using Teckin smart plugs around the house for quite some time now. They’re really handy as they integrate with Google Home via the Smart Life app ecosystem. This means that each night we can tell Google to “turn everything off” and our lamps all switch off at the wall socket. What I have wanted to do for some time, after seeing my friend do it with great success, was to flash the Teckin firmware to esphome so that I can control the sockets via Home Assistant and also get realtime values for the socket’s watt, amps and voltage loads.

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Danny McClelland 5 years ago

Customise Remoteapp Work Resources Name

When using RemoteApp on Microsoft Server 2016 I noticed that whenever you add the RemoteApp workspace feed to iOS or iPadOS devices, the resources are listed under ‘Work Resources’. Although this works perfectly, it becomes a problem when you connect to different RemoteApp servers and they are all titled ‘Work Resources’. The solution is simple and takes about one minute, assuming you don’t use an RDP gateway - if you do, it take a minute or so longer, that’s all.

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Danny McClelland 5 years ago

Mikrotik Failover Netwatch

Over the years I have used many different methods of failover for primary to secondary, sometime tietary, wan links on Mikrotik devices. Along with manual routing table entries, I have always relied on scripts of some sort that are triggered when one of the WAN links goes down. I have had varying success with this approach. One of the biggest problems I have had when switching from a primary WAN to a secondary WAN is the registration of VoIP phones seems to hang.

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