James's Weblog

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

So, I set up a Wireguard server to use as a personal VPN.

I created a client (peer) on my laptop that allowed my laptop (Fedora) to connect to my Wireguard server. All worked fine.

I then installed the Wireguard app on my Android phone, and created a new connection, choosing the “from scratch” option. The fields on the Android screen matched the entries in the configuration file on my Linux laptop, so it seemed intuitive what to put into each box.

Some AlmaLinux systems I run were failing to tell me that a reboot was required (using dnf needs-restarting -r) after a kernel update. This post looks at why that was, and how to solve that particular problem.

Romans 8:31: “What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?”

At Trinity Church Scarborough, one of my roles is to oversee our Life Groups, and to look after the Life Group leaders. These are our midweek groups. They are much more than just a Bible study group (they’re about doing life together, as the name suggests), but they are certainly not less than that.

Psalm 34 is an acrostic. In Hebrew, the first word of each verse starts with successive letters of the alphabet. So, if this were English, verse 1 would start with A, verse 2 would start with B, and so on.

At Trinity Church, we’ve been preaching through Book 1 of the Psalms (that is, Psalms 1-41) from Easter until the end of August. We won’t have had time to preach on all of them; we’ve had 18 weeks, so there will have been time to preach on just under half of them. Nevertheless, we thought it would serve the church better to preach selected psalms from the first book, rather than a selection dotted across the whole psalter.

I've never noticed this before, and it’s a bit of fun.

Whose tomb was Jesus buried in? Joseph of Arimathea, you’d reply, and you’d be correct.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1 that the message of the cross sounds foolish and weak to someone without faith in Jesus. This can sound remote and theoretical, but is beautifully illustrated by Pi Patel’s account in the book The Life of Pi.