I cancelled my Washington Post subscription. Lots of people are right now, as the newspaper said it won’t endorse a U.S. presidential candidate this year°. I am constantly astounded by Trump’s awfulness and think him having a second term of office would genuinely threaten America’s democracy, but that’s not the reason I cancelled. I’d been meaning to do so for a while.
I only subscribed because it was dirt cheap. But I found it had a shocking lack of content for a major newspaper. I’d launch the app every few days and go to, say, the technology section and there’d seemingly be almost no new articles.
Anyway, like most subscriptions they try and convince you not to cancel by offering you a discount. To try and change my mind they offered me a plan of £2/mo. But I currently pay £1/mo. They didn’t change my mind.
Notes from London Comic Con 2024.
This was my first time, and it was better than expected. The venue was so big I’m not actually sure how much of it I actually saw.1 50% of I think?
I thought it would mostly be selling stalls and that I’d quickly get bored. But there was also music, food, meet ‘n’ greets, gaming machines, talks, promotional stalls, and gaming tournaments. Lots on.
Pay extra for the ticket which lets you in early. You can get your bearings and then see what you want to see before the crowds. The areas around the selling stalls in particular pile up with people as the day goes on, making it unpleasant if you don’t like crowds.
It was nice seeing nerdy people get to have their day, where they could dress up and express their interests with unrestrained glee.
I knew people dressed up, but I didn’t realise quite how many. I would guess 35% were in costume.
I’m clearly not as steeped in nerd culture as I once was, as plenty of the costumes were alien to me. My favourite was Pedro Pascal’s Joel from “The Last of Us” TV show. I liked it not just because I like the show, but because it’s the sort out outfit that you won’t be embarrassed to wear on the train journey home.
Those meet ‘n’ greet queues – where you can get an autograph or photo – moved slow. It was nice seeing people get the chance to have a few minutes to chat. But man the staff should have sped things up a bit. My girlfriend wanted an autograph from Tim Downie just before we were going to queue he had to go elsewhere. So later on we queued a 10 minutes before he returned. 45 minutes later we were turned away right near the end of the line as he again had to go elsewhere. There was not that many people in front of us when we started queueing, they were just slow buggers.
By 14:00 I was satisfied with the day and left. ↩︎
I rarely think about how I’m lucky to live in a warm house with running water, have access to the internet, the freedom of a car, or that I’ve outlived plenty of my ancestors. I barely notice any of it – to my shame.
But nearly every time I have that first sip of Fanta Orange or bite of a burger I am immediately delighted, gleeful and thankful.
As I’ve gotten older, less and less excites me. Life simply felt sweeter at 16. But at least a Sprite still tastes just as sweet.
The Cultural Tutor points out that Charles Dickens wrote over a million words in his career — a decent amount of which were on Victorian London’s most awful and violent underbelly — and yet he never used a swear word.
Take Scrooge:
Dickens does not rely on brutality or violence, or vulgar language, to make him so despicable. It is rather by his simple acts of meanness and miserliness… that Scrooge seems so cruel.
How tempting, when describing something bad, to immediately choose the most vivid imagery or direct language. Dickens proves that we need not necessarily do so.
Photos from a morning walk.
AI has officially arrived. My Mum has sent me a AI-generated video on Instagram.
Awful music. Horrific squawks.
The blogger Dave Winer invented podcasts. And he posts ‘podcasts’ to his blog scripting.com.
But to most people, they’re not podcasts, as he is just quickly sharing his thoughts in audio form.
And to me they’re not podcasts either.
I like them though. And I’d like to try doing some on my blog. Only with a different name.
And since I did my first one a few minutes ago I had to think up a name. I struggled. I even asked a LLM. I wanted something catchy and smart.
In the end I liked the simplest and most obvious: audioblog.
Update: Although if you say you’ve “released an audioblog’ it sounds like the blog itself, not an individual post. Mmm. Maybe ‘audiopost’ would be better? Or ‘spokenpost’? We’ll see. One for future Elliot to decide. Not 1am Elliot.
Audioblog. I want to read the body of a post when browsing a blog. Why do so many blogs just list titles, requiring me to have to click one-by-one to read posts?
I’m not sure. But I recorded a quick audioblog talking about it.
Don’t have time to listen? I asked a LLM to turn it into a blog post:
Most blogs show just a list of titles. Click. Read. Back. Click. Read. Back.
I prefer seeing entire posts on one page, one after another. Just scroll and read.
It puzzles me how many blogging platforms default to title-only lists. Why?
Maybe it’s just my way of reading. I like scanning quickly through content, letting interesting bits catch my eye. Others might prefer a more methodical approach: carefully selecting posts from a clean list of titles.
The title-only approach does add a certain weight to each post. When you click through to a dedicated page, it feels more substantial, like you’re about to read something significant.
But for short posts especially, I want to just scroll and read. No clicks needed.
Curious to hear from those who prefer the title-list approach. What am I missing?
I have zero interest in a video of some rich twat giving a University commencement speech.
In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Here’s an example: a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room. There’s no one to call to complain, no way to communicate back to that distant leader that they’ve scotched your plans. The accountability is swallowed up into a void, lost forever.
Being unable or unwilling to follow a chain of decisions and their outcome – and not hold decision makers accountable – is one of the biggest creators of bad businesses.
Dr Pepper just doesn’t hit like when I was a kid.
The article I linked to about Japanese clutter mentioned the Collyer brothers° who were hoarders who died in their home – one after being trapped by the rubble, the other of starvation.
They were born in the 1880’s and died in 1947. And it got me thinking about how far back certain mental illnesses go.
Some I’m sure are caused or exacerbated by our modern world. But surely some mental illnesses were present in tribes, say, 30,000 years ago. Did any of them get depression, ADHD, hoarding, PTSD, OCD, or eating disorders? Which ones are inherent in our make-up?
I’m listening to The National’s album “First Two Pages of Frankenstein” (Spotify link).
I’ve never listened to their stuff before. Just one song: ‘About Today’ (Spotify link), that I discovered via it being in “Warrior” (2011).
There was a profile of the band I bookmarked though. I didn’t bother reading the article – it was too long and I’m not that interested. But it said their new album was good. So here I am, checking it out.
It’s okay. I probably need to give it a second listen, as I’ve had it on in the background as I read and write. But currently it’s a 5/10. The songs are too dull and too similar. Oddly enough, the best song on the album is the one with Taylor Swift (Spotify link).
Exploring Are.na. I couldn’t get my head around it when I first signed up in 2022. I’m still struggling, but I think I get it now. It’s the thinking persons Pinterest?
I’m not a huge fan of its design. It feels very 2012 to me – with its heavy use of Helvetica and whitespace. It just doesn’t inspire my creativity.
But feel free to follow me on there. You never know, I might find a use for it.
Talking of Japan, I’m a big fan of Japanese ambient music (Spotify playlist). And I noticed whilst looking at Haruka Nakamura’s albums that some of them are official soundtracks for manga comics.
I didn’t realise that was a thing. And I’m still not 100% sure how it works. Are you meant to read the manga whilst listening to the music? If so, I love it. What a beautiful idea.
1.86.0-TZPVOLRPBYUP57Q2DTET6RSXD4.0.1-5
I was listening to the soundtrack for “Look Back“. It’s a lovely little album (Spotify link). Especially the last song ,‘Light song’, which is beautiful.
“The life-changing magic of Japanese clutter” – Aeon°
The world still turns to Japan for things; it also turns to Japan to rid itself of them. There’s only one problem: Japan isn’t anywhere near as tidy as outside observers give it credit for.
[…] While treatises abound on Japanese simplicity, minimalist design and culture, precious little is written about the nation’s masterfully messy side.
A long read on how Japan isn’t the minimalist paradise Westerners often think it is.
To be fair, as a Westerner, I do associate minimalist interiors with Japan. But I also associate incredibly maximalist spaces with it too. It’s either one or the other, in my mind.
Why can maximalist spaces be worthwhile?:
Cosily curated Japanese clutter-spaces are different [to modern minimalism. There is a meticulousness to the best of them that is on a par with the mental effort poured into simplifying something: a deliberate aesthetic decision to add, rather than subtract – sometimes mindfully, sometimes unconsciously, but always, always individually. Clutter offers an antidote to the stupefying standardisation of so much of modern life.
The article mentions the photobook “Tokyo Style” by Kyoichi Tsuzuki that showed a Tokyo “startlingly unlike the rarefied minimalism that the world had come to expect from Japan. Tsuzuki’s photos were a joyous declaration to the contrary, celebrating the vitality of living spaces filled with wall-to-wall clutter.”
Many of the photos in the book do show anti-minimalist spaces. But some don’t. Including the cover, which I’d say has many minimalist cliches like a bed on the floor, just a couple of plain t-shirts, and just one form of entertainment – music in this intance.
The article mentioned ōhsōji, “an annual year-end tidying-up emerged as a popular ritual among the masses, a ‘big cleaning’ to ring in the New Year.”
I like the sound of that and adopt it as a tradition. Post-Christmas is when a home is at its most messy and cluttered. Apparently ōhsōji is done between Christmas and New Years day.
I think I’d prefer to do mine in January. I like that those days between Christmas and New Years where the house is strewn with wrapping, presents and half-eaten food. I wouldn’t want my ōhsōji to be too early. January 1st is the best time, for me.
If you go to Studio Ghibli’s offices in the leafy western suburbs of Tokyo you’ll stumble upon the “immaculately designed and managed facility replica of the director Hayao Miyazaki’s workspace. It is a glorious mess. Heirloom-grade wooden shelves, overflowing with bric-a-brac and thick tomes, line the walls.”
In searching around for the highest quality copies of the images above 👆 I stumbled upon this random which. I like it and it does give off a somewhat similar vibe to Miyazaki’s workspace.
Just discovered that ⌘ + S will save your draft in the WordPress editor. Good to know.
Morning all 🍂
UK-folk, don’t forget to get yourself into some woods in the next few weeks — the leaves are looking gorgeous. They’re even managing to give some autumnal life and deep colours to this drab industrial estate.
My Saturday agenda:
📖 Read
🪑 Ikea
🥾 Walk
🍿 Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
“Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems” – James Somers°
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more.
[…] Time is especially valuable. So as we learn that a task is slow, an especial cost accrues to it. Whenever we think of doing the task again, we see how expensive it is, and bail.
That’s why speed matters.
[…] The prescription must be that if there’s something you want to do a lot of and get good at—like write, or fix bugs—you should try to do it faster.
That doesn’t mean be sloppy. But it does mean, push yourself to go faster than you think is healthy.
[…] Being fast is fun. If you’re a fast writer, you’ll constantly be playing with new ideas. You won’t be bogged down in a single dread effort. And because your to-do list gets worked off, you’ll always be thinking of more stuff to add to it.
I have a tendency to try and perfect things and do them too well. ‘Good enough’ is something I need to say way more often.
I’ve known that for a while. But what this article made me realise is that if I am faster – and tasks are less arduous – I might be more likely to start tasks. And struggling to start tasks is something I severely suffer from daily.
I’m going to start right now, in fact.
I have blog post I drafted earlier. I’m not going to perfect it. Instead I’m going to set myself a 15 minute timer and get it published.
I’ve been considering writing a “Working With Me” document for some time. But I always feel like it’s a bit… much.
I stumbled upon this persons one on GitHub and I rather like it.
It’s simple and to the point (no pun intended). And gives a good overview without going into the weeds.
If I ever do write my own I think I’ll follow their 👆 lead.
Update: In fact, I’ve created a generic template for it, based on his (I hope you don’t mind Andy). The .md file is here.
The permalink structure for the posts on this blog are like: https://elliot.my/1234.
I like it because it’s short. And this blog is for short posts. It works.
However, the number comes from the post_id. And it just doesn’t feel very resilient if I have to backup and restore this blog on a new server, for example. In my head the post_id will be different.
Apparently it won’t be an issue though. It’s stored in the blogs WordPress MySQL database. So if I can restore the blog and its posts, then I can restore the post_id‘s too. So I guess I’m comfortable with that.
However, if I can’t restore the blog automatically due to some sort of awful data loss, and have to restore more manually I might be in trouble.
Because if the structure is like https://elliot.my/2024/10/18/title-of-post it’s fairly easily to manually recreate, as long as I know the date and title of the post.
Or let’s say I want to move this blog off WordPress onto Hugo. Hugo will easily create URLs that match, again going off the date and title.
But with https://elliot.my/1234 I’m going to have to manually tell it what the permalink is.
I’m probably worrying about nothing. It’s unlikely I’m going to ever manually restore this blog. If I do, I’ll probably have bigger things to worry about.
The post_id still makes me nervous. But I’m going to keep using it, as I like the short URLs.
One more thing. The post_id isn’t really a post ID. Every media upload and post revision/draft has a post_id too.
My last blog post had an ID of 433. The one before that 430. As I’d obviously hit ‘Save draft’ a few times.
A concern I had was how quickly the number would climb. If it’s the four hundreds after 28 posts and 8 days, what will the number be in 1 year? Or 5 years?
Assuming a similar pace:
After one year: around 20,000.
After five years: around 100,000.
I think having a six digit ID after five years is fine. I mean Twitter has 20 digits or so.
Terminally ill could end their life if two doctors and a judge agree – The Times
A judge and two doctors will have to agree that terminally ill patients can be helped to end their lives under a proposed law to be introduced on Wednesday.
I am for assisted dying. As long as reasonable safe guards are in place, people should be able to end their life if they so wish.
This bill is just for the terminally ill who have 6-12 months to live. But it’s a start.
The bill is expected to pass.
I envy people who can be productive in a coffee shop or office. My ideal working condition is a a dark, windowless pit devoid of light and people.
Cheating alleged after men’s world conker champion found with steel chestnut – The Guardian°
The winner, 82-year-old David “King Conker” Jakins that he used a steel conker to win.
This is his first time winning the competition, after 47 years of trying (since 1977).
To be honest, after 47 years I’d be tempted to cheat to win too.
The chap who lost in the men’s final against “King Conker” said:
“My conker disintegrated in one hit, and that just doesn’t happen … I’m suspicious of foul play and have expressed my surprise to organisers.”
I love stories like this.
And I’m pleased and surprised to see it get attention from both Hacker News and Sky News (video).
Dave Winer has been talking about how he’s hooked up his WordPress blog to Mastodon.1 He raved about the possibilities it opens up. But he was light about how to do actually go about setting it up.
Click the checkbox of ‘Enable Blog-Profile’ in the settings of the plugin.
That’s it? After that it seems like it just works. For example, you can follow this elliot.my blog by searching @blog@elliot.my in Mastodon of other ActivityPub sites. Here’s the profile on Mastodon.cloud and Micro.blog.
I’m hoping this post will show up!
Update: this is me doing an update to see if it gets picked up by the Fediverse.
Update 2: it only bloodly works! Not only the post – even the body of the post appears! But also the edits. The edit I’m writing right now I’m sure will be picked up.
Update 3: Mastodon updates when I update here, but Micro.blog doesn’t. Oh well.
I’m getting old. Not because I turned 33 yesterday. But because ‘late nights’ are now defined as going to bed late enough to miss the start of BBC Radio 3’s “Night Tracks” at 10pm.
I’ve tried writing several email newsletters down the years. Every time I lost interest immediately.
For me there’s just something inherently uninteresting and unexciting about newsletters. They reek of promotion and desperation.
Blogs are a digital living room where I can share my ideas and thoughts with whoever drops by.
And if I’m writing on the web, I want to write on the web. With things like blogrolls and reblogs, trackbacks and pingbacks, atom feeds and webmentions, via’s and hat tips.
Blogs will always be my emotional and technological home.
How does my ADHD manifest? Mostly as accidental cardio from running up and down the stairs 20 times a day.
When you review things on Plex your friends can now see them. I love this. I trust my friend’s opinion over a critic or even IMDB/RT/LB/etc.
I’m not going to use it for planning, but for J3T (Just 3 Things). On paper anyway (no pun intended).
Each morning I’ll sit down with my to-do list and chose my work and personal J3T for that day.
I’ve decided to write up my favourite 500 songs. I expect to be done in about 3 years.
Update: I’ve changed it to 100 songs. 500 is too many. 100 is good because you actually have to think about if it’s worthy or not. With 500 you could have pretty much all my favourite songs. Also, the list is ranked from most to ‘least’ favourite. That would be impossible to do with 500 songs.
The more I use Gemini the more I want to sell my Google (Alphabet) stock.
Every now and then it comes1 up a winner and somehow solves a problem over LLM’s couldn’t. But most of the time it’s utterly terrible.2
I love a cutesy nickname. But I draw the line at “doggo”.
There’s just something about it that oddly enrages me.
It reminds me of cringe reddit slang from 2012.
As far as I can tell, you can’t schedule a post to be published in the WordPress iOS app?
Update: you can. You have to hit ‘Publish’ and then it gives you the option. Not the best decision, as I presumed when I hit ‘Publish’ it will publish right away.
Me (middle) on my first day of secondary school.
I mostly just get sad when I look at photos of me as kid.
The hope, wonder and expectation of life is still there on my face, alive and well.
Adulthood is a sham.
I am trying my very best to highlight multiple paragraphs in the WordPress iOS app. And it just isn’t letting me.
For the past few months my background sleep noise of choice has been BBC Radio 3.
But for the past week I’ve been going to bed a bit later, meaning Night Tracks is over and ‘Round Midnight is on instead.
I like jazz. But it’s not exactly sleeping music (some of it is. But not as a rule).
At least tonight I’m going to bed evenlater than usual and it will be finished soon and Through the Night will take over.
Yesterday’s post was over 1,700 words. Not too bad.
I won’t be able to keep that up of course. But I’m pleased my first day was active.
It was fun brain dumping to be honest.
Today I’m grateful for… vision.
An obvious one to be grateful for, I know. But sometimes I think about how much it sucks to not be able to see – if I think about it too much it stresses me out.
It’s such an essential part of being alive. Not just for convenience, but for… everything.
Talking of blindness. There’s a TikToker I like called Ellie Wallwork (@somewhatellie).
She does a series called ‘things I didn’t know about vision’. It’s interesting to see her learn about the oddities of sight and the world. Like:
Seeing out of one eye is not the same as seeing out of both eyes.
You can see individual raindrops falling.
Your lips are not the same colour as the rest of your face.
You can see the moon in the sky.
Shadows change shape, depending on where the sun is.
She is also gay (or maybe bisexual. She says she’s ‘queer’, and I’m never sure if that covers bi people too (also the ‘taking back’ of the word queer, from slur to acceptable description again is interesting)). And it got me thinking about blind people and attraction.
Are blind people more likely to be gay or bi? I wonder if the differences between sexes are less obvious when blind.
Though I’m not so sure. I think if you’re a straight man, you’d still find men unattractive when blind. The masculine voice and energy alone is more than enough differentiation.
It was 0°C when I awoke this morning. Winter is coming.
Song of the Day: Queen of the Slipstream on “Poetic Champions Compose” by Van Morrison.
And honourable mention to “I Forgot That Love Exists”, which sounds great with headphones.
I’ve decided to write up my favourite 500 songs. I expect to be done in about 3 years.
Robbie Robertson in The Last Waltz is my style icon (well, if I had the balls to wear it).
I can’t sleep if I have even the remotest whiff that there’s an eyelash in my eye. I’m scarred someone bad will result of it being in my eye for circa 8 hours.
The rest of the day:
“The Substance” at the cinema. Weird, good.
Steak dinner at Prime with my girlfriend in celebration of my birthday tomorrow.
“The Guard”. First time watching it since I saw it on release at the cinema. It’s good. The mood and humour is right up my street.
A ‘traditional’ blog doesn’t suit me in many ways, because most of the thoughts I want to write/blog/post about are fleeting, short or minor.
So a Micro blog, Tumblelog or Twitter is the best place for it. But I still like the idea of it being on a ‘proper’ blog that I own, control and run. Like WordPress or Hugo.
I also weirdly don’t like the idea for a URL/post for each entry. The text is often too small. I like it grouped on a daily basis.
I’ve been keeping a Daily Log in Obsidian via jrnl for a while and I like it. But maybe I should give a blog another go.
Dave Winer’s scripting.com works how I want this to work – grouped by day. And with each ‘thought’ being linkable as it’s own URL (something I might not easily achieve with WordPress).
But I’m going to give it a go. Here’s my first day. Set to auto-publish at 23:59 on Thursday, October 10, 2024. More thoughts to follow below (I hope).
Started another This Country watch. It’s so good. It has a similar feel to Detectorists. Just a lot less genteel.
It’s nice watching it with my girlfriend, who hasn’t seen it before. Some films and TV shows are much better with company. Comedy and horror especially.
I have this weird thing where I have to catch my tiredness. I feel tired for a spell and if I don’t take advantage of it within 30 minutes or so then the tiredness quickly disappears and not only can I not sleep, I can’t sleep for many hours. Often falling asleep sometime between 3 and 6 am.
I have a number of Habits that I try and do every day. But I have ADHD, so I’m lucky if I do them once a week. Maybe I should include if I have or haven’t done my habits on this blog. Obviously no one is reading, but it is ‘public’, so will make me somewhat accountable, and feel embarrassed if I don’t do it.
The WordPress iOS app is both very well put together and polished, and also at the same time extremely buggy and weird behaving. I’ve only really mostly tested it out as a text letter thus far. And whilst it hasn’t been utterly terrible, it hasn’t been particularly a nice experience.
Though maybe that’s just a nature of text on the iPhone. It’s always been an awful awful experience.
I wonder what saves more battery on an iPhone: putting it in airplane mode, or low power mode? Maybe LWP turns off loads of battery-intensive background tasks and saves the most battery power. But to me the king is still airplane mode – rightly or wrongly.
I uploaded an audio file to the blog. It worked earlier, but now it isn’t? No idea why.
This WordPress blog is a Docker container, and it’s been surprisingly reliable out of the box thus far (more than any installation I’ve had). I hope it’s not Docker’s fault.
One of the issues with Dropbox is that the least amount of storage it offers is 2 TB at £8/mo. That’s overkill for lots of people – myself included.
I’ve recently transitioned away from Dropbox for that very reason. I don’t want to pay £8/mo anymore when I only need around 100 GB of storage.
It would be great if, like iCloud and Google Drive, it offered something like 200 GB at £2/mo. Well, it does. Kind of.
You can buy different amounts of storage through the Lenovo marketplace. On paper anyway.
The purchase didn’t go through for me. I’m guessing because it’s US only, and I’m in the UK? I tried putting in a US address. But maybe my bank details show as being from the UK?
Oh well. I’m actually a big fan of Dropbox. Sure its Mac client uses too much RAM. But it does exactly what I need. I just wish I didn’t have to pay for much.
As I mentioned above, I’ve dropped Dropbox. I’m currently experimenting with Syncthing and Nextcloud.
Both seem to be having occasional issues with .xxx folders.
And that makes lose confidence in them. But, here’s the thing. For all I know Dropbox had loads of sync issues but it just never announced them to me. It’s hard to judge how reliable a sync/backup service is. Because some are very quiet and some are very vocal. But that doesn’t mean one is more reliable than the other.
Update: Syncthing didn’t like those files because my Mac user (elliotclowes) only had Read Only permissions. Once I gave myself Read & Write permissions it worked fine. Odd. I’d imagine I have plenty of files knocking about that are Read Only? Maybe I’m wrong.
My Mac’s home directory (Users/elliotclowes) is full of hidden folders. I would like to tidy them up. But I better not. I’m sure they’ll be things that I think are from an old app that are actually really important.
I have a big local Unraid server that stores all my media files as well as some backups. Because it’s 50+ TB it’s tough to backup.
Depending on the folder it’s backed up to either a Synology, or one of several external hard drives. A bit of a pain.
I use rsync currently. I thought git-annex might make my life easier as it’s meant to take some of the headache out of working out where files are backed up to.
I had a good look into it, asking GPT-4o a bunch of questions on it. It seems a bit complicated though. Too overkill for my needs. It’s not that annoying having backups across multiple locations as it’s all done via a backups.sh script. So is simple enough really.
I also like how rsync handles deleted files, keeping them around in an _Archived folder. git-annex has file version history. But again, it was all a bit complicated.
I have done some changes to my backups though.
I’ve created a backups-remote.sh script to backup some files to my dedicated Ubuntu server in the cloud.
And I’ve created a note in Obsidian which lists all the various folders I backup and where and how they’re backed up.
For example:
MacBook
Synology / Time Machine / MacBook
MacBook/elliotclowes
Google Drive / Arq / MacBook
MacBook/elliotclowes/Dropbox
Mac mini / Syncthing / MacBook
One of the most consistently good frozen dinners is Fish & Chips – as long as there’s a decent amount of fish inside, and the batter is not awful.
Pair it with some mushy peas. Smother it with salt and vinegar. Lovely.
I couldn’t finish “Speak No Evil”. I don’t like horror at the best of times – it’s just not a genre I enjoy.
It’s not that I get scarred. I might get a bit anxious or tense – which I very much did in this film. It’s more that it somehow annoys me and generally stresses me out. But maybe I just don’t want to admit that I’m scared?
Anyway, “Speak No Evil” is solid enough. It’s just not for me.
James McAvoy is tremendous as ever.
I’m one of those people who would prefer for a cast to made up of people I’ve never seen before. It really helps with the realism. But I make an exception for McAvoy.
He’s not enough to counteract all of that. When I see nearly every other actor act I still see them. And even an unholy amount of makeup can’t really change that.
But something happens with McAvoy behind the eyes. He feels like a totally different person. He feels like the character. Even when he still looks like James McAvoy.
I’m realising more and more that I’m not fully enjoying life if I don’t have some sort of tech software/hardware I’m currently fiddling with.
I don’t know if it’s my ADHD, but I do need some sort of hobby or interest in the forefront of my mind. Otherwise I find life boring.
But that can be expensive. Tech is a better option. Because usually it’s the software side that interests me (and that I can afford).
Like at the moment, I’m fiddling with:
Different file syncing solutions.
Different backup solutions.
Using Docker to make having a Ubuntu server in the cloud easier
I’ve used Docker containers before for various things. But never really got to grasps with them. Or used them to their full potential.
For example, this WordPress blog is a Docker container. I’ve never done that before. I’ve either relied one one-click install tools. Or tried to install it manually (with difficulty).
Don’t get me wrong, Docker has a lot of pitfalls. But when it works well, it’s very nice indeed. It being contained is just lovely.
Writing on this blog.
I already have way too many websites. But if this WordPress blog sticks I’ll probably transfer combine it with Clowes.blog and move that blog from Micro.blog to here
It’s been years since the WordPress Gutenberg editor came out. I still strongly dislike it. It tries to combine writing and designing into the same interface and it just doesn’t work. It’s distracting, buggy and cumbersome.
Okay, this WordPress workflow is already annoying. Mostly the editor. It doesn’t auto update. And I understand that. I always refresh the page/app before writing.
But on the app it obviously failed. So I wrote something and hit ‘Update’. Only for it to announce a conflict. Why not here‽ It wasn’t even a conflict with what I had just written. It was from hours ago! And of course once I chose to ‘resolve’ it I lost what I had written.
Oh well. But my own sake, so I can write about it again later when it isn’t so late: it was about Life Logs and adding them onto here.
My girlfriend has YouTube ambient videos on whilst she sleeps.
But she no longer has Premium, so she gets ads.
She’s listening to most peaceful music. Only to be disturbed by a loud advert for a mobile network.
I don’t know how she stands it.
I love a door you can open just by pushing it. Sure, the doorknob is busted and it should be fixed. But I won’t. It makes my life joyously easier.
