elliot.my

  • This is a fediverse test.

  • 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.

    Blog post. Video demo.

  • One of the consistently good sources for interesting websites or news is the Pinboard ‘popular bookmarks‘ page.

    I visit it everyday.

  • I’ve only just noticed that there’s a ‘Duplicate’ tab option in Chrome. News to me!

    For me it’s still slower than copying the tabs URL and pasting it into a new tab.

    But it’s amazing how you can see something hundreds, or thousands, of times and yet never see it.

  • I was gifted a Field Notes 56-Week Planner for my birthday.

    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

    1. Another footnote. ↩︎
    2. And I’m using the ‘Advanced’ model too. ↩︎

  • 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 even later 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.

    Films. Trees. Humans. Mountains. Writing. Computers. Yourself.

    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.

    A great list of some great, still active forums.

    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.

    A good classical album to sleep to (Spotify).

    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.

  • Me on my first day of secondary school (I think).