🤷‍♂️ Life

• Night in Perth ahead of Monday at work in Blairgowrie. Too easy to fall into bad eating habits — the place we stay at Perth has some GREAT food options — whilst I’m away for the night (see the impact on my weight!), and it pushed me out of routine for the entire week so didn’t make it to the gym at all either.
• However, I did manage a few walks as I start to focus on “just moving” again, as I’ve got a weird back/muscle spasm thing going on so a bit limited.
• Mother-in-law was in hospital for an op this week, so naturally Becca has been a bit distracted by that.
• Had Friday off, got a few little jobs done that have been on my list for ages, and some time to chillax too.
• Built a little Apple Shortcuts to let me post direct to my blog, more on that later.
• Spent today at the Science Centre with Jack, we have a “passport” so go fairly often. Great to be there when it opens as it’s so quiet. He loves it, 4hrs of playing and learning today. I’m knackered!
  

📚 Read

• Through A Glass, Darkly by Helen McCloy – a rather odd book sort of centred around the paranormal. Part amateur detective thriller, part commentary on the “monied class”, I am firmly in a 3 out of 5 mindset after reading it.
• Better the Blood by Michael Bennett– not long started, fairly general crime/killer storyline but with Auckland Māori history thrown in, quite interesting so far.
  

📰 Considered

• Tim Cook on Shaping the Future of Apple – Interesting read, particularly his comments around THAT Trump presentation and his approach to people like the orange faced buffoon.
• Apple at 50 Rewind Video – Nice look back at 50 years of this influential company.
• Daring Fireball: More on Apple’s Fun ‘Rewind’ Video – So many details I wouldn’t have noticed, love this kind of thing.
• Reasonable Doubt at 30 – When music that I ‘discovered’ hits these milestones I invariably just feel old, but I can still remember hearing this album for the first time and realising it was ‘different’ to a lot of the rap I’d been listening to. Game changer.
• College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work – No school like the old school, am I right?!
• Emoji Season is Open 🏃‍➡️ – by Jennifer Daniel – I’ve read a few articles like this over the years, and the depth of thought that goes into something as seemingly simple as an emoji never fails to amaze me.
• Everything Flows: Robyn at Assai Records – Well this is just lovely. Nice to hear nice things about someone you always thought was nice. The wonderfully talented Robyn.
• The Old Internet is Still Here – As someone who has been blogging since 1999, I can confirm. Great article.
• Seeing like a spreadsheet – Love them or hate them, you can’t deny them! They are still many business running on spreadsheets, for better or worse.

📺 Watched

• Still re-watching Schitt’s Creek (one or two episodes every one or two nights, but we are close to the end now).
• Manosphere – wow. These emotionally stunted, faux intellectual men are so unaware of their selves, so closed off from reality that I struggle to even understand them. But I feel like I need to so I can keep my son on a better path. Been loving him a bit harder since I watched this.
• Hitler & the Nazis: Evil on Trial – Always informative to remember (and learn) how these monsters came to be, how much support they had in Germany before it was too late, and the utter horrors they went on to inflict on the world. Hard to watch. More people should watch it.
• Artemis II launch – Still awe inspiring. The world may be going to shit, and there is an argument that the money for this could’ve been better spent elsewhere (very valid) but this still captivates my excitement. I’ve posted the live data tracker link already but tracking the timeline of events is thrilling just to read.
  

🎧 Listened

• Creature of Habit by Courtney Barnett– as ever, eminently listenable, gorgeously crafted songs. Rarely puts a foot wrong but always sounds fresh.
• Fred again.. & Thomas Bangalter DJ Set – the latter better know as one of the guys in some house dance music outfit called Daft Punk? I dunno, they must’ve been pretty good cos this set is wall to wall banging beats (or whatever the kids say these days).
  

🩻 Health

• Current Weight: 113.4kg. Back up cos I moved less and ate more.
• Avg. Sleep: 6h 39mins. Big drop as Jack was a little restless a couple of nights this week, definitely feeling the difference in energy/mood levels.
  

👨‍💻 Tech

• Bye bye Folio – as a replacement for Pocket it was ok, but I used the Pocket RSS feed more than I realised, so ditching this and building my own “capture article to read” Shortcut (currently writing to a txt file), which I’ll eventually convert to push out an RSS feed too.
• Quick Notes Post ShortCut – built with assistance from ChatGPT, a slightly frustrating yet amazing process. Full blog post coming soon!
• Metapen Pencil D1 – to help me markup the draft of the novel I’m slowly working on, I thought “PDF and Apple Pencil” would be perfect. Except I lost my Apple Pencil years ago and never really used it. Thankfully this one is just as good, if not a little better with additional functionality by button click.
  

🗓️ Next Week

• Focussing on moving and eating habits. Need to renew our broadband deal with Virgin Media. And largely get back into a routine.