[{"meta":{"title":"App defaults","date":"2023-12-03","subtitle":"Always open with","titleBgColor":"#fff","titleColor":"#05f","categories":["personal","web","design","ux"]},"path":"/blog/app-defaults","content":{"html":"

Jumping on the bandwagon. There’s more stuff on my Uses page.

📨 Mail Client: Gmail
📮 Mail Server: Gmail
📝 Notes: iOS Notes and Notion
✅ To-Do: Things
📷 iPhone Photo Shooting: iOS Camera
🟦 Photo Management: iOS Photos
📆 Calendar: Apple Calendar and Google Calender for work
📁 Cloud File Storage: iCloud
📖 RSS: Reeder
🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: Contacts
🌐 Browser: Arc
💬 Chat: Slack, Discord, Apple Messages, WhatsApp, Signal, and Messenger
🔖 Bookmarks: Arc and Raindrop
📑 Read It Later: Pocket
📜 Word Processing: Notion, Google docs
📈 Spreadsheets: Google Docs
📊 Presentations: lol
🛒 Shopping Lists: Notion
🍴 Meal Planning: Notion
💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: Google Sheets
📰 News: The Internet
🎵 Music: Apple Music, Spotify, and recently Doppler
🎤 Podcasts: Apple Podcasts
🔐 Password Management: Secrets

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"RSS was a glimpse of a future","date":"2023-11-20","subtitle":"Future feeds","titleBgColor":"#894106","titleColor":"#ffc18e","categories":["web","tech","dev"]},"path":"/blog/rss-was-a-glimpse-of-a-future","content":{"html":"

About a year ago, I wrote a post when I got back into blogging and RSS. I’m still doing both of those things, but I’ve also been building a few more projects.

Some of the best things you can work on solve problems for yourself, and I wanted to build something that would collate all the exhibitions on at major cultural institutions in London. Normalised, searchable, filterable, and readable.

Nothing too wild I thought. I’ll just need to combine all the RSS feeds that the respective sites publish for their upcoming exhibitions. To my surprise, none of them had RSS feeds.

Interoperability on The Internet

I’ve made websites for half my life, and I’ve seen many things come and go. With the recent breakout of AI fever, one thing that came back to me, was the idea of The Semantic Web.

On that page, there’s an interesting quote from Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web:

I have a dream for the Web in which computers become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A “Semantic Web”, which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The “intelligent agents” people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Intelligent Agents? Although that sounds a lot like the current wave of AI chatbots, I think it could also mean something else.

Blogging as a standard

I remember when most major sites had RSS feeds. Big organisations rallied around the idea. My final project in University, was a graph dashboard with some very simple sentiment analysis of RSS feeds from major news sites.

That was 2011. I was able to build something that could pull in data from all these different sources and display it in a way that was useful to me.

Trying to pull together data for my exhibitions project left me dissapointed. The Tate, Natural History Museum, Wellcome Collection, V&A, and many others, were feedless. It’s been a long time since I saw the little orange badge, but I expected better from these cultural institutions.

Meaning in the madness

I think, that Blogs and RSS were a little taste of this semantic web.

Now, we’ve got many sophisticated ways of parsing and using this data, but it’s all at an OS level by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Google pushed the spec of Atom and RSS with Google Data and Kinds. We have some great extensions of content here - event start and end dates, locations, quality ratings for reviews, and people associated with the content.

Kinds a great idea. It’s what I hoped we had by now.

It’s just a shame that using and remixing the web is only capable by big companies.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"October 2023 Media Diet","date":"2023-10-31","subtitle":"Let's get spooky","titleBgColor":"#f47302","titleColor":"#000","categories":["personal","media","tv","movies"]},"path":"/blog/october-2023-media-diet","content":{"html":"

It’s the perfect day for a rundown of all the spooky things I’ve enjoyed this October.

Hereditary

Ari Aster can do no wrong. This one is about a family dealing with grief and the trauma that we inherit from our parents. It’s surprising, interesting, and brutal. Worth not watching the trailer below just to get the full impact.

\n\n

The Fall of the House of Usher

An Edgar Allen Poe anthology meets Succession by Mike Flanagan. Haunting of Hill House is one of my favourite things Netflix has done, but I thought that everything since then has been a bit … crap. Luckily, this time round he really smashed it. Bruce Greenwood is absolutely brilliant as a spooky Logan Roy.

\n\n

The Midnight Club

Last year’s Flanagan thing that somehow I missed. It’s OK and at least more interesting than some of the previous ones.

\n\n

A Quiet Place Part 2

I loved part 1. This one switches up the formula in a way that I won’t spoil, but it’s definitely influenced by The Last of Us.

\n\n

Old

It’s been a while since I watch a Shyamalan film. I enjoyed the inventiveness and unraveling of the situation. There’s a few real gruesome moments that make it extra fun.

\n\n

Cocoon

Cocoon is the new game from the designer behind the famous indie darlings, Limbo and Inside. Although not spooky, it’s definitely somewhere on the spectrum of bio-mechanical HR Giger-esque body horror.

You play as an alien humanoid bug thing exploring a World that contains orbs, which can contain other Worlds, which can contain other orbs, which can all effect each other.

\n\n

The end of Men In Black when aliens are playing marbles with is a good comparison.

I finished it today, and towards the end it had some amazing mind bending puzzles with ingenious solutions.

Unhonourable mentions

Insidious Chapter 2 was terrible and Malignant was so bad we turned it off after 30 minutes.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Boxed sandwiches","date":"2023-10-6","subtitle":"Why do the Brits love sandwiches in boxes?","titleColor":"#fff","titleBgColor":"#9e1a30","categories":["culture","food"]},"path":"/blog/boxed-sandwiches","content":{"html":"

I have lived in London for 10 years now. There are many things I love about this city, but one thing I don’t understand is why everyone here loves a sandwich in a box?

It’s pretty standard in Ireland for small shops to have a deli counter. Fresh sandwiches are a staple of the University student diet.

In many parts of Ireland, the Chicken Fillet roll has reached a status shared only by holy artifacts.

\n\n

So I ask myself, why does Britain love sandwiches that come in boxes?

I have a theory.

Rail bread

Recently, I watched an interesting a show on whatever Channel 4’s streaming platform is called this month - The Secret World Of Sandwiches.

Look, it was a very hungover day on the sofa, this was a good watch.

Anyways, in the show, it charts the history of high street sandwich chains in the UK.

Before there was M&S and Pret, the main place you bought boxed sandwiches was on trains. The food car on National Rail trains sold simple sandwiches, an easy thing to sell from a place without a hot kitchen.

Marks and Spencer’s saw an opportunity to sell better sandwiches from branches based within train stations.

My hot sandwich take

Ireland’s reliance on train infrastructure is minimal compared to the UK, which means that Irish people don’t have the same emotional or historical relationship to train travel as British people.

No train travel, no boxed sandwiches.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Input Me To Death","date":"2023-09-12","subtitle":"Please try again","titleBgColor":"#fff","titleColor":"#f00","categories":["personal","web","design","ux"]},"path":"/blog/input-me-to-death","content":{"html":"

I’ve filled in a lot of forms lately.

We’ve been in our house for two years and now we’re doing renovations. We’re buying kitchens, radiators, and doors. All of those require setting up a new account to checkout.

Our home insurance is also up, so time to shop around for a new deal.

I had to report a missed bin collection to my local council.

I’ve filled in a lot of forms lately.

90% of them barely fucking worked.

The worst offenders

Render.com

Even developers, when faced with this super helpful error, might struggle to create a new database.

$\"A$

How am I meant to understand this?

After some work it became apparent it didn’t like dashes in the database name.

Admiral insurance

I couldn’t add Lila as a second driver to my car insurance because it thought her phone number was invalid.

Waltham Forest Council

The date picker was a dropdown of recent dates. Upon submission, the form errored and told me I hadn’t entered the date in the right format.

American Express

For some reason it masks some characters in the username field when logging in with a saved username, like a password field would. Occasionally, the browser remembers your username with the dots as the characters like example••••. This isn’t your username though, so now you’re logging in with the wrong username.

One Time Passcodes

Masking the input for a one time passcodes might seem secure, but it makes it more likely that you lose your position as you glance back and forward between your phone.

Barclay’s

I’m a Monzo customer, but I use Barclay’s for a few things. When did high street banks get so complicated for logging in? You’ve got a membership number, memorable word, 5 digit passcode, and an app based pin sentry. How are you meant to keep track of those things without writing them down somewhere, thus making them insecure?

I also use Secrets for password management, but you can see how someone who doesn’t use a password manager would just write these on a post-it note and stick it to their screen.

One shout out

Over the years, giving companies, and/or friends that worked at said companies, some grief about their UX, sometimes managed to get features built. My contribution to the Monzo codebase, was getting Apple’s OTP autocomplete attribute added to Monzo’s 3D secure prompt.

It’s one of my favourite features in iOS. It’s even extended to emails with OTP in iOS 17.

Loading pains

There’s been plenty of critique recently of single page apps, but my biggest issue with them is focussing on rendering anything first.

Then, I watch a loading animation, while I wait on the thing that I wanted to actually load. It sometimes feels like I need knowledge of how the proverbial sausage is made in order to eat the sausage.

It’s not just bad, it’s infuriating.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"The Safe","date":"2023-08-30","subtitle":"Entering and breaking","titleBgColor":"#aaa","titleColor":"#fff","categories":["personal"]},"path":"/blog/the-safe","content":{"html":"

Two years ago, I made an amazing discovery.

My girlfriend Lila, and I, were a week into home ownership. Our first home together. We were still unpacking and deciding where to store everything.

It was a Saturday morning. A friend was dropping round to give us his old drill. Just as he arrived, I crawled into the cupboard under the stairs to start packing away our camping and festival gear. Summer things that wouldn’t be used for another ten months.

I spotted a black cube to my left.

A surprise feature that wasn’t in the listing.

A mystery.

A locked safe.

By my own admission, I’m terminally online. I remember the locked safe thread on Reddit. Finding a locked safe is a dream come true.

So we now own a locked safe. Next thing is to break into it.

Attempted break in #1

I was sure to capitalise on this discovery by sharing it online. Straight away I posted it on Reddit and Twitter. The comments had the same thoughts that I had - what was in it?

I tried to move it out from under the stairs, but it wouldn’t budge. A couple of minutes with a crowbar moved it enough to shine a torch behind it and see that it was bolted to the wall from the inside. Now we know it’s both locked and not moving from that spot.

The immovable secure storage under our stairs wasn’t a huge priority, so it sat there, silently taunting me. What secrets did it hold?

I had to know.

Attempted break in #2

Months go by.

Friends ask me “How’s the house going?” only to cut off my answer with the real question - “What about the safe?”

As part of some DIY we got the front door lock changed. I asked the locksmith can he crack safes. No, but he know’s someone who can.

WhatsApp messages go back and forward. Photos and explanations.

Then, silence.

He stopped replying.

The mystery lived on.

Breaking in

So now it’s August 2023. A Bank Holiday weekend. We’re starting renovations on the downstairs. My mate Chris is our plumber and working on moving our boiler. I mention The Safe. It’s next to our gas main, so he had a look.

“We’ll have that out today”

Finally!

The day has come.

Thanks to my prior crowbar attempt, he was able to get behind it and lever it out. It pulled away from the wall leaving behind one of the bolts, and several dents from crowbars.

Chris took a hammer and crowbar to the back of it.

It didn’t last long.

We were in.

$\"The$ \n $\"Getting$ \n $\"Breaking$ \n $\"Finally$

Finally cracking the safe.

Inside we found absolutely nothing.

Sometimes, the mystery is more fun than solving it.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Surprise & Delight","date":"2023-08-21","subtitle":"Just for fun","titleBgColor":"color(display-p3 1 0.784 0.2)","titleColor":"color(display-p3 0.424 0 1 / 1)","categories":["games","ui","design","software"]},"path":"/blog/surprise-and-delight","content":{"html":"

I just got my Playdate a few days ago. A tiny yellow square of fun. From the moment you turn it on, it provides so much joy. I had a smile on my face even during initial setup. Once you get going, the intro tutorial that teaches you the controls is a delight.

\n\n

Many years ago, I worked in an Apple Store when wired earphones were common. They broke constantly. We always opened new iPods for various reasons so had hundreds of spare earphones sat in a drawer. When customers came in with broken earphones, we walked away with “Let me see what I can do” and came back with a new set. No charge, no faff, no paperwork. We called these Surprise & Delight earphones.

I always loved this term. It’s a nicer way of saying “Under promise and over deliver”. In software, if a user clicks on a button, why not use that interaction to add an extra bit of fun?

Even after a few hours of use, my Playdate is full of surprise & delight. New software is literally unwrapped by two robot arms. It takes 2 presses of the lock button to unlock it, each press opening a closed eye on the little guy’s ~~screen~~ face.

I can’t wait to play with it more.

Juicy

After Wordle was sold, I listened to an episode of the Syntax podcast which interviewed Josh Wardle. In it, he brought up a talk on the concept of Juice in game design.

\n\n

From the description of the talk:

A juicy game feels alive and responds to everything you with do tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input.

Substitute game with software and you realise just how boring software can be. With the move away from skeuomorphism, we lost some of that juice.

It doesn’t have to be that way though! We’re in an era of modern browsers with CSS transitions and animation libraries. Go wild if you like, or don’t. Maybe not if you work on a Will writing service or some serious healthcare software. I’m not saying we should go back to wood textured shelving backgrounds, but think about what you’re working on and what extra things you can do to make it feel tactile.

The Playdate is so fun to use it’s all I could think of from the moment of unboxing. The box even says have fun on the inside. The juice that Panic added adds so much to it. Instead of being just another gadget, it becomes this little yellow robot of fun.

I think software could do with having more juice.

\n","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Apple Music Taste","date":"2023-07-16","subtitle":"Dance to the beat of the drum","titleBgColor":"#fc3c44","titleColor":"#fff","categories":["music","tech","apple"]},"path":"/blog/apple-music-taste","content":{"html":"

A few months ago I decided to give Apple Music a shot.

I’ve been a Spotify user on and off for years. Since I DJ, I resisted for a long time and stuck to listening to music that I had downloaded over the last decade and a half.

Eventually, I went all in on Spotify. My music collection still lives locally, since it’s required for DJing using Traktor. With my job and personal life existing on 2 different laptops, it also made it easy to listen to the same music everywhere.

In our cloud based modern life, for most people, Spotify is now the way that music is discussed, shared, sourced, and listened to. Going to a party or away on a trip with friends? There’s probably a Spotify playlist in a WhatsApp group chat for you to add songs to. Spotify has slowly became the default.

So why switch?

Colly wrote up a good review that echos a lot of my feelings. But for me, there were 2 big reasons.

Offline support

I’m begging people who work in Tech to try and use their products with Airplane Mode on.

Spotify must be trying to hit an API every chance it gets, because it constantly throws up an error alert when it doesn’t have network access. Although I work from home 100% of the time these days, when I take the tube and want to listen to some music, I don’t want to be told off for having no network access when I’m several metres underground.

Apple Music will happily work away without network access.

The Apple Ecosystem

I’ve been a Mac user for more than 15 years. I’ve got an iPhone, Airpod Pros, Apple Watch, and a personal 14” Macbook Pro, along with one for work. It’s safe to say I’m in deep when it comes to Apple’s products.

I started running again a few months ago with my Apple Watch providing the soundtrack. Spotify is patchy at best on the Watch. Switching from my MacBook Pro, to the Phone, and to the Watch, always caused hassle.

Apple Music has no such problems. The ecosystem provides.

Back to Spotify

I haven’t cancelled my Spotify subscription though. I still bounce back and forward between them.

There’s one main reason for that - my music taste.

It’s safe to say, my music taste is pretty weird. I mostly lean into electronic music, with a big affinity for hardcore and all its’ subgenres and off shoots. I’ll also listen to ambient and lo-fi. Or maybe even hip-hop and grime.

Spotify understands this and serves me up accurate recommendations. My Daily Mixes are segmented in a way that’s easy to understand what music informed their contents. It’s easy to pick what I want to listen to at any given moment. Discover Weekly and Release Radar are great ways to dip into unfamiliar and newer tracks.

Apple’s offering on that front is OK, with their Daily Mix equivalent of Chill, New Music, Favourites, and Get Up! playlists. I prefer deciding on the music style, rather than what mood Apple has decided that it evokes.

When I do find an artist that I like on Spotify, I’ll fire up their Artist Radio and see what else they bring me to. Apple Music has the same functionality, seemingly just a bit more hidden than Spotify. Some big name artists also have 4 playlists that Apple Music creates: Essentials, Deep Cuts, Inspired By, and Influences.

I’ll be the first to admit that most of my music isn’t that popular or well known, but the only artist that I regularly listen to that has these playlists was Aphex Twin.

$\"Aphex$

Aphex Twin’s playlists

For most artists, I’m lucky if they have 1 of these standard 4.

Lastly, the Browse section of Apple Music is meaningless to me. I don’t want Pop, R&B, Soul, or chart Dance music. I’d rather some algorithm recommends me accurate stuff than a hand curated page of drivel.

I don’t care about Playlists Apple loves. I want Playlists I love.

$\"Apple's$

Who the hell are all these people?

Algo-rhythms

I’ll probably stick with both for now. Apple’s ecosystem helps a lot. Spotify’s continual push towards Podcasts within the same space doesn’t work so well for me and Apple keeping them separate is a nice bonus to my switch.

There’s some core things that Spotify could improve and make me go back 100%. Offline support and better predictability to switch device would probably do it.

Apple Music would really need to provide a better experience of personalisation to get me to go all in.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Monthnotes: June 2023","date":"2023-07-04","subtitle":"Hot hot heat","titleBgColor":"#ef3123","titleColor":"#fff","categories":["personal","monthnotes"]},"path":"/blog/monthnotes-june-2023","content":{"html":"

Hotted June on record for the UK. It certainly felt like it.

Everything’s fine.

It was Lila’s birthday right at the start of the month, when we were in Manchester. It was hot there, but nice to wonder round all the breweries and enjoy the weather. The warmth continued right into the next 2 weeks.

Mobile madness

I spent most of the month working on getting a mobile MVP of CastRooms working. It was a big challenge, but I learnt a lot about browser behaviour on mobile devices. The M for us in MVP meant that we don’t have Twilio video calling working yet, but that’s future Tommy’s problem.

Old friends and late nights

The weekend after Manchester I went to a Deliveroo reunion at one of our old haunts in Fitzrovia. It was for the 10th anniversary of the company. I spent 5 years there, so there were a lot of familiar faces. I’m still good friends with a few of them, who I see every few weeks. It was really nice to catch up with people and find out what everyone is up to.

That night I was playing a set at a friend’s 40th birthday. So after a load of daytime pints I went home, ate some food, and had a disco nap before heading back out near midnight. It was at an old strip club in Shoreditch - which is now just a regular nightclub. She rented the basement function room. Pole still in the centre and little booths at the side for lap dances. Certainly up there with one of the stranger venues I’ve played at.

Field party

Another busy weekend had my flying back to Belfast on Thursday for a packed itinerary. My parents were away at the weekend, so I fit in some time to see them along with other family and old friends.

We went to a new pub, or new to me anyways - The Reporter.

Situated in an area which previously housed the various newspaper offices in the area (The Reporter. Get it?) it had walls full of newspaper clippings and photos of presumably some previous regulars.

$\"A$ \n $\"A$ \n $\"A$

Some photos from the night

It also had Neck Oil for £3.80, so it was light on the wallet.

The primary reason for being there was to go to a friend’s family farm and drink with a pile of lads. Good wholesome fun of getting drunk and sitting around a fire. The weather even held out. It was probably some of the best weather I’ve seen in Ireland.

Everything’s fine.

Honourable mentions

BBQs with friends are nice. We hosted a few and went to a few.
I’m still playing lots of Zelda. I’ve finished the 4 temples, but have no plans on ending the story for myself any time soon.
I played a little bit of the new season of Halo Infinite. I’m still enjoying it, but if I can ony play for 10 minutes sometimes it’s not enough time to find a game and have fun.
We watched all of Long Way Round, Long Way Down, and just this week, Long Way Up. Now I want to go and travel/cycle/motorbike round the world all the time.
We also rinsed Silo, so by the time the finale was up we were up to date. It’s good. Amazing set design. Everything looked like you’d expect if you were living in a Vault-tec Vault.
I listened to Behind The Bastards’ episodes on Vince McMahon of WWF/E and Stockton Rush of the recent Titanic sub disaster. Insane and funny in equal measures.

An extra honorable mention to me, for writing a blog post this month that wasn’t Monthnotes - Feeds for the soul.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Feeds for the soul","date":"2023-06-29","subtitle":"Really simple sites","titleBgColor":"#ff7800","titleColor":"white","categories":["internet","culture","rss"]},"path":"/blog/feeds-for-the-soul","content":{"html":"

2023 has been the year of big tech in some sort of self imposed death spiral. Management at Twitter and Reddit seem steadfast in fucking over their most diehard users.

For me, 2023 was the year that I got back into RSS feeds.

RSS is a breath of fresh air from the algorithmically produced stream of content that I see on traditional social media. Being able to control what I read, in what order, and when, is really nice.

I was a heavy user of both Reddit and Twitter. My Twitter use has dropped to almost zero, although I still read it every now and again. Reddit I’m not sure if I’ll give up soon, but it might happen the way things are going. RSS is slowly becoming the best way to read content on the internet - again.

In the spirit be the change you want to see in the World, I’ve changed my feed to have the full text. It wasn’t a conscious choice when I wrote the code for generating the RSS and it has been on my todo list for a while. It’s nice to change it and make the RSS experience better.

An ask for recommendations

On Mastodon, Ethan Marcotte posted asking for some recommendations.

\n\n

I responded with Brr.fyi. A blog from a worker at McMurdo Station. It’s a look into the mundane but fascinating things that go on when you put humans into one of the places on Earth that humans aren’t built for. What other kind of writing would give me an insight into all the different types of doors that they have?

Most of my feeds are Tech related or personal blogs, but here’s some others that I’m enjoying:

ooh.directory - a regularly updated directory, which has helped me populate my feeds
It’s Nice That - creative industries coverage
Bangkok Glutton - a foodie blog from someone living in Bangkok, but regular international posts
Bikepacking.com - articles about traveling long distances by bike
Kottke - the OG link blog and still as good as ever

Feed me!

I hope people give RSS feeds a chance. Maybe you’re giving it a second chance like I am?

If you’ve got any recommendations for me - hi@tommyp.org or @tommyp.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Monthnotes: May 2023","date":"2023-06-06","subtitle":"Bank holidays everywhere, but none of them relaxing","titleBgColor":"#1bf995","titleColor":"#951bf9","categories":["personal","monthnotes"]},"path":"/blog/monthnotes-may-2023","content":{"html":"

Music has the right to children ascending the throne

Right at the top of the month, I was at my favourite music festival getting destroyed and listening to stupid donk remixes. Much better than watching some fat fingered fuck sit on a gold chair.

Weird to be a staunch anti-monarchist and see it everywhere before and afterwards, but not during. Even on our way back on the Monday, we stopped in Birmingham Star City and they had a statue up. It was pretty ironic that a man who has never worked a day in his life was asking people to donate a day of unpaid labour to charities just after a horrific display of ostentation.

Bangface is where I get to hear all the music that I love and hang out with my friends that I only see once a year.

It’s a pretty special place to me.

We felt brutally sick afterwards, which wasn’t as much fun.

Venues

We’ve been browsing wedding venues and picked one that we think really suits us. We picked somewhere in North East London that is in a pretty area. Now comes the rest of the planning.

The last weekend in May had us at a wedding in Oxford. The venue was beautiful, and it was fun to go to another wedding while planning our own.

Wales

After Oxford, we drove a rental car out to Porthmadog in Wales. The Welsh Highlands is full of incredible landscapes.

We visited Portmerion one day, which is a surreal Italian style town right on the coast with some other mad stuff, like a chines style lake, and a dog cemetary.

$\"China$ \n $\"Portmerion\"$

Portmerion

We followed a little trail that took us out to a view point. The tide was way out, so the view was incredible.

$\"Estuary\"$ \n $\"Estuary\"$ \n $\"And$

Clouds passing over the sand like alien spaceships

On our second last day, we booked a boat trip out to a Puffin Island near Llanfairpwllgwyngyll. The wind was insane and we saw that other tour companies had cancelled their trips out that day. Our boat operator carried on. They took us further inland for a quick tour and only told us we wouldn’t head out towards the sea when we got back to the pier. It was pretty disappointing.

In Porthmadog, we went to a nearby pub on two of the nights. On the first night, a Tuesday, the Police were called after we left to deal with two drunk women. And then they were called again when one of the women tried to kick the door in. When we went back a few days later the barman told us the story. That evening, a family kicked off at being served a chicken wing with a pink tendon. They ate the rest of the wings and then due to some miscommunication when paying for what they had ate, the Police were nearly called again.

Wild scenes in Porthmadog.

The day after we left that where the highest temperature in the UK was too.

Manchester

Continuing our week away, we finished it in Manchester with some friends. Touring shops, pubs, taprooms, and restaurants. It was the FA Cup Final, Arctic Monkeys, and Coldplay, so it was a pretty busy weekend. I’ve been in Manchester a few times before, but this was the first time I properly got to explore it.

Honourable mentions

The Legend Of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom - Incredible fun. What a game. Full of slapstick comedy as I try to build contraptions to complete elaborate tasks only to completely fuck it up in a hilarious way.
Taskmaster Season 15 - Speaking of completing elaborate tasks and fucking it up in a hilarious way, Taskmaster is as good as ever.
Human Origins: 7 million years and counting - I bought it in the oldest bookshop in the world a few weeks back when I was in Lisbon, which seemed a little ironic to me given the subject matter. It’s been a nice read instead of doomscrolling.
Succession - Still the last episode to go, but I think it’s been spoiled for me.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Monthnotes: April 2023","date":"2023-05-1","subtitle":"Obrigado","titleBgColor":"#DA291C","titleColor":"#FFE900","categories":["personal","monthnotes"]},"path":"/blog/monthnotes-april-2023","content":{"html":"

I started writing this straight after my last one. That’s some personal growth right there. I did only manage this sentence, but still.

Work

Rough times with Svelte. I’m doing some funky stuff with video and WebSockets over at CastRooms, but with downtime in product planning I tackled some tech debt and decided to port our big React component to a SvelteKit app. It was going well, until I ran into problems with videos freezing. I’m almost certain that React’s explicit rerenders and Svelte’s implicit rerenders are the difference causing the issue. Once I get this figured out, it’ll make a good blog post.

Hyper mobile

I started running again recently with a Couch to 5k app. I messed my ankle up right at the start of Covid by going from running 5k to running 10k overnight. I used to run 10k every few days and thought I could do it again easily, but I ended up unable to walk for a few days.

This time, I’m taking things slowly and building my tolerance back up. I finished week 5 just before I went to Portugal.

It’s nice being able to run again. I’ve missed the solitude and the nature.

Lisbon

ElixirConf EU 2023 was on in Lisbon this year. I stayed for an extra week afterwards. Lila joined me for lots of walking, eating, drinking and chilling on the beach. And we got engaged, which is amazing.

A great city, and we have a great reason to go back now.

Watch

Barbarian is a great horror film about an AirBnb. Perfect to watch before we stayed in one in Lisbon.
Beef was great. Go watch it.
All Quiet on The Western Front was harrowing, but I’m glad we watched it.
Jurassic World Dominion was absolute mess.

I’m still logging everything at Letterboxd.

Games

Destiny 2: Lightfall has some of the worst plot of the world of Destiny so far, but the guns still feel amazing and the multiplayer is great. I’m enjoying it, but sometimes it’s a pain in the arse when you get killed with a gun that can only be obtained by a high level raid.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a game I’ve tried before, but the janky controls and animations made me give up. I’m trying it again, but I might just watch a recap before the sequel.
I started Metroid Prime Remastered a few weeks ago, but only just finished the tutorial. I picked it up again this weekend and I’m enjoying it. Some of the gameplay and quality of life features are a bit dated. I’m sure in 2002 it was mind blowing.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"ElixirConf EU 2023","date":"2023-04-30","subtitle":"def handle_event","titleBgColor":"#ac00ea","titleColor":"#fff","categories":["elixir","conference","personal","tech"]},"path":"/blog/elixirconf-2023","content":{"html":"

I’m just back from ElixirConf EU. My first conference since the big C, and my first Elixir conference since 2016.

Day -1

I got to Lisbon on Tuesday, for training on Wednesday, and the conference ran until Friday. I was staying about 10 minutes away from the conference hotel. The room looked alright, but the hotel was covered in references to old Hollywood stars - Audrey Hepburn, James Stewart, and Alfred Hitchcock. They called the hotel Hotel Florida, which seems like a weird thing to do with all the Hollywood references. Maybe Planet Hollywood owns any references to that?

After dropping my bags I went for a beer at a local place and got a Francesinha. That is a meal made for drinking.

Day 0

I was mostly there for a WebRTC workshop from the folks behind Membrane. Nice guys, and although it was their first time giving the workshop, I thought they did a great job. Some minor stuff to improve on. I was surprised at people showing up to the workshop having not written any Elixir or not followed any of the instructions. It wasn’t exactly cheap.

Day 1

The first day of talks started with one on Livebook. I haven’t used Livebook at all, but it was super interesting and really sold it to me. Another talk on the same day showed how to use it to debug a production app. I’ll definitely use that.

Unsurprisingly, lots of the talks focussed on LiveView. I’ve been slowly working through the Pragmatic Studio course and used it a bit for work. Optimizing LiveView for Realtime Applications had some great tips on using it in big apps. At work, I’m just using it for an admin UI, but I’m building something else with it too and this was a good talk full of practical tips.

A really fun talk, was on building Not Hotdog. I’m still amazed by computer vision and machine learning, so this was mind blowing.

Lars Wikman finished the day with another mind blowing talk titled Lively LiveView with Membrane. He built the slides with LiveView, and used Membrane and Nx to do live subtitles. He even changed slides with just his voice. It was really fun. I got a chance to tell him how much I enjoyed it at the end of Day 2 in the pub just before he had to leave. He even mentioned me in his writeup.

Day 2

In the morning, the CTO of Auroville showed how they moved from Drupal to Elixir. After working at GOV.UK, I’m really interested in how government can use technology. Hearing how a city built out the infrastructure for citizens and businesses was really cool.

Product focussed analytics for LiveView was a perfect talk for me. Figuring out how we can use a specific technology to build better products for users is always interesting. It turns out you can build live dashboards using LiveView to understand user behaviour.

James from Electric SQL showed their product - an offline client side local database that can sync with and resolve conflicts when it reconnects to the database in the cloud. It was really cool, and an interesting counterpart to so much LiveView, which requires a constant connection. I’ll be following it closely.

Chris McCord’s keynote was a great look at how far LiveView has came. It’s insanely powerful. I’m looking forward to working with it even more.

We finished the day with drinks at Musa da Bica. It was a nice way to round off a great week. The talks and the chats in the pubs left me feeling inspired - and excited to keep working with Elixir.

I’ll definitely be back to ElixirConf.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Monthnotes: March 2023","date":"2023-04-10","subtitle":"pubs crawls","titleBgColor":"#4cb1e0","titleColor":"#fff","categories":["personal","monthnotes"]},"path":"/blog/monthnotes-march-2023","content":{"html":"

I’m late again, but getting better.

March started off with me going for a double 40th birthday party at a big mansion near Buxton. It’s usually a wedding venue, but we set up a rig and had everyone DJing. It’s not the first time I’ve done that, but it’s a lot of fun every time. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do that with multiple groups of friends.

Crawl

I went on a pub crawl with some friends that I met during a lockdown. We sat at a table next to them when you could only sit outside and got chatting. We’ve became good friends since then. We crawled around some of my favourite spots in Hackney. Here’s the list:

Someone on the pub crawl, who was English, kept impersonating my accent. It pisses me off a lot and I fucking hate it, so I gave off to him. Luckily, my friends were on my side. They’re from New Zealand and probably get the same shit too.

Brat

Lila couldn’t come on the pub crawl, but her and I went to a few of the same spots in Hackney after an amazing lunch at Brat. We ordered some bread and when it came it turned out to be a giant slab. Everything was amazing.

Beyond the Streets

We went to the Beyond The Streets exhibition at the Saatchi gallery. I found it pretty ironic that an art gallery founded by someone who helped the Conservative Party get elected had an exhibition on hip-hop and graffiti culture.

Ignoring the hypocrisy, the exhibition was great. We went on a Friday night. It’s been a while since I went to any of the art gallery or museum lates. I used to go to loads, so it was nice return to that side of culture in London.

Work

I’ve been tackling some tech debt in work. Our repo is a Phoenix app which has a single page with a big React component view. I started pulling it apart into a Phoenix API and a SvelteKit app. It’s going well, but Svelte has some quirks that come with the learning curve of building something large. Maybe I’ll write about that more in future.

Housekeeping

I did some tidying up round here. Changing font sizes, line length, removing the link to my Twitter, and consolidating my work and about pages. Removing Twitter was sad, but it needed done.

This Next month

Since I’m technically late, I should really get started on next month now.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"PsychOdyssey","date":"2023-03-23","subtitle":"What colour is the sky in your world?","titleBgColor":"#9F19A8","titleColor":"#00ffc7","categories":["games","documentaries","psychonauts"]},"path":"/blog/psychodyssey","content":{"html":"

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been glued to one of the best documentary series I’ve watched in ages - PsychOdyssey. It’s a glimpse inside the videogame studio Double Fine, as they work on on a new sequel to their beloved cult classic, Psychonauts.

Previously, on PsychOdyssey

First, some background:

Double Fine are known for being an extremely creative studio. Founded by Tim Schafer, who previously worked at Lucasarts. He worked on some popular games like Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, and Full Throttle. While working on Full Throttle, a game about a biker gang, he wanted to have an interactive peyote trip. Lucasarts objected, so he quit and founded his own studio.

Double Fine’s first game, Psychonauts, was an action platformer in the lineage of Mario 64. You play as Raz, a boy who has ran away from his circus acrobat family to join a summer camp for children with psychic abilities. He hopes one day to join the titular Psychonauts - a psychic spy agency.

Psychonauts differs from other platformers by its level setup. In most games of that genre, the levels pull from common archetypes like ice, lava, jungle, etc. In Psychonauts, you enter people’s minds and exist in a space representing their mental state, defeating enemies and completing tasks centred around their particular condition.

It’s most famous level is The Milkman Conspiracy. Set inside the brain of Boyd, a Milkman obsessed with conspiracies, you explore a 1950s American suburban street populated with shady G-men watching you. The G-men pretend to be housewives and construction workers and speak in nonsense while the street itself twists within 3d space back onto itself, representing the twisted logic that Boyd sees in the world around him.

The development was difficult for the team, and although it wasn’t a commercial success, it received a lot of critical acclaim. Over the years, more and more people have played Psychonauts and loved it so much, that even the existence of a sequel was hotly anticipated by many.

Office culture

At 21 hours long and spread across 31 episodes, on the face of it, it’s a huge commitment to watch this thing. It absolutely flies by and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in creative work. It’s a fascinating insight into work that is software development in the traditional sense, but coming at it from a different angle.

Like all workplaces, personalities can get in the way and people clash, but nobody is exactly a villain or a hero. People come and go during the 6 years of filming. Some departures are amicable, while others are not. There’s an old and new guard, and some people completely new to the industry join during the development.

Lots of the old guard have worked together at Double Fine for nearly 20 years, and they have some amount of shared culture and bonding from the time spent together. You see them try to adapt to new people and new ways of working, while the new people try to adapt to the existing culture.

Psychonauts 2 is a much bigger game than anything that Double Fine have made before. The creative nature increases the scope of work involved as many characters have many different artistic depictions matching the artistic style within each level. You see this challenge really hit the team hard. There’s some amazing story arcs as they struggle to handle the workload, deadlines, and finances.

Making a good game

It’s great to see such an in-depth look within one of the most creative teams in the industry working on one of the most creative games in recent memory. After having played Psychonauts 1 and 2, watching this is amazing. You see how a passing comment or a joke turned into an idea, which turned into a prototype, which got the whole team thinking, and then they build something good, fun, heartfelt, or just plain weird.

Not everything is a fully formed idea right at the start, and you get to see the process that forms the finished product.

One level involves reuniting a brain in a jar with a body, who then gets overwhelmed with their new senses. You enter the brain, which eventually manifests a trippy music festival camp ground in the style of Yellow Submarine. It started out completely differently, and seeing the iterations of that level and how it came to be is one of my favourite bits.

The C word

Psychonauts 2 eventually came out in August 2021, so it’s probably not a surprise that you see the impacts of the Coronavirus pandemic in the documentary, alongside all the other shit the world threw at us between March 2020 and then.

Finishing the documentary left me missing life before 2020.

I’m now working from home 100% of the time, and if I could pick my perfect setup, I’d work somewhere hybrid. I miss the comradery of office life. The lunches, the jokes, and the drinks after work. I like my own space and my own setup, but I also like hanging out with other people.

The Journey They’ve Been On

I loved Psychonauts 1 and 2. I love videogame documentaries. I love documentaries. I love learning about how creative people work. I love absolutely everything about this series.

Even though I have no interest in sports, I loved Welcome to Wrexham. Although it is technically a sports documentary, it’s also not about sports. It’s about working class people and investors making a business gamble.

Similarly, PsychOdyssey is a videogame documentary, but it’s about how creative people build something so creative. It’s about how close businesses like Double Fine can come to running out of money. It’s about how working relationships can blossom and break with equal ferocity. It’s about art.

Give it a go. I think you might like it

\n","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Second chances","date":"2023-03-11","subtitle":"let's give it another go","titleBgColor":"#d1d1d1","titleColor":"#000","categories":["tv","books","games","culture"]},"path":"/blog/second-chances","content":{"html":"

If you ever meet me, I could happily talk for hours on end about TV, films, and videogames. One thing I love about all those things is how there are basically no whole original new ideas. Everything is a remix, and then, every so often, something comes along so completely unlike everything else before it that it reinvents the genre - or even the medium.

Recently, I’ve experienced a TV show, a book, and a videogame, for the second time. The first time round, each of them didn’t grab me at all, but after giving them another go I’m loving each of them.

Curb your Enthusiasm

I’m a massive Seinfeld fan. When my partner and I started seeing each other, it was the show we put on after coming back from the pub. We ended up watching all of it together - the second time for both of us. I even went on the Seinfeld tour with the real Kenny Kramer. If you’re a Seinfeld fan, you might remember that this was even parodied in an episode.

For all my love of Seinfeld, I hadn’t watched Curb your Enthusiasm until a few years ago. The first few episodes were so cringe inducing that I gave up with it almost immediately.

At the end of last year, I gave it another go. I’m midway through Season 9 now and absolutely loving it. I can’t believe it took me this long to watch it and enjoy it, but I’m glad I did.

Dune

One of the biggest cultural gaps in my life, is being a keen reader. I’ve just never found that much of the time or attention span comes naturally to me. I’m trying to change that, so I’ve finished a few books that have taken me years to read and bought a few that I’ve always wanted to read. I did really enjoy audiobooks, and Dune was one of my favourites, so I’ve picked it up and slowly working my way through it.

As everyone comes back to the indie web and away from social media, an article I read a while ago really stuck with me. The easiest way to avoid doomscrolling is to have a book with you for those moments of boredom. I’m hoping to stick with this idea.

Elden Ring

If you’re not a gamer, you might not know of a company called FromSoftware. They’ve reached a level of success over the last 10-15 years for making brutally hard games - Dark Souls, Demon Souls, Bloodbourne, and most recently, Elden Ring. They’ve been so critically well recieved that they’ve even became their own genre - Soulslike.

I tried Elden Ring when it came out and it didn’t click with me at all. I knew it would be hard, but I didn’t realise it would be cryptically hard. With all of the awards at the end of the year, I gave it another try. I asked some friends for help understanding the gameplay systems systems. After their help and some extra research I’ve ended up loving it. What a fantastic game.

Second time’s the charm

Ever had something not click with you when you thought it should, why not give it another go?

$\"After$

Me, after defeating Margit, The Fell Omen

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Monthnotes: February 2023","date":"2023-03-01","subtitle":"better bread than dead","titleBgColor":"#9c6b33","titleColor":"#fff","categories":["personal","monthnotes"]},"path":"/blog/monthnotes-february-2023","content":{"html":"

My partner had surgery had the end of January, so her and I have been taking it easy.

Bread and beer

I had a bread making class right at the start of the month at ProCook in Tottenham Court Road. Like everyone, I tried making sourdough bread during a lockdown. The crust came out perfect, but inside wasn’t cooked. I didn’t want to make a fresh loaf of bread every day so there wasn’t much point in trying keep a starter going. We made 4 different types of bread, so this weekend I tried making bread again and it came out fantastically. Expect more bread chat in the future.

Straight after the bread class I met some ex-Deliveroo folks for drinks at one of our old haunts. It was nice to catch up with people and see familiar faces. I worked there for 5 years and some of those people I haven’t seen since they left, or when I left in 2021. I also highly recommend showing up to the pub with a rucksack full of freshly baked bread to share with people. You’ll be very popular.

Cabin fever

Now that I’m working from home 100% of the time, I’m starting to go a bit spare. Being at home so much over the last few weeks hasn’t helped much either. I’m trying to get out of the house and Walthamstow at least once during a weeknight and at the weekends too. It’s hard to work anywhere except my home office as the product I’m building at CastRooms needs a decent Internet connection for me to test video and audio. Doing a mic check in a café might not go down too well.

Our founder and I went to an electronic music conference called AVA at The Printworks. I loved the conversation with David Rudnick. He’s one of my favourite designers working right now so it was a nice surprise to see him on the lineup. I’ve been at The Printworks for some events and even a conference and work afterparty. It’s a cool place, but such a huge cavernous warehouse used for dancing crowds that a few people sat on deck chairs left the space extremely cold. We left early to go and sit outside a pub in the Sun to warm up, even with it being 4 degrees celsius outside.

Travels

We planned a holiday to Vietnam, but we’ve had to cancel it. Luckily we’re getting a full refund so we aren’t down anything to cancel it. Immediately after we were meant to get back I was flying to Portugal for Elixirconf EU. Instead, she’s going to fly to Lisbon and meet me. We’re going to spend a lazy week hanging out in Lisbon, which will be lovely.

Busy, busy

I’ve started a big burst of tech debt tackling in work, which I’ll be writing about soon. I’m getting to use SvelteKit and Elixir, because I get to decide what to use. It’s a learning experience for sure, but a fun one.

I want to write more here, which I failed on this month, but on advice of Andy Bell, I’m trying to find some process that works. Collecting ideas and setting aside time is my first attempt, so I’ll see how that goes.

Read

10 years of Meteor - a look back at 10 years of this interesting JS framework that had amazing ideas, but got eclipsed by so many of its’ peers.
An introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer - many of my friends of been laid off and some of those are joining unions, so this article was a great read.
The Window Trick of Las Vegas Hotels - I’m an architecture and psychology nerd, so using one to trick the other is super interesting to me.

Watched

Welcome to Chippendales (Disney Plus) - I had no idea how much crime was involved in the story of a male stripping empire. A great watch, and listening to the podcast after it was fun too.
The Last of Us (NowTV) - It’s fantastic. Bella Ramsey is great.
The Gold (BBC) - The true story of the biggest robbery in the UK by the 80s. A fun watch of cops and robbers trying to outsmart each other.

Played

Lots more Elden Ring. I want to write up my experience when I finish the game.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Monthnotes: January 2023","date":"2023-02-09","subtitle":"Wet Jan","titleBgColor":"#77ddd8","titleColor":"#000","categories":["personal","monthnotes"]},"path":"/blog/monthnotes-january-2023","content":{"html":"

Yeah, yeah. I realise I’m late.

New Year’s Eve

I played a gig on New Year’s Eve in the basement of an Italian restaurant in Stoke Newington. It’s been a while since I played in front of big crowd that included people that I didn’t know, which was pretty exciting.

Although it was a private party organised by friends, we could invite other sound people that we knew. The bit of London and the UK rave scene that I inhabit isn’t that large and people are pretty dedicated. It was a nice surprise to see a lot of familiar faces that I didn’t know were coming, including a few that don’t live in London.

You can listen back to the re-recording. Re-recorded only because when I listened back to it some of my mixing was dodgy. Playing at 3am on NYE will do that to you.

It made me realise how much I miss DJing. This year, I’m going to try and do more of it. I’ve already got two more gigs lined up at friends birthday’s.

Countryside

My partner had to go in for some surgery at the end of January, which necessitated self isolating for two weeks in advance. Before that, we went out to a little Airbnb near Thetford Forest with a hot tub which was great, until the hot tub broke on the 1st full day we were there. It was a little shepherd’s hut on a lake inhabited by a few ducks and a very aggro swan.

$\"A$ \n $\"Some$ \n $\"Our$ \n $\"The$ \n $\"Some$

Some photos from the trip

Misc

I got a new tattoo. It’s a skeleton at a rave. It’s not exactly how I imagined it, but I love it. It’s a fun design that mixes old styles with something new and weird. It’s meant to be two-partner. It’s on the back of my right leg and was super painful near the top, so I might wait a bit for the next one.

Watched

Glass Onion - like everyone else
Am I Being Unreasonable? - I love Taskmaster and Daisy Mae Cooper was new to me when she was on it. This is a comedy, but with some hard hitting dramatic stuff and a few twists and turns.
10 dollar death trip - a brutal documentary about the fentanyl crisis in Vancouver
White Lotus S2 - Hard to compare it to the first season, but it stands almost as well by itself. The Sopranos was one of our lockdown watches, so it was nice to see Michael Imperioli show up in something else.
The Batman - a decent take on Batman’s more detective side and I enjoyed it way more than any of the Marvel stuff that I’ve watched recently.
Banshees of Inisherrin - Absolutely incredible. The dialogue is pitch perfect for the way Irish people talk to each other.

I’m trying to log all the films I watch on Letterboxd. Follow me if you’re on there.

Read

After buying the book in September, I finally made an effort to start reading Dune. I listened to the audiobook years ago, but I wanted to try and finish the book before part 2 of the film comes out. There’s some scenes I remember in the book that weren’t in the film that focus in on the scarcity of water, but the film gets that point across in other ways.
The disappearance of the ashtray is an article about a class of object that took on an artistic look, but is no longer present in modern life. When I was at the British Library in Euston for the first time I saw wall of shelves separated by vertical panels. Only when I walked past them a second time did I realise they were phone booths. I find remnants of previous human behaviour like that really interesting.

Played

After giving Elden Ring a second chance I’m really enjoying it. I asked some friends for advice on getting good and picked up a new character that I made previously. It turns out when you understand the mechanics for a game that complex it actually becomes fun.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Elephanti Sunt Personae","date":"2023-01-31","subtitle":"Pink Elephants","titleBgColor":"#db259e","titleColor":"#000","categories":["personal","walthamstow"]},"path":"/blog/pink-elephants","content":{"html":"

After moving to Walthamstow, I kept finding status of elephants all over the area. With no obvious clues to the reason or origin, it became a real life Easter Egg in my life. I resigned myself to the fact that I would never know why or how Pink Elephants came to reside in my borough.

$\"Two$ \n $\"An$

Statues on Orford Road and Lea Bridge Road

Eventually, I found a mural on one of the streets.

$\"A$

The mysterious Elephant mural

I still live in Walthamstow, but now nowhere near these statues. After I moved house, I eventually forgot about the Elephants. Until just recently when I cycled past the mural.

Elephanti Sunt Personae led me to We Are People. A guerilla art campaign to show that the consciousness of an Elephant and other species can be considered comparable.

Elephants are people, one day this will be thought self evident to all

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"The future of transport","date":"2023-01-21","subtitle":"Two wheels good, four wheels bad","titleBgColor":"#00d","titleColor":"#fff","categories":["personal"]},"path":"/blog/future-of-transport","content":{"html":"

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of transport.

In July last year, my car overheated and had to be scrapped. I mostly used it for the weekly shop. But a few times a year I’d drive a few hundred miles around the country for music festivals, weekends away, and visiting friends. After that July, I had no more big drives planned, so I held off immediately buying a replacement and decided to wait and see if I could survive without.

Since then, I’ve adapted to living without a car. I work from home nearly 100% of the time, so I don’t have a commute. I’m also lucky enough to live in London and within Waltham Forest, which was part of the Mini-Holland programme. Waltham Forest is a nice place for cycling, with a lot of bike lanes and low traffic neighbourhoods. I’ll cycle to meet friends, run errands, go shopping, and go to the pub.

Cargo

My house is on the North side of Walthamstow. The canals and the towpaths run alongside us North to South, which also runs right underneath the North Circular, which itself is followed by industrial estates and retail parks.

When we were doing a lot of DIY to the house in November, Lila ran out of ceiling paint, so I hopped on my bike with my takeaway tray and cycled the 10 minutes over to B&Q. Coming back with 10 litres of white matt paint was a little wobbly, but doing it a second time would be fine.

$\"My$

My first test of no car club

I love this bike. I’ve owned it for seven years. It’s got a hub gear, which means I can change the gear while stationary. No downshifting when coming up to traffic lights and I can zip off when the light goes green. Adding the basket 18 months ago made me love it even more.

Distance

Carrying capacity alone, does not a transport mode make. I love cycling, but sometimes I don’t want to arrive somewhere as a sweaty mess and need to cool down or have a shower. When I worked in central London I cycled in about half the time. The first place I lived was only a 20 minute cycle to the office but when I moved to Walthamstow, it became closer to 50 minutes. Showers and lockers in the office made it a good workout. Free exercise without paying for the commute.

Recently a friend decided to sell his e-bike, so I jumped on the offer. £500 is a steal for an e-bike. Cycling all over with little effort is nice, but if I was cycling longer distances regularly I’d prefer the exercise. The battery is good, and it’s fun to glide along. The furthest I’ve cycled is probably 18km with about 1/3 of the battery remaining.

Longer journeys

When my car had to be scrapped, we were on our way to spend the weekend with friends in Devon. Rather than cancel, we rented a little Seat Ibiza from a HiyaCar and didn’t let our car trouble ruin a good weekend.

Just last weekend, we rented another car through HiyaCar to drive out to a little Airbnb about 2 hours from London. Along the way, we discussed the pros and cons of becoming car owners again. Once we’d talked it through and crunched some numbers, we decided to stick with our setup for now. We don’t do long car journeys that often to warrant spending a few thousand on a car, with another thousand for insurance on top.

Two wheels good, four wheels bad

We went to Rotterdam at the start of the Summer on the Eurostar. Rotterdam is like a nicer Amsterdam. We cycled out of the city and through the Dutch countryside, full of amazement at the bike-first culture that the Dutch have. Other cities are taking notice, like Paris.

If you want to help the environment, one of the best ways you can do that is to get rid of your car. When we had ours, we would drive short distances that we could’ve cycled.

Maybe bikes, and by extension e-bikes, are the real transport of the future. Combined with a solid train network, you can go nearly anywhere. Not flying cars, self driving cars, cars in enclosed tunnels or cars in a vacuum tube.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Monthnotes: December 2022","date":"2022-12-24","subtitle":"Beer and cheese","titleBgColor":"#00ff00","titleColor":"#000","categories":["personal","monthnotes"]},"path":"/blog/monthnotes-december-2022","content":{"html":"

We finished off a load of DIY just in time for Christmas. After owning the house for a year, it’s nice to have least done half of it. Our house is starting to feel like ours.
At Castrooms, we had a few test parties culminating in a set from a guy who regularly plays at Notting Hill Carnival. I managed to get a pretty difficult feature working just in time. It was a great way to end the year.
I’ve got more and more into RSS feeds again. I bought Reeder on macOS and iOS which is really nice, but it has a few little differences from NetNewsWire which I’m still getting used to. I’ve enjoyed coming back to reading blogs. It’s a better way to ~doom~scroll when I’m bored. I also added RSS to this blog, if that’s how you roll.
I wrapped up work on the 16th and had grand plans of making great use of my time. Instead, I mostly played Destiny 2 and Vampire Survivors.
I did however, add albums to Lineup.fun, which has already came in handy for end of year lists.

Here’s some things I’ve enjoyed

The aforementioned Vampire Survivors. It combines the great element of idle games like Universal Paperclips which Bullet Hells
Christmas specials everywhere, but Behind The Bastard’s Keep The Yultide Gay chronicles pre-Christian Christmas: Part 1 and 2

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Many years ago, I read this incredible article about how pop culture exists in 30 year loops. It’s why Back to the Future jumps from 1985 to 1955. There’s plenty of examples within that article and now that you know about it, you’ll see it everywhere.

Now that we’re firmly in the 20s, we can see a big resurgance of pop culture from the late 80s and early 90s. Remakes, revists and spin-offs have came back around again - Dune, Scream, Top Gun, Jurassic Park, Toy Story and Predator to name a few.

When I read that article and started to notice the 30 year cycle in media, I also noticed that a lot of the games that I played around that time fully embraced the 80s 8 bit retro era. Celeste, Hyper Light Drifter and Return of The Obra Dinn were 3 of the biggest, and all recall an older era and the limitations emposed by technology.

What the article put forward, made me think that eventually, we’d begin to see newer games referencing the games of the mid to late 90s. Until recently, I hadn’t seen much evidence of that assumption. Only in the last few weeks did I start playing 2 new games that have distilled the games of that era.

Prodeus

One of the first games I ever played, was DOOM on an uncle’s PS1. I remember barely any of it, other than the hard as nails difficulty, incomprehensible story, and the brutal guns.

Prodeus takes all its inspiration from those early DOOM games. The guns, graphics, and gore, are all throwbacks to that style of first person shooter from the 90s.

\n\n

Signalis

This one is a bit different for me, as it’s channeling the early survival horror genre, which I was never into. Resident Evil and Silent Hill are what I’ve seen it compared to. I never had the patience for those games, but I loved this one. I’d also compare it to Metal Gear Solid for a lot of reasons.

It’s full of CRT scan lines, limited inventory, save points instead of checkpoints and some very cryptic puzzles.

\n\n

The CD case

Playing Signalis reminded me of one of my favourite puzzles in Metal Gear Solid - you obtain a disc before need to contact a character on your radio. You’re told “the frequency is on the back of the CD case”. I have no idea how long I spent trying to look at the disc in my inventory, which you actually can’t do. Eventually, I realised the the frequency was in a screenshot on the back of the physical game case. Searching for this online still has plenty of people trying to figure it out. I think this must be one of the most incredible examples breaking the fourth wall and one that might only be possible in the medium of videogames.

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Yet again, here I am, attempting to blog regularly.

In previous years, I had a blog that involved designing each post. A carefully hand crafted framework and toolchain allowed me to create a post with individual colours, layout, and art direction. Sometimes the design I had in my head wouldn’t translate to the screen easily, so I’d spend many hours over many days, tinkering away. Either getting it right, or figuring out something else that I liked.

I also made the mistake of thinking that every post had to be a think piece. That I had to have some grand idea worth exploring.

I’ve recently tried to get back into RSS feeds. Familiar names and URLs keep resurfacing from 10ish years ago. One site I came across was Chris Coyier’s, and one of the first posts I read from him was There is no bar, which has this thought provoking question:

Why do people have a hard time with that publish button, even on ready-to-rock personal sites?

For me, the hard time of publishing was waiting for a deep thought and designing something that I was happy with - they kind of went hand in hand. A great article deserved a great design. Without one, I couldn’t let the other see the light of day.

A new adventure

Since April, I’ve been working on a startup in the music streaming space called Castrooms. It’s a new and exciting thing to be the ~~only~~ best engineer at the company. One of my colleagues, Will, has been writing for years, and is increasingly putting out thoughts and questions on Twitter. We both spent formative parts of our careers at the Government Digital Service, where we constantly heard Make things open: it makes them better.

Not many people in our field get to do what I’m doing - working on something from the beginning, that I’m personally interested in. Maybe I should write about it?

It’s also technically hard. We’re combining real time audio and video from many sources and using multiple third party services together. I’m writing some complex and horrific code. But that’s all OK because it’s a startup, so we’re still figuring things out and prototyping. Maybe I could write about that?

Shit’s on fire yo

Much of the modern web is a walled garden. When I last tried to start blogging, I kicked it off with a post titled “Let’s make mad shit”. I didn’t write as much as I wanted to after that, but I did make a few mad shit things, like Lineup.fun. I still think we need more art galleries than malls on the web. And for me, I want some way to express myself online that can’t be ruined by a serially divorced dad obsessed with imaginary trains.

Once more, unto the breach

So, yet again, I’m saying that I’m going to blog more. I’m cutting myself some slack this time round. Everything I write doesn’t have to be some well researched and deep article. It can just be something I want to share. This doesn’t have to be some world changing website. I can just have fun with it.

My little corner of the Internet is just that - mine.

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2020 has shown us that The Internet can be utter shit. It’s awful. It’s full of depressing news, racism and people without medical degrees thinking their opinion is as valid as a Doctor.

But 2020 has also shown us that the Internet can be amazing. It kept us together and in touch when we couldn’t do it in real life. It allowed for so much creativity, interaction and communication in this fucking terrible year. So many people out there are making cool things but we don’t see it because we get bogged down hating all of the terrible shit.

Remember when people had blogs? And they wrote things? Everyone had their little corner of The Internet. Now we write them in 35 part Twitter threads. Or even worse, Medium articles. You want me to make an account on Medium just so I can read more than 3 articles a month? Oh and if you’re trying to browse them on mobile, I hope you have an iPhone 12 Pro Max because otherwise you’ll not be seeing the article when the page loads.

Both of those are terrible ways for us to create and share things.

Even with all of that stuff making the Internet worse, people are still making fun and cool things on The Internet.

Here are a few things I enjoyed in 2020:

Poolside - ultra vibey website and app that brings a pool party to your internet communication device.
JavaScript30 from WesBos - I’m pretty good with JavaScript but in an effort to understand it more deeply, I did this free course at the start of Summer. It took me a bit more than the 30 days, but I found it really enjoyable beginning my day with some coding and Wes’ cheesy jokes.
Jon’s experiments with three.js shaders.
Jonty’s camjam - watch a feed from a selection of random TFL CCTV cameras.
govbins - I helped Harry rebuild govbins this year, but even with my obvious bias I’ve enjoyed the abusurdity of people taking photos of wheelie bins.
it is what it is - an injoke taken to an extreme but then used to raise awareness about systemic racism
Sketch’s article about native being better - regardless of weather or not you agree with their point, you have to agree that it looks absolutely gorgeous.
Clubhouse - drop in audio chat that replaced office shit chatting for me and kept me slightly more sane whilst working from home.
Ogmios’ School of Zen Motoring - drives through North East London with a soothing narration.
I Thought About That A Lot - a series of essays which includes a really touching story about disposing of a body and thoughts on Caroline Quentin’s career.
Many Twitch DJ streams from my friends, with a simultaneous Zoom call to chat and see familiar faces.

A while ago I’d decided to start blogging again in 2021, but I didn’t really know what to write about first. Before my thoughts started to coalesce, I read this great blog post from Simon Collinson and suddenly it all made sense to me.

He talks about two things I want to call out here:

Admittedly, most company or client work tackles real issues for real people; it’s rarely a sandbox for us to climb into and make mad shit.

He’s absolutely right on this point. Even as someone doing more development than design, I have ideas of fun things to build or fun ways to build them that I just don’t get to do. Why don’t I do that? I should do that!

And this:

…just because GOV.UK does an excellent job of helping you pay your car tax doesn’t mean your own playground should look like it’s been built with a government design system.

Although we should make sure our own spaces work for everyone we think will use them, if you want to do something weird with your own site, go ahead! Why not? Nobody is going to tell you it impacted conversion or a client didn’t like it.

Like most people in 2020 I also watched The Social Dilemma, though I watched it later than most on 1st January 2021. Something stuck out to me near the end, when Bailey Richardson described The Internet now as being like a mall and that she remembered when The Internet was full of creativity.

I want more art galleries and less malls.

We used to have fun on the Internet.

We used to make mad shit.

I’m going to do that again in 2021.

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