Thursday, 19th March, 2026

We got the cat back. It’s quite the story and I should write it up sometime.

Work have now blocked OneDrive on personal computers. I was using that to sync my markdown notes so when I worked at home I could access them that way. Was even thinking of changing from vs code to obsidian as I don’t hate it anymore. I can just GitHub as a sync method…seems like that defeats what IT are trying to do. Maybe obsidian has a nextcloud sync to use my server at home.

I could use onenote 🤮

Used pika the other day. It’s so nice for writing posts. But I don’t want to pay $60/year for it. Maybe I could look at export options and some elaborate song and dance to convert.

Thursday, 12th March, 2026

One of the cats hasn’t come home in a few days. 😿

Wednesday, 11th March, 2026

It’s funny how quick you get out of a habit. Still think about lots of things to write but then just don’t.

Thought about that new MacBook Neo. I like that it doesn’t really have any upgrade options as then I wouldn’t get sucked into a £2000 laptop. Plus all I do is browser and plaintext files. Maybe photo editing but it would probably just be Photos.app. Then I could also play with Tinderbox. Likely could wangle edu discount via my wife too. But I don’t need another computer.

Fell into a Time rabbit hole. Ordered a QRP Labs clock that gets the time from GPS. Mostly as it was pretty cheap and I get to build it. Seems the next level of accuracy is then £100s up towards £1000, to run a network PTP server delivering circa nanosecond accuracy. It would be cool to do that though, just because.

Saturday, 28th February, 2026

Been losing interest in this site recently.

Doesn’t really matter, it’ll just sit here until I come back.

Tuesday, 24th February, 2026

I did it. Got my 1,000 points in SOTA for the “Mountain Goat” award. I ordered the glass, engraved trophy 🏆.

Now what?

Saturday, 21st February, 2026

Put the rower in the attic for now. Turns out it did take up a lot of room. Moved away from building custom shelves on one wall, and just ordered some newer, more robust set of shelves for the garage. Be a good opportunity to sort out the existing ones and hopefully tidy up somewhat. We’re still a very long way off fitting a car in the garage.

A friend told me he’s bought a SNES to add to his impressive game console collection. I think in the past I would’ve like that, but these days I’m not interested. I still have a strong overwhelming desire to not have things, but many of the things in this house aren’t mine and so it’s hard to get rid of them. Plus lots of my stuff that takes up space, are “maybe useful items”, like cables, adapters, fittings, tools, etc. I don’t mind those, although I would like them to be organised more. Have been quietly thinking about selling some of the boys’ Lego. They’ve got a lot of minecraft sets and once built they’re not that exciting to play with. We’ve dismantled them all now, and they’re back in boxes/bags. Makes me wonder about the lego trains as well. Wonder what I should do with them, they’re quite big. I guess they’re packed up in boxes and one boring wet weekend I should get them out and have the kids make a new track etc. on the lounge floor. Although I think I enjoy them more than they do.

Makes me wonder about tiny miniature railways. I should investigate that. Be nice to have something that could fit on one table but be interesting, with switch points, signal logic, etc. something that could be setup and not be annoying to have out for a longer time.

Almost at 1,000 SOTA points now. Monday should be my day, although trying to find a suitable hill(s)/route. My hiking pal wants to come too, which is good but then that changes the options. Still lots of snow on the hills and the slight thaw is making the avalance risk higher. Getting access to some is also tricky, or it would be an absolute slog in wet, slushy snow. It’s hard to know what some places will be like. He’s supposedly going to think up options so I’ll see what he comes up with. Probably spend all evening looking at the map and making a load of schedules to compare.

I did start making my own scheduling app - bsaically a sqlite db plus some interface to add and look things up. My spreadsheet is fine but it gets messy and hard to remember if I’ve looked at a hill or not. I should finish that off at some point.

Tuesday, 17th February, 2026

I should sell the rowing machine. If I’m honest - it’s boring, my free time to use it is the evenings and when I did do that I struggled to go to sleep as all worked up/hot. Maybe at weekends I could use it during the day. I lack discipline/ motivation / incentive to use it.

Speaking to guy at work about it and he immediately said I should sell it. I’m torn as they’re a pain to sell, I keep thinking about in years to come, ie retired, I might want it as an activity to do, and I got mine for a good price. Ugh I dunno. Perhaps I should pack it away into the loft and worry about it another day.

It leads on from a conversation with my wife about sorting out the garage. She does not like it being in there. Wait till I tell her I was thinking of a defender and how that could live in the garage.

The defender is not a light purchase. Getting GAS for something like a MacBook or camera or LEGO trains etc. even a rowing machine is fine as the thing isn’t that big and when I get bored it isn’t overwhelming. The Defender is not that. Especially if it’s the third car. I do worry it’s just a phase, another minor obsession that lasts 1-6 months and then I’m done. The only thing I’ve lasted with is summits on the air.

I like the idea of modifying it myself and making it my own, but then when each bit is £250+, I’m not sure I could do that and in the end just do nothing.

Probably best I don’t.