Friday, 1st May, 2026

I still think about making a single blog for everything, and even having AI build the whole thing for me. However, I just don’t know what I really want. Someone was talking about not wanting people to know they have a blog, and I’m quite like that. In fact, it’s a reason why I don’t want to have a single blog. If I email people with a domain, and they look it up and see my site. Particularly, with ham radio, when I make a contact with someone, they’ll often look me up on qrz.com and I have my site linked there, or similarly if I email them. What’s the big deal? I dunno. I guess I worry about what they think - when I know fine well I shouldn’t care what they think. I also like to keep things separate. Maybe what I should do is not narrate my idle thoughts on here…I think combining posts about radio outings, books I’ve read, or whatever else goes well together. The journal stuff is a bit different.

Another factor is that it’s a some work to create a new site. I could use blot or pika or some other hosted, predone thing, but I know I’ll not like it and think that I should have my own site. I think I’m going to do it, but then I sit down on the computer and don’t - always finding excuses not to start or just feeling like it’s too much hassle for what it’s worth. That’s sort of why i started making a new tiddlywiki, mostly as it does everything for me. Although I still don’t like that idea for some vague reason. Maybe I should just pay for pika, and start using it. Then when I get upset about £5/month, that’ll motivate me to do something. But if it doesn’t, then I have a nice site. There’s a little bit of the hassle of migrating all the old stuff but, again, I should use AI for it.

I think I still like the idea of a landing page on main domain, blog here, and then journal can live on neocities or something random I find. Although that doesn’t work for the radio domain. I had thought if I made a new static site I could just have multiple domains pointing to the same site. Not sure if that works for pika.

I was reading a post on some German ham’s site, and he was using Ghost. The theme was nice, and the overwhelming “subscribe here” wasn’t present, so not sure what the theme was or if he did some manual edits. So of course I wondered about using that.

How long has this debate gone on for?

I’m so pleased the film photos came out. The leaf shutter seemed slow on the TLR when out and I was worried it wasn’t going to work properly, but seems to have been fine. Has made me think about film again. Although probably just taking the X-E4 would be good. Started watching a YouTube video Jack shared about this lady doing the ...Appalachian, that's it, and making a documentary whilst also shooting black and white with a Fuji TX-1 (the wide landscape camera, like the Hassy XPan). Got interrupted whilst watching it, so need to come back to it later. I heard her on the joy of the outdoors. I love going out. It started as chasing points and ticking off lists - which I still do and makes me go to new places - but being out is a great feeling. Even when it's miserable weather. I do feel like I want to capture it more, with photos or words or video or something. I shared my TLR photos on the SOTA forums, and when I look back at the iPhone photos of the trip, they just look so bland. The scenery is still stunning and it captures what we did and everything around but there's no character. Probably I could edit the iPhone photos with grain and filters etc. to improve it. Anyway, many times I don't stop and savour the moment, I'm always on a schedule to get to the top, do radio, get back to the car and get home in time for xyz family stuff. It was also unique last week as we were on the air for quite a while and when we got back to the bottom of the hill, we just sat by the stream, had a drink from it, and enjoyed the moment. It helped it was warm, but we had plenty of time.

I’m still on the pursuit of new hills that are far away to complete lists but I shouldn’t forget the ones closer to home that still offer a nice day out. In fact there’s another hill scheme that focuses on hills with prominence of 100 to 150m (vs. SOTA which is 150m or more) and there are loads of these other hills about in places I’ve never been. Perhaps I should try one.

Back to the camera front, I did start down a small rabbit hole for micro 4/3s cameras for hiking. Mostly as they’re smaller than APS-C, offer IBIS, weather sealing and seems like plenty of good quality but lightweight lenses. I’ve looked at these before for big telephotos for birds etc. (not that I ever take photos of birds). I had to go out and then when I came back I’d forgotten about it - probably for the best. Unless I’m selling the Fuji, I don’t think getting a 4/3s system is a good idea.

Thursday, 30th April, 2026

Talking to a bike friend, he suggests just buying one. Probably sensible. I like the Alpkit sonder bikes, except they have so many options I have no idea what to get. Obviously going into a store would be best but the nearest is 2.5/3 hours away. Maybe I’ll ask AI what I should get and see if it can explain the differences between the various seats, pedals and particularly stem post connectors…

M4 Mac minis are just gone. No store has any. Probably for the best. I’ve been saying I’ll get a Mac mini since the M2 (never get 1st gen apple products, and in fact best to get the 3rd gen) but always put it off and then a newer model is coming. When you don’t need it immediately it’s easy to keep putting it off until the next model comes out.

Wednesday, 29th April, 2026

Fitted new brake pads to my bike - wow what a difference! Although the previous pair came with the bike…that I bought 5 years ago 🫣 Anyway, nice to sort it out. I sort of want to build my own bike from select parts, to make it unique (because it’ll cost more “I built my own $3,000 bike for only $5,000”) and to then reallly understand how all the pieces fit together. Just not sure what type of bike. Had thought about a mountain bike, as I don’t really like mine, but I rarely use it - I think because I rarely use it and “don’t know how to ride a mountain bike” that I don’t like it. It feels unstable, hard to control, slips easily - which I think is because it has 29” wheels and a long wheelbase and wider wheel fork angles. But the internet tells me all these things makes it better to ride, and how it’s made for stability. Maybe it is better than a regular bike and I just don’t know how to ride downhill on mud and stones.

Or I make myself a new commuter bike - which I use everyday. Probably the better choice. But then I’ll look at prices and think it’s better just to buy a new one but that wasn’t the point - and so I’ll do nothing.

Tuesday, 28th April, 2026

We’ve gone full lockdown on devices with the kids. Turned all the screen time apps to max! (Max restrictions obv).

I lose interest in computer things quickly. Sometimes before I even start whatever I’ve been thinking about.

Simultaneously, I looked at M1 Mac minis, thinking they’d be cheap. Not as cheap as I thought they should be.

Friday, 24th April, 2026

During the day I think of these things I want to do on the computer. Then by the evening when I have time to do it, I’m not interested. Mostly just being a bit tired but also it seems like a chore.

I wanted to finish my time book - Splitting the Second. It’s both very interesting and boring at the same time. Some sections go into more detail than I really want but there are plenty of sections that are interesting. It’s a comprehensive book on time and how it’s measured and how that’s changed over human life, plus the application of very accurate time keeping.

Now we have very accurate time, it gets impacted by Einstein’s special relativity where “moving clocks go slow”. It’s somewhat of a hard concept to grasp 🤓 but is it time being affected or the mechanism that is used to keep time? If I could somehow build a nanosecond accurate quartz clock would that also go slow. They did experiments with radio signals coming back from the Viking landers on Mars and when Mars was behind the sun the radio waves slowed down going around the sun, and they travel at the same speed…or something like that.

Relativity was in Artemis book about how the other species didn’t know about relativity.

Glorious sun today and off out into the hills with my hiking buddy. We haven’t actually been out together for a couple of months now, for various reasons. Be doing a local hill, which will remind me they’re still interesting even though I’m not chasing points and I’ve done it twice before.

Thursday, 23rd April, 2026

Last night’s “lying in bed thinking about websites” thought was that I should use tiddlywiki for my main site. It is appealing. Single html file but fully functional. Plus I always feel like my natural state is wiki.

I have one already but obviously I’d need to start again. (And rebuild the same thing).

Was talking to Claude about setting up a new tiddlywiki. Was good to explore ideas for structure and if gives me the wikitext to do some of the filters and lists etc. probably they’re simple but I just never can learn them.

Sometimes I like the basic tiddlywiki theme and layout but then other times I want it to be different. There’s a notebook theme I always look at and do like, except that sidebar. I don’t like that but maybe Claude can fix it for me.

Wednesday, 22nd April, 2026

I went to bed thinking I should just pay for pika for a few months and use it. Their markdown and images export makes it super easy to migrate away if I don’t like it or stop using it. I woke up thinking I should just suck it up and spend the time to write stuff in my existing static blog that works just fine.

Last night I also used Claude to convert an old landing page - that I originally stole from someone’s tumblr - to more modern CSS and make it somewhat responsive. I was just using the web browser free version and it took a few goes but it go there in the end. This was with the idea I’d not bother with a blog on my main site and just have a landing page. I even started looking at domain names for the idea of starting a single, new blog that’s everything altogether but without the burden of the past. I gave up on that idea pretty quick as I couldn’t think of anything good and I don’t need another domain. Still sort of think making a new site will help me start a fresh, just where and how and what to decide…small details.

As usual, I don’t really know what I want and so I don’t go anywhere. Plus I’ve been dropping in and out of various sites and so any posts that I have made are scattered about.

Once it’s been a week since I last went hill walking, I get a bit antsy and think it’s about time I went out again! This week is super busy at work, and so my day off is Friday. It’s fine but I typically have less time on Friday’s due to the school runs. The forecast is good though, so hopefully that remains true.

Another thought I had was moving this site to neocities, and then using this domain for the blog. Why? Not sure, I just like neocities. Looked at bearblog too - easy to get sucked into the lifetime subscription but probably shouldn’t start with that. Also tiddlywiki’s in there somewhere.

Not read with the X4 much…

Thought about selling all the lego trains and building a real model railway. Just because it can be much smaller and fit in somewhere but still be interesting. I should investigate prices before I start thinking about it too much, probably even more expensive than Lego! Wondered about selling some of the boy’s lego too - or sell some sets and then buy some different ones. My wife is pretty good about keeping pieces together in the box once they’ve been built and then put away.

Also deleted about 160+GB of photos last night. Mostly raws from 5-10 years ago that I’ll never ever go back to. Was quick to do as at some stage I’d decided to make a raw and final folder in each albums folder to keep the files. Some events I also had my uncle’s photos but often those would be 50GB for one day. I have my own and don’t need his. The bigger task, which I may never do, is culling low quality shots per event. I started looking at some of the photos and had plenty of nostalgia and “oh don’t we look so young”. So that’ll mean it’ll take even longer. I like when Jack puts an older photo at the top of his daily posts, I’d like to do that such that I surface things I miss.

If I had macOS computer, would it simplify everything?

I have an iPhone and so the obvious integration between them is good. Photos from my phone would be easily accessible and manageable, I could pay for iCloud 2TB tier and just keep everything in it, and still get web access and sharing with others (like I have with nextcloud). Apps I like would be accessible, particularly DayOne that I’d like to make more use of. I could use the micro.blog app to manage my website (if I want that). It’s unix-y enough to do things easier than Windows. My email domains are taken care of by iCloud. I could do iCloud sync for obsidian. I could use Tinderbox. It would also just be my computer that no-one else uses, so I don’t have to cater to others’ needs. The new Framework Pro came out, looks nice but pricy (it is the pro model).

I now have a mac keyboard, a Bluetooth mouse and a usb c monitor already that I could hook it up to if I wanted.

But is this all just me trying to justify buying a Neo, that I don’t really need? Do I want everything in Apple world, do I want to be paying for iCloud? I could just use Apple passwords and not bother with vaultwarden anymore.

The ease of it is great, it just makes my “I should self host everything and only use open source software” idealism cry. That option just comes with more effort…maybe.

Oh well, another thing you me to write the same thing about every day and make no progress forward - but at least not backwards….I hope.

Set this site up to build and be pushed to neocities. Maybe when the domain expires I won’t renew it, main site to landing page and be done. Or maybe it’ll be home to a new blog or maybe nothing. I just really like nothing. I remembered I made some goals a while back. There still here. I like how the numbered bullets don’t work so they’re all #1.