Friday, 27th January, 2023

I seem to be averaging about every other day on here so far this year. I feel bad for missing days but at the same time I don’t want to force myself to write something inane just to fill the day.

I have a few blog posts in my head for my other site, but I just never get round to starting them. Maybe this weekend…

My replacement power supply for the soldering iron arrived, so I could attempt to fix my header pin soldering on the pi zero…

A friend linked a funny video of a bird eating too many fish. It then led me to open up YouTube, which I’ve not been on in a while, and start watching random things it suggests for me. Camera reviews, film, lenses, random tech reviews, etc. Pretty much every video I started I stopped after 20 seconds thinking “I don’t care.” I’m counting this as a win. Last year I spent/wasted a lot of time on YouTube, and then it made me want stuff that I probably don’t need.

I did manage to write a blog post. I had a lot more photos to add to it but they’ve got lost somewhere. They were all phone photos and I tend not to care about those, any good ones I’ll stick into DayOne otherwise I’ll let iCloud back them up. I think I lost them when I went in and out of the 2 TB iCloud subscription and included all my photos. Oh well, doesn’t really matter. Actually I saw one of them this week, but I don’t remember where and I find that strange. I feel like it was online on a website, so either Apple Photos or Amazon Photos, but I looked there and it wasn’t there. I guess if I come across it again I can take a copy.

Think I’ll target 1 blog post a month. My original 2023 plans included one a week, but not sure I can manage that. One a month is still perfectly acceptable to me. It doesn’t actually take long but it’s slower than this site. I still maintain that I much prefer the blogging under the date title as the way to go. So much easier to write that way.

Speaking of 2023 targets, I’ve not looked at them this year. So how am I doing…

• Sleeping - ah…varied…
• Exercising - I cycle to work each day so I’m okay with not doing anything else, although I should…
• Reading - pretty much every night I’ll read my fiction book. I’ve not read non-fiction though and I have some books to read. I still choose the computer over reading.
• Journalling - Good enough, don’t tend to write much in DayOne during the week. I could but I forget.
• Typewriter - done nothing. My wife’s granny died this week and my wife wrote a poem about her Granny to read at the family gathering. She printed it out but I thought about typing it out as well.
• Printing photos - printed a bunch when we re-did our photos on the wall. My wife wanted a black and white montage so I printed out about 12 photos.
• Computer time - been on it every night. I have been playing games with my friend, so not the mindless youtube etc. that I’ve done in the past. Conclude: so-so
• Buy less stuff - I’ve not really bought anything extra this month. Some parts to replace broken things, also sold a few items (although people complained something didn’t work but I’ve not heard back so guessing they’re fine now?). I do still want some books and a bigger notebook. I’m convincing myself that books and notebooks are exceptions and are not a waste. Books are obvious, and notebooks will eventually get used…even if I do have a few blank ones already…
• Work smart - not been that smart. Doing my weekly summaries for myself at least. Seem to have been very busy and “no time to plan” which is a lie, I always have time I just immediately jump right into something first. The weeks are flying by though.
• Computer games - Yep, doing this! It actually makes me feel better in the evenings. One night I was super tired, so just watched TV. Been playing Valheim with my friend. A survival, crafting game with a Viking theme. We both died last night exploring a new area and we are both feeling a bit of rage-quit now. We lost everything and it takes a long time to make stuff. We’re both guilty of flitting between games. Play one for a week then get bored and move on to something else. Often we’ll come back to them in weeks, months or even years time. I would like to get really into a game, but maybe that’s just not realistic to expect now. I do prefer multiplayer, co-operative games but I’ve got some story RPG ones to play though which are fun as it’s like an interactive movie.
• Projects - not started anything. Have restored my soldering iron to fully operational so that’s a start. Thinking about the e-ink display and doing something for that. My driver for that is not really as it’ll be useful to me, but as something to show to some friends at work. Not sure how I feel about that as a driver.

So as February approaches what am I going to do? Well obviously close all those gaps and do everything I said…in reality, what could I hope for? Maybe finish the letter to my sister, get the e-ink screen working with the pi zero, read one non-fiction book…We’ll see.

I wish I could use Tinderbox, and had something to use it for. Not sure why I suddenly had this urge but I then spent a while on the forums. I guess this is what happens when I’m left with a browser to fill my evenings.

Well I’m not going to do anything useful now, so I should go to bed and read some stories. I’m enjoying The Realm of the Enderlings series, even if I have only just scratched the surface with book 2 of the first trilogy out of 6 trilogies (one has 4 parts).