Tuesday, 22nd April, 2025

My trip away with my friends is coming up this weekend. Hoping to do lots of radio summits in the English Lake District. The only issue is that it’s prone to rain, so I just hope it stays dry.

Nothing like a deadline to get me to finish various antenna and radio projects. Although most likely I’ll not use half the stuff.

A guy in New Zealand wants to try and arrange a summit to summit contact. Which would be amazing but I think it’ll mean I’ll have to be on a summit at 5:30am! Need a spreadsheet to figure out the times and make sure we actually arrive the same time and talking about the same day 😅

Feels like I’ve not really had anything to do at work for a while. But in that because I’m not reacting to something that’s happened and I get to choose my own story, but you get so used to working in a reactive way, it’s hard to change to proactive. There is plenty to do but deadlines are ages away…

Monday, 14th April, 2025

My broken monitor is a work one and I asked what they wanted me to do with it. “Bring it in and we’ll give you a new one” was the answer. So that’s nice. I was looking at a 27” 4K monitor, but a free 24” 1080p one will be just fine.

My radio blog has one post per hill but some days I do more than one. I keep thinking about changing the structure so it fits better with one post per day, regardless of number of hills, but then would I have to change the old posts to fit? All it means is that instead of writing up my trips I fiddle faddle about with a test site and make no decisions or progress. Even if I just posted the photos I took and no text that would be better than nothing. In fact, I might just do that. Plus a screenshot of my route and contacts I made.

Can always come back later and write stuff if I want. Or lunch time at work etc. it’s my website, I can do tf I want with it 😅

Last week I tried to be more proactive about taking my camera and actually taking photos. We had a trip away and I took it with me. Didn’t take that many photos, as I often didn’t take it out the house, but did take some. Myself, my wife and our friends all took photos with our iPhones (various models, mine is probably the newest with iPhone 13). I liked all the iPhone photos better. A few of mine were nice but mostly I didn’t like them. Maybe I need some new colour profiles on the camera, or I could edit them in lightroom etc. but I’ve lost interest in all that. I like taking a photo on my phone, maybe editing it and hitting auto, or quickly adjusting something (but mostly don’t need to) and it looks good. Phone to desktop isn’t the greatest, unless I get a mac though. Am I going to sell my camera and buy an iPhone 17 in September? The camera can take good photos, it’s me I know, but not sure I’m going to do anything. I never did sell the lense either. I did think about a X100VI as I often just pick the 23mm, but meh… I don’t want to be another person with an iPhone taking photos but then again, what does it matter.

Remember when I was quite into stoicism. Now I can’t even spell it. Four years ago I made a tiddlywiki with all of Marcus A. Meditations as tiddlers. Was mostly fun to process the text files, as I never read it.

I should just take film photos but film is too expensive in my opinion, however, I do like the photos so there’s that again. Other thoughts include a Ricoh GRIII for taking with me up hills to capture the scenery better than my phone but is it really better?

Blahblah blah time for bed…

The cats keep escaping at night and waking everyone up, we might need to put child locks on the kitchen door 😅

Saturday, 12th April, 2025

Coming up two weeks since I last wrote anything. Was feeling like it was a chore, so didn’t bother. Plus it’s been school holidays and we’ve been away.

Thinking of resurrecting my old blog with a new SSG system. Sometimes I want a blog that’s not radio focused and not journal-y but just a regular one for regular sort of posts. Probably I’ll never use it.

Need to rejig my radio summit write ups, one post per summit can be tiring when I do several in a day. It also doesn’t read as well as a trip report. Plus I can make use of the API to load my points and list automatically vs. me maintaining a separate list. Although this does have its advantages.

So much admin to do…and for what? Tidying pixels online…

Then there’s the SINGLE BLOG to rule them all. 💍 where I have everything all together. Also not going to happen.

My iPhone 13 (I think) keeps going flat during the day. It never used to. Can’t believe the battery degraded that much. Looking at the app info on the battery settings page, I think WhatsApp is to blame.

Tuesday, 1st April, 2025

Oh it’s April. Have to make a new folder for this post.

The shelf on the wall that has the camera plus other stuff started to lean and looked like it was going to fall off. I fixed it but it meant I took everything off. Made me debate about selling all the Fuji gear and getting a fixed lens camera. Like a X100XYZ. I should at least sell some lenses I never use. I just don’t have any interest in taking a camera and taking photos. I’ll bring my phone and snap one or two but that’s it.

I do feel bad about it. My wife has started in the next photo album, of last year, and there’s enough but it’s getting less and less each year. I’m a bit obsessed with radio at the moment but it’s not like I take that everywhere so it’s not really displacing a camera. I still bring it out for birthdays and Christmas etc. better make sure it’s charged for this week’s birthday.

The photos never look that great either. The colour settings on the camera aren’t great - some profile I set ages ago but no longer like, and I really don’t want to edit them afterwards.

Grumble grumble grumble.