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.