Thursday, 28th May, 2026

It’s been a very busy week at work. Everything landed in the same week, so no SOTA outings. Which is a shame, as the weather has been very nice.

All my car cleaning stuff arrived. Suppose I have to actually clean the car now 🧼. Watching videos and making lists about it, made it seem fun.

Got home assistant setup and running again. Controls the battery and stats about the solar and whatever. It is so powerful and I just barely scratch the surface with it.

A MacBook 12” I wa watching (but forgot about) sold for £52 yesterday. That is cheap. I don’t really need it though and I recently cleared out all the laptops and mini pcs and whatever else I could find as it’s just clutter.

I bought a radio a while back that I plan(ned?) on installing in the new car. Be a fun project but I suspect I’d use it….twice a year…. maybe more but pretty infrequently. Even if I did a long drive once a week, I bet I’d rarely use it. I don’t really want to chat on it whilst driving, it’s mostly to reply to those calling CQ from activation sites to give them a contact. And round here, that’s not very often.

I still might install it, although Fraser already bets I’ll sell it and not install it. He’s probably right. It falls into the same dream of a Land Rover defender all kitted out.

Another ham friend, who recently retired - although from one office job to about 10 volunteering or other jobs - said he has a Land Rover but it’s just an expense as he doesn’t have time, or wants to spend time himself, fixing it up and doing things. He wouldn’t recommend…even though he’s on his second. I think that’s the point - it’s an activity in itself rather than a mode of transport.

My wife said I need to find another hobby when I retire as she doesn’t want to come climbing hills with me. She likes walking but not up. Even if she did get into hill walking, no-one wants to be standing at the top of a hill for 30 minutes (or more) whilst I shout a series of random letters and numbers into a radio in exchange for another set of random letters and numbers. This will be for when she’s at work and I’m not - mostly as she loves her job and mine is fine but no longer than necessary. I did start wondering what might be those other hobbies. There’s film photography, which combines well with outdoors, Land Rover maintenance…possibly although I don’t know anything about it, and likely we’d need to be living somewhere that I can keep it and it doesn’t get in the way and annoy everyone! Setting up more radio stuff at home, but that also needs space not to annoy everyone at home! Potentially car cleaning, should that take off. Model trains has been kicking around in my mind for a while…also needs space not to be in the way and annoy everyone… seems to be a theme here! Visiting Scottish Islands would be nice to do. I’d, of course, want to do some hills but I’m sure we can work out a balance.

What else? Minimising time on the computer currently seems sensible as it can get to me. I have plenty of books to read, and music to enjoy. Could always start that rock tumbling I thought of a year ago. There’s probably not going to be a shortage of things I try out, just are they all solo activities?

The busy work also involved important (as far as importance goes in a work context) stuff that had to be done/needs to be finished and has all be squashed into a short time frame. Inevitably, typos and mistakes have accumulated and I was worried it would all come crashing down. Remarkably, it didn’t but I feel like I lucked my way through it at times. A few people - long term friends of 30+ years - have commented that I often seem quite lucky. I do tend to agree with them. It’s a funny characteristic, heavily used in computer games and RPGs, and not a real thing (? Right ? I’d say? Maybe?). Or is it some subconscious action? Weirdly I have guessed lottery style games correctly a few times - now probably that’s my bias in only remembering the times I got it right vs. the times I got it wrong. But this week I feel lucky in some of the answers I gave - which turned out to be correct but we’d not done the work - and how, what I’d describe, as a bit of a shambles all fell into the right place at the end.

I have made mistakes that weren’t too far from “that’s the opposite of what I told you” but they worked out okay in the end. Maybe everyone is accepting and the general strive to to the right thing eventually forces everything in the right direction, even if you step out of line for a bit.

Jack’s blog reminds me that I want a Nikon F100. His blog reminds me I want lots of things. Probably should stop looking at it…but don’t tell him that.

We still have some ancient - 8? years old - kindle tablets, the 7” ones. When I bought them, they were refurbs for $20 or something crazy from Amazon. The kids still use them a little although they’re pretty slow, and struggle to download software. Not sure if the OS is too old or the SD card is dead or what but it’s painful. Streaming on them works just fine once you’re in the app. For long car journeys or flights, it means everyone has a screen to be entertained. However, they do seem like they’re getting just that little bit worst - downloading Netflix items for offline use seems to be slower and slower and harder and harder now. At some stage it’ll stop functioning. I don’t want to but I feel obliged to get some new devices so that everyone still has something. It conflicts with my desire not to have so many devices in the house, but the issue is then just one person goes without and that’s not really fair. Probably I should buy an iPad, often the base models are pretty cheap (well for iPads) and then everything will work nicely. I used to buy my wife a new one and then the old one would go down the pecking order. I suppose that’s an option, but hers is fine. I thought about getting one but then I don’t want to kids messing it up and I don’t need one.

So probably I’ll just wait for it to die and then immediately buy something.