Thought about that new MacBook Neo. I like that it doesn’t really have any upgrade options as then I wouldn’t get sucked into a £2000 laptop. Plus all I do is browser and plaintext files. Maybe photo editing but it would probably just be Photos.app. Then I could also play with Tinderbox. Likely could wangle edu discount via my wife too. But I don’t need another computer.

Fell into a Time rabbit hole. Ordered a QRP Labs clock that gets the time from GPS. Mostly as it was pretty cheap and I get to build it. Seems the next level of accuracy is then £100s up towards £1000, to run a network PTP server delivering circa nanosecond accuracy. It would be cool to do that though, just because.

Doesn’t really matter, it’ll just sit here until I come back.

Now what?

A friend told me he’s bought a SNES to add to his impressive game console collection. I think in the past I would’ve like that, but these days I’m not interested. I still have a strong overwhelming desire to not have things, but many of the things in this house aren’t mine and so it’s hard to get rid of them. Plus lots of my stuff that takes up space, are “maybe useful items”, like cables, adapters, fittings, tools, etc. I don’t mind those, although I would like them to be organised more. Have been quietly thinking about selling some of the boys’ Lego. They’ve got a lot of minecraft sets and once built they’re not that exciting to play with. We’ve dismantled them all now, and they’re back in boxes/bags. Makes me wonder about the lego trains as well. Wonder what I should do with them, they’re quite big. I guess they’re packed up in boxes and one boring wet weekend I should get them out and have the kids make a new track etc. on the lounge floor. Although I think I enjoy them more than they do.

Makes me wonder about tiny miniature railways. I should investigate that. Be nice to have something that could fit on one table but be interesting, with switch points, signal logic, etc. something that could be setup and not be annoying to have out for a longer time.

Almost at 1,000 SOTA points now. Monday should be my day, although trying to find a suitable hill(s)/route. My hiking pal wants to come too, which is good but then that changes the options. Still lots of snow on the hills and the slight thaw is making the avalance risk higher. Getting access to some is also tricky, or it would be an absolute slog in wet, slushy snow. It’s hard to know what some places will be like. He’s supposedly going to think up options so I’ll see what he comes up with. Probably spend all evening looking at the map and making a load of schedules to compare.

I did start making my own scheduling app - bsaically a sqlite db plus some interface to add and look things up. My spreadsheet is fine but it gets messy and hard to remember if I’ve looked at a hill or not. I should finish that off at some point.

Speaking to guy at work about it and he immediately said I should sell it. I’m torn as they’re a pain to sell, I keep thinking about in years to come, ie retired, I might want it as an activity to do, and I got mine for a good price. Ugh I dunno. Perhaps I should pack it away into the loft and worry about it another day.

It leads on from a conversation with my wife about sorting out the garage. She does not like it being in there. Wait till I tell her I was thinking of a defender and how that could live in the garage.

The defender is not a light purchase. Getting GAS for something like a MacBook or camera or LEGO trains etc. even a rowing machine is fine as the thing isn’t that big and when I get bored it isn’t overwhelming. The Defender is not that. Especially if it’s the third car. I do worry it’s just a phase, another minor obsession that lasts 1-6 months and then I’m done. The only thing I’ve lasted with is summits on the air.

I like the idea of modifying it myself and making it my own, but then when each bit is £250+, I’m not sure I could do that and in the end just do nothing.

Probably best I don’t.

Thought it might be useful as a lazy-mode journal/scrapbook. Think it has 5GB of storage, so should be plenty for images as it compresses things anyway.

Really I don’t have time for another hobby/project and if I did get a Land Rover and it broke down then most likely I’d take it somewhere and pay for it. Uh I dunno. Maybe I should find something to distract me.

One of the niggles with a Land Rover is that we don’t really have a nice place for it to live. Sure it can sit on the drive but the drive is only two cars wide and so we’d have to stack them up. That’s fine but I can see it being annoying at times. Maybe I should set myself the goal of organising the garage such that I could keep it in there. Probably help with it not rusting! Be nice to have an organised garage with tool racks and worktops for stuff. Although my concern is that there are too many things to fit in the garage. Felt bad enough when I was trying to setup the rowing machine (that 1 million metres goal has long gone). Probably just better storage is needed, although 6 bikes makes things difficult.

Or I should put some effort into my home ham radio setup. Actually put up some decent antenna, get an aerial man to put one on the chimney. That kind of stuff.

Should arrive Monday, and more snow is forecast next week, so hopefully get an outing with them.

Was looking at Land Rover Defenders again. I could just buy one. Seems excessive but fun. I do worry I over optimise everything. Do nothing now, to save money, to do things later. That’s a slight exaggeration but I do always think “I’ll do that when the kids leave home” or “once I’m retired”. Why not now? Future me will be old and boring.

This is probably just my brain justifying buying things.

Soon enough we’ll have a teenager in the house…

It’s also pretty expensive and I have clothing already. I don’t know if they ever do sales but maybe I’ll just keep an eye out.

So I looked at Land Rover Defenders. I like the 90 county models, with the old inward facing bench seats in the back. What I’d use it for, I don’t know. Learning “cars”, which would be good to do. It would be fun…is that allowed? Or does everything have to be optimised…

The Reddit time limit on my phone does work. I can easily bypass it or add more time - perhaps some settings to limit that - but it just acts as a nice trigger to go “this is a waste of time, go do something” vs. just sitting there for two hours until I need the toilet.

I was worried I’d cocked up at work on Monday and was wondering if anyone would notice, and why my excuses would be, but then I realised I was mistaken and things weren’t as bad. No doubt a lesson there.

Maybe I’ll get the 2.3GHz transverter instead of the mountain shirt…

But also less things.

For about three years I’ve been saying I should do a monthly write up of our expenses. Just to put a bit of context behind the table of numbers. Still yet to do it. I used to do it in my dokuwiki which was my “whole life” website back in 2017 or something. Even made a template to use each month. I should recreate it. But I won’t.

Reminds me that I made a backup of that dokuwiki somewhere. I wonder if I still have it or if it’s in some random github repo.

Logged into my public services vps and went to update the docker containers but docker compose wasn’t recognised as a command…so not sure what that’s about. I think the only docker thing running is linkding.

Think I need to yolo more and research less. My snow shoes arrived and immediately I regretted not getting the larger size (which is what I started with based). Back they go!