Raspberry pi’s, e-ink, visitors and a trip to Belgium
Notes on the week
We’re just back from a short trip to Belgium for the bank holiday weekend. We took the bus to Ghent and got to see Irish artist Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s show at the Kunsthal before continuing on via train to Bruges. It’s probably the most beautiful urban centre on earth, but I think that 2 days is all you’d really need to spend there, which was perfect for our little trip! Side-note, cobblestones are really cute, but terrible for walking/cycling on.
Before heading away on our trip we had Elle’s Sister’s partner stay with us for a few days after a conference in The Hague. It was really nice to get some one-on-one time, as usually we only get to hang out at family events where everyones attention is being pulled in a million different directions. He had the honour of being the first visitor to see version 2.0 of the apartment, and I gave the usual tour of the city and some of the new things we’ve found since moving to the south.
I’ve started work on building my new bike. A classic steel frame was salvaged from the collection at the Bike Workshop, and after a good bit of cleaning it’s going to be the basis for my “MGOOF” build - Modern Gear On Old Frame. I don’t care about being era accurate, I want to build something fast, cheap and sturdy. I expect progress to be slow, as it will take time to find parts that fit the older frame, but I think the end result will be worth it.
We are swimming in Raspberry Pis. At my last count we have 5 in the house, and I’ve really fallen in love with how convenient these tiny computers are. They make incredible media players using software like MP4MUSEUM, and are a great starting point for any electronic tinkering. Over the past few days I’ve updated my e-ink project from last year, this time to focus on realtime bus information for the stop outside our flat. I’ll do a more detailed write up on that soon.
A bit late on this one, but I’ve started reading Sapians by Yuval Noah Harari. After enjoying Home Deus so much, and his new book on AI after just coming out, I figured it was time to go back and check this off the list. So far it’s fascinating! More to come later.
My partner had an exhibition recently in Berlin, and the work she wanted to show was a series of pencil drawings, captured on 35mm film and projected using an old slide projector. She has a 35mm film camera and a projector, but the problem was that she had no way to control the movement from one slide to the next.
The projector had a (wired) remote with buttons for forward and back, but it has no way to set a timer. This exhibition would run for weeks, and it wouldn’t exactly be practical to have someone stand around pressing the ‘forward’ button every 30 seconds. Thanks to my newly found courage when it comes to hardware tinkering, and the support network of the folks at the Pixelbar, I said I’d take care of it.
Initial thoughts
I knew that I wanted to be able to:
Advance from one slide to the next
Reverse through the carousel, back to the beginning
Adjust the time in between slides
I also knew that because the remote was wired, it must work by just closing loops on different circuits with each press of the different buttons. Thankfully, Kodak published the circuit diagrams for their products back in the day, and I was able to confirm this by taking apart our particular remote.
I knew that the remote connected to the projector using an 8 pin connector of some variety.
The Plan
The plan was to create a device that would mimic the wired remote control, would be programmable, and would advance the slides at a set interval. This device would connect to the same port as the existing remote control (by splicing the remote control cable if necessary).
The heart of the device would be an Arduino. Its a low power, low cost device, has plenty of pins to connect things to, and there’s a plethora of knowledge available online.
I would need some way of triggering the ‘buttons’, i.e closing the circuits for the different functions (in retrospect I know this is very basic stuff, but I’m new to this hardware world), and the whole thing would need to be packaged up in a way that would be relatively discreet.
The Build
Turns out that the 8 Pin connector that the wired remote used is a pretty standard DIN connector, the same connector used by MIDI cables, so I ordered a cheap MIDI cable that I could cut in half, using the exposed wires on one to interact with whatever device I would make. This also had the benefit of leaving the original remote intact and unadulterated by this whole process.
At this point I had the interface with the projector sorted, next we needed to focus on the actual device itself.
Of the 8 pins on the remote cable, one is used to provide a common voltage shared across all the functions, one controls the ‘forward’ action, one controls the ‘back’ action, there are two dedicated to focussing the lens (which is something I figured could be done by hand on the projector itself and was outside the scope of this project), one pin is for ground and the remaining two are not used for anything.
I would need to connect the common wire and the wire of whichever action I wanted in order to make the projector do what I needed. The name for this component is a relay, and you can think about it just like a switch.
You can think about a relay as being split into two parts, the bit that takes instructions (in my case this would be connected to the Arduino) and the bit that distributes power (this will be connected to the projector). The instruction side of the relay has an input for power, an input that tells it what to do (control voltage), and an output to ground. The distribution side of the relay has three connections, one for the incoming voltage, and two outputs that the switch will swap between.
In my scenario the incoming voltage would be coming from the projector via the common wire, the control voltage would come from the Arduino, and the two different outputs would return to the projector via either the ground (do nothing) circuit, or the ‘advance’ circuit (advance the slides). Repeat the process for the ‘reverse’ action and we have the basis of a feasible solution.
The first problem was that I only had one common wire, and I needed two switches. I didn’t know enough about electricity and wiring to know if I could split the common wire and use this split wire as input into both relays, so I decided against that. What I settled on was, I think, a more elegant solution.
The common voltage from the projector (Yellow wire) enters Relay A’s input.
Relay A’s default position is ‘off’, i.e do nothing, which pushes the current through it’s output 1.
Output 1 of Relay A is connected to the input of Relay B.
Relay B’s default position is also ‘off’, which pushes the current through it’s output 1.
Output 1 of Relay B is connected to the ground (black wire) running back to the projector
The relay is controlled by passing a voltage to it’s control input. When you send a voltage (in the case of the relays I used, 5V) over a wire connected to this input, the relay switches from passing current through output 1, to passing it through output 2 instead. When you remove the voltage from the control input, the switch closes and current passes through output 1 again.
The relay I used was a 2-channel relay that I got from Kiwi Electronics. By having essentially 2 relays on one board, I only had to worry about one “instruction side”, which would receive power from the Arduino, and would accept two control voltages, one responsible for each relay on the board.
Once all this was wired up and connected to the Arduino, I needed to write a simple program that would toggle the relays on/off at the desired interval. The project contained around 30 slides, and the carousel has room for 80, so I needed to quickly reverse back to the start once we reached the end (rather than moving forward and cycling through 50 blank slides).
The following is the finished program, it’s pretty basic and could probably be tidied up a lot, but it works!
// start by initializing the pins that will control the relays, and some variable that lets the program know if this is the first run - or subsequent runs. The reason being that for the first run we want a delay before starting everything, every subsequent run there should be no delay. There's also a variable to keep track of which slide we're on.
int ch1Pin =2;
int ch2Pin =3;
int ssrON, ssrOFF;
int firstTimeRun =1;
int current_slide =0;
// This is where we configure the length of the delays between slides, expressed in milliseconds
int text_delay =18000;
int img_delay =2000;
int rev_delay =2000;
//Here we set the mode for the pins, in this case want to use them as outputs, and set them both to OFF for the time being
voidsetup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
pinMode(ch1Pin, OUTPUT);
pinMode(ch2Pin, OUTPUT);
ssrON =LOW;
ssrOFF =HIGH;
digitalWrite(ch1Pin,ssrOFF);
digitalWrite(ch2Pin,ssrOFF);
}
// This is core of the program, with a run plan with specific timings and a few debug messages coming over Serial.print() so that I could keep track when figuring out timings. It took a little time to figure this out, as too short a delay between instructions will be misinterpreted as single action, rather than two.
voidloop() {
Serial.print("Projecting Slide: ");
Serial.print(current_slide);
Serial.println();
if(firstTimeRun ==1){
delay(5000);
firstTimeRun = firstTimeRun +1;
for(int i=0;i<13;i++){
forward();
Serial.print("Projecting Slide: ");
Serial.print(current_slide);
Serial.println();
delay(text_delay);
}
}
else{
for(int i=0;i<12;i++){
forward();
Serial.print("Projecting Slide: ");
Serial.print(current_slide);
Serial.println();
delay(text_delay);
}
}
for(int i=0; i<8;i++){
forward();
Serial.print("Projecting Slide: ");
Serial.print(current_slide);
Serial.println();
delay(img_delay);
}
for(int i=0; i<7;i++){
backwards();
Serial.print("Projecting Slide: ");
Serial.print(current_slide);
Serial.println();
delay(rev_delay);
}
for(int i=0; i<7;i++){
forward();
Serial.print("Projecting Slide: ");
Serial.print(current_slide);
Serial.println();
delay(img_delay);
}
for(int i=0;i<13;i++){
forward();
Serial.print("Projecting Slide: ");
Serial.print(current_slide);
Serial.println();
delay(text_delay);
}
for(int i=0; i<33;i++){
backwards();
Serial.print("Projecting Slide: ");
Serial.print(current_slide);
Serial.println();
delay(rev_delay);
}
}
//I separated the forward and back actions to their own separate functions, and call them from within the main function whenever I need them
voidforward(){
digitalWrite(ch2Pin,ssrON);// turn relay SSR2 ON
delay(200);// wait for .2
digitalWrite(ch2Pin,ssrOFF);// turn relay SSR2 OFF
current_slide++;
}
voidbackwards(){
digitalWrite(ch1Pin,ssrON);// turn relay SSR2 ON
delay(200);// waite for .2
digitalWrite(ch1Pin,ssrOFF);// turn relay SSR2 OFF
current_slide--;
}
With the hardware built and the software working, the only thing left to do was create a rudimentary housing for everything. I 3D printed a case for the Arduino, and another for the relay unit and glued these two parts together. I then packaged the whole thing in a small, clear plastic lunchbox with a hole drilled through for the MIDI and power cables. A few cable ties and some hot glue ensured that nothing could move around or come loose during transit. It’s rough and ready, but it works and is secure!
The feedback from Elle has been really positive, the system worked perfectly at the show in Berlin (even if I forgot to pack a USB power adaptor and she had to run around the city trying to find one on her install day, my bad!), and it’s really made me a lot more confident taking on hardware projects in the future.
It’s been a while, and the lengthy gap in posts here has taught me something valuable about habit and routine. If you’re like me, and you want to do something new and make it a part of your routine (like me at the start of the year when I started writing these things) the worst thing that can happen to you is a gap. A pause in routine completely derails me, and that’s clearly what has happened here. 24 weeks this year, nearly halfway and the first gap, then a longer second gap and eventually the posts dry up. I’m not sure what the remedy is other “do the thing”, but maybe I just need to be more intentional, actually block out some time on the calendar every week to sit down and write. I can knock out a thousand words pretty quick, but it looks like I might need to hold a proverbial gun to my own head to make it happen.
Notes on the week(s)
With all that aside, it’s been a hectic summer and start of autumn.
We are well and truly settled in our new apartment. For reasons far too interesting to share publicly we’ve had to replace all the furniture in the flat, and over the course of about a week managed to acquire replacements for everything for less than €300 (and 200 of that was renting vans!). The Dutch buy-and-sell website Marktplaats is absolutely incredible, the sheer volume of items that people are looking to either sell quick or get rid of for free is wild. Obviously for a “forever home” we might be more intentional about the items we choose, but for what is only ever going to be a relatively short time here, I think the eclectic collection of pieces is actually great!
I’ve joined a co-working space in the city. I go three days a week and enjoy the luxuries of blazing fast internet, coffee and snacks galore and the joy of meeting new people. I say that last part only half sarcastically, because the last year of ‘restarting’ life over here without knowing anyone other than Elle has taught me to really enjoy meeting new people. Plus there’s a weird psychological trick at play, when arriving home after travelling to and from the office that makes the work day feel more done.
Elle has been so busy lately, with three exhibitions, a publication and a reading in just the last few weeks. The exhibitions featured three new works, the first was a series of analog photos of pencil drawings inspired by old Irish stories taken from the children’s story archives, that were projected by an old slide projector (I got to help out here by building a controller that would automatically advance the projector). The second was a pair of one metre tall glass cyanotypes made from images of the building that was hosting the show (yes, they were as difficult to make as that sounds) and the third was an installation piece with old metal farm equipment, CRT TVs and some 3D rendered imagery. I’d love to travel back in time and show a younger Ellen all the crazy tools, techniques and materials that she’s going to be working with in the future. She’d be shook.
I’ve been collecting links in Raindrop for the past year, but was frustrated by the process of moving them from Raindrop into a post. I had to copy the link, paste it into Obsidian, wrap it in brackets, then go back to Raindrop and copy the title to paste in square brackets ( [Link Title](link.url)). I had checked Raindrop’s export to csv and txt, but unfortunately they only export the URL, not the titles. Only this morning did I check the other export option, html, which does exactly what I need, and turns the link dump from a tedious job, to about three clicks.
Reading
Currently reading Femina by Janina Ramírez, which is a study of female figures throughout medieval history that have been ignored or written out of the established narrative. Not very far into it yet, but it’s really enjoyable.
Listening
The Empire podcast by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand is a fascinating journey through the rise, fall and influence of the major empires that have existed over time.
Somehow I ended up going down a Jethro Tull rabbit hole recently, and I will never get sick of listening to the “Heavy Horses” album.
My bike isn’t really fancy. It’s a lot better than the first one I got when we moved here, but that only cost €50 from a charity shop. One time both pedals fell off at once when I had just left the apartment, so I parked up, locked the bike and just left the pedals resting on the back pannier rack. Incredibly when I got back after a few hours, the pedals were still there so I had to get it fixed. A few weeks later during the middle of moving house it was stolen. Maybe it was the stress of moving, or maybe it was the achievement of a sort of Rotterdam right-of-passage, but I was kind of glad to see the back of that first bike. By the time it was stolen I’d put more money into fixing it than I’d spent to buy the damned thing.
My new bike is a Union Flow, and I got it second-hand after a life spent as part of a fleet for a now defunct bike rental company. It’s a kind of retro-modern take on the classic Dutch “Oma-Fiets”. Six of the seven gears work really well, and it’s the first bike I’ve ridden with an internal gear mechanism. It’s really cool being able to shift through the gears whilst stationary, and I can see why even though they’re heavy and really tough to work on, they make for amazing city bike transmissions. It’s a really ugly colour, and it’s still covered in the stickers from the rental company that used to own it, but I love this bike.
Having a bike opens up the city in a way that I haven’t experienced before. Have a look at the map below, it shows how far you can cycle in 20 minutes from the city centre. If you’re really eagle eyed you might have noticed that the area covered includes the airport! Granted, there are no regular flights in or out of RTM that I’d be taking, so the cycle access is a moot point, but the fact that I could is amazing.
There are a few things at work that make cycling in the Netherlands uniquely wonderful. First, and there’s no way around this, the place is really, really flat. The tallest mountain in the entire country is only 322 metres tall. That doesn’t even reach the Irish definition of mountain at all (a peak above 500 metres). Being flat makes the physical act of cycling a lot easier, but what makes it so accessible is the incredible infrastructure and societal acceptance. Cyclists are not second class citizens here, with well maintained, separated cycle lanes everywhere and are treated with patience by other road users on the occasion that there is not a dedicated lane. I actually dread the thoughts of cycling around somewhere like Dublin or Cork, as I will almost certainly be likely to at least try when we move home.
Tempted to rebrand to the Month in Review, or maybe even the Quarter.
Notes on the week
It’s not quite the end of summer, but we’re getting close. It’s been so hot for the past few weeks, to the point where it was actually a relief to cycle across the city in the rain a few nights ago. I was on the way to a cycling workshop, where volunteers meet up once a week to help people with problems they might be having with their bike. I don’t have much to offer in terms of knowledge of bike repair, but I’m eager to build up a bit of experience and it was nice to be able to help a few kids that came by last week with some minor problems. This is all in service of my new found addiction, cycling.
It dawned on me recently that once we leave the Netherlands, I’ll probably never have access to such incredible cycle infrastructure again in my life, so why not take advantage of it? I took my first test ride of an ultra-lightweight racing bike last week, and I’m hooked. The experience is so unlike my city bike that it’s actually offensive to consider them as the same mode of transport. The weight of the racing bike is the first thing you notice, it’s actually disconcerting to the point where I caught myself continuously picking ip up at just marvelling at how little effort was needed to lift it off the ground. The second, and more visceral thing is the riding position. On a city bike you’re upright, with your back more or less straight and turning your arms gently to suggest which way the bike should go. On the road bike you lean forward, hands on the drop bars attacking the road. The weight of the bike, the riding position and the tight width of the handlebars make the whole thing feel more “connected”, you demand the bike to turn and it duly obliges, you push more power through your legs and the bike responds with more and more speed.
Sufficed to say, I’m a convert, and have spent the last few nights browsing Marktplats.nl trying to find my own road bike. Cycling is one of those hobbies where no matter how much money you have to spend, someone is selling something that feels just out of your reach, and after a couple of conversations with people that have been cycling for a long time, the best move is to buy an old road bike in decent nick, fix up any little bits that need attention and just get riding. The Canyons and Specialized carbon frames will always be there in the future, but the most important thing is to get out on the road. Just this morning I had actually hoped to go for a test ride on a bike I found during the week, but the owner just messaged to let me know that someone had gotten in before me! The hunt continues.
Since my last update here, we’ve had a great trip to Finland where we spent some time in Helsinki before travelling north to see Elle’s sister play at a folk music festival in Kaustinen. It was an amazing trip from start to finish, but the most incredible thing was witnessing perpetual daylight once we got up north. It just never got fully dark, and even though these aren’t the most ideal conditions for sleeping in tents, I was really glad we were camping because there were no walls or curtains to obstruct the feeling of constant daytime. One night we got back to our tent around 2am, at the ‘darkest’ part of the night, and we could see clearly all around us. The sun actually set below the horizon for what felt like around 20 minutes, before the first glimpses of it emerging again began. I can’t even imagine what it must be like in winter, when this process is reversed and the folks up there live in almost constant darkness.
We then travelled home for some work stuff, and got to spend some time catching up with friends and family. Then roughly 24 hours after we travelled back to the Netherlands my family were over to visit. This was their first time seeing the new apartment and it felt really good to have them, especially considering how much more “our space” the new place feels. We were basically housesitting the last apartment, waiting for the owner to return, whereas we’re really able to put a stamp of this flat. The next week a few of our friends came to visit and just last week one of Elle’s sisters came to stay for a few days as well! It’s been a busy few weeks, I think it might be clear why updating this blog has been low on the priority list.
Last time I wrote, I had just finished Scott Lynch’s “The Lies of Locke Lamora”. I’ve since gone on to finish the series, or at least as much of the series that exists today. I discovered not long after finishing the first book that the author had planned for this to be a six part series, but the most recent book to be released was book 3, and that was ten years ago! It made the read through of book 3 a bit tough, knowing that it would likely leave me wanting more, without any sign that the author would ever get around to finishing the series. I couldn’t believe it, just days after finishing the book, that Lynch announced that he had finished work on three novellas to bridge the gap between books 3 and 4, and is expecting them to release soon! I feel bad for those that have been waiting ten years for new material, but I’m really happy that I (hopefully) won’t have to wait much longer.
Listening
It’s getting to that time of the election cycle, where no matter how much I convince myself that I want to tune out and just let it happen, I find myself hooked to every news source, poll and opinion that I can find. “The Rest is Politics” is addressing my political podcast needs, and manages a decent spread of focus across US, EU and world topics.
Rónán Ó Snodaigh, of Kíla fame, has a massive back catalogue of solo work, but I had missed this album he made with Myles O’Reilly back in the pandemic days. It’s a great listen, but track 3, “Tá’n t’Áth Liom” really, really stands out.
I’ve started a Substack. This is a term that is quickly becoming the new “I’ve started a podcast”, but I’ve been looking for an outlet to write about my favourite sport, Formula One, for a while now and thought that it might be fun to play around with a weekly newsletter. Hopefully I’m a little more diligent about it than I’ve been with this blog. If you want to check it out, it’s here . The F1 Gods were smiling down on me this weekend by giving me plenty to write about after a shocking moment in the Austrian Grand Prix.
The hackerspace I joined in Rotterdam, the Pixelbar has moved to a new location. This time last year the Pixelbar, and a number of other organisations, were the victims of a terrible fire at the Keileweg, where they had been situated for the previous eight years. Thankfully no one was hurt, but years and years of projects, progress and memories were gone in a matter of moments. For the past few months the Pixelbar has been operating out of a small temporary space, but last month we got the keys to our new space, at De Kroon, a former electrical factory that is now a home to over a hundred different businesses, artists, makers and more.
As a group we’ve spent the last few weeks preparing the new space - building new walls, making workbenches and storage spaces, rewiring the electrics and so, so, so much cleaning. This weekend was moving day, and over the course of about 14 hours we moved everything from the old space to our new home. Just like any move, we’re still finding our feet, and there’s lots more to do, but it feels amazing to be part of a little community of like minded people that have a new, permanent place to call our own in the city.
We’ve been in the middle of a bit of heat wave the last few days, so we took a trip out to Hoek van Holland over the weekend to cool off. After a day of chilling out in the sun and going for a swim we had a beautiful dinner at one of the restaurants along the beachfront. During the day we had seen lots of families out flying kites, and it came up that Elle had never flown a kite before. A quick trip to one of the beach shops quickly remedied this situation, and we spent the last part of our time on the sand learning to fly our new kite. With the heat finally starting to calm down, we hopped on the metro and travelled back to the city, and have been finding sand around the apartment for days since!
Elle has finished her first year of her Masters! It’s hard to believe that it has come around so fast, but this week she’ll hand in her final assignment for the semester, officially drawing to a close the academic year. One thing I’ve learned is that doing an MFA is not at all like doing a typical Masters programme, as much as it is about research and academic rigour it is also deeply tied to your creative output, and all the potential pitfalls that come with that. What happens if inspiration doesn’t strike? What if the fear of knowing that a grade is associated with your creativity holds you back from experimenting and trying new things, forcing you to stick with what you know? I’m so proud of how she’s handled the transition from B.A to MFA, and she is building a really impressive body of work here, taking on new mediums and really immersing herself in the experience. I can’t wait to see where it takes her as she prepares for her Grad Show this time next year.
Speaking of Grad Shows, we went to the Grad Show for the current crop of second years. It was a really nice evening hosted at the Piet Zwart Institute, where each graduate took over one of the large studio spaces in the building to show off the culmination of their two years of work. A drinks reception was hosted outside, and thankfully the weather in Rotterdam has been amazing the past couple of days, so there were plenty of people milling about. Towards the end of the evening the students hosted an auction to raise funds for the annual trip I mentioned a few weeks ago. Both students and faculty members submitted pieces of work to the auction and every last piece sold! We picked up a few pieces throughout the event, and I’m looking forward to brining them home next week to decorate the new apartment.
Reading
“The Lie of Locke Lamora” by Scott Lynch is the first in his Gentleman Bastards series, and was recommended to me over a year ago by a friend of mine. I never quite got around to starting it, but a few days ago I finally gave it a chance and adored every second of it. It tells the tale of a group of professional thieves, raised from a young age to be masters of their trade. I devoured it, and fell in love with the characters, the world and the premise. I’ve already started book two.
Listening
It’s Tour De France time, so it’s daily episodes of the Lantern Rouge Cycling Podcast. I got into listening to these guys during the 2022 tour, when I was watching with my Dad. They are clearly extremely knowledgable about the sport, but present in a very approachable manner, and it’s actually helped me learn a lot about the intricacies of grand tour racing.
RSI and split keyboards, Elle goes to Belgium, what the hell is Deep Dip 2?
Notes on the week
An annual tradition at the Piet Zwart Institute is the Fine Art class trip, where the first and second year groups travel somewhere in Europe together for a break right before the end of year assessments. This year they’re gone to a little town just outside of Liege in Belgium, and as I check the news tonight it’s currently experiencing a massive flood! Thankfully they all arrived safe in their little convoy of vans to the beautiful chateau they’re taking over for the weekend. Hopefully the weather will clear up and they’ll have a great time, and whilst Elle is away I get to spend an obnoxious amount of time watching all the formula 1 sessions from this weekend’s race at Imola.
As I’m typing this, I’m feeling a small bit of pain in my right ring finger. This has been a problem for me since my final year in college, I remember it flaring up for the first time typing up my final year project. Considering how much of my professional and private life is spent with two hands on a keyboard I’m surprised it doesn’t flare up more often, but I think I’ve gotten to the point where I need to start listening to the warning signs my body are sending, so I’ve started to research some alternative keyboards. I want to try an ortho-linear board, and one with significantly fewer keys so there is less reaching and stretching. I also want a split keyboard, so that I can rest my hands at a more natural width apart. Combined with my desire to do another ‘hardware’ project after the E-Ink display, I think I’m going to build my own Corne split keyboard. I think the ultra minimal layout and having to learn home row mods and layers will enforce a more deliberate practice when typing, and hopefully force me to unlearn decades of bad habits.
Trackmania is a game that I’ve been aware of for a long time, but have never really spent too much time playing or following. It’s a racing game where the basic premise is that players compete with one another to finish a track as quickly as possible. There are no collisions or overtaking, just the player against the track and the stopwatch. This description doesn’t really do justice to just how challenging some of these tracks can be, the speed and technicality really ramps up quick. A Trackmania player, ‘Wirtual’, has been showing up in my recommended YouTube videos for a little while, and this week I saw a video about something called “Deep Dip 2”.
Deep Dip 2 is a track created by 16 of the most talented track creators in the Trackmania scene, who worked together for over a year to build the ultimate challenge for players, a 16 floor hillclimb that is designed to push players to the absolute limit of their abilities. There is a real world prize pool for the first person to complete the track, and the last time I checked it was around €30,000. Unlike a normal Trackmania competition, where players have a set amount of time to try and set the fastest time on the leaderboards, the challenge here is to become the first person to finish the track. It’s been a week now, and no one has even got close. At the time of writing someone has made it to floor 13 of 16, and out of thousands of participants fewer than 10 have made it further than floor 8. It’s a wild competition to keep an eye on, and watching the progression of the payers as they overcome obstacles that looked to be impossible only a day or two ago. I’ll be keeping watch as the challenge progresses, and I’m rooting for Wirtual to make a big comeback! There are two great sites to track people’s progress through the challenge, one made by (for?) Wirtual here and another made by Loah here
Aurora’s above Kilkenny, SV Charlois and dinner parties
Notes on the week
I love space. I am fundamentally aligned with the idea that humanity should become an interplanetary species, and that the need to explore the unknown is hard coded into our DNA. I remember when I was very little, being in the back of my parents car driving home from visiting friends, looking up into the night sky and being scared. I couldn’t tell you why for certain, but I was probably beginning to get a grasp for just how tiny our little blue drop in the Universe truly is. Now, many years later and a little bit more informed as to just how infinitesimally small we are, oddly when I look up at the night sky I feel nothing but wonder and awe.
This is all a long winded of saying, when the Space Weather reports forecast a once in a lifetime Coronal Mass Ejection aimed straight at Earth I was raging that I had made my plans to travel home at the end of May, and not the start! The Aurora Borealis, visible above Kilkenny! I have never felt so jealous of, and at the same time so happy for, my family that they got to see it. My sister happened to be home that night and the pictures they got together under the Northern Lights were incredible to see.
I’ve joined a football club. Kind of. SV Charlois is the nearest football club to our new flat, and as part of an attempt to integrate more in the community, get a little fitter and have a bit of fun before my knees truly pack it in, I decided to check out if they have a very ‘amateur’ team. Turns out they have dozens of teams, across all age ranges from kids all the way up to ‘walking football’ for seniors. I went to watch their Sunday morning men’s team play this week, and the standard is exactly what I’m looking for, a little slow on the physical side but fully committed on the competitive end. The season is just coming to an end, so I can’t join properly until June ahead of the next season, but I’m going to go watch more games over the coming weeks.
We had guests for Dinner! Elle invited a couple of the girls from college around to our flat for dinner, and it was really nice! We definitely need more dishes and cutlery if this is going to become a recurring thing, I ate out of a piece of tupperware with a plastic fork (the guests got priority when it came to real dinnerware). The weather here is amazing at the moment, so we had our balcony doors open to let the sun and summer breeze in, and Elle made an amazing pasta dish that went down a treat. We also got asked the ultimate neighbour question, to keep a set of our friends apartment keys in our house in case they ever get locked out. I think we’re properly settled in now.
I’m intentionally taking my time with Wuthering Heights, and just taking a chapter a night before bed. I’m really enjoying it, and doesn’t feel anything like the chore that Moby Dick was. It’s one of Elle’s favourite books so I’m really looking forward to getting deeper into it and chatting with her about it. Before reading the book, I was aware of the name ‘Heathcliff’ but knew literally nothing about him, I wonder where his character goes throughout the novel, but so far he’s not exactly the gentleman that I had in my head.
Listening
The Kendrick/Drake beef is all the music world can talk about right now, but beyond even the tracks released by the artists themselves, the highlight has to be BBL Drizzy, an AI generated song by King Willonius
The Vision Pro, Elle’s work trip and Adrian Newey shocks the F1 World
Notes on the week
I got to try out Apple’s Vision Pro headset this week. I thought it was going to be a long time before I got to try out the headset, but one of the PixelBar members has one for some of the work he’s doing for his day job, and brought it to the hackerspace for people to try out. After a few minutes using it, I’m convinced that this is the future of computing. Not in it’s current form - it’s far to heavy, bulky and inconvenient - but it feels obvious to me that the augmented reality view of presenting computing as a layer over the physical world feels like the next natural evolution in personal computing. Computers have gone from something we needed massive rooms for, to something we dedicated a space for in our homes, to something we carried in backpacks, to something we cant bear to let out of our sight. Our relationship with technology grows more and more personal over time, and after spending a moment inside the Vision Pro’s pass through spatial computing world I cannot wait to see where this technology goes over the next five to ten years.
Elle is home this week for another gig photographing an exhibition. I’m so proud of her for carving out this niche, a life in the arts is such an uncertain one, and to have a skillset that can be used for paying work on a regular basis and keeps her involved in the art scene at home is just fantastic to see. I might be biased, but I think she is insanely good at documenting exhibition spaces, and curators must agree with me because she’s already been booked for another gig later this year! Whilst she’s away I have the new flat to myself just after settling in, which is a recurring theme for us. Every single time we’ve moved into a new place as a couple, one of us has had to leave within the first week for work. The first time was in Limerick, where Elle started an artist residency in Dublin a couple of days after we moved into a house with our friends from college, then when we arrived in Rotterdam I had to fly home after a few days to finish up a project for Ericsson. I guess if the pattern continues then I’m next to have some urgent work trip when we eventually leave Charlois. I wonder what it will be.
The new office furniture arrived, and just as promised the delivery guys brought it to the front door and no further. For a €15 delivery fee I’m not holding it against them, but I (perhaps somewhat stubbornly) had to drag the desk up to the third floor on my own. I say stubbornly, because I could have spent a little time to disassemble it outside and bring it up piece by piece, but I did the lazy man’s load and lugged it up in one go. If anything had gone wrong, imagine how embarrassing the news article would have been? “Irish man abroad crushed by second hand bureau”,
In F1 Corner, Adrian Newey has decided to leave Red Bull at the end of the 2024 season. This is seismic news. In the 32 years since 1992, a Newey designed car has won 14 World Championships, and is all but certain to add a 15th this year. That’s a remarkable hit rate in a sport that attracts the greatest engineering minds from all around the world, and a huge loss for the Red Bull organisation that seems to be doing everything in it’s power to self destruct internally, despite utter dominance on the track. We don’t know where Newey is going next, but if Fred Vasseur can lure him to Ferrari, after already poaching Lewis Hamilton to the Scuderia for next year, they’ll build statues of the French man in Maranello.
Wuthering Heights is next on my list to get through this year, and with zero background knowledge the first few chapters are already ‘spookier’ than I was expecting.
I’ve been remiss in my duty to writing these updates. I’m going to blame moving and no one will argue with me, it’s a stressful thing to do!
We’re up and running in our new home in Charlois, and by we I mean me, because Elle had to travel home this week for a job.She’s shooting another exhibition in Ireland. The place already feels a lot like home, the minimal decoration of the flat when we moved in meant that all our little trinkets and personal stuff really stand out, and I love that. I spent the week working from the kitchen table, as the ‘office’ room is completely unfurnished, but a trip to our favourite charity shop ‘Het Goed’ has solved that. We found a desk, an office chair and a few other bits and pieces that we needed for €80, including delivery.
They’re due to arrive next Monday. They only deliver to the front door though, and with Elle away that means I’m going to have to navigate getting these things up three flights of stairs (no elevator is a pain) on my own. If anyone spots a deranged looking person disassembling a desk on the side of the road in Charlois next week, don’t judge.
The same day that we went to Het Goed to get some furniture, I also got a new bike. During the weekend of moving, my bike was stolen from outside our old flat in Glashaven. The glass half full take here is that it meant one less thing to move?
When we got to Rotterdam we were advised that if we didn’t have indoor storage (we didn’t), don’t buy good bikes. We spent very little on ours, and managed to get a surprisingly long time out of them. They were a bit rough around the edges, and have needed some TLC over the months to keep them going, but two bikes for roughly €100 wasn’t bad! I guess that’s why I don’t feel too bad about mine being robbed, it was either going to let me down mechanically in a way that was too expensive to justify fixing, or get stolen, and I was aware of both eventualities.
One of the great things about our new place is that we have access to a basement. Each apartment has it’s own storage room underground, and honestly it’s pretty big. I think in Dublin you could probably rent the space out for a grand a month. With the security of having somewhere to lock up safely I felt better spending a little more on a little better bike, and on Wednesday went to Mega Bikes, a massive bike shop with locations across the city. I got a second hand city bike in great condition for €250, and it is such an upgrade on my old bike. It’s so much smoother, lighter and faster, and I feel much more comfortable on it.
The added benefit of having the basement room is that if I do need to perform any maintenance or repairs on the bike, I have somewhere to do it that isn’t the side of the road! When Elle gets back we’re going to get her up and running with a new bike too, because if my old bike was hanging on by a thread before it was stolen, hers is held together by hope.
I’ve finished my journey aboard the Pequod. It took far, far longer than I ever could have expected. Moby Dick is a big book, but not excessively long (especially in comparison to some of the longer fantasy books I’ve read a la Sanderson or Robert Jordan), but it was such a struggle to get through. I described it to friends recently as having prose that was written just recent enough that the english is perfectly understandable, but long enough ago into the past that the structure and phrases are so different to what I’m used to that I really had to take my time to make sure I was getting the correct meaning of each sentence.
Overall, I’m really happy that I stuck with it. I nearly gave up on it many times, but I actually feel a real sense of satisfaction having gotten through it. Ishmael’s meandering narration annoyed me at first, but as the book went on it actually drew me in. In the same way Andy Weir’s The Martian is so compelling as a series of journal entries, Moby Dick feels more like Ishmael’s private thoughts on the topic of whaling rather than a story being told for our pleasure.
Clocking in at an average 1,800 words read per day, it might be the slowest I’ve read a book since I was a child, but on reflection that was kind of a cool experience too, as the tiny slices of narrative I took in every day read like a daily dispatch from Ishmael, rather than a broken up long form piece. For comparison, after I finished I finally got round to reading “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir, which I devoured and finished within 24 hours. 9/10 Book, would highly recommend.
Listening
For whatever reason, last summer I got really into watching the Tour de France with my Dad. Like most people I knew roughly what the Tour was about, a team based cycling race across France, dipping into other countries on occasion before ending with the final stage in Paris, but had no idea of the complexity of strategy employed by the teams to get their riders to the front of the peloton. I looked up some YouTube videos to find out the backstory of the great rivalry we were watching, Pogacar vs Vingegaard, and along the way stumbled across the Lantern Rouge cycling podcast. I learned more over a few days listening to these two guys breakdown the event than I had in a lifetime of casually observing the Tour. I’ve kept up listening to them long after Jonas won his second Tour, and even if I’m not a massive cycling fan, still find it really enjoyable.
We’ve moved! This Sunday was our last day in our first apartment in Rotterdam. The last few weeks and months have been spent trying to find our next place to live, and thankfully we finally found somewhere. Unsurprisingly it went right down to the wire, with us only signing the lease on Thursday, moving Friday and Saturday, and cleaning our old place Sunday. Our new apartment is in Charlois, in the south of the city and is a little bit out of the city centre, but it’s got two bedrooms (i.e a bedroom and an office), is pretty well kept and is within our budget.
The last apartment we lived in was beautiful, with stunning views overlooking an old harbour and was tastefully decorated. I tend to think about it as being ‘opinionated’ and I guess that makes sense, as we were only ever renting short term and it was someone’s home at the end of the day. Our new place in contrast is a blank canvas. There are only the bare minimum of furnishings and it really feels like somewhere that we can make our own as we settle into it. Already after just a few hours it feel more like a reflection of us than the other place ever did, even though I will never not long for coffee mornings spent looking out over the water.
The logistics of moving were tough. We don’t have a car, and for two people that moved here on a plane, we have a surprisingly large volume of stuff. Thankfully we kept all the boxes from when we shipped over some of our bigger things, and have built up a collection of these small An Post parcel boxes from months of care packages sent from home! Elle did the Lions share of the packing, as I had to work through the week, and so by Friday evening we had all of our stuff more or less ready to go.
I rented a van from Van ’t hart, a recommendation from a colleague at the Pixelbar, and drove the short 10 minute trip from Kralingse to our old flat. I haven’t driven in a few months, and for my first trip to be on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, in a van with no rear-view mirror, in a city I only know as a pedestrian or cyclist, surrounded by other cars and bikes at Rush Hour, was an experience. I managed to survive without hitting anything or anyone, and found a parking spot just across from the flat. Then the boxes. So many boxes, some heavy and some light, some big and some small, all of them on the sixth floor of our building. This is a good time to mention that the elevator in our building only goes to the fifth floor.
Two full loads of the van back and forth across the city, and finally at around 11pm all our stuff was in. Our neighbours must hate us already. The new place is on the 2nd floor, but there is no lift so we had to bring everything up the stairs. I normally take a bit of time at night to fall asleep, I don’t even remember lying down Friday night. I had to be up Saturday morning to return the van for 8am, and spent a bit of time in town picking up some things that we noticed the new place doesn’t have. I’m sure we’ll come across more and more as the weeks go on, but the biggest item right now is a desk. I’ve taken over the dining table for work for the next few days.
Sunday was spent exclusively cleaning, and by the time I left the old apartment I don’t think a surface remained in the flat that you couldn’t sit and seat a three course meal off of. Of course in my tiredness I left a bag over there, and will have to annoy my old landlord next week about collecting, but other than that, we are out. We’re settling into Charlois, figuring out our new routine for getting around, which busses and metros to take, what’s good to eat around here, where the nice walks are, where the bad walks are etc. It was exhausting but it feels really exciting, and I can’t wait for us to be properly settled in.
Anything other than Rental Listings! The sheer number of email updates I’ve unsubscribed from is beautiful!
I’m this close to finishing Moby Dick, haven’t got a huge amount of pages done this week as it’s been so busy, but I’m really enjoying the conclusion of this book.
Listening
“You’re dead to me” is a comedy podcast that “takes history seriously”. Each episode pairs a historian with a comedian and they discuss a famous figure or period in history. I love laughing whilst I learn
This week has been dominated with the search for housing. As a recap, our landlord is returning from an extended work trip in the next few days, and we’ve been searching to find a new place to live for the past two months. This has been a pretty challenging experience, with the Netherlands going through a similar housing crisis to what’s happening in Ireland at the moment. Thankfully, in the past few days we’ve received offers for two apartments that we’re happy to accept, but for a minute there it was starting to look rough. With this experience in mind I thought it might be worth outlining a few thoughts on the experience.
There are a number of housing platforms in the market here in the Netherlands. Back home in Ireland my impression is that Daft.ie has the lions share of the traditional market, but here there are at least two major platforms, Funda and Pararius. Beyond those there are smaller players, and the individual estate agent’s websites as well (but those agents tend to post all their listings on one or both of the big platforms). Funda and Pararius are dominated by estate agents, but there is a healthy market for individual landlords as well, with sites like HousingAnywhere and Kamernet having a pretty good supply of houses and apartments.
Anecdotally we have had the most success with Kamernet - it’s where we found the apartment we’re living in right now, and also where one of our two prospects this time round was found. This doesn’t tell the whole story though, as the experience of using Kamernet is atrocious. The design is infuriating, basic features like search filters reset all the time, saved searches don’t save at all (what is the point), the messaging platform that’s built into the app feels like something built in the 90s but less resilient and on top of this they charge a monthly fee.
We’ve probably applied for close to, if not more than, 200 apartments in the past few weeks. Of those applications we were invited to view around 20. The vast majority of the houses that we saw were of a reasonably high standard, and I saw none of the horror stories that I’ve seen shared from home, especially in the Dublin housing market. There is a small amount of selection bias here, as we are not looking at the absolute bottom rung of the housing market, but I am still impressed. I reckon for what we need (2 bedrooms), the houses I’ve seen are all in the bottom 25% of the price range for the market, and none felt like exploitative, low standard housing. There was that one place without a sink in the bathroom, but that was an outlier.
The toughest thing about the whole experience, and what I imagine is a universal truth for those searching for housing at the moment regardless of which city or country, is the ‘always on’ nature of the hunt. It is a full time job, and then some. With the sheer number of people applying for viewings, if you’re not in the first 50 or so people to reply to an ad you’re at nothing. This resulted in us having notifications turned on for any new postings, as well as email summaries being delivered multiple times throughout the day. It’s kind of hard to fully think about anything else, as it’s always on the back of your mind that something might pop up, and you have to be ready to respond.
We have all our documents ready and collated into a single pdf that is easy to share. We have another document that contains our ‘personal statement’, explaining who we are and why we deserve a home, in two different formats as the different sites have different maximum length requirements for this entry. We also have the added benefit of having one of us working full time on a computer all day long, ready to pounce at a moments notice for any new property that matches our requirements.
The whole thing is exhausting. After a few weeks of this, we both sat down the other day and just sighed, it’s overwhelming. I can’t even begin to imagine what this experience must be like for anyone trying to find somewhere to live that also has kids to look after.
Simulacrum in Amsterdam, visitors round three and summer arrives in April
Notes on the week
On Saturday night I was sat out on our balcony chatting away with Elle, having a beer, and I was wearing a pair of shorts. It was 18 degrees at 9.45pm. At the same time in Ireland my family were winding down after spending the day fixing two damaged roofs after a day of storms and gale force winds. Climate change is real, and very scary, but in the moment it was pretty nice to enjoy a bit of warm weather after a long, wet and dark winter. The whole city seems to have come alive in the last few days, with flowers blooming, trees sprouting bright green leaves and the people flocking to waterside bars and restaurants. We’re moving house soon, but I’m so glad that we got to experience the start of Spring/Summer properly in the harbour, it’s such a beautiful spot in the city.
A friend from college and his recently engaged Fiancé were in town Friday night and Saturday morning. They had been to visit Efteling during the day, and then got the train to us in Rotterdam. We got to hear the full story about their proposal, what the plans are for the wedding and the reception (One is Dutch and one is American, so there is a huge geographical spread between the required guests), and then went for a lovely brunch together on the Saturday morning. They continued on their way back to Groningen after a quick walking tour of central Rotterdam (Cube houses, Markthall, Maritime Museum - I have this down a tee at this stage) and Elle went to Amsterdam for work on an art project.
Sunday we were back in Amsterdam to visit a Simulacrum event. Simulacrum is a publication, and the event was a launch for their latest edition and included some visual arts, performances and readings. The cover artist for the upcoming edition, and one of the artists showing work at the event was one of our friends, Lore, who is doing the MFA with Elle at the Piet Zwart. She does these incredible large scale pencil drawings, and incorporates some sculptural and performance work into her practice as well. We took a little walk through the streets of Amsterdam after the event (it was so sunny it was impossible to not fall in love with the place) and grabbed a burrito before hopping on the train home. We got to ride on one of the new intercity trains, and sat in First Class (Don’t arrest us NS.NL, there were no other seats). The new trains are weird, they feel faster and are very comfortable to be in with decent seats, plugs on all seats etc, but the actual riding experience of the train is weird. It seems to sway a lot more on the tracks, leading to this weird little wobble feeling in your seat as speed. Elle noticed it too, so it’s not just me being picky. They are also a lot louder on the inside, especially during acceleration. 7/10 overall.
We’re still house hunting, but oddly enough as our move out deadline gets closer and closer, I’m more and more confident that we’ll find somewhere. Maybe it’s the denial phase of the stages of grief, but I’ve met one particular agent at so many viewings that we’re now on first name terms, and I think he might be able to help us. Fingers crossed.
I’m on the home stretch with my friend Ishmael and his tale of the whale. 80% there and loving it. Not sure if this is Stockholm Syndrome, or just a truly great book. I can’t believe how long I’ve been reading this now, I’ve never read a book so slowly. Going to jump into Andy Weir’s “Project Hail Mary” next for something more aligned with what I’d normally enjoy.
Listening
Ethan Bortnick is a crazy musician that my friend Niall introduced me too. His music is really bipolar, half relaxing and half stress inducing. I love it!
I think he’s aware of this dichotomy as he has also released a chilled out piano version called ‘The Lullabies’ to go alongside his main release “Luna Park”
More visitors, a trip to the beach, F1 Corner gets competitive and a long weekend
Notes on the week
Following immediately after the departure of my friends from Tipperary, we had friends from work pass through Rotterdam as part of their three week long trip around Europe. Having recovered from the shock of one forgotten set of guests, the second we took in our stride. I met the guys for dinner and drinks, watched the Netherlands play Germany in an international friendly, and gave them a long list of things to check out in the city whilst I was working the next day. Their travels must have caught up to them, because the following night they stayed in at their AirBnB and were too tired to venture out two nights in a row. On the third, we hung out at the apartment, and - as is the way with these things - spent most of the night talking about work. They departed for Denmark, the final leg of their tour, the following day.
Our little F1 chat, “F1 Corner”, has gotten competitive. The two lads at home met up to watch one of the races together recently, and during the time after decided to play the F1 23 game to see who could do the fastest lap around the same track the race had taken place on. On the phone the next day they were sharing their lap times and suggested I try to see if I could beat them. I did exactly that, and not long after what started out as a bit of fun has quickly become a formal challenge we will be taking on as a group for the rest of the season.
Each race week we have until Sunday night to set our fastest lap around the circuit being raced on in real life. We can use any car we want, but the “equal performance” setting must be enabled, we can tweak the setup of the car to our hearts content and we must use no ABS and only the lowest Traction Control setting. There is a google Doc set up to record our laps, and after this marathon 24 race season we’ll see who’s the inaugural F1 Corner Champion. This has gotten so serious, so fast that one of the guys has bought his first game console in over a decade to get involved, and there are not so light hearted jokes about people investing in sim-racing wheels and pedals.
We went to the beach this weekend, this wonderful 4 day long weekend thanks to Easter, and it still blows my mind that we can hop on the Metro in Rotterdam City Centre and arrive at the seaside about 40 minutes later. We spent the afternoon walking up and down the beach, across the dunes, sipping coffees and eating burgers. It was a really nice break to get out of the city for a little while, and although it’s still too cold to go for a swim, Elle at least dipped her toes. I wasn’t quite so brave.
House hunting continues. House hunting always continues. There is nothing but the hunt. Notifications are triggered to send the moment a house is posted, pre-prepared messages are ready to be copied, pasted and sent, viewings go into the calendar and we arrive alongside the rest of the legion of “young professionals”, exhausted from trying to make it look like we’ve all got our shit together for the nth time this week. There is friendly banter, but you know that this is your competition. Someone always tries to be extra chatty with the agent from the rental company but we all know that it’s pointless. The veterans already know what questions to ask, and you lurk nearby to make sure you take note. You do Square Metre per Euro calculations in your head, and try to justify it all. I watched the Hunger Games over Christmas, and now I live it.
The whale and I are friends now. I’m actually loving it. I read on the Moby Dick subreddit that it really picks up after chapter 41 and I tend to agree. I’m even beginning to find Ishmael’s chapters that completely abandon the plot kind of charming.
Listening
“Thoroughly Considered” is a show about product design and small businesses. I love hearing from Myke and the guys from Studio Neat as they chat about design decisions, business decisions and pens. Maybe you will too.
Moby Dick background music. 8 Bit Chiptune versions of sea shanties!
An astonishingly late update this week. 16mm film scans arrive, as do visitors!
Notes on the week
House viewings continue as House Hunt 2.0 ramps up into full swing. We still have a few weeks to find something, but it’s proving to be pretty tough. Our budget is reasonable, and our requirements are pretty fluid, but the level of demand in Rotterdam, as is the case across most of the world right now, is so high. Fingers crossed that the next few viewings actually trigger some follow up from the agents showing us around.
Elle’s 16mm film scans have arrived! Opening the file was one of the most stressful things I’ve witnessed in person, as the cost (both financial and time) has been so high for her working with this new medium. Thankfully, through a combination of luck and hours researching, it looks like everything went pretty well, and the shots are both exposed correctly and in focus! There is something very strange about watching footage shot in 2024, on a medium from the first half of the last century, there’s some weird mental mismatch going on in my head whenever I watch it back. Like, I know the people in the frame, why are they in the past? As much as the digital supremacist in me hates to admit it, there is a charm and a quality to the images that is very tough to describe, but really nice to watch. I can’t wait to see where she goes with this work.
We went to the art space, Time Window, to see a performance from one of Elle’s college friends and two other artists. The roughly hour or so long piece dealt with impermanence, and started with the audience placing little clay men into cups of water. The performance then went through dance, singing, roller blading, paper airplane making and more, and by the time the show ended our little men had dissolved into the water. It was pretty cool all in all, and we grabbed a drink on the way back home. A really nice evening.
Saturday afternoon we were out in town picking up some bits before Elle visited one of her friends, when I got a text from a friend from home, “We’re on the way!” alongside a picture of the motorway to Dublin. “To the Netherlands?” I replied, half joking - half panicking. They weren’t joking. Turns out a few months ago we had talked about when playing some games together, I had shared hotel recommendations and they had booked their flights. I obviously went to bed that night fully expecting my brain to remember this MAJOR IMPACT on our domestic life and pop it into our shared calendar. Brain did not. Brain did no such thing. Brain completely erased any memory of that conversation, and happily went about day to day life.
The last few days with the lads have been really fun, and the timing of it is spectacular. I had felt the smallest twinge of homesickness on Friday night before bed, and seemingly out of the blue two of my best friends show up on our doorstep. I can’t imagine that it will ever happen again that I’m in literally another country and my friends show up to hang out.
…..except, it happened again. Sunday afternoon I get a text from one of my friends from work, who a few months ago, had told me about a trip himself and some other friends from work were going to be taking through Europe, and how they would be passing through Rotterdam. If this is sounding familiar, refer to the previous tale of important news, filed away mentally to be captured officially later and duly forgotten. They arrive on Monday!
The experience of reading this book is as epic a journey as Ahab’s hunt across the seven seas. I sat bolt upright the other day and proclaimed to Elle that I had just finished the first full chapter of the book that I truly enjoyed. Not three chapter’s later Melville was back to his meandering pondering, describing the many attempts of scholars throughout history to accurately describe and capture the image of a whale. On a few occasions I’ve read entire books in one go, cover to cover. It’s the end of March and I’m just past 50%.
A bonus of having the lads visit this week has been getting a bunch of recommendations for new books to read. I don’t know where I’m going to get the time to fit them in, but I’ll try. And in the middle of it all, Sanderson announced ANOTHER secret project, one that has the entire Cosmere community in a state. Roll on 2025 and The Isles of Emberdark
Listening
Jersey are this hyper energetic electronic two piece. I know very little about them, but I came across this video of them performing in what looks like someone’s patio, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Their EP, “The World I’m Searching For” is a great listen too!
A little late on the update this week, blame bank holiday laziness
Notes on the week
The e-ink dashboard project is complete! I had really hoped to get it up and running in time for our anniversary as a gift, but it ended up running one day over (the classic trope of software developer timeline estimates). I got a wooden IKEA frame from HetGoed that was about the correct size, and cut the paper mask to suit the the size of the e-ink panel. My last minute adjustments were overseen by some other members of the Pixelbar, and someone made the brilliant suggestion that the whole thing should be in portrait orientation, not landscape. This made much more sense, but added that last little bit of complexity as I had to re-design my UI to take into account the vertical, rather than horizontal, layout.
The final product works pretty well, and I’m really happy with it as a first attempt at making a hardware project. Every 30 minutes it fetches the latest weather information, as well as Elle’s college calendar and updates the display. After 5PM it stops showing Todays events, and switches to displaying items for tomorrow. One little USB cable out the back provides power, and the whole thing actually looks kind of nice. A future revision would be to drop the Raspberry Pi and use an ESP32 microcontroller to really, really cut down on the power draw. I think that it might last well over 6 months on battery in that case, but for the purposes I want to solve, a power cable is no big deal.
We’re going to Finland!
Ellen’s sister and her band are playing at a folk festival in Kaustinen this summer, and we’re going to go. The plan is to start off in Helsinki, travel up through one or more of the national parks, before arriving at the festival to document Maggie’s performances, maybe shoot some video and beyond that just take in the tunes. I can’t wait! Helsinki was one of the cities on the list of possibilities when Elle started looking to do her Masters, so it will be really interesting to take in the city - not just from the perspective of a tourist, but also wondering what our lives there would have looked like.
Ireland won the six nations for the second time in as many years. I went out to the pub here to watch it, but got my times wrong and ended up watching the end of the Italy/Wales match. Italy, the perennial underdogs of the tournament sealed a historic win to cap what was their best six nations in recent memory. I still cant believe that they went within a few inches of beating France (in Paris) a few weeks ago!
As mentioned above, this week marked six years of Elle and I being together. It’s crazy how fast time flies by, and the milestones that keep racking up on this journey that we’ve been on together. Growing up I always saw myself travelling through and living in different countries, taking in what the world has to offer. As I got through my twenties that kind of faded. I couldn’t tell you when, or why, but the breadth of my desire to explore just shrank. Amongst the litany of wonderful things about her, Elle has completely rekindled that sense of adventure, to try to make the most of every opportunity, to say yes more often than say no. I know it’s not exactly the most glamorous city in the world, but the me of only a few years ago would have never considered moving to Rotterdam, and now I’m sitting here wondering how many more stamps can I get on my passport. For this, and a million reasons more, I’m so grateful
“Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology” by Chris Miller was last weeks book, and I’ve followed it up straight away with “The Power Law” by Sebastian Mallaby, which documents the origins and incredible success of Silicon Valley venture capital. These two read back to back make a really interesting pair, documenting the tools that shape our modern world, and the financiers that backed them. The lines between these two worlds really blur, with successful technologists transitioning to the venture world and both authors have done a great job telling the story of the valley.
Meanwhile, in fiction, I’ve been dipping my toe back into Moby Dick. I will, finish, this, book. Like Ahab chasing his white whale, this book will not escape me.
Listening
Can’t share this one publicly as it’s unreleased (for now), but a friend shared a song with me that I’ve been playing over and over and over again. Can’t wait for the rest of you to hear it
I’ve been enjoying The Guardian’s ‘Long Read’ podcast, where they produce an audio version of some of their bigger articles. The recent one o Pakistan’s wooing of western travel ‘influencers’ was really good!
I have the apartment to myself this weekend, as Elle is back home for a few days. She’s been asked to be the official photographer for an exhibition, and I couldn’t be more proud. It’s a big deal to get paid for your work in the creative arts, and it serves not only as an external validation of your skills and abilities, but also serves to quieten the little voice inside that can be so quick to belittle and detract from the progress you’ve made. One of the tricks to surviving in the arts seems to be finding a gig adjacent to your practice that can be your ‘money job’, the one that keeps the lights on until you get set up as an ‘established artist’. I think this might be exactly one of those gigs.
On a side note, I have a whole ‘theory’ on success in the arts, and how there are 5 or 6 major filter events that an artist must pass through in order to make a living with their work, I’ll dive into it another time.
I’ve been using Day One a lot again. It’s a journalling app that I find is really nice to use, especially when you lower the expectation on yourself. I’m not forcing myself to write deep reflective pondering on the days events, just a few quick lines about what happened. I think it’s so easy to lose memories, especially of the smaller moments, over time so it’s a good idea to keep track, and remind yourself of them in years to come. I try to make sure that there’s at least one photo is each post though, as the visual really helps jog the memory.
We are two weeks into the F1 season, and the on track action is predictably boring. Red Bull and Max have extended their lead over the rest of the field, and it’s a very real possibility that he will win every single race this year. A dramatic prediction two races in, but the advantage of the Red Bull car, and the lack of challenge from Max’s teammate makes it plausible at the very least.
However, as so often is the case, the most dramatic part of F1 isn’t the on track action, but the off-track. The controversy around Red Bull leader Christian Horner refuses to go away, and after an internal investigation cleared him of any wrong doing, a ‘leak’ of text messages between Horner and the accuser found it’s way onto the internet. From the outside looking in, it appears that a full scale power war is taking place within the team, with factions lining up behind Horner, and others behind Helmut Marko, head of the Red Bull young driver program. Marko’s influence is significantly larger than his role would entail, as he is responsible for Red Bull signing Max, and the Verstappen camp are fiercely loyal to him, with Max going so far as to say that if Helmut was to leave, or be forced out, he would go with him.
None of this is resolved, a million questions hang in the air, and if the racing continues to be dull I hope that this drama at least keeps coming for rest of the year.
I threw Moby Dick overboard, try as I might I just couldn’t get into it enough to truly enjoy it. It’s been replaced with “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology” by Chris Miller. It documents the origins, rise , and continued importance of the global semi-conductor industry. It’s fascinating, insightful and a book that couldn’t be more relevant today. If you see Nvidia becoming the hottest company in the world seemingly overnight, and wonder what’s the competitive advantage, or how they can keep such a monopoly on the AI chip market, this book is for you.
Listening
Jacob Collier, who is quite possibly the singularly most talented musician on the planet, has released the final part of his four album “Djesse” project. I adore Jacob’s musicality, but if I had to criticise his work, I just wish that 1% more of his abundant talent had gone towards his songwriting ability. His songs are always technical marvels, but his ability to move a listener emotionally is usually restricted to his interpretations of existing songs. I don’t know if this is the record where he emerges from this, but it’s absolutely a step towards it.
When you boil it down, Life is just a bunch of decisions. Some of these will be made by you and others made for you. It’s all just a number of crossroads at a scale that none of us could ever really comprehend. As we make our way through the journey of our lives the scope of these decisions might narrow, and sometimes they might grow. Someone else’s path might cross with yours and all of a sudden you’ve got a co-pilot to help you navigate the cosmic maze that is life.
All we can try to do is try to make the best decisions we can - to choose a path that brings us joy, that brings us safety, that provides for the ones we love, that does the least harm to others. The measure of a life is all these decisions bundled together, and the echos and ripples as they impact others. The beauty of a new life is the blank canvas ahead of us, the potential energy, all the big choices and u-turns, the uncertainty, the mistakes and mishaps and that hope that this time will be different.
It is beyond cruel that sometimes the ultimate decision can be made for someone before they ever even get a chance to make a mark on the canvas. The decisions that you had ahead of you will now hang over the rest of us as questions that will never have answers. What would your favourite colour be? Who would your friends have been? Where would your life take you? Would you have your Dad’s nose? Your Mother’s eyes?
This week two of my friends went through the worst thing a couple can face. They’re going to have these questions, and probably a million more, keeping them up at night for a long, long time. Nothing could ever put your own struggles, your uncertainties or fears into perspective more completely.
Electronic components arrive, Film gets posted and pedals fall off
Notes on the week
My E-Ink dashboard project is gathering steam. After a productive chat at the Pixelbar , I ordered some components (which arrived the next day - city living has it’s perks), and spent the following evening assembling them into a very crude representation of the finished project. I used the cardboard box that the e-ink display came is as a ‘case’ to hold everything together as I tested everything. Turns out my software works just fine, and updates the display correctly. The problem I’m facing now is the legibility of the text. Something in the process of converting from HTML to a 2 part bitmap for the display is causing a lot of blur, so I need to dive into that this week. Still though, the first time that everything booted up and watching the display come to life was pretty cool.
We’re patiently waiting for Andec , a film processor in Germany, to send us the digital scans of the 16mm film we shot over the Christmas break. I’m equally excited and terrified to see the results. The ‘one-shot’ nature of film is so intense, you either got the shot or you didn’t, and there’s no way to know for days, weeks or even months after the shoot. Compared to the instant review of digital, shooting on film feels like playing a game on the most extreme difficulty setting. So cross you fingers for us that everything was in the frame, in focus and correctly exposed.
I was cycling to the gym earlier in the week and heard a little rattle, then felt a little wobble under my left foot and then felt, nothing. My pedal, crank and all, had fallen off. I know we got our bikes for next to nothing from a charity shop, but this was not one of the inevitable wear and tear failures I was expecting to experience. I guess it highlights just how little I actually know about bike maintenance, and definitely need to reduce my blindspots around. Thankfully the local bike shop was able to get me sorted pretty quickly, the thread had completely worn through so the crank had to be replaced, but they had a suitable one floating around. It’s just typical that the day after I got a puncture. Riding a bike in a city is amazing, owning a bike is a pain. There’s actually a lot to be said for the multiple bike rental companies that operate in the city.
I visited Zandvoort this weekend, which amazingly is completely open to the public. I was able to walk the grandstands, the paddock and pit lane, the hospitality areas etc. The only place off limits really was the track itself, which was understandable as there were plenty of people ripping around in Porsche 911 turbos. I may not have got to see an F1 driving in anger, but being in the cauldron (empty as it was) was a surreal experience. I know tickets for the Dutch GP in particular are so hard to get, but I’m hoping beyond hope that I’ll be able to get one for the Dutch GP later this year.
On Sunday Elle and I visited Kinderdijk, a sleepy little village a kilometres east of Rotterdam, whose name comes from a folk tale where a child and a cat washed ashore in a cradle. It’s also home to a UNESCO world heritage site that hosts nearly twenty 18th century Dutch windmills.
Getting there, a few kilometres away and on the other side of the Maas river was surprisingly easy. We took the bus, but not a regular bus, a Water Bus! Rotterdam is a city of many, many different forms of transport and the Water Bus might just be my favourite. The boat is incredibly comfortable with big plush red seats, amazing views of the river, lots of space to store bikes and very affordable. Our trip was 40 minutes each way, and cost only €9 each. It was so nice to get out into some nature again, we haven’t really left the urban world in the last two months, and seeing loads of green, lots of birds and not hearing the sounds of the city was really nice. Kinderdijk and the walk/cycleway along the polders is free to the public, and we just spend our afternoon walking and exploring, but there is also a number of museums, exhibits, tours and canal boat trips that you can pay for, and I think the next time our families come to visit we’ll be heading back for the full experience.
Moby Dick sucks. Well, maybe that’s unfair, the process of reading Moby Dick sucks. The story itself is actually really good, it’s just such a challenging read. I am a fast reader. If I really get into a book I can usually burn through it in a 24 hour period. The whale is putting up a fight though, the prose is so heavy and meandering, and I’m finding it so hard to get into a ‘rhythm’ with it. During our trip to Kinderdijk this weekend I got through 2 chapters, which is a paltry amount. I really enjoyed them, but I had to work for it.
Listening
The BBCs ‘Beyond the Grid’ F1 podcast are running a special series, where they went behind the scenes at Mercedes and Williams in the run up to the 2024 season. I think tomorrow’s episode is going to cover the Hamilton/Ferrari news, and I cannot wait.
Playing
I’ve been playing lots of Risk of Rain 2 with some of the guys from home. It’s a ‘Rogue-like’shooter with pretty simplistic graphics and a super satisfying gameplay loop. I think our next game as a group is PlateUp, which applies the rogue-like loop to restaurant management, I’m nervous and excited.
A 5k parkrun, CMAT in Amsterdam and Elle learns chess.
Notes on the week
I woke up at 8am on Saturday morning, threw on some gym clothes and cycled to Kralingse Bos to take part in my first ever 5k, the weekly Rotterdam Parkrun. I made a point last year of making running a part of my life, and whilst it started well with the help of an encouraging partner and the wonderful JustRun app, I just never found it becoming habitual and was always an effort.
One of the many benefits of living in a large city is that there are almost certainly a number of other people with shared interests or goals (see the pixelbar for example). I figured what I need to help me get running was a community, so I signed up for the ParkRun during the week, and just showed up on Saturday without knowing what to expect, and without really doing any training either. The crew (all volunteers I add) were great, welcoming and have all the logistics down to a tee. Around 08:58 they called all the runners (around 110) to the starting line and at 09:00 exactly we were off. In the initial pack before everyone gets strung out, it was great to see so many different people across a huge range of age and ability all coming together for this weekly event.
As noted previously, I have not been training for running, have never been good at running (even when I played sports every day of the week I was only ever dangerous over short distance) and have the cardio vascular fitness of a Jaffa Cake. It wasn’t long at all before the elite runners were disappearing into the distance, and I found myself with the pensioners and pram pushers. Honestly that’s not even fair, because what must have been a late arrival absolutely glided past me about 2km in, pushing a svelte and aerodynamic buggy with a sure-to-be future long distance running champion on board. I finished 99th, just inside the top 100 and just inside the 40 minute mark (39:11). To say I have a lot of work to do is an understatement of Dublin Metro North scale, but I think this way of running is magic. You have camaraderie, friendly competition, a number of metrics to measure yourself against and it happens every, single, week. Ask me again how positive I’m feeling about the whole thing if the weather turns ugly next weekend, but the great thing is whether it’s sunny, stormy, wet or dry, I know I’ll be there. Top 100 to top 90 and beyond, sub 40 minutes to sub 35, then who knows maybe even sub 30.
On Thursday we went to Amsterdam to see CMAT play at the Melkweg. Elle’s been a big fan for a long time now, and has been buzzing to see her play live. We got the train from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, about 35 minutes and then a quick tram journey to the venue, without once having to book, or even purchase a ticket for either (you just tap your debit card or phone at the turnstile, or at the door for the tram). Have I mentioned before how good public transport is in this country?
The gig itself was phenomenal. CMAT exudes star quality, and she owned the stage from the moment she stepped out. None of this was in a grandiose manner though, she was self deprecating, funny, full of crowd interaction and really shared the stage (and the spotlight) with the members of her band. I think there are two parts to evaluating a gig - the performance itself, and the crowd’s reaction. The performance was perfect, she really is an incredible vocalist, but the way the crowd hung on to every word really stood out to me. I think the world has been crying out for an artist like CMAT, and for young women especially having someone sing about such relatable things in such a beautiful way is incredible. The guilt of apathy, "And I feel bad ‘cause I didn’t cry when someone I grew up with died", the casual substance use "Shaking my hips and cutting lines , Feels a little passé now, shoulda cherished my wine", one sided relationships "I’m just somе stewardess who feeds your pets ,And does your dishes and pays your rent , And helps you heal from something Heaven-sent" all resonate with people in very real way. I think she’s a breath of fresh air and can’t wait to see what’s next for her.
On Sunday the weather was crap. It rained a lot, but we timed an escape during a predicted break in the rain (thanks buienradar.nl), and cycled to the Library. Elle wants to learn how to play chess, and there’s loads of tables set up for playing in the Rotterdam library. I taught her the pieces, the moves and the objective of the game. I don’t know how someone gets through life without coming into contact with chess, but I was delighted that she hadn’t because the hour or so we spent today together learning about the game, and then playing our first match together was lovely. I hope that we keep it up, I’d love to improve myself, having been on the receiving end of some demolition jobs at the weekly board game night hosted by Library, and even more so I love finding a new activity for us to enjoy together.
I cracked the code for reading Moby Dick. Sea Shanties! I was determined this week to back into Ishmael’s adventure, and figured I’d try some ambient music to help get in the zone. I put on the soundtrack to Assasin’s Creed Black Flag, a video game set on the high sea and lo and behold it worked, and I’m now burning through the book. The style of writing is so weird, and reads more like the journal of a slightly deranged ADHD sufferer trying their best to tell a story through intermittent bouts of distraction, but I’m getting there.
Listening
Rob released what I think is the best song (at least available to the public) that I’ve heard from him. It’s massive, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see this get picked up for sync in Film or TV this year. Congrats on the release Rob!
Watching
‘Poor Things’ is a stunning film that captures all the best of Yorgos Lanthimos unique style of film making, and triumphs in spite of some of the worst aspects of his particular style. We went to see it this weekend at Cinerama, and were blown away. Not one for the squeamish or prudish, (it’s a Lanthimos movie and that comes with all the usual baggage), but definitely my favourite of his films so far. Emma Stone not only delivers a 10/10 performance, but was very hands on with the production of this movie and it shows.
