I’ve been a huge fan of read later services for years, starting out with Instapaper way back in the Marco days, trying out Pocket, and even giving Safari Reading List an honest go once or twice. The entire category of app seemed to flourish, and then fade into mediocrity over the past few years. Lately however, I’ve been using the incredible GoodLinks 2.0 and I’m very, very impressed. Voorhees over at MacStories has the definitive review, but for my two cents - the platform native design, ease of use and deep extensibility instantly won me over.
My fiancé, like many others, has become jaded with the current social media landscape, and after a bit of nudging from a professional nerd has decided to set up her own little corner of the internet. Part of her site will be a blog - ostensibly a log of her experiments with new techniques and materials in her studio practice.
The problem, as with any new project, was the blank page problem.
Sometime in the long, long ago - before the Pandemic, but post Brexit, I realised that I had developed a pretty serious fear of flying. This was weird because a) I had travelled a lot growing up and b) I understood that flying was by far the safest mode of transport. Didn’t matter though, because through a combination of decreasing travel opportunities, an increasingly healthy respect for mortality and a million other things even the thought of getting on a flight had my heart rate spiking.
One of the new features that I’ve been really enjoying about my iPhone 16 is the action button. Initially I had it set to toggle silent mode, replicating the behaviour of the switch on every previous model of iPhone that I’ve had. I quickly realised that I rarely, if ever, don’t have my phone silenced, so I mapped the button to my “Night Time” shortcut.
This shortcut sets media volume to 0%, turns on do-not-disturb, sets the screen to black and white, drops the brightness to a below zero value and sets the home screen to very limited collection of apps.
Rather than a weekly update, I’m taking a look back at the month as a whole. It’s been a busy one.
Notes on the month Back in Ireland People are returning to the office in their droves, and I’m no exception. With a couple of days on-site every week now mandatory, the great Dutch adventure has come to an end (for the moment at least). With the news arriving at the end of the year, and amongst a number of “life things” happening in a short period of time, the transition was a little stressful, but we’re making the most of it.
A little meta commentary on the past year of writing here
Notes on the year 30 weekly updates written. Better than 50%, but really fell off towards the tail end of the year. The goal for 2025 is to get as close to 100% as possible, allowing for the inevitable ‘life gets in the way’ moments.
25,547 words written across 30 weekly update posts, plus another 2,000 or so in standalone posts.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
And weeks 21, 22, 23 etc. It’s been a while.
Notes on the week 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.
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!
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.
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.
Week one in the new house, delivered a week later
Notes on the week 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.
Mission complete: Housing Acquired
Notes on the week 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.
House hunting enters the final stages
Notes on the week 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.
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.