week in review 2024-42
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
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.
Links
How I animate 3Blue1Brown | A Manim demo with Ben Sparks
I built a retro Mac from BRAND NEW parts!
Enterprise Philosophy and The First Wave of AI
11 laws of showrunning nice version
After Apple, Jony Ive Is Building an Empire of His Own
How I Built an NFC Movie Library for my Kids
Watch: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money
The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
Shot On iPhone 15 Pro Max by Me. No gimbal, no lens, no filter!
A quick note on the links section here.
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.