Week in review 2024-06
F1 silly season continues, Open Studios and the in-laws descend upon Rotterdam
Notes on the week
WDKA just had their Open Day for prospective students, and one part of the program of events is the Open Studios. The current crop of MFA students, of which Elle is one, open the doors of their studios spaces to the public to talk about their work, their process, the college and field any other questions that might come up. It’s a really great idea that’s beneficial for both future students (who get to learn more about the college), and for current students (who get to focus their practice, workshop ideas, and tidy their studio spaces!). I helped out in a small way, painting one of the walls in Elle’s studio that was need of a bit of TLC, and setting up my monitor in her space for people to view some video work of hers. It meant that this weekend would be spent without my usual computer setup at home, an inconvenience any other weekend but not this time because….
The Wallaces were in town! Starting Wednesday, and continuing Thursday and Friday a series of flights landed in the Netherlands carrying Elle’s siblings, plus one partner. It’s important to note that she doesn’t have 696 brothers and sisters (the passenger capacity of four Aer Lingus A320s), but rather her two sisters, one brother, and a sister’s partner were all travelling from different cities. The climate of impact of this weekend was immense, but it was easily exceeded by how good of a time was had. Mandatory visits to the Cube Houses and Markthal were interspersed with Bike rides, Bitterballen, Pints, Movies and the general catching up and good times that can only be had when everyone is in the same room together. The next time we’ll all be together again will be the Summer at the earliest, Christmas at the latest so it was a really precious moment. The fact that the trip lined up with Elle’s Open Studio day was amazing, and it meant we could bring the family to show her work and to meet the new friends we’ve made since moving here.
In my spare time I’ve been working on a little E-Ink dashboard for Elle’s college calendar. Their system is based on MediaWiki, which is for all intents and purposes objectively terrible. You cannot subscribe to the calendar, so you can’t have it sync with your existing iCloud or Google calendars. It has no way to alert you to an update or removal of an event. It is ugly, and honestly is just no fun to use. It is however, completely open to outside internet which means I can write a script to scrape the information (this also means anyone else in the whole world can see the comings and goings of a number of MFA students, but that’s beyond the scope of my ability to change). My goal with this project is to take this information and make a nice little wooden frame that will house an E-Ink display, showing today’s events, the current and predicted weather conditions for the day, and tomorrow’s events.
I’ll make a more detailed breakdown at a later date, but at this point all the code is running, successfully scraping the MediaWiki calendar and parsing out the correct event data, as well as tying into the BuienRadar.nl API to grab weather information. This is all passed into a html template that is laid out in a simple, but hopefully visually pleasing way. Because this information will be rendered on an E-Ink display and running on a very low power cpu, rather than displaying the output of the script as it runs, I convert the html to an image file, which the display will then render. In theory this all works, but the next step is to purchase the physical components and get building. I’ve never really worked with electronics before so this should be lots of frustrating fun!
Links
How to make a self balancing cube
Thoughts after 40 hours with Vision Pro
The Dutch art of doing nothing
The world is awful. The world is better. The world can do much better
Rules for negotiating a job offer
Deepfake video call scams are now a reality
Linux drops support for Floppy Disks
Reading
I think I’ve forgotten how to read. Things are not looking good for 12 classics in 12 months.
Listening
Final Fantasy 7 Remake part two, Rebirth comes out in just a few weeks, a fact that both to my delight and surprise slid under my radar. With the release impending this weeks MacStories Unwind goes into detail into how Federico is preparing, including a quick overview of the first instalment in the Remake series.
F1 Corner
Last week the F1 community was thrown into disarray with the news that Lewis Hamilton will join Ferrari in 2025. In what has already been a tumultuous off-season (Steiner sacked from Haas, Andretti’s bid to create a new team being rejected, Barcelona being replaced with a Madrid street circuit) the Hamilton news felt like the seismic shock to cap the silly season. However, right now as I type this on Friday morning Christian Horner, Team Principal of Red Bull Racing is taking part in an internal hearing into allegations of inappropriate behaviour made against him by a colleague.
There is little to no information out there other than rumours right now, but to say that he very well may be fighting for his career is no overstatement. F1 is not the old boys club that it used to be, and I applaud the Red Bull organisation for taking any allegations this seriously. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out, and what information makes its way out from the hearing.
Horner, whether you like him or not, is the beating heart of the Red Bull team and his partnership with Adrian Newey has dragged the Milton Keynes team from a curiosity on the fringes of the grid, to a multiple world championship winning team, and in 2023 the most dominant driver/car pairing in the sports history. If Christian is found to have behaved in a way incompatible with his role as team principal, and must go, it will leave a vacuum of monumental scale within the RB hierarchy.
Week in review 2024-05
Vision Pro launches, Care packages arrive, Lewis goes to Ferrari and house hunt 2.0 begins.
Notes on the week
The news of the week, perhaps the year, is that Lewis Hamilton will be leaving Mercedes to join Ferrari for the 2025 Formula One season. This is Brady leaves the Patriots, Messi leaves Barcelona or the UK leaves the EU levels of bombshell. A hint of a rumour started to float around Wednesday night that something big might be about to hit the paddock, and by Thursday morning those rumours had picked up more credibility as more informed and respected voices started to share what they had heard through the grape vine. My little F1 group chat was giddy, especially when the likes of Adam Cooper started to corroborate the story.
Before any official announcement had been made, we were already busy determining the knock on effects across the paddock, as the seat freed up in Mercedes must be filled, and Carlos Sainz leaving Ferrari will surely stay on the grid? The permutations were debated, with dream scenarios (Alonso to Mercedes), and likely outcomes (Sainz to Sauber ahead of it becoming the works Audi team in 2026) passed back and forth. It was great craic, and within about an hour Sky Sports were reporting on the move as ‘a done deal’. Ferrari and Mercedes both came out later that day to make it ‘official official’, but at this stage the reality was already beginning to sink in. Lewis will be wearing red in 2025.
So what does this mean? First, it backs up a statement by Sebastian Vettel a few years ago, “Everyone is a Ferrari fan. Even the people that say they aren’t, are Ferrari fans”. The most romantic, turbulent, brilliant and infuriating team in the sport’s history, Ferrari has an allure for F1 fans and drivers alike, one that transcends the reality of sporting accomplishment or statistical methodology. Are they the best team in F1? Absolutely not. Does everyone want to drive for them? Absolutely. To win an F1 race is a dream of any driver, to win for the Scuderia goes beyond simple dreaming and is more akin to a religious experience. The Tifosi, the ultra passionate devotees at the alter of the Prancing Horse, have already dubbed Charles LeClerc “The Little Prince”, as if awaiting his inevitable coronation as the World Champion some day, now they have their King.
This driver line up is a win-win for Ferrari. Lewis arrives with nothing to prove, 7 World Titles in the bag, the most wins, the most poles, the most points. If the Little Prince can go toe to toe with the King and hold his own, the future of the realm is healthy, and if the King comes out on top, well thats what a King is supposed to do. In 2025 Ferrari will have the strongest driver pairing on the grid, with Lewis bringing unrivalled experience, mentality, an underrated technical ability in the garage and the personality to forge a team around him, and with Charles they have the outright fastest driver on the grid over one lap. If they can close the gap to Red Bull over the course of 2024, ‘25 could be very, very interesting, and who knows what the competitive order will be after the new regulations come into effect in 2026.
I often refer to F1 as my Soap Opera. The characters are larger than life, the plot lines incredulous and the political subterfuge more potent than any season of Succession. That this drama is all merely the backdrop against which the main event takes place is the icing on top, because for all the gossip, rumours, write ups and emergency podcasts, at some point in March 2025 Lewis will put on a scarlet race suit, climb into the seat of a Ferrari, his Ferrari and put his life on the line for the Scuderia. If the car is competitive, if he’s still sharp and if the dice rolls the right way, the Tifosi will take their yearly pilgrimage to Monza, The Temple of Speed, and maybe, just maybe he’ll win. In Red. In Italy. They have hated him for so long, perhaps begrudgingly respected him in recent years, but once he dons the red they will love him, and if he can win for them, they will immortalise him.
Okay, with F1 Corner out of the way, this past week in Rotterdam was pretty good. I spent a bit of time hacking away getting Elle’s video project running on the CRT TV we bought last week. The connection was a mess of adaptors, HDMI->RCA->SCART, which I was shocked worked straight away and without much strangeness. The only weirdness was the SCART adaptor had a switch to toggle between PAL and NTSC, and for whatever reason I was getting terrible flickering when set to PAL, despite the TV being European. Flicking over to NTSC solved the problem though. I set up a Raspberry Pi to autoplay the video files on startup, without any input so that if the power went it would go straight back into action. This was pretty straightforward, just a little shell script to trigger VLC on boot, with a few arguments to play without and window chrome, on screen controls or video titles.
cvlc --no-osd -fL /home/pi/filename.extension
One of the days this week I was out doing some shopping, and it was cold. Not the bitter chill of winter that we had a few weeks ago, but a more insidious cold. Because the weather has been improving, I wasn’t ‘prepared’ in the same way as a few weeks ago, no leggings, no scarf, hat and gloves. By the time I got home I was freezing, tired and just wanted a cup of tea and a biscuit. When I got up the stairs to our door there was a little An Post package at the door. A care package, from home. Let me tell you, there are precious few things in the world better than coming home to surprise HobNobs, Terry’s Chocolate Oranges and ‘real’ tea bags. The fact that you know in that moment that your people at home are thinking about you, and went to the effort to send a little taste of home is enough to warm you right up, without having to put the kettle on at all.
Apple Vision Pro launched this week (in the US). I am convinced that this is one of those roadmap products that will influence how we think about computing on a global scale, the ramifications of which probably won’t be obvious for at least another ten years. I would give an arm and a leg to test one out, and have been watching and reading every review I can get my hands to learn more about what the experience feels like. Elle hates it.
Links
A look back on the glory days of iPhone hacking
China, the worlds shopping car
There’s not planet B, for fantasy writers
Listening
Of all the coverage of Lewis going to Ferrari, nothing else quite matched the level of giddy glee and utter bewilderment of Matt on the emergency episode of the P1 Podcast.
An Oldie, but such a goodie. Ahnohni has one of the most unique voices out there, and this album is a masterpiece. Definitely not a happy body of music (The opening lyric to the album is literally “I hope theres someone when I die, who’ll take care of me”), but so beautiful.
week in review 2024-04
Group Crit prep and 17km cycle days
Notes on the week
This week Elle had her first Group Critique of the year, so a lot of time was spent back and forth between the apartment and her studio space in preparation. Without a car, and with a lot of material and equipment to move that meant renting a Bakfiets, which we were able to using a service called BaqMe. For about €2 to secure the rental, and then €0.12 per minute thereafter, you get access to an electric Bakfiets, which is comfortable, powerful and honestly the quickest way to move a reasonable amount of stuff around the city (so long as it’s not raining).
I joined the Pixelbar, a hackerspace in Delfshaven. I visited for the first time on Thursday night, the same night Apple announced their plans to ‘comply’ with the EU’s Digital Markets Act. To be amongst a group of people with shared interests discussing and debating the things that you’re excited about was really nice, and I can see myself getting pretty involved with the group. The space itself is in an old shipyard, that has fallen out of use from a shipping perspective, but is now being used by a number of groups. I saw a gym, restaurants, woodworking groups etc. I’m hoping to make a little E-Ink dashboard for our apartment, and I think the knowledge of the members, and the tools in the space will be a huge help.
We bought a CRT TV. Elle is experimenting a lot with analog video, and recently bought a Bolex 16mm camera. She has an exhibition coming up next week, and wants to show the footage on an old TV, so I spent Saturday riding around Rotterdam to all manner of Charity Shops, Second Hand shops, Antique markets etc to try and find one. It needed to be a CRT, and have at least some form of input. The input could be RCA, SCART or even RF, as we have a digital to analogue video converter, (and I figured I could access a modulator if we needed to go down the RF route).
I found loads of ‘new’ second hand TVs (flat screens), and lots of really old TVs (think wooden frames) that looked great, but nothing that fit the bill. Saddle sore and feeling defeated, I checked MarktPlaats, a dutch craigslist/done-deal equivalent and found exactly what I needed. 20" CRT with working RCA and SCART inputs, only a 20 minute cycle away. I rented another Bakfiets, met the guy selling it and was on my way home within the hour. I just wish he had posted his ad before I did an impromptu cycle tour of the city.
The upside to doing a massive tour of the City is the interesting things you find along the way, and nothing comes close to the Rotterdam Radio Museum, on the top floor of the Correct Electronics store in the north of the city. The two gentlemen I met here were so generous with their time, showed me around many of the exhibits and were even willing to rent me one of their exhibit pieces if I wasn’t able to find a TV for Elle’s exhibition. It’s an incredible place, and whilst it’s mainly focussed on audio equipment, they have a wide variety of historic televisions and computers, the jewel amongst it (in my opinion) being a Twentieth Anniversary Mac in great condition! Check out this video to get a sense of what the place is like.
Links
The story of Crusty the Mac that wouldn’t die
The Computer History Museum reunites the Mac team for the 40th anniversary
Joz on the enduring appeal of the Mac at 40
How to read a QR code, as a human
The Stanley water bottle craze explained
Flight search tools are letting users filter out certain planes
Reading
Another poor week, going to write this off as Group Crit week taking up a lot of mental space in the apartment and hit the ground running again today.
Listening
Acquired have an episode on “The Ozempic Company”, Novo Nordisk, and it’s a fascinating deep dive into the economics of disease.
Ham Sandwich are an Irish band that have been going for 20 years now. I remember seeing them at The Stables in UL in 2008 and thinking they were amazing, and just this week a friend sent me a link reminding me of them. The song ‘Words’ off this album is a real standout.
week in review 2024-03
Settling back into life in Rotterdam after the Christmas break.
Notes on the week
The main focus for the next few months is start living like locals, and less like tourists on an extended holiday. That means, for better or for worse, meeting new people. Elle has met some wonderful people in the University, but as I work from home it’s a little harder. Thankfully Rotterdam is a lively city and there are groups across all manner of interests, the problem is actually plucking up the courage to get involved. Maybe it’s a hangover from the pandemic, maybe it’s part of being an adult or maybe it’s just me, but I find the prospect of making new friends pretty daunting. I don’t consider myself a shy person, and in a professional setting I can chat away with just about anyone about just about anything, but for whatever reason meeting a new person with (potentially) no shared interests just feels awkward. Let’s see how it goes.
Escalators here are really cool. Yeah, that’s not sentence I ever thought I’d see either. But genuinely, they’re great! The Central library in Rotterdam is a six story building with escalators that get a lot of use, but rather than moving at a constant speed, they slow to glacial pace when there’s nobody riding . As soon as a person steps foot onto one it ramps back up to a normal speed. My guess is that it takes less energy to drive them at the slower speed, plus it has the added benefit of making it easier to get on.
The escalators at some of the Metro stations take this concept and go one step further, with the entire stairs stopping completely when there’s no one on board. This enables the escalator’s best trick, its not an ‘up’ escalator or a ‘down’ escalator, its Bi-Directional! Sensors at the top and bottom detect when a person is approaching, and will start the escalator travelling in the required direction just in time for them to step on. For intermittent and heavily directional flow of people, like those disembarking a metro, this is amazing, plus it must save a huge amount of energy over the course of the escalators lifetime. It’s little savings like this, both in energy usage and general wear, tear and maintenance that I think we need to be thinking about just as much as we focus on alternative energy production.
I’ve been involved in some discussions this past week in work about role definitions, specifically around defining a new role within our department. It got me thinking about how important these definitions are for some people, and how nebulous they are for others. By setting in stone a definition for a role it provides a sense of security for a newcomer to that role. This document will define what you do, and if you understand everything discussed you should be ok. On the other hand it also can create boundaries and over-prescriptive definitions of done that can be exploited, (but that kind of problem should be filtered out on the way in).
It also reinforces the roles that Job Titles play, and like it or not they are incredibly important to many people. If you don’t think they matter, consider two very similar titles, “Team Leader” and “Team Lead”, which would you prefer, and why? The importance of the role someone performs day to day, and the way that the role is perceived within the organisation can vary massively and this problem is only exacerbated by a poor choice of title. This has knock on effects that can impact recognition, satisfaction and even mobility within the org.
Links
Inside the NewYorkTimes puzzle team
Are genes a blueprint or a guideline?
Is Issacson actually any good at writing biographies?
Common misconceptions of medieval warfare
Viticci makes the silliest iPad
LeBron James and his total recall
Reading
Very bad week for reading, but hoping to get through a few chapters this weekend.
Listening
RAYE, of ‘Oscar Winning Tears’ fame has an incredible version of her Album “My 21st Century Blues” recorded with the Heritage Orchestra at Albert Hall.
Watching
We’ve started watching “The Great”, a hilarious and unfortunately now cancelled take on the rise of Catherine The Great.
week in review 2024-02
It’s cold in Rotterdam this week and I’m looking out the window here at a light dusting of snow starting to fall. It’s supposed to get as low as minus five!
Notes on the week
We flew back to Rotterdam from Dublin on Sunday last week. We needed to be at the airport around 08:30 and thankfully my parents offered to drive us. It’s bittersweet getting to spend every last possible moment with family before leaving for a few months, there’s just something about airport goodbyes that hit different.
It’s my preference to fly Aer Lingus (even if they seem to exclusively use their oldest A320s) on this route, but booking late meant RyanAir was far more affordable. All the extra legroom seats were gone, and 30" of seat pitch just isn’t enough for someone of my height. A middle seat was just the icing on the cake. A solid 4 out of 10 flight. The more vertically challenged Elle had a very comfortable time though, and a quick spin on the intercity direct train had us back to the apartment with plenty of daylight left. My biggest fear for the apartment was put to rest as we discovered that the plants had somehow survived in our absence.
It was my birthday on Tuesday. I normally don’t like my birthday, there’s always been something about it that feels like a clock ticking down rather than a milestone achieved? I don’t know what’s changed - a fresh perspective, finally growing out of teenage angst or just being in a particularly good head space - but this year’s was perfect. In reality we celebrated twice - first, last week at home with my family over a beautiful meal (my sister’s birthday was only 3 days ago so we doubled up, and our parents and partners were in attendance) , and again this week in Rotterdam.
There was no crazy party or extravagance but just a regular day bookended by a cozy coffee breakfast in a bakery I’ve been wanting to visit and a trip to the Kino cinema for dinner followed by “The Boy and The Heron”. The pastries, coffee, burgers, beers, movie and most of all, the company, were each exquisite.
The fact that my local bike shop did the repair I’d been putting off since before Christmas for free (I didn’t mention the fact that it was my birthday, I swear) was just the cherry on top.
The greatest (and worst) thing about being chronically online, and having been so for the best part of two decades at this stage, is that you build up a significant digital footprint that has followed you around for years. A result of this, is that the link saving tool I’ve used up until last week (Pocket) has entries in it from as early as 2012! I imported all of this into Raindrop, and am really curious about what things I found interesting ten years ago. Some examples that caught my attention:
Matt Gemmel taking about working from home years ahead of the rest of us
GTA V was, and remains the most recent instalment in the series
Google hired Geoffrey Hinton to lead AI work, he resigned from in May 2023
Gruber reviews the iPhone 6 and 6 plus. This year we’ll see iPhone 16
Brief update on the weather, I bought a pair of leggings to wear under my jeans. Absolute game changer, when combined with a good jacket (thank you parents) makes the cold weather completely manageable. Considering we get around Rotterdam completely on foot, bike or public transport, being able to stay dry and warm is vital.
Links
A problem with the Raindrop.io workflow I tried out last week is that the list is dynamic, and any changes I make will be reflected across every post that links to the list. Rather than creating a new collection for every week I think the cleanest (and most robust) is to just export the links and post them as plain text.
First update of the year from my favourite Antartica based blog
Europe’s new wave of Libraries
Do You Talk Funny? | David Nihill
How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment
The engineering of the humble rice cooker
Why Platformer is leaving Substack
Reading
Call me Ishmael.
The first book of the 12 classics I’m hoping to get through this year is Moby Dick. Somehow I know next to nothing about it other than the opening line, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s in store. I started last night, getting through the opening “Extracts” was a bit of work and reminded me of a character from “A Gentleman in Moscow” and their appreciation for Bread.
Listening
My knowledge of Ancient History is mediocre at best, but “The Ancients” from History Hit is really helping. There are so many “I really should have known that” moments during this show.
The end credits of “The Boy and the Heron” rolled over a song by Kenshi Yonezu, and it immediately brought me back to his amazing “Stray Sheep” album from 2020. Enjoy.
week in review 2024-01
A new year begins and with it all the usual trappings of struggling to slide back into a routine after weeks of living by no schedule other than the serving of dinners and starting of movies.
Notes on the week
Flying back to the Netherlands later this week, I can’t wait to be back in our apartment but am dreading discovering the condition of the rainforest of plants that have been left unattended for weeks. Plus the fridge, God I hope we got everything out of the fridge.
A new year brings with it the usual clamour for new routines and habits. I’ve never really been one to make ‘resolutions’, and the odd time that I have I’ve fell more or less flat on my face. This year though I’m taking a hint from Myke and Grey with a theme. I am incredibly happy in my life, but have felt in the past few months that I have been following along with the twists and turns that arise rather than taking an active role in steering. I guess this can painted as living a reactive life vs a proactive life. The theme of this year is to take a more hands on approach to life, and take stock of where I’m at across personal, professional, fitness etc. The ridiculous name I’ve been toying with is The Year of the Quartermaster.
I started this blog with the intention of ‘running the tap’ with writing until something good came out, but I’m really enjoying the weekly process. Honestly this is more of a little diary to myself without the pressure of daily notifications ala DayOne or Apple’s Journal app. Would I like to pick a topic or theme and make some long form writing? Yes. Will I be happy if this year all I create are these weekly posts? Absolutely.
A friend in work told me about the ‘rules’ of buying gifts for kids, “Something they want, something they need, something to wear and something to read”. I guess I’m a kid in my people’s eyes, between the Netherlands-weather-proof jacket, over-engineered coffee cup and my new most prized possession in the world I’m feeling pretty spoiled.
Posy has an amazing YouTube video talking about a method for ‘motion extraction’ in a video file, and I’ve been playing with the effect on some footage I had. I’ve pushed the time parameter out quite a bit, and you end up with this crazy ghost effect, where the position of the subject in ‘the past’ acts as a mask to reveal the background in ‘the present’.
Links
Testing out using Raindrop.io to manage links this week, and stumbled upon the feature to share a collection from within raindrop as an embeddable list:
Reading
Checking back in after starting the Hunger Games during the break. I finished the series in pretty short order, the first two books especially grabbed me and had that ‘just one more page’ impact. The third got overburdened by the weight of trying to resolve the overarching plot points, as well as tie up the characters development in satisfying ways. I think it fails a bit in this regard, but not so much that it detracts from the overall experience.
As a trilogy I’d give it a solid 8/10, and the individual books 8, 9 and 7 out of 10 respectively. Your mileage may vary, but definitely worth checking out the first at least.
Listening
A History of the World in 100 Objects is fascinating, and now available to purchase as one complete audiobook, but the original podcast series is still available. Take a trip through objects that shaped humanity.
CMAT is one of the breakout Irish artists of the past few years, and her music is equally catchy as it is relatable. One of the firm favourites in our apartment, I can’t wait to see her playing in the Netherlands later this year.
week in review 2023-52
This week has been spent with family and friends eating, drinking, laughing and painting a ceiling. It’s been perfect
week in review 2023-51
Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring because James and Ellen were tearing across the country visiting friends and family and doing last minute shopping before the big day.
Notes on the week
Rest is overdue, and sitting in my parents house in front of the fire with Christmas music playing away in the background is precisely what has been needed. We did a rapid triangle trip across Ireland after arriving home, Roscommon -> Kilkenny -> Cork -> Roscommon, before heading to our families for Christmas itself, and it’s been amazing to catch up with people. Cork is amazing, and every time I visit I leave thinking when we do settle in Ireland, the People’s Republic will be very tempting.
There is a housing crisis, a cost of living crisis, a general air of financial stress and despair in the air, and yet, every retailer I spoke to during the week has said it’s been crazy busy all week, no sign of any penny pinching or belt tightening at the tills. I’d love to know how many families are choosing to go into debt to cover the cost of Christmas rather than adjusting their spending.
My sister is studying for her QFAs, and whilst the image of her in front of the tree wearing Christmas PJs and fluffy slippers surrounded by notebooks, printouts and her laptop is hilarious, I can’t help but be very proud of her. Also learning by osmosis just sitting around and hearing her work on stuff is great!
Successfully bump started a car today! I went to move my sister’s car, which has been sitting up for a while, and the battery was dead. In the back of my head was a bit of trivia from an old Mike Boyd video to get the car going without jump leads, and unbelievably it worked!
Links
Germany hits 80GW of Solar Production
How the 2022 World Championships Changed Classic Tetris Forever
Reading
He did it, because of course he did. Sanderson had another secret book ready to go for the conclusion of the “Year of Sanderson”. After turning the publishing industry upside down with the most successful Kickstarter project in history, Brando Sando rounded out the year by dropping the release date for Stormlight #5, and one last little gift for his readers, the unreleased novella, Long Chills and Dough.
Also, after watching the new Hunger Games prequel movie with Elle and her family, I decided to start reading the books. So far about 20% into Book One and genuinely enjoying it.
Listening
The Vergecast do a holiday special each year on interfaces that define personal computing. In the past they’ve had episodes dedicated to BlueTooth and to HDMI, and this year it’s everyone’s favourite symmetrically shaped but technically inscrutable port, USB-C.
Lankum are Ireland’s premier purveyors of experimental, heartbreaking folk music, and have just won the Guardian’s Album of the Year with their fourth album, ‘False Lankum’. It’s a masterpiece, and they are an absolute must-see if they ever visit a city near you.
week in review 2023-50
Back in Ireland this week for the Christmas break and getting into that end of year wrap-up frame of mind.
Notes on the week
Flew out of Amsterdam a week later than planned due to Elle’s neck injury, thankfully it’s starting to show proper progress and she no longer needs help putting on socks! I’ll never understand the stress people experience in airports, especially people travelling on their own, and it seemed like there were a lot of flustered people that day. The airport wasn’t even that busy, so I don’t know what was going on. Waiting at the gate I spotted a mother and her kid having a meltdown, the kid had insisted on carrying their own boarding card and somewhere along the way had lost it. I could relate to both.
I watched the Ronnie O’Sullivan documentary, “At the Edge of Everything”. Even if you don’t know a thing about Snooker it’s a compelling watch. O’Sullivan is the greatest player in the history of the game, still at the top well into his forties and has battled demons, a tough upbringing and crippling mental health problems throughout his career. I didn’t expect to be moved so deeply by a sports documentary, but this film - the last act especially - is outstanding.
Being home whilst Elle is still in The Netherlands for a few more days means we’ve been talking on the phone a lot more, and this has lead to us encountering the strangest thing. When she calls me, her phone number is different every single time. Not only does the number change, but the country code the call is originating from! So far we’ve had The Netherlands (weird, but at least understandable), The UK, Malta, Romania, Slovakia, Czechia and Lithuania! Thankfully due to work I’m fairly well positioned to get to the bottom of any weird telco things. Will have to report back if we ever figure this out.
Links
OMG.LOL - An oasis on the internt
Sci-Fi Interfaces - Hackers (1995)
Reading
I was chatting to my Mother last night about books - she’s the most voracious reader I’ve ever come across - and we got talking about all the great books that we’ve wanted to read but never got around to. Coming out of it, I’ve decided to pick one of the literary greats for each month of 2024 to get through. Maybe she’ll join me (but it might be hard to find a book she hasn’t read) and we can have a little chat every month, should be fun!
Finished ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ tonight too, what fantastic book. Heartwarming, entertaining and dripping in style, I loved every minute spent with Count Rostov and the rest of the cast of the Metropol Hotel.
Listening
Kara is Tech Journalism royalty, so it’s no surprise that her podcast is consistently brilliant, but I’ve been really enjoying it lately. Her coverage (across written and spoken word) of the Sam Altman drama was top-notch.
Laufey is so good and so chill, and I just stumbled across this little Christmas EP she released that features a collaboration with Dodie Clark.
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Notes on the week
A stiff neck is no joke, something we learned the hard way this week. Elle pulled a muscle in her neck (after a sneeze) and for the past few days has been pretty much out of action. I was due to fly home but had to postpone until next week and she’s able to put on her own socks again.
Work announced the biggest deal in their corporate history. I’ve seen first hand the incredible effort gone into pulling this off and couldn’t be happier for, nor more proud of, those that dragged this into reality.
My new favourite thing to do to pass a few minutes is to create images using Dall-E. I find that the more detailed and descriptive the prompt you provide, the better the output image is. Instead of spending time coming up a prompt myself, I’ve taken to asking GPT to generate a prompt for Dall-E to create what I want, and then massaging that initial prompt into exactly what I want. Some of the results leave a lot to be desired, but some are delightful, like this Art Deco inspired desktop computer.
My workflow for this weekly notes section is built entirely on Obsidian. I understand that Obsidian isn’t the most approachable piece of software, but after a few tweaks and thanks to it’s incredible collection of community plugins I think I’ve settled on a setup that I love, and most importantly gets out of the way when it’s time to write. Paired with the excellent micro.publish plugin I have everything I need without ever context switching. The appearance is the AnuPpuccin Theme with a few tweaks to the workspace layout made in the Style Settings plugin
Google have released their Gemini Model that promises to meet or exceed the performance of OpenAI’s GPT-4. Most interesting from my point of view is the limitations of this model in Europe, it appears that a lot of the most powerful aspects will not be available in the EU. I value a lot of the customer protections that the EU provide us, but there is a fear that AI is the next great arms race and the EU is woefully behind. It’s taken the EU over a decade to start making progress into breaking some of the monopolistic practices of the larger Tech companies, and with the exponential growth of LLMs and their potential to drive economic growth this is not an area that I’d like to see the entire continent take a backseat on.
Links
Early Computer Art from the 50’s and 60’s
Reading
After finishing “Legends and Lattes” last week I haven’t spent too much time reading this week, but hope to sink back into “A Gentleman in Moscow” over the weekend. I think I’m going to check out “Project Hail Mary” over Christmas, “The Martian” is one of my favourite books ever and Hail Mary comes highly recommended.
Listening
I’ve decided to expand the listening section here to include podcasts and well as music, and the first item on the list is the wonderful “Sherlock and Co.”. It’s a modern telling of Sherlock Holmes told from the perspective of a Doctor Watson who fancies himself as a budding podcaster. I look forward to every new episode released on Tuesdays. Start from episode one and enjoy a wild ride.
Morning music is a staple in the house, and Fatoumata Diawara’s new album has been getting played a lot lately. It’s the the perfect accompaniment to a big cup of coffee looking out at the sun breaking up the morning fog.
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Notes on the week
Two weeks in a row. I’m honestly a little surprised, but I think that this format actually helps building a writing habit quite a bit. Adding some structure to the task of regularly writing makes it so much easier. What happened in life, what have you read, what links did you find interesting and what are you listening to? Easy questions to answer, and make for a (maybe) interesting weekly update.
It’s nearly time to head home for Christmas, and wind down the Rotterdam apartment for a few weeks. I hope to write a bit more about the experience of the first few months here, but so far so good. The City is cool, people are nice, weather sucks (but no worse than at home), bikes are great, and having our own place together is incredible.
I’ve been reading a lot more lately. I buy physical books because they look nice, but most serious reading gets done on my Kindle (It’s old and I’d love to upgrade to an Oasis, but until Amazon add USB-C to their flagship e-reader it’s not for me). It never really bothered me before, but all that content is locked away behind Amazon’s DRM. I’m locked into their devices, and whilst that’s fine now, in the future I might like to change my reading device. I stumbled upon a cool project where someone has created a private GPT to absorb their book collection, and a major step in this was ‘de-DRMing’ their Kindle library. I just spent the last twenty minutes doing this to my entire library of Kindle books, and will probably continue with every new purchase I make.
YouTube threw some nostalgia at me today with Chetreo’s remix of Portal 2’s “Want you gone”. This sent me down a rabbit hole of listening to a lot of Chetreo’s remixes, but also thinking about Portal and how it’s pretty much as perfect a game as it gets. Elle has been looking to play more games, so on my recommendation we fired it up. It really struck me just how inaccessible first person games are to non-gamers. Very, very quickly the mechanical demands of the game outstripped her ability, and I could see her getting frustrated at not being able to do what she wanted her character to do, despite knowing exactly how to solve the puzzle of a particular level.
I grew up with a controller in my hand so this body-brain disconnect is completely foreign to me, so I have no advice to offer other than put in the hours and it will begin to feel more and more natural. This is possibly a topic for a much longer piece, there is a plethora of gaming ‘vocabulary’ that I’ve absorbed over literal decades that all inform how comfortable a new game feels, and this vocab is completely absent for an adult looking to get started.
Ireland has made it to space! Massive congratulations to the EIRSAT-1 Team that successfully made it to orbit and got AOS. The energy in this video is lovely to see, and hopefully this is the only the first of many future Irish missions.
Links
A visualisation of how a Large Language Model works This is an incredible free resource for understanding whats going on behind the scenes in a transformer model.
Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT This is wild, and the technique for triggering the leak is equally hilarious as it is scary.
No Feature The team at iA with a nuanced take on adding AI to existing software. Part 1 of 3, it’s worth reading them all.
What if you pointed Hubble at Earth? xkcd’s ‘what if?’ in video form.
Let’s build a GPT Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former Director of AI at Tesla discusses how to build a GPT from scratch.
An Ultrasonic TV remote from the 70’s
The best way to ripen avocados
How to choose better colours for your charts
Reading
Paused progress on “A Gentleman in Moscow” to check out “Legends and Lattes”. I don’t know if it’s the time of the year, or just being overwhelmed with the mess the world is in, but I fancied something cosy and Travis Baldree’s breakthrough novel is very light, very easygoing and was the perfect companion to a chilly week in Rotterdam. An Orc is fed up with her life of bloodshed and decides to make a clean break to set up a coffee shop in a new city. I wish I’d had this during the depths of the pandemic, but like a great Latte it went down well this week all the same.
Listening
The one and only Robert Grace has a new release out this week and it’s typically top class. Rob has really matured as an artist over the past few years, and his writing partnership with Ryan Mack continues to blow me away. You couldn’t meet two nicer guys either.
Micro.publish test
This is a test of the micro.publish plugin for Obsidian by Otávio Cordeiro. If you’re seeing this, it works.
Apple Music Embedding
Wednesday, November 29, 2023 →
This is a test of Apple Music embedding. It’s also a great tune by Irish artist John Francis Flynn
week in review 2023-47
Wednesday, November 29, 2023 →
Something new! I enjoy writing, or at least I think I like writing, but friction is a killer. In an attempt to build a habit I’m going to try to keep a weekly log of general life stuff and interesting links (hat tip to Kev).
Notes on the week
Moving to Rotterdam a few months ago has been a big change. This apartment is the first place that Elle and I can truly call our own. It’s amazing. I’ll be forever grateful for how welcome I was at home during the pandemic, and the opportunity to live with friends again once the world started to open up, but there is something fundamentally different about having your own place.
A side-effect of having our own place is entertaining visitors! In the past few weeks we’ve had my family, Elle’s parents, her brother and two of our friends. Nothing will make you feel more loved than people using up annual leave to visit a cold, wet and windy Rotterdam in November. Now if we can nail down dates for the 2 remaining Wallace siblings to go we’ll have collected the whole set!
It’s impossible to write anything about moving to the Netherlands without mentioning bikes, and we are now the proud owners of two scrap heaps that cost a combined total of €150 from our local charity shop. The temptation was definitely there to go all out off the bat, but our apartment only has on street bike parking, and we were warned that nice bikes have a tendency to go missing when parked on the street, no matter how good a lock is used.
With all that said, we got both bikes serviced and honestly they’re not bad! I haven’t cycled this much in my entire life, and trips that left my legs burning (embarrassingly so, considering the pancake flat terrain) only a few weeks ago are second nature to me. It helps that the infrastructure is amazing (even if Rotterdam is apparently one of the worst cities in the Netherlands for cycling) and drivers tend to respect cyclists. I even rented a Bakfiets recently to help move some things to Elle’s studio!
Links saved this week
The Revised Psychology of Human Misjudgment, by Charlie Munger
The Rest of the World’s list of books
How to help people use a computer
What if Money had an expiration date
Some cats have an instinctual fetch response!
Preston Thorpe is a programmer, writer and prisoner
Reading update
Making progress with ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’. It feels right to take this book leisurely. It’s a total change of pace from ‘The Sunlit Man’, the last of Sanderson’s Secret Projects, which surgically attached itself to my hand shortly after the opening scene.
The Honey Badger is back
Daniel Ricciardo is back on the F1 grid less than half a season after his exit from the sport following a disappointing run of results with Mclaren that left the Australian struggling to match the pace of his younger team mate Lando Norris.
Ironically, it’s the poor run of form of another driver, Nyck De Vries, that is after providing Ricciardo with the chance to prove himself. Nyck has been unceremoniously dropped from Red Bull junior team, Alpha Tauri, less than a year into his debut season. Ricciardo’s return to Alfa Tauri, (the Italian outfit was known as Scuderia Torro Rosso when Ricciardo last raced for them *10 years ago*) marks a pivotal moment in his career. Is he there to act as a benchmark for his younger teammate Yuki Tsunoda, or is this the opportunity to repeat his path from a decade ago and graduate to the Red Bull senior team for the second time.
The prospect of a motivated Ricciardo with capable machinery underneath him would bring a tear of joy to even the coldest Formula One fan. The chance of him replacing an underperforming Checo Perez at Red Bull for the 2024 season, to line up against (by then certainly triple) World Champion Max Verstappen is enough to send us into a collective rapture. Daniel is the only driver that has ever beaten Max over a season as teammate, and operating at his prime is absolutely a match for the Dutch phenomenon in wheel-to-wheel combat. There are countless variables that stand between us and this Hollywood story coming to fruition, but if Daniel truly is embarking on the third act of his redemption arc, the world of Formula One will be all the better for it.
My Dad, the fixer
My parent’s air fryer broke the other day. The timing was, as is the way with this kind of thing, perfect. With most of our dinner already cooking and the chips being the last thing to go on, a fryer failure was the last thing they needed. Luckily, I have the exact same model and was able to deliver it just in time to save dinner. Save your applause, I’m not the hero of this tale.
What happened next has really stuck with me these last few days, and has me thinking about our approach to products, to ownership and the balance between convenience and conservation. After dinner the discussion turned to what should be done about the broken air fryer. It wouldn’t switch on at all, there were absolutely no signs of life. Basic troubleshooting (checking a different socket, changing the fuse in the plug) yielded no progress, so I asked was it still under warranty. It wasn’t. I’m away from home a lot lately with work so I offered up my fryer until my folks decided what they wanted to do. I assumed they’d look up whatever the newest model was, and maybe pick one up the next day they were in town.
The following morning I came into the kitchen to find a rat’s nest of cables, electronics and a triumphant looking father perched over the disembowelled De’Longhi proclaiming that he’d found the problem. He had narrowed the issue down to a few likely suspects, and then using his trusty multimeter had discovered that a thermal fuse had tripped (this is a safety mechanism to automatically shut the fryer down if the temperature got too high, it is however a non-resettable fuse) causing the whole unit to die. A four euro part ordered online would solve the problem, and for a fraction of the cost of a new unit, crispy and somewhat healthy fried goods would be back on the menu!
This, is quite frankly amazing, and not just from a monetary perspective. The refusal to see something as a single use good, but rather as a collection of individual components with their own lifecycles is something that my Grandfather’s generation grew up with, and is completely in opposition to the disposal device dystopia that we find ourselves in today. My Dad in turn has taken that same approach to life, and somewhere inside I feel myself coming around to the same line of thinking. I want to be more like my Dad, I want my first question when something breaks to be “how can I fix this?” instead of “how am I going to replace this”. I think it’s incredibly important that we empower people to feel confident taking their devices apart, that we make repair guides and replacement parts easily available and that the throwaway culture of cheap electronics starts to be seen more akin to littering.
Manufacturers and retailers would rather we see their products as monolithic, black boxes that consumers should never be so bold as to look within. Planned obsolescence and proprietary repair requirements are not only an insult to our rights as consumers, but also an aggressive attack on our ability to consume responsibly.
Side note: if you only check out one link from this post, please read about the Phoebus Cartel and the birth of planned obsolescence
The Cosmere
The pandemic was a crazy time. We all tried things to fill the time spent in and out of lockdown. Some baked bread, some watched Tiger King and some fell down the rabbit hole that is author Brandon Sanderson’s series, genre and medium transcending, shared narrative universe - The Cosmere. I did all three, the bread was great.
Sanderson is a weird guy. Not creepy weird, just esoteric weird. His output is prolific, often releasing multiple books in a single calendar year. His college room-mate was Ken Jennings, yes that Ken Jennings, of Jeopardy fame. He was drafted in to complete one of the greatest fantasy series of all time (IMHO), The Wheel of Time after author Robert Jordan passed away, despite having only published two books of his own. He has the record for the most successful kickstarter campaign of all time. His bibliography page on Wikipedia has over 70 entries. And he’s only in his forties.
Some people love A Song of Ice and Fire’s author, G.R.R Martin, but loathe him at the same time for his glacial output rate. I love Sanderson, but sometimes it feels like I’m drowning trying to stay on top of everything that comes out!
Why we love Formula One
This is an old piece of writing that I never finished, but with my new found enthusiasm thanks to this micro.blog I thought it would be nice to see it through. Looking back it’s hard to believe that the race that was about to take place somehow surpassed all expectation and provided us with the most exciting (and controversial) finish to a season in recent memory.
I’m writing this the night before the 2021 Abu Dhabi grand prix, the final race of what many would consider the single greatest season in Formula One history, the culmination of the year-long battle between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen and in a larger sense, a moment that feels pivotal for F1’s place in the greater sporting world. After the longest, most gruelling season to date, both drivers arrive to the circuit level on points, wrapped up in the maelstrom of controversy that was the Saudi grand prix, with one final frantic dash to the finish line separating either driver from their place in the history books. Lewis can leave tomorrow with his eighth World Championship, and the outright record for the most titles won by one driver (a record he currently shares with Micheal Schumacher). Max on the other hand is on the cusp of clinching his first, and in doing so join the exclusive club of Formula One World Champions, ending 7 years of Mercedes dominance and dethroning the man that many argue is the greatest driver our sport has ever seen. Quite simply, this is peak F1.
Formula One is a unique sport in many ways.
First of all, it’s not exactly accessible, certainly not in the way football, cricket or any other run of the mill sport is. A kid watching football on TV can witness Lionel Messi drop his shoulder and pirouette around a defender, watch him take a split second to glance up and realising that the goalkeeper is off their line, strike with the most delicate of touches to send the ball floating tantalisingly above the goalkeeper’s fingertips and into the net. After observing poetry manifest itself in the form of a 5’7” Argentinian, that same kid can grab her football, go outside and spend the rest of the evening trying to replicate her hero.
The next day when she watches an F1 race with her friends, and she sees her favourite drivers mere inches apart from one another, pulling more than 5 times their body weight in G-force through a corner, and hurtling the down a straight at speeds in excess of 300kph, she doesn’t have any way to take that experience and recreate it herself. Outside of the rare few that have grown up with some exposure to motorsport via wealth, luck or a combination of the two, most people don’t have a frame of reference through which they can relate to the experience of driving an F1 car.
In many ways this should be detrimental to a spectator sport. How can we as an audience care about what we’re watching when we have no basis for it in our own experience of the world? I like to think of this as the ‘astronaut equivalence’. The very idea of becoming a Formula One driver is as foreign a concept for most people as the notion of setting forth into outer space. Neither profession is something that you can ‘practice’, and the only way to even get your foot in the door is to rise to the top of a number of other disciplines along the way. And yet it is exactly this exclusivity that is so attractive.
Sidenote, there is an interesting parallel in the number of people that have been to space and the number that have ever competed in an F1 car, with around 650 intrepid explorers strapping themselves onto the top of rockets throughout history whilst 770 drivers have taken to the grid of an F1 race. Compare this to the over 100,000 currently registered professional footballers around the world.
When I watch the latest crew of astronauts blast off from Cape Canaveral, there is a potent cocktail of excitement, awe, anxiety and fear in the deepest pit of my stomach. The only other time I get that mix of feelings is waiting for the lights to go out at the start of a grand prix. There is so much energy coiled up in those cars before the green light, standing still almost against their will, against their very nature as objects designed purely for speed. Then there are the drivers, seemingly unaware of the tension in the air, the weight of expectation from the crowd, and the absurd fact that 1000 horsepower is waiting to respond to the slightest twitch of their right foot. When we watch a race, we are watching real life superheroes do things that the rest of us could never even begin to attempt. At every bend we watch them take unimaginable risks, and hold our breath as they do battle over inches of tarmac. F1 is more than just a sport, it is a celebration of engineering excellence, a throwback to the danger of gladiatorial combat, and an awe inspiring expression of man and machine operating together as one.
It might not be for everyone, but tonight hundreds of millions of people are going to bed imagining the infinite number of scenarios that could play out on track tomorrow. There will be pundits and punters arguing back and forth all morning over driving style, team work and strategy. The previous 21 rounds will be dissected, every overtake, every collision and every statistic, prediction and opinion will be rendered meaningless. The cars will take to the grid, Lewis and Max sharing the front row. The lights will go out. Thousands of components refined over millions of simulations will dance in perfect unison to accelerate them towards the first turn, reaching nearly 200 kph before they jump on the brakes. What happens next is anyone’s guess.