Welcome!

It’s been about 5 months now since the release of Civilisation VII and it’s starting to become a playable game. This is partly due to me getting used to it and partly the effect of quality of life patches and additional features.

At the time of writing, one way to demonstrate the illusory nature of LLM intelligence is to get one to try and answer a cryptic crossword clue.

“I’ve never had one fail” says my Dad brandishing his drill on Boxing Day 2022, before heading out into the garden and putting up our Christmas gift, a handsome wooden bird box. “If I put it up, they’ll come along eventually.”

I sometimes wonder if I picked the correct 808 State album for my understated classics series. That’s because today I was listening to their 1996 album Don Solaris and it’s pretty darn good. For understated classics I chose their earlier effort Gorgeous, partly out of the belief that probably no one else ever would, but also because 10X10 and Plan 9 are such total bangers.

I’ve been trying to settle on a text editor, IDE, and terminal for a long time now. Partly I’m limited by what I can use at work because I owe to myself and my colleagues to be able to reproduce all my skills in a work setting. However, part of me has also wandered off a bit after reading about the idea of a “personal Development Environment” (or PDE I guess, though in a former life that meant something very different), which is essentially an application where you can do anything and have it configured exactly how you like. Here’s an update on my progress on that front:

As part of getting the garden done, we’ve been out and about looking for trees. It’s quite exciting seeing in person all the trees we’ve discussed with our garden designer. Here are some of the species we’ve been looking at: