posts

I did that thing I sometimes do and that is really think about what I’d like my blog to look like instead of actually getting on and writing some posts.

Nevertheless, I’ve got a plan to get back into the saddle and start writing some posts again. Part of it will involve redesigning the site so there will be some visual changes (mostly to enable more posts that are just an image or two) and some additional features added.

Faced with writing about the best albums of 2025 a bit late, I figured an extra six months of perspective might help me make some decisions about which albums truly were the best of last year.

Truth be told, it didn’t feel like the best of years for albums last year, but that just might be me getting much more in to the various mixes on Apple Music. While I am passionate about the album format where you get to listen to a set of songs by one artist, I do find that I am also very appreciative of mixes these days that blend together sometimes surprising choices of songs. For example, there was an excellent Beats in Space mix by Paula Tape that included an old mix of a sacred spirit track and sent me down the rabbit hole of listening to that album again.

Ten years ago, ahead of the 2016 European Championship, I wrote a few posts about the Panini sticker album for the tournament and my efforts to fill it up. It was a nice subject to investigate with Excel and R as a little data science exercise. This post is a little update.

About eighteen years ago, I got a copy of Nicola Barker’s “Darkmans” for Christmas. It’s a hefty novel, one of those small runs where the ‘hardback’ is actually a paperback. I have the first edition and it’s ginormous. I read it at home because I couldn’t really take it anywhere.

But I got through it with the help of the following hack.

This is a quick blog post to say Happy New Year. I’ve got lots of things to write about, including my favourite albums of last year and a whole month in Australia. Obviously you don’t spend a whole month in Australia and blog about it while you’re there because someone will come and rob your house.

So anyway, there’s a whole load of posts I need to write about: some books, all sorts of things really. Looking forward to doing that.

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:

45 is Bill Drummond’s sort of memoir, albeit one with a hazy memory of the events most readers (myself included) are likely to be interested in. Drummond is/was one half of pop-pranksters The KLF, but 45 barely mentions them at all. There’s a lot about before (e.g. managing Echo and the Bunnymen in late-70s and early-80s Liverpool) and after (various shenanigans in the art world and attempting to relate to his children), some of that writing is very interesting. Nevertheless the whole lacuna of his pop heyday seems to punches a hole through the entire book.