I started the week with 13 jars of pasta sauce in my kitchen cupboard. It’s snuck up on me slowly - I use one or two a week but they’re always on 3-for-2 offers when I do my weekly shop. And I can’t resist a bulk buy bargain. You can’t escape the maths. I’m ending the week on 9 and a temporary moratorium on buying any more. A separate initiative will cover the growing kidney bean stash. I’ll keep you updated.

I’ve been hacking on two projects this week - first up I’m making a hosted RSS reader.

I really, really don’t want to end up running a VPS or any of my own infrastructure. In many ways this would make things easier but I think of sysadmin as a phase I briefly went through when younger that I don’t want to revisit. You end up caring about things that you don’t really need in your headspace - it’s like when I was briefly blonde and started worrying about my roots. The RSS reader is a bit trickier than most of my projects to the extent that it needs to do batch stuff with subscriptions. The danger with my approach is that you can end up with a Rube Goldberg mesh of different services. But, as usual, this is a playground for me and I like to see how far I can push things. More on this soon.

The second project is done. I bought an Xteink ebook reader after being impressed with a colleague’s. I’ve been looking for a while for something I could use as a dashboard to tell me whether to commute or train. The Xteink is a nice self-contained package that has all the things I need - wifi, screen, battery and it’s easy to reflash with my own software.

I’ve always liked Richard’s bicycle barometer but I wanted something that gave me a bit more context. I’ll write up what I did in more detail soon, but for now, I have an unobtrusive battery-powered dashboard (no wires!) stuck on my wall that should last a few months between charges and which updates twice a day.

I feel like I’m finally hitting my stride at work. There’s been so much to learn in the first few months that I haven’t had space to think very much or be very present in the tasks I’ve been taking on. Things go slowly when everything you try to do requires some digging around, asking questions, building context. And the nature of this job is that it has a big surface area - customer-facing tools, internal systems, historical quirks - and a deep stack from hardware, through operating systems to web services. Colleagues are always happy to help, but you don’t want to interrupt them too much. It’s pretty amazing, though, to be able to point an LLM at a repo - you can imagine we have a few - and say ’tell me about this project’. An under-discussed benefit, I think.

My eldest messaged me this week to ask if they could drill a hole in my guitar that they’ve been ‘borrowing’. I can’t tell you how proud I felt.

The youngest is staying over next weekend and I’ve bought a couple of Tim Fowers’ two-player games for us to play - Fugitive and Run. We loved the aesthetics and gameplay of the Burgle Bros. games so hopefully they’ll arrive from Germany in time. We’ve also got a trip planned to the Centre for Computing History with an old friend and their son. Retro fun awaits.

Grab-bag

  • There’s all kinds of stuff in the browser that you never think about - complicated, detailed work that is probably someone’s obsession. This week I was fascinated to discover Intl.Segmenter.
  • Tiny Tapeout is an amazing project bringing ASIC design to hobbyists. I wish I had a reason to try it out.
  • I’d forgotten Long Bets existed. Maybe that’s the point. Winners and losers here.