weeknotes for w/c 07/04/25

beautiful weather this week, although I've been writhing in mild discomfort from a medium-sized walk on Saturday. my thighs are incredibly sore

• went to a Campaign Lab hack night on Monday.
  • didn't do much code, but floated around and helped answer people's questions. met the Digital Anthropology Collective, who seem like an interesting group of people
  • after the hack night, I went to the London Night Cafe. haven't been in ages, but bumped into some people I met from codebar. managed to dispense some career advice, and offered to help someone break into tech. we'll see how it goes!
• went to Polo Bar on Tuesday morning after Night Cafe. managed to do the mental arithmetic to split the meal between the three of us (including the service charge!). awfully chuffed with that
• met with Josie on Tuesday afternoon. we’re definitely cooking some cool stuff I’m excited to share soon-ish
• cooked for Newspeak House's Ration Club on Wednesday evening, somehow managed to pull off salmon en croute with mashed potatoes and steamed vegetables for ~15 people.
  • did a shop worth ~£65 at Morrison's, which works out to just over £4 per person for a premium, delicious and flavourful meal. can't claim any of it back, because I lost the receipt 😭
  • the cook took three hours, and was a massive team effort. thanks to Ollie and Claddagh for their help in the kitchen, as my phenomenal sous chefs.
• binged Black Mirror on Thursday evening after work
  • a consistent theme in this series has been about the mind, memory and perception, with three of the seven episodes featuring TCKR System's Nubbin device. I've found it very interesting, albeit a little homogenous
  • the cinematography in Plaything is brilliant and horrific. Peter Capaldi’s performance was phenomenal. even though I could see the ending about halfway through, I found it was still nicely executed
  • physical access (to your brain) is root access (to your brain)
  • rewatched The Waldo Moment from Series 2. given today's political climate, it's a particularly salient episode
• had a late lunch on Friday, and had a lovely picnic with Oliver 🥰
  • ate crackers and cheese, and played with a frisbee in the park
  • got vanilla, white chocolate and cookies and cream in a waffle cone. it's from a place on the high street that is quite obviously a money laundering front, but I believe in supporting local businesses
  • took this week's KARG in a park, where we discussed knowledge units, nanopublications and their implications for scientific publishing. they were thrilled to hear about my talk in Ghent!
  • bought a spatula from TK Maxx
  • went to Brewdog Shoreditch on Friday evening. it was lovey to see some people I haven’t seen in ages
• went on another picnic and a lovely walk with a friend in Foots Cray Meadows on Saturday!
  • started the day with breakfast at Tesco café. bought a meal deal and a bunch of snacks for us to share
  • saw two butterflies, which was lovely.
  • walked around for about three or four hours, and my thighs are absolutely sore now
• spent Sunday doing some personal care
  • fixed a conference badge with some tape
  • sat in Costa and jotted down some thoughts about Plane, Outline and the model context protocol in my diary for my talk in May. need to start looking at flights and accommodation
  • organised my personal wiki, detailing my ongoing projects and my future commitments. doesn't seem too overwhelming, and I feel excited for the future. also upgraded Outline to the latest version
  • after months of procrastination, started to clean up my workbench! took off a bunch of papers and dumped them into a basked, but I need to sort through them. life truly is shuffling papers around.
    • found my iPad buried under a bunch of stuff after ages. it‘s going to be useful for reading papers and books, which I’m excited for. irritatingly had to set the region back to the UK so it would use English in the spell check, instead of the butchered language that is “US English”.
• had Andrew over for dinner and co-work session. cooked chicken thighs in a lovely sauce in my wok and made some chicken thigh burgers with lettuce, tomato and onion. didn’t have any garlic or onion powder, but found some asafoetida down the back of the cupboard that did the trick!
  • popped into Lidl to get a few items for dinner, but it evolved into a full food shop (even though I didn’t mean it to). had to be done at some point, so I’m glad I stopped putting it off. happy I’m set for the next month at least
• reviewed a PR for notanotherpizza/stickers
• been sold on the value of backpacks which unzip all the way, around instead of just opening on the top. they let you get to stuff in the middle without digging up the whole bag which is great
• this article about coming off Twitter got me thinking about identity on the internet and how we lack absolute control over it, although I think AT Proto and the Fediverse can provide some remedy to that.
• think I can see the final stretch for working on this project at work, which is reassuring. excited to get onto the next stage
• set up self-hosted Wakatime on my homelab and installed the extension in VS Code to track the amount of code I write. it'll be interesting to get concrete metrics. also uninstalled some unused extensions to clean things up.
• need to moisturise better, especially my hands
• learnt that if you long-press on a YouTube video, it plays at double speed.
• voted in my building society's AGM
• I've never lived through a real trade war before!
• not 100% happy with my current blog's theme. I want a blog theme which allows me to write Terence Eden-style short notes that look pretty. found Lumen Yang's notes site, which also looks interesting.
• put up little hooks at my door to hang my house keys, so now I don't lose them. much better than the little plastic bowl I had before, although my setup is now a lot less versatile