What I done did in August 2024
It’s been warm but it’s starting to get Autumn-y!
Went to Karaoke with my work colleagues
As part of the socials we have at work there was a trip to a local karaoke place. The room itself was like a sauna so made it a little hard to really belt anything out but it was fun nonetheless.
I “treated” my colleagues to renditions of:
- Toxicity by System of a Down
- War Pigs by Black Sabbath
- Nightboat to Cairo by Madness
- Sound of the Suburbs by The Members
I think I got away with doing some slightly less than normal numbers and no one’s night was ruined by this so I count it as a win.
Spent a weekend in Whitby
I’ve always wanted to go to Whitby ever since I saw the ruined abbey in Dracula and learned about its gothy vibes but, whenever we’ve looked at the journey it’s been a bit of a trek from Leeds, taking about 3 hours.
Since we’ve been back from NZ the spirit of adventure has kinda lingered so we decided to book a hotel in Whitby for the night and spend a weekend there, getting up at 6am to get the Coastliner bus from Leeds at 7am, getting into Whitby for 10am. And all for £5!
As there was going to be 6 hours of bus journey I decided to take a couple of books with me but I ended up just making it through Radical Candor, a book I can’t say I enjoyed reading I think in part that it basically lays out the way I already approach things so there wasn’t really anything new for me to learn.
Once we got to Whitby though we had a great time walking up the 199 steps, walking around the Abbey and walking to Saltwick Bay to go fossil hunting and then finishing the day off with a chippy tea and some ice cream.
It was a knackering first day but the hotel had a bath so I took this as an excuse to soak in the tub and help my leg muscles heal a little.
On the way back the Coastliner bus wasn’t going through to Leeds which was a little confusing so we ended up getting a train back into York and using the stopover as an excuse for me to get a coffee from my favourite coffee place before heading back home.
Overall it was a really nice chill weekend and a nice reminder that I don’t need to be on the other side of the world to take a little trip out.
Completed the Leeds Monopoly Board
Leeds City Centre had a Monopoly themed game going on in August. This saw the city carved into various areas, each corresponding to a colour on the Monopoly board and players having to solve puzzles in those areas.
It was really fun and reminded me of the good old days of running around Leeds City Centre playing Pokemon Go as the different areas were spread about a fair amount.
There were some fun prizes too (which I didn’t win) and some statues of the different monopoly board pieces.
Bought a Philips Hue Sync Box
I’ve had some Philips Hue Play lights laying around doing nothing for a while so I decided to invest in a sync box to make use of them. It’s quite good at what it does and it has allowed me to clean up the mess of cables at the back of my TV which occurred to a lack of HDMI ports on the TV itself.
If there was one down side it would be how the physical HDMI input switcher doesn’t work so well so it has a habit of switching input source randomly when different devices trick it into doing so but I have to go into the app and switch it back instead being able to reliably press the button on the box like I should be able to.
Set up my Mac mini M1 for iOS development
As I start to define the approach I want to take with my Swift refactor of JiffyCV I decided to wipe my old Mac Mini M1 which was sitting around gathering dust after I stopped work on Reciprocal.dev and set it up as my primary dev machine.
There’s something really nice about having a desktop machine for development instead of relying on a laptop, which while having the benefit of being portable tends to just not “feel” as good (it’s hard to explain and very subjective).
I’ve always loved the Mac mini, it’s such a cool little box and I think when the new M4 ones come out I’ll likely look to get one of those as it’ll be a nice performance upgrade.
Moved my PKM over to Obsidian
I found I was struggling a little with organising my thoughts as I had a number of different tools I was using. I had Bear for writing things, Notion for planning and Things for Todos and this was adding a little bit of stress in my life.
I decided to move everything over to Obsidian as I had been using that recently as part of the JiffyCV planning and it would give me a means to consolidate all the information in the various places.
So far it’s working well and I really like how Obsidian supports Mermaid charts out of the box.
Carried out my first bit of user research for JiffyCV
After the initial release of JiffyCV and before I burned out from it I was looking at adding a journal to the app so that people who could keep track of the things they do in their current job and then use the entries to build a CV.
Now I’m looking to redo JiffyCV this is an idea I’ve been keen to explore so I’ve been conducting user research to see where to start development on such a thing.
So far it’s been really insightful but I feel like I’m reaching the limit of what the free tiers of the tools I’ve found offer so I’m going to have to decide if I want to invest in using such a tool and bite the bullet and pay a lot of money for these.
