My Blog

  • Setting up my new computer, vim, and listening to Spotify in the terminal

    I recently got a new laptop, and I decided that this would finally be the time that I don't set it up in a completely ad hoc way. Previously I would install every program I needed as I needed it, with no real plan of how I would replicate the setup if I needed to move to a different machine, or wipe the current one. Tellingly, the one thing that I did make an effort to protect was my Vim config, which I've been maintaining for five years at this point (I have been a software developer for 5 years). I want more things to be like Vim, so, I should decided to setup my computer with Ansible.

  • Walnuts can stain your hands for a very long time

    I am currently in England, and it turns out that a long hot summer has created the ideal environment for amateur foraging. Since being here I've eaten plums, blackberries, apples, plums, and damsons, all plucked from the abundant countryside. It all feels too easy. English people seem to have forgotten that you can eat this stuff, so even when walking on the busiest footpaths one can still gather pounds of free fruit. This is very different to Berlin where there is such a strongly ingrained culture of foraging that finding a single blackberry is a great success.

  • Life is very long when you're lonely

    The queen is dead. And coincidentally I am in England. I'm staying at my Mum's house where my stepdad, in the throes of technology addiction, receives push notifications from the BBC news. These notifications play the familiar sound that accompanies any headline on the TV. We knew that the queen was somewhat ill, and when one of these alerts went off we joked 'sounds like the queen has died', he checked his phone and she had in fact.

  • Reflections on my prediction of Pogacar's defeat

    The Men's Tour de France is now over. It was a very special race, probably one of the best of all time. 10/10 great sporting event. I only would have liked the times going into the final time trial to be a bit closer, and also for Geraint Thomas to win.

  • How about now (regarding Pogacar)

    I wrote recently that I thought it was unreasonable to give Pog a 50% chance of winning the Tour. We're now 6 stages in, with Pog in the yellow jersey, and we're past the cobbled stage that I thought was a particular risk. So lets reflect and re-evaluate!

  • What are the odds that Tadej Pogacar will win the Le Tour de France?

    'Le Tour' has just started. And the first question is of course 'will Tadej Pogacar win again'. For the uninitiated, Pogacar (henceforth Pog) has convincingly won the previous two editions of the Grande Boucle, and many of the other significant races that he has competed in.

  • Is madLAD sentient? - An interview

    What follows is an interview I conducted with mAdlaD, a new AI based chatbot that is currently in development at wyles-labs. Due to technical limitations the interview consists of very few questions.

  • What I Read on Holiday

    I went on Holiday to Greece (it's nice) which is why I didn't update this website for a while. Here are some thoughts about the books I read on holiday. Some of them I even finished!

  • Super Booth 2022

    I went to superbooth, the world's premiere synthesizer expo. I arrived at 1pm, feeling pretty tired having been out till the early hours listening to electronic music in some distant sandy forest. Superbooth largely consists of tents blasing electronic music in a sandy forest. Such is life in Berlin.

  • Shaving Is Too Expensive. Also the world is out to get you

    Shaving is too expensive and is a demonstrative example of how most consumer products are designed to extract more money from you rather than to improve your life, or the world, or to be in any way remotely good.

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