About. Bloody. Time. 🍻
“Beer duty could be cut in pubs and raised in supermarkets”
This video of the Perseverance rover landing on Mars after being lowered by a sky crane(!) is straight up incredible. What an age we live in.
So I read the UK PM’s announcement as a very slim but possible chance that I will be able to have a beer in a pub garden on my Birthday (12th April). Let’s hope for the best!
Having Dustin from Smarter Every Day explain how sonar works has to be one my favourite video of his. I learnt so much in such a little amount of time. Would love to know more! youtu.be/AqqaYs7Lj…
Yes! @ynab have added widgets to iOS for budget categories! https://www.youneedabudget.com/widgets-for-ynab-on-ios/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=weekly_newsletter&utm_campaign=weekly_roundup&utm_content=weekly_roundup_253&utm_term=253_widgets_btn
Hooray! My Backblaze Backup has finally completed the initial seed. 7 Days total over our 6Mbps upload, pausing during work and TV time. Now, time to start with the external drives.
The efficiency of Safari over Chrome is absolutely incredible and with the battery life improvements that brings on M1 it simply makes no sense to use Chrome on MacOS. Well, unless the site doesn’t work in Safari 🙄. www.macrumors.com/2021/02/2…
It’s now been a year since I got on an aeroplane or left the country. Bit sad, but I’m powering all my energy into hope that we’ll be free soon.
Little concerned that I won’t be able to maintain any self control once that ‘book’ button arrives back in my browser.
🤞
Commiserations to Team Ineos UK over in New Zealand, knocked out during the Prada Cup Final. Italians simply had the faster boat and executed well. Some good tactics and starts from Ben and the UK team, impressive work. 👏
Cheering for Italy now, let’s bring that cup to Europe.
For a couple that despise media attention they’re certainly doing a good job of attracting it. 🙄
Think I’m a bit late to the party on this but can’t wait to give it a try #Marmite
Thinking about travel in 2021 andrews.io/blog/Trav…
I feel rather embarrassed that I did not know about the Medway Megaliths until today. Shall be visiting them when we’re all allowed out again.
Travel Optimism for 2021
It’s a gorgeous sunny day outside today, which means all I can think about is summer. Since last year was a non-starter I desperately want to get back out into the world and do some travelling. I really do hope that there will be some opportunity to do so and am quietly praying that it will all be fine.
The past few weeks I’ve been thinking about a route and some of the things I’d like to see and do. The #TrainToTurkey trip in 2019 was fantastic and while I wouldn’t change much, there were a few lessons we learnt to apply to the next trip:
Know what to do It’s fair to say that we weren’t adequately prepared with ideas of what to do or where to go in certain cities, particularly Sofia and Ankara and as a result we ended up wandering without much of a clue. In Ankara we weren’t able to get an internet connection and that really hampered things, we ended up in some pretty strange bars, wandered around an abandoned theme park and along a motorway before finding something interesting and a bar that was showing the Formula 1. That and in some places we weren’t staying long enough to have time to figure things out, Sofia was an example of that. This issue is mostly solved with prep beforehand, we just didn’t really do much.
Duration We did get the duration for most places just right, staying less than a day in most cities with a little more time in the places we knew we wanted to spend time (Belgrade and Istanbul). This does against the general advice of most Interrail travel blogs to basically spend WAY less time travelling but we were probably more time-restricted than most on this kind of trip and actually didn’t feel the need to spend that long in places. We were on a bit of a mission though, rather than a holiday.
Distance We need to dial the distance back for future trips. Travelling from Penzance to Ankara was a really freaking long way, it was great but now that we’ve done that I would instead fly in and fly out allowing more time for the relevant journey or destination. in 2019 we basically ‘gunned it’ to Munich and the first part of the trip didn’t add much in the scheme of things. That said, if conserving annual leave from work weren’t an issue then I would absolutely travel on rails for the whole thing, doing a big loop would be pretty amazing.
Pack lighter This is always a top tip but I took heed and packed pretty damn light. I took the same bag I use to commute, I wore the same shoes, shorts and shirt for basically the whole trip and smelt like a foot when I got home. Foolishly though I packed a pair of jeans that I didn’t wear at all until the last day and carried around my $2,000 MacBook which I refused to let out of my sight - this was stupid. On days where we were back to back on sleeper trains this meant we carried everything in the day which was really quite shit. Slimming packing back even further and only taking things that are replaceable would have made a big difference for comfort and freedom. An iPhone, headphones, charger, toothbrush, passport and the clothes I’m wearing is all I’m taking next time.
Keep and eye on the time We very, very nearly missed the flight out of Kiev on the way home. While it all would have been fine, it would have been painfully expensive and soured the last day. We didn’t build much contingency into the schedule so a failure early on would too have totally screwed us until we got to a ‘checkpoint’ where we did have contingency. The delayed train situation from Cologne to Munich very nearly knocked the dominoes over but thankfully we get back on track.
Actually visit the country It’s bugged me a lot since we got back that we completely sailed through Slovenia and didn’t spend any time there, same with Zagreb to a degree. If the goal is to visit the country, spending the day there is kind of the minimum that I think I’m going to consider fair. I’ve noted where I’ve been in a country/state but only been in the airport, I think I’ll note something similar for when I have been there but haven’t been there.
Blog better I was lazy with this. I should have taken more photos and journalised everything I could. The blogs I did get out were pretty much me just thinking back and I know I’ve missed certain things that are interesting. Using Squarespace was the most frustrating thing and that has changed in my new setup and I would probably just publish straight to Microblog more frequently to capture things.
For the 2021 trip, as with #TrainToTurkey, the goal is to visit new countries and to get some time on the tracks. There are three clear candidates for trips when looking at what’s left for me tick off, and if I’m going to see all of Europe making all of these happen is really the fastest way to do so:
- The Balkan states (Bosnia - Greece)
- Central Europe (Poland travelling south to Hungary, possibly on to Moldova via Romania)
- Nordic region (Norway, Sweden, Aland Islands, possibly travelling to Latvia too)
The Balkan States
It feels like the this is an ‘advanced’ level trip. Trains don’t operate in certain countries and where they do the connections aren’t ideal for a Northwest to Southeast route. To make it possible, it’s going to involve road transport and patience. I think we’d need to be more flexible in scheduling, prepared to operate in full backpacker mode and allocate more time. That said, these are some of the more ‘unchartered' countries in Europe and I would love to get the opportunity to visit and blog about them - one of the best parts of #TrainToTurkey was visiting cities and countries that were off the normal tourist trail. This option certainly presents the best ‘haul’ for ticking countries off the list too, there’s at least six and potentially the opportunity to cross off some of the more obscure territories based on the Century Club list. Avoiding COVID restrictions would be tricky here and not being able to enter a particular country could completely scupper the trip, so presents a big risk.
Central Europe
This would certainly be a little easier than the Balkans but still present a bit of a challenge. There’s great train connections across the board and pricing should be reasonable for ticketing. There’s night trains that could work for a number of routes and in 2019 these proved to be fantastic for keeping hotel costs down and proving an effective method for keeping on the move but visiting places during the day. There would be plenty to see with food, drink and accommodation all pretty inexpensive too. The route could be planned pretty well up front, I think something like Gdansk > Warsaw > Katowice > Bratislava > Budapest would work well. It could also be possible to include a cross-Romania trip into Moldova to make things interesting although looks as though the train on this route has been cancelled for the time being.
Nordic Region
This is the one I’m leaning to most although would certainly prove to be the most expensive. As with the other two options it would prove a little too time consuming to travel from the UK via train to start the trip so it would make sense to fly in to Stavanger or Bergen. That said a UK start would allow for the Harwich to Hook ferry which is on my unpublished list of things to do. I would expect that these counties to have a reasonable grip on the COVID situation or at least a well published policy as to whether a trip is possible or not. Food, drink and accommodation would be expensive, travel costs too would be high but there may be options to control that with a Eurail pass. I think a West to East route is the obvious approach but that doesn’t lend itself too well to night trains, although that’s probably not too much of an issue as there wouldn’t be took much ‘rail time’. North/South travel does provide sleeper options but would likely eat into trip time. There’s a lot to do, The Flam railway in Norway, visiting the famous [Vasa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship) in Stockholm and it might event be possible to align the trip with the Tall Ships Races which visits the Aland Islands in July. In addition to visiting Norway, Sweden and Aland I would love to get to spend some more time in Finland. I absolutely loved being in Helsinki during 2019 and want to see more of the country. Could be possible to extend the trip by travelling from Helsinki to Riga by ferry or St Petersburg by train - both would present a great ‘final stop’.
Still seems too early to be making plans though, I’m typing this out very optimistically while under national lockdown rules. If it does look like international travel is off the cards for the summer then the opportunity would be to put in some UK travel instead, there’s a lot of domestic railway that I’ve not travelled on and a whole heap of cities I’ve yet to see. A week with an all UK Rover ticket could prove to be a lot of fun. Potentially a good chance to visit Northern Ireland too, which always seems to get bumped to the bottom of the list!
Let’s see how we go, I’m confident that something will be possible. Might start piecing together an itinerary or two.
This week’s #TescoTuesday was much more successful. Only one sub, which isn’t bad at all. 😁
Made the switch to use Safari as my default browser last week, switching from Chrome. It’s taken a little bit of adjusting, but so far so good. I’ve found that 1Password integrates much better, Safari is much better at not hogging system resources and when I get a security code vis SMS, it pops up as a suggestion. Also switched to using duckduckgo as my default search engine and that’s working out well too.
There are a few sites that don’t play nicely with Safari, Microsoft admin portal is one notable one and YNAB Toolkit (a chrome extension) of course doesn’t work. I will have chrome installed for these but do my best to limit my ‘Chrome time’.
Blogging with Jekyll
Moving my blog to use Jekyll and GitHub Pages was a really good move, it’s a great setup and it makes me happy that my precious blog is stored locally, is super simple but hosted properly too. It used to really stress me out that I might one day lose everything. The fact that it has version control as a result is a bonus too.
I have some frustrations with the setup, but some of these applied even when I was shelling out for Squarespace:
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Managing images for upload. This is a pain, I have to first find the images I want in Apple Photos, I then have to export them from Apple Photos, although granted some of this process works quite well because I can resize them, set them to be jpeg and add to the correct directory. Annoyingly though while I have the option to name based on album name Apple adds “1 of 1” rather than just “1” so I have to go and rename them, i remove the spaces here anyway. I don’t like having any EXIF data in the photos so I then have to run exiftool from terminal to strip everything. Not the worst process, but not the simplest. Perhaps some of this could be improved with Automator or another tool. The other frustrating part is that I have essentially just fixed the image size, which isn’t really ideal for web hosting. I’d rather publish the full resolution image and some other function figure out the optimum size/scale to deliver in the browser.
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Posting. I’m using Atom, which is a pretty good app. I have two frustrations with it, the first is that I can’t put posts into folders within the “_posts” folder because it breaks Jekyll, the result is that I have an enormous long list of posts in the left pane of Atom. Maybe this is something that can be changed in Jekyll’s code. The second is that I want to be able to just post, I don’t want to have to stage, commit, and push. I want one button. Maybe there is a way to be ignorant of Git’s process or even a simple script that I run that does those three things. The answer here is probably just to use a CMS tool like Forestry or Siteleaf, it’s just a little frustrating that they are both web apps rather than a local Mac app.
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Image Galleries. I have lots of pictures on the blog but I can’t see any of these unless I actually read the post where they are shared. I want a page that automatically updates with my most recent images, formatted in a consistent way (much like gallery of Micro.blog) which link back to the post where the image was shared. I’d also love a way to share photos in albums on a page, where a particular trip has lots of pictures and perhaps I didn’t add all the pictures into the post. I think this plugin by ggreer should do what I’m thinking, but I need to invest some time in making it work right.
In short, why can’t everything just work the way I want for my very specific use case?
Good! I plan on buying once it’s released, my XS’s day will be numbered by then. I don’t need to have a big device and have never wanted one, very pleased they brought small back. My iPad/TV/Mac is for big-screen content consumption.
I have discovered PowerPhotos from Fat Cat Software - The answer to my prayers for a number of features missing in Apple Photos, such as, how big is this file?
Mandatory Leave
The COVID situation last year meant that we really didn’t get to go away as much as we usually would have and as a result I had lots of annual leave left. Colliers permitted the carry-over of five days leave to 2021 on the condition it is taken before the end of March. With the current national lockdown we aren’t going to be using those days to go away. So, I plucked a week out of thin air and booked it off…
It’s actually been quite refreshing to have a week off with no rush to do anything in particular or with a set agenda. I can’t say I love it, I much prefer the hustle and bustle of a full calendar, but that’s not an option. In my week off I have managed to get quite a few things done that needed to be done.
In the house I put up some new blinds in the conservatory. When we moved in there were some vertical blinds installed which were not great, so we took them down. We have lived with no blinds for a while now, but it’s a bit annoying having to close the lounge curtains when it gets dark outside. The new blinds were only cheap, £25 quid each from Dunelm and do the job, the all needed to be adjusted to the right width which took about an hour and a half per blind since they were “not adjustable”. I also had to install some spacer blocks so that they didn’t catch on the window handles. After having installed them I am really quite happy with them, certainly £100 happy, it feels a bit warmer in the conservatory and the neighbours can no longer see me rowing either. We installed “party mode” for the conservatory too, with 10 meters of cheap LED lights which I ran around the inside edge between the window and the roof. I was surprised, the lights are actually really fun, although I have no idea what the neighbours must think - from the outside it looks a bit like a shady nightclub. They will be really good for parties when we’re all allowed to see each other again.
With that all done I also had a bit of a digital cleanse. I have been using Google Apps/G-Suite since about 2012, I moved from the personal Gmail service to GSuite because it enabled me to use my own domain name. This was great for a while, it gave me a few different capabilities and everything played well, I could have any number of email aliases and victoria had an account too. More recently, it’s become a bit of a pain.. Aside from having to pay for it every month, it has grown into a very enterprise-focused platform rather than a bit of a workaround that let me use my own domain name. Since moving from Google/Android to Apple/iOS I have also slowly realised that Google isn’t the right cloud for all my things to live, while things work they just don’t integrate as well. Photos was the big one, the Apple Photos app is just better if you’re in the ecosystem. Mail, Document Storage and Calendars were less important, they all worked but not quite as well as things could work. This week I have been chipping away at getting my precious data out of Google closing G-Suite.
Moving email was relatively easy, I signed us up for Fastmail and shifted the domain/s over. I debated moving all the email data out of Google and into Fastmail but in the end just moved everything to a local mailbox on my Mac. There it’s backed up it’s not just taking up cloud storage and it’s going to be a hell of a job to filter genuine email from marketing spam. One of the benefits of the COVID situation is that I have no reservations or emails that I might need while I’m out and about, so that’s kind of convenient to have a fresh start. To get mail working I changed the default mail app on devices and deleted all the email that was left in Google. The setup process from Fastmail is really good, it sets up the profile and does everything for you.
Calendars was pretty easy too, we have two shared calendars in Google, one for Events and another for Birthdays & Anniversaries. These I simply exported, added to the native mac app and merged. Apple has a calendar for anyone in a ‘Family’ already, and I just added another for the birthdays calendar and shared. Again, just , I had to adjust the default calendar app on devices too. I really like the native calendar app, I probably should have synchronised Google with it a while back, but hey! I know that if you add a birthday into Contacts it also adds it to the calendar, but these aren’t shared so we’d have to both manage everything.
Getting documents out of Google was a bit more tricky. It seems that when you initiate Google Takeout and instruct the export of everything in Google Drive it includes all of my photos too, as Google used to present these as a folder (and still do, although it doesn’t update). The folder isn’t displayed as something that you can unselect but selecting everything else seems to exclude it. Downloading the takeout files is a complete PITA on my internet connection, the files just seem to timeout and fail but once they are down it’s fine. Helpfully Google converts files from their format into Microsoft and those files that I used to use frequently still seem to work. I haven’t yet deleted all of these and am particularly curious if it will let you delete the Google Photos folder, once I have everything backed up I will be deleting everything here.
The one Google service I completely overlooked was YouTube which I will still need to use. I don’t have many YouTube videos but I do have some, erasing them from the internet would be a little frustrating. What I managed to do in the end was to move my channel to a new brand channel called ‘Laurence Andrews YouTube’. This moved all of my videos and subscriptions into a separate channel but retained comments/likes and permalinks. I then created a new personal google account (google@andrews.io) and added this new account as an owner of the new brand channel. This seems to have worked quite nicely, I am signed out of my G-Suite account and still have access to all my content and surprisingly still have my subscriptions too. The final thing to do is to make the new personal google account the primary owner of the new brand channel, this can only be done once it’s been an owner for 7 days, which seems to be a safeguard Google have implemented. Of course, I will still need to have a google account, but there’s not much I can do about that and at the end of the day, it’s going to be difficult to live without YouTube! Here’s a link to moving channels
Moving Photos has been a whole thing, I have shared a blog about the process I used to export from Google and ingest into Apple. Fair to say that this was one of the most painful things I’ve done in a long time. Good news is that I am almost there, Apple now has essentially all of my pictures and once I go through the few that are remaining it’ll all be in one place. This makes me very happy. I look forward to some product improvements with Apple Photos, it’s absolutely better but it’s crying out for better integration into the “Family” functions within Apple. I can share Albums with Victoria but I can’t make that the default for most things, which I’d prefer. The lack of Folder management for Shared albums is annoying too. Another function that would be really helpful is to store a full copy of my library on an external drive but an iCloud optimised library on my local storage. This isn’t a problem yet, but will be if the album grows much more. Certainly a consideration when buying a new mac too, as the internal storage needs to be able to manage the full library.
Aside from the Google shift I have signed up to Backblaze in addition to managing TimeMachine for backups. I’ve been putting this off because of the cost, I have so many subscriptions to services I just couldn’t justify another one but with Google about to go away and save £17 a month (1TB storage + 2 G Suite licences) it makes sense to sign up and cover ourselves. Backblaze has been doing it’s thing on both mine and Victoria’s computers for the last three days, our piddly 6Mbps upload is frustrating for things like this. Still, I think we should almost be there by this time next week. To help it along I spent a good while going through my mac and deleting a load of stuff that I don’t need any more (I have a crazy amount of screenshots and screen recordings stored) and got rid of all the one time applications I installed and no longer need - including Chrome! I did the same on my iPhone too, no more Google things there any more.
All in all, a busy week or so but happy that there is some order in my digital life. :) Now, back to work.
Hat update
Victoria has been very busy indeed. Expect first fitting tomorrow afternoon some time. Can’t wait to give it a whirl.
Today’s project: Hat
Alpaca and Merino from Cascade Yarns in Seattle, WA 🇺🇸 Wool made in Peru 🇵🇪
Victoria is going to be busy. 😁 @tigziefc
Pattern: sweetfiberyarns.com/blog/2015…
The ‘Free Churo’ (The Eulogy) episode of Bojack Horseman is troublingly dark, but one of the best episodes the show. Absolutely fantastic.
I C U.
I am exactly 0% surprised or shocked about this. Don’t be fooled by the frill and pomp, the Queen is very much still the boss.
It’d all be so much simpler if we instead consumed the energy that nature gives us for free. 🤷♂️
We owe Russia the Nord Stream pipeline over Nazi atrocities, says German president
