// Personal website of Chris Smith

Another month, another roundup post. This month has been very… exercise-y. Which is, for the record, not normal for me. For the previous year my only source of exercise has basically been walking, but that’s not a great fitness activity for me. When my regular walks entered the 10-15km territory it got more and more annoying to find the time and/or an interesting route.

I also managed to injure my knee while walking through a particularly muddy field, and spent a few months going slightly stir crazy. Coming out of that I started running three times a week, bought a bicycle, and added in some strength exercises along with the ones the physio recommended. If you told me a few months ago that I’d be annoyed at not being able to exercise too much on rest days I’d think you were mad.

Website updates and other projects

Before we talk even more about exercise, let’s do the usual topics I cover in these posts. The only website update this month has been a post about… exercise. Maybe I have a problem. Anyway, in Tracking PBs without the dark patterns I talk about building a slimmed-down, single-player Strava to track my personal bests, without all the nonsense that annoys me.

Other than the PB tracker, I’ve not been working much on personal projects. I’ve not really had any other itches that need scratching, just the usual background noise of dependency updates and other project maintenance.

Entertainment

Behold, the section where I normally talk about the films, TV programmes, and board games that have kept me entertained this month: […]. Yep, not a single one.

I have played a few games, though. A friend and I finally got around to trying out Escape Simulator 2, and it’s just as good as the original. The rooms feel a bit more detailed, and there are a few cool interactions that probably wouldn’t be possible in the old version. There’s also a hard mode for all the rooms which we’ve not yet tried, but sounds like it’ll keep us amused for a bit longer.

I’ve also been playing a bit of World of Warcraft, but it’s now in the awkward stage where I’ve done most things I can reasonably do this season, and there’s not really any point in doing anything else. All the gear will become mostly irrelevant in a few weeks when season two releases, and we’ve hit the major milestone achievements for Mythic+. Feels a bit anticlimactic to get to a fairly good stage and then just… not play for a bit.

Fitness

Given how much exercise I’ve done, it probably deserves its own section in these monthly posts. I have the vague idea of aiming to run a marathon before I turn 40 (i.e., within around 15 months). That’s both scary and yet not completely impossible. I’m going to work up through the distances and see how it goes. A 5k at the start of September, 10k in November, half marathon around Easter next year, then a full marathon just before my birthday in October. That way even if it gets too tough or something goes wrong I’ll have accomplished something.

New hobbies mean new toys. My bike is nothing particularly special: a hybrid from Halfords that’s about one step up from entry-level. But it gets the job done, and has helped me remember how much I enjoy cycling. The infrastructure around here is pretty terrible, though. There are lots of little bits of multi-use paths and a few dedicated bike lanes, but they’re not joined up or signed well in the slightest. In most cases it’s easier to just stay on the road and deal with the traffic. It’s a bit sad that they’ve spent time and money to do something and it’s not very useful.

On the running side, I picked up a Garmin Forerunner 165 watch. I’ve been wearing an Apple Watch for a little over a year now, but using the touchscreen to navigate screens and start/stop activities while running is annoyingly fiddly. The digital crown keeps getting gummed up with sunscreen and requiring cleaning, too. The Forerunner has physical buttons, and is much better at showing the data I want to see in a clear format, and letting me set things up like target pace or distance on the watch itself, instead of via a phone app. Oh, and the battery seems like it’s going to last for a week rather than a day, which is a nice change of pace.

I’m going to need to make a nice widget to show off my monthly runs and bike rides, but for now here’s some artisanal stats:

• I went out for 14 runs, totalling 48km, although a significant portion of that was walking for warmup, cooldown or recovery.
• My longest actual run was a 20 minute straight run covering 2.5km.
• My average running pace is 8min/km, which is a “conversational” pace for me right now.
• I went for 9 cycle rides: 2 on rented mountain bikes, then the rest on my own bike. They covered 128km.
• When cycling I made 8 coffee shop stops, which works out to exactly one every 16km on average.

Next month I’m hoping to ramp the running up to hit 5k by the very end. I’m mostly following the NHS Couch to 5k plan but I’m tweaking it a little bit as otherwise I’d finish on 3.75km at my current pace. I guess “Couch to 30 minutes of running” isn’t quite as catchy. I made a Couch to 5k page to track my progress and adjustments.

Around the web

Blogging Can Just Be Stating The Obvious

I often look at my own posts and think, “There’s nothing novel, or important, or deep in here at all — is this even worth saying?”

I’ve written before about The Curse of Knowledge and Blogging, and this is a very similar take from Jim Nielsen, but it’s still super interesting to see a similar idea expressed in another way by another person.

I Built a Voice Opening Door to Moria (My Garage)

A YouTube video documenting a really cool project. What grabs me is the amount of disciplines he dabbles in: he’s part blacksmith, part carpenter, part electrician, part programmer, and so on. It’s one of the best examples of maker culture I’ve seen in ages.

There’s one bit in particular that sticks in my mind: he tried to find a rendering of the door online, and realised all the existing ones were gibberish or illegible, so he downloaded a font and worked out the exact inscription himself. It makes my inner perfectionist feel validated.

Linus Torvalds on AI in the Linux kernel

LLMs are very divisive, and there are a lot of unsettled moral and ethical issues. But at the end of the day they’re a tool that’s not going to go away any time soon. There are people on crusades to try and ban LLM tools in projects, boycott any projects that accept contributions, and so on. It’s a bit like militant veganism. I can understand where they’re coming from, but also please stop shouting at me. Anyway, this take from Linus seems pretty spot on to me.

Buttons

An interactive, graphical history of how buttons have been rendered in various operating systems and desktop environments over time. Maybe it’s just my age and nostalgia, but it really does feel like they peaked around the late 90s/early 2000s. I’m not quite sure why we went from elegant skeuomorphic buttons to ugly plain squares with weird accent colours when you click them.

Rotating sandwiches

For some reason I expected this to be static pictures of sandwiches which spun in a circle, but it’s actually recordings of sandwiches rotating on a turntable. It’s oddly mesmerising. I wonder why I’ve never seen a restaurant menu with gifs like that?