The container for my toolkit, a UGREEN "travel accessories" bag
For a while now, whenever I’ve traveled anywhere I’ve dumped a selection of tools into my backpack just in
case I need them. Originally this was mostly focused around being able to open and fix my laptop if anything
went wrong, but over time has slowly expanded to include other useful tools.
Repeatedly packing these tools and then returning them to where they belonged was tedious, though. I couldn’t
just leave them in the backpack as I often needed them for non-travelling purposes, and I didn’t want to just
buy duplicate tools that spent most of their life a few meters away from each other, so I ignored the problem
and just dealt with the tedium.
Eventually I acquired enough tools that — while not quite duplicates — I wouldn’t miss often if they were kept
in the backpack. Building on these I’ve created a little travel toolkit that contains everything I might want
(and more) while away.
The base
The biggest challenge I had before was finding a screwdriver set. I have an
iFixit Mako
set that did the in-and-out-of-the-bag routine for several years. Nothing else covered the range of drivers I
wanted for generic electronic tinkering and more chunky work. I finally found one in the form of a
Wera Tool-Check PLUS TR-Edition. “TR” stands for “Tool Rebel” and is Wera’s “fan club” brand. Its signature features over the normal
Tool-Check PLUS are a fancy fabric case and a 152mm bit extender; but it also comes with a much different set
of bits, which is why I picked it up.
Simple backups with Restic and Hetzner Cloud
Published on Dec 6, 2024
Restic's mascot, who's dual-wielding umbrellas to save you from a rainy day.
I have a confession: for the past few years I’ve not been backing up any of my computers. Everyone knows that
you should do backups, but actually getting around to doing it is another story.
Don’t get me wrong: most of my important things are “backed up” by virtue of being committed to remote git
repositories, or attached to e-mails, or re-obtainable from the original source, and so on. I don’t think any
machine failing completely would be a disaster for me, but it would certainly be a pain.
This week I finally got around to doing something, and it ended up being a lot more straight forward than my
previous forays into backup-land.
Restic
After soliciting a few opinions, the choice of backup software came down to either
Borg or Restic. I’m pretty sure
either would have done what I want, but I leaned towards Restic for a few reasons: it has a more informative
website, it’s written in Go rather than Python, and Borg seems to be transitioning between major releases at
the moment.
How I Get Things Done
Published on Sep 1, 2024
I always quite like reading about how other people do things. What software or hardware they use, or
how they manage reminders, todo lists, and so on. I’ve never actually written about how I do any of that,
though. So here it is!
Productivity
In the past I’ve fallen victim to the idea of there being One True Productivity System that would solve all my
problems and make me amazing at getting things done. The title of this post is a nod to Getting Things Done,
which I’ve read and tried to religiously follow in the past, but it’s just not for me. One thing that did
actually stick from it, though, was the idea of “open loops”:
Anything that does not belong where it is, the way it is, is an “open loop,” which will be pulling on your
attention if it’s not appropriately managed.
If I want to do something and it’s not recorded in a way I trust, it weighs on me a little. Those little
weights all add up, and just make life uncomfortable. I deal with those in a few ways:
Inbox Zero-ish: if an e-mail needs me to do something, it sits in my inbox until it’s done. When it’s done,
it gets archived.
Notes: random things I try to remember I put into my notes, so I can search for them later.
Budget: anything monetary I just adjust in my budget or create a category for.
Todo list: any other kind of task I want/need to do either now or at some point in the future goes into
Todoist.
Further adventures in 3D printing
Published on Aug 4, 2024
The Bambu Labs P1S.
Not quite a year ago, I bought a Sovol SV06 3D printer and
wrote about my initial experiences. At the end I joked:
I’m sure there will be more problems, but hopefully I get at least a week or so before anything else goes
wrong. Maybe I’ll print an “X days since the last SV06 problem” counter…
That turned out to be more prophetic than I expected. It became a running joke that I’d flip the imaginary
“days since” sign back to 0 almost every time I printed. I still really enjoyed having a printer, though: it’s
so useful to be able to be able to go from an idea to a CAD drawing to a physical object in the space of
minutes or hours. So when Bambu Labs reduced the price of the
P1S — a printer generally regarded as about as
trouble free as you can get — to £522 including shipping, I splurged on one.
Concerns
I make it sound like that was an easy decision, but I actually ummed and ahed a lot before pulling the
trigger. I had a lot of objections to a Bambu Labs printer, and wasn’t quite sure if the price made up for
them.
A year of boardgames
Published on Jul 26, 2024
I realised the other day that it’s a little over a year since I started building out a collection of board
games, and thought it’d be fun to go through the collection and what I think about the games in hindsight.
The beginning
Ticket to Ride: Europe
I don’t remember how I discovered the concept of “modern” boardgames, but just over a year ago I purchased
Ticket to Ride: Europe as my
first. Prior to that I thought board games were like Scrabble, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, etc: they might
provide a distraction occasionally, but didn’t amount to actual fun in the same way a video game
might. I’d characterise those “classic” games as generally being extremely dependent on luck, not presenting
many interesting choices, and generally being punishing if you’re behind.
Ticket to Ride came as a breath of fresh air. You get to decide where to route your lines, whether you want to
take on more cards, how aggressive to be in blocking the other players, and more. There’s still some luck
involved, but it’s managed by being able to draw from a pool of visible cards, or being able to select which
route cards you keep.
