Here are all the blog posts I've written, starting with the most recent. If you're looking for something in
particular, you can see all the titles on one page in the site map. If you want to stay
up-to-date with what I'm writing, you can subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite
feed reader.
Recently I realised that I’ve developed a self-imposed quality bar for blog posts. They need to be a certain
length, and have a certain substance to them. They need to be generally useful in some way I can’t
quite define, to some imagined future audience. They need to have images to break up the page, and opengraph
data for when they’re linked to on social media. But… maybe they don’t? Those things all make sense for longer
“article” type posts, but not so much for a personal blog.
I’ve done some fiddling so that I can make posts without all that extra stuff. We’ll see how it goes. The
posts won’t be distinguished on the site (yet?), but I have set up separate RSS feeds for just
short form posts and long form posts in case subscribers are
radically opposed to one or the other. Now I can start blogging like it’s 2005 again. But hopefully with a bit
less cringe.
I’ve been staring at this post in my editor for about five minutes. The urge to make it longer, more thorough,
more article-like is really strong. This entire paragraph is only here as a compromise with myself so I can
actually save and commit the post.
My watch. Yes, I am available for wrist modelling opportunities.
Around ten weeks ago I picked up an Apple Watch 10, and have been wearing it almost constantly since. It’s not
my first Apple Watch — I had a Series 5 for a bit back in 2020 — but it’s the first time I’ve actually stuck
with it. Ten weeks seems like an apt time to reflect on it.
Firstly, why did I even bother? Well, for a couple of years I’d been wearing a Xiaomi Smart Band 7, mainly to
monitor my sleep stats and set alarms that won’t wake up everyone else nearby. Its battery life was fantastic
— with notifications and other things turned off, I got about a month of use between charges — but actually
using it felt like trying to order food via the medium of interpretive dance.
My biggest gripe was the screen lock. If I didn’t have the screen locked then I’d periodically trigger it
during the night when I moved around and it came in contact with my chest or leg. With the lock enabled you
had to deliberately swipe up from bottom to top to enable interaction, but it didn’t work reliably. When I
wanted to adjust an alarm, I’d be stood swiping repeatedly trying to get it to respond. When you finally get
it unlocked, the whole interface is just fiddly.
The other issue was the data quality. There were some nights when I’d been woken up, sometimes even getting up
and moving around, and it just didn’t show it in the data. If it can’t even get whether I’m asleep right, can
I trust anything else it says?
I spent a while researching the best devices for sleep tracking. The Oura ring came highly recommended, but it
was expensive and required a subscription to do anything useful. No thanks! The Apple Watch was consistently
rated pretty well, and I reasoned I could pick up a refurbished older unit. I’ve been
using an iPhone as my daily driver for a while, so it’d fit
right into my begrudged walled garden.
The Series 10 has a significant advantage, though: it charges much quicker than all the previous generations.
On a 30-minute charge, the Series 10 can go from 0 to 60%; the 9 can only make it to 40%, and my old 5 a
measly 30%. Shorter charge times means I’m far less likely to leave it on charge and wander off without it. In
some ways the daily charging is more convenient than monthly: the wireless charger sits on my desk, and I plop
the watch on it for a little while in the evening; I don’t need to dig out the weird pogo-pin connector that
has vanished sometime in the last four weeks, then carefully arrange it so it stays attached.
How a watch maybe saved my life
One of the big features of the Apple Watch, like many other wearable devices, is health and fitness tracking.
I didn’t think much about this, beyond the sleep data I wanted, at first. I’ve never had a particularly good
relationship with exercise, but I do like some good statistics. I started going for walks more often to get
more data and see the graphs of VO2 max and HR recovery gradually inch up. That wasn’t the most profound
effect on my health, though…
Recently I’ve been on a small campaign to try to make my personal website more… personal. Little ways to make
it obvious it’s mine and personal, not just another piece of the boring corporate dystopia
that is most of the web these days. I don’t quite want to fully regress to the Geocities era and fill the
screen with animated under construction GIFs, but I do want to capture some of that vibe.
I’d added some bits and pieces along those lines: floating images in articles now look like they’re stuck to
the page with sellotape, related post links have a wavy border that animates when you hover over them, and so
on. Next, I wanted to change the heading fonts from a monospace font to something cursive, to resemble
handwriting. Less terminal output, more handwritten letter. I couldn’t find one I liked, though. So why not
make my own? It can’t be that hard, right?
Failing to do it myself
I set out to try to make the font myself using open source tools. After doing a bit of research, it seemed
like the general approach was to create vectors of each character and then import them into a font editor.
That seems to mean either Adobe Illustrator and FontLab (if you have too much money) or Inkscape and FontForge
(if you like open source). I fall firmly into the latter category, so I grabbed my graphics tablet and opened
Inkscape.
Three months after I built my new computer, it started annoying me.
There would occasionally be a noise that sounded like a fan was catching on a cable, but there weren’t any
loose cables to be a problem. Over the course of a few weeks, the sound got progressively worse to the extent
that I didn’t want to use the computer without headphones on. I measured the sound at 63 dB, which is about
the sound of someone talking. That may not sound terrible, but it’s a constant, nasty noise coming from
something that sits about 40cm from my head.
After some investigating, I identified the PSU fan as the culprit. I have a Cooler Master V750 SFX, which is
not super high-end, but wasn’t cheap, either. It shouldn’t be developing issues after three months.
Thankfully, it comes with a ten-year warranty, so it should be easy to get sorted, right?
Warranty woes
I looked at Cooler Master’s warranty, and for issues within the first two years you have to deal with the
retailer. That would be Amazon in my case. So I looked at Amazon’s information on warranty issues. Their
policy is that if it’s more than 30 days since purchase, you have to send it off to a third-party repair
center and wait for them to diagnose and try to repair it. Here’s the kicker:
Usually repairs take up to 20 business days (including delivery time), but could take slightly longer
I use the computer for work, have upcoming LAN parties to go to, and generally can’t do without it for an
entire month. That’s assuming they reproduce the issue: the PSU fan only turns on when it reaches a certain
temperature, so if you just plug it in briefly it won’t exhibit any symptoms.
I realised my media consumption was too close to this for comfort.
For the longest time I used Spotify for all my music needs. And I listen to a lot of music: sometimes
actively, but mostly passively as background noise. I cancelled my premium subscription last December, and
stopped using the service entirely. Why? There’s a bunch of reasons.
Let’s talk about the money first. Spotify launched at £9.99/month, and stayed that way for over a decade. Then
in 2023 it went up to £10.99/month. That’s probably fair: the economy was in the toilet, and they haven’t
changed their price in so long. Then in 2024 they upped it again to £11.99/month. Hmm. The service they were
providing me didn’t improve in that time. I didn’t want audiobooks in my music player, I didn’t want an AI DJ
that spouted inane comments at me. Paying them more money to do things I didn’t want seemed silly, and the
money that actually goes to the artists is both so small and gets split in such a convoluted way that it’s not
worth even thinking about.
My bigger concern was how uninvolved I became in choosing what to listen to. I leaned hard on their
algorithmic playlists like “Discover Weekly” instead of manually curating playlists. But they ended up
developing this weird feedback loop where it kept playing a country band that I didn’t particularly like, but
also didn’t dislike enough to skip. That acted as positive reinforcement, and they kept coming up everywhere.
There were definitely ways to solve that by changing how I used Spotify, but the realisation that I was
basically just consuming whatever was fed to me made me want to try something completely different. So I
decided to go back to buying music instead. Which is where things got… complicated.
