Tuesday, 27th January, 2026

We hosted a big birthday family ceilidh this weekend and had a lot of fun. I took the X-E4 and 23mm f/1.4 and overwhelmingly all the black and white photos I took (well colour profile I chose) are everyone’s (and my) favourite. The dark, indoor setting made it hard to do colour without huge ISO or slow shutter speed. Whereas for my B&W profile I let the camera go to a much higher ISO and it doesn’t matter. I culled my photos to 53 and my wife picked 21 to share with family, 4 were colour.

Probably it’s just a reflection on me and not knowing / having a suitable colour profile for the darker evening indoors settings. These are all straight out of camera jpgs as I don’t have time to edit them.

I did add all these photos to Apple Photos.app album and that made it very convenient to share. No doubt other software has very easy to share albums too.

Think I have a Lego hoarding habit…it manifests itself via designing/building new trains or associated items but really all that happens is it gets built and stored in boxes in the garage. Where I’m now standing looking at it thinking “I should get some more 9V track”. I the start thinking about how nice it would be to have it all organised into various trays and drawers etc.

I don’t think I’m going to hit 1,000 points in SOTA before our day out. The weather has been dire so it’s hard to do higher point places. Think I’m fine with it though; but also would like it out the way.

Thursday, 22nd January, 2026

My one million metres isn’t going too well. Was fine the week we were snowed in, but not been on it since! Did do four hill walks this week, so it’s not for lack of doing anything. I’m annoyed with the winter weather though. I wanted to be off Monday and Tuesday next week to go out but it looks miserable. Wind and rain - the worst combo. Can’t decide between trying to go to a couple of hills with trees on the top for shelter - but lots of up and down and more exposure to the rain, or do a high hill for more points but likely blowing a gale, snowing, and freezing cold. If I’ve got any chance of keeping my plan then probably I need to do the big hills. Still a few days away yet to maybe things will improve.

Wednesday, 21st January, 2026

I started looking at Hugo themes…some I quite like. Not sure if I can motivate myself to setup a new site and migrate stuff over though.

Already bored of Path of Exile 2 😅 It’s just pointless…probably you can say that about everything but just seems more so.

Tuesday, 20th January, 2026

We have a planned radio activation day at the start of Feb. Think about 14 of us will be out on the hills and then meet at a cafe for “tea and medals”. I’ve got it in my head that I want that day to be my 1,000 point activation - an award called Mountain Goat. Which is nice but I started the year on 901 and so need to make short work of the difference. So far I’m managed to do the hills in my plan but today was a huge geomagnetic storm (lots of aurora) and that destroys radio. There’s also still snow on the hills but wet snow and it’s a slog.

Next week will be the decider as I need to get quite a few hills in, not checked the weather yet - bit early anyway - just hoping not for snow storms or pouring with rain all day.

It doesn’t matter if I don’t do it, just would be nice. Plus I kinda want to get it out the way. Then I can just do whatever I want when I want it and not be thinking “oh but I could get more points if I do x”.

I’m on VS Code and a couple of markdown file at work now. Logseq is gone. But past couple of days I’ve noticed VS Code being annoying laggy. Seems some issue between the markdown plugin and git? I deleted the git stuff because I don’t need it at work. Also removed some extensions I never use. Did make me think if there’s some lighter weight markdown editor I could use as I don’t really need much. Notepad.txt …

I have a year file, which today I realised I have the top heading as 2026 then everything is a sub heading. If the file is just 2026 why do I need the heading? Going to fix that tomorrow. Unless I decide I want a log.md and all years go in it. I have three other markdown files that relate to my job but did start wondering if I should keep all the content in on log and use tags or something to link them but I didn’t like that with logseq and prefer just the few files. Also tile the log and the other file side by side and then everything is solved. Still want to see what other markdown editors there are.

Because I’m stingy and also because I know I won’t really use it that much…I’d wondered about using pika pages for writing then exporting it and configuring some SSG to use the export.

Sold a radio this week and now have £500 sat on my eBay account. I know I spent that to buy it originally but it feels like free money 😅 a Mac mini is £500…

Monday, 19th January, 2026

One of the boys spent their Christmas money on a remote control (rc) car. It was okay, something cheap from China no doubt that was “on sale”. But they enjoyed it. We need to build a ramp for it. They asked me to print one but that was going to take 18 hrs, and sometimes whilst you can print something, don’t mean you should. Gonna make it from some bits of wood I have lying around.

However, this sent me down the rabbit hole of real rc cars….

Saturday, 17th January, 2026

Built a 14’ circular trampoline today. Getting a contractor to come dig a hole in the garden for it to go into. If I was organised, I would’ve got them to dig some channels for coax cable for future ham radio antenna. But I’m not.

One of the cats likes it. Or is curious about it. She’s been in and out a few times and has sat on it after exploring all around it. She came in and started meowing at me. Thought she was hungry but she has kibbles, so I think she’s trying to tell me about the trampoline!

Speaking of tea…work has installed new coffee machines. Some nespresso huge thing. It does hot water and they brought in some tea bags but it tastes gross. I took a tea bag home to see if it was them - they look fancy but it wasn’t that great. Better than at work but still not great. So it’s a combination of the 85°C water and the cheapo tea bags. So now I’ve brought in some mint and rooibos tea to use instead. I could complain and make a noise but I can’t be bothered. Maybe it’ll be better for me to drink less caffeine at work.

Started playing Path of Exile 2 last night. Diablo-like game which just had a new update with another character available. So I started with the new Druid. I’ve not actually finished the story so it’ll be new once I catch up to where I was. I do like playing games, just beforehand I think of them as a waste of time. Then proceeds to look at shit on Reddit/ youtube/ etc. because that’s not a waste of time…

Thursday, 15th January, 2026

I’m kinda bored in the evenings now.

Felt like I’ve always had stuff to do, sort out, figure out, etc. and so evenings have been busy. But now…I dunno.