On the 7th night after his escape, my wife spotted Rupert on the security camera and decided to stay up late to coax him into the house. I’m pleased to say we got him. This time, its definitely the right cat because Giles _**did not**_ react viscerally as if er had brought a war criminal into our house. We are so pleased to have little Rupes back

Today is Father’s day in the uk so happy father’s day to those who celebrate. It’s a special one to me this year as its the first with ny daughter. she got me (with some help from my wife) a card, a customised book and she got a baby grow with “my first fathers day” written on it #personal #parenting

What I’m up to at the moment as inspired by Derek Sivers’ NowNowNow project: Last updated: Feb 2026 * * * I’m currently preparing to return to work after the birth of my daughter in November and taking an extended time off. I’ve found that parenthood is definitely an up-and-down experience with good days and bad days. I am enjoying spending time with my little girl now that she’s a few months old and starting to develop a personality. I am currently reading Bullshit Jobs and finding it quite interesting how many of the concepts relate to our current world. I am also reading Brandon Sanderson’s Defiant for a bit of fun.

Since having our daughter in November, we’ve been logging events like feeds, nappy changes etc. Whenever you speak to a midwife, a doctor or a health visitor they always want to know how many nappy changes you’ve had (to check for dehydration and constipation etc) and how much formula the baby is drinking. It’s difficult to remember these details, especially when you’re delirious with sleep deprivation. ## Requirements I wanted a logging mechanism that my wife and I could both make use of, that didn’t send our little one’s data to a private cloud and which has an easy-to-understand data structure which I can analyse myself. The app should be able to push/pull data to privately hosted cloud and sync across my phone and my wife’s phone. ## The Search We found plenty of proprietary solutions that charge a fee and log everything to the cloud (and presumably double dip by selling that data to other companies). Many of them promise to help you predict and optimise your baby’s sleep patterns (at 8 weeks old, this is pretty much not possible as they don’t yet have a circadian rhythm or an ability to sleep for any extended time). I was keen to avoid signing up to these services and paying them to data mine my kid. Eventually, I spotted Luna Tracker on f-droid and decided to give that a go. ## Luna Tracker An open source app by Daniele Verducci, a parent scratching his own itch. It’s dead easy to set up and use. There are buttons for different events like nappy change, bottle feed, medication, sickness etc and you can log quantities for feeds etc. The app stores everything using a simple JSON file (more on this below) and the file can be synced via WebDav out of the box. I just configured both mine and my wife’s phones to point to my nextcloud instance and it instantly synced. Colour me impressed. ## The Data Format The data format is dead simple, it’s a JSON object containing a list of objects corresponding with events of interest like so: { "time": 1767088231, "type": "BABY_BOTTLE", "quantity": 70 } Each entry has a unix timestamp, a type and optionally a quantity (e.g. number of millilitres of milk consumed). Some event types can also have a `note` field so you can capture free form notifications. ## Applying My Own Data Science Brain With simple access to this data, I decided to set up my own dashboard so that I could calculate some useful metrics at a glance like how much milk she’s drunk over the last 24h and the last times she went to the toilet, had a drink etc. I made use of streamlit to provide a simple frontend and loaded the json data into pandas. From there I could do more interesting operations like calculate trends for milk consumption and plot graphs using matplotlib. I’m using webdavclient3 to pull the json from nextcloud when I load up streamlit. I’m using a combination of matplotlib and streamlit widgets to show some of the stats. I was inspired by this gist to provide more human “X hours and Y minutes ago” for events as these are quite useful and reduce friction in the moment (you’re supposed to feed newborns roughly every 3 hours if they don’t cry to remind you to do so). It’s very basic but if anyone is interested in using it, I made my dashboard code available here. Streamlit is a bit annoying to build authentication around so I have my instance of the dashboard hosted behind my caddy server with HTTP auth enabled so that people can’t snoop on my baby. Here’s a config similar to mine: babydashboard.example.com { basicauth / { username $somepasswordhash$ } reverse_proxy localhost:8501 } The password hash can be calculated by running… caddy hash-password … and following the prompts ## Conclusion Overall I’m pretty happy with the solution and grateful to Daniele for developing his tracking app. It’s a really nice way to keep an eye on our baby’s stats with minimal friction. Sometimes we do forget to log a feed or something but it’s easy enough to add something in the past if we remember and most of the time the data is pretty accurate. I will probably carry on adding new features to my dashboard over time and I plan to make a couple of PRs to Daniele’s luna tracker to fix a couple of small bugs/niggles there.

It seems like only yesterday that we were at the beginning of 2025. Another year has passed and it’s been somewhat eventful. ## +1 Ravenscroft 👶 The biggest theme this year has been our fertility journey culminating in the birth of my daughter in November. Mrs R and I needed a little bit of extra help with having a baby and underwent IVF treatment early in the new year. We found out that it was successful around the end of March. From then on it was action stations to make sure that the house was ready for a baby. The whole process had a lot of emotional ups and downs and we had a lot of health scares and uncertainty. Finally in November, we were brought in a little earlier than planned for c-section after a pre-eclampsia diagnosis and our daughter was born. She is now approximately 7 weeks old. She is brilliant but also very hard work. It’s awesome watching her grow and change on a daily basis. I’ve got extended parental leave from work and I go back in March which is amazing as it means I can share the “fourth trimester” with Mrs R and be present for the early bit. We had a lot of fun preparing the house for her and testing out baby gadgets. ## Professional Life Speaking of work, another big change for me was joining Thomson Reuters at the start of the year. It’s a very different environment to the startup where I was CTO for 8 years but after nearly a year I’m feeling settled and a helpful member of the team. The Labs team is full of smart and friendly people and it’s amazing having access to so many like-minded. insanely clever people on tap. So far I:- * built a really good rapport with my new team. * organised a week-long collaborative hackathon in May to kick-start development on a new software project which we then productionised over the summer and shipped in October. * I led the design and architecture on the new project and shipped some PoCs to get the ball rolling and them some actual feature code. I’m a “manager” but I still get to be hands on and code which I love. * submitted some funding proposals for R&D projects * championed some PoC work around small language models (as opposed to large language models) published a blog post on the labs medium page. * co-organised TR’s London Tech Unconference in which internal and external speakers came together to deliver a diverse array of talks about work that’s happening in the company. * Helped my team with a bunch of pastoral and admin type issues like making sure new joiners get the right laptops and that everyone has what they need to get their job done. It’s sometimes funny coming from a startup into a big company because everyone is kind of blinded by processes that seem arcane and long-winded and you can just go “hey let’s just do this instead”. ## Travel, Holidays, Day Trips This year Mrs R and I managed to get two decent holidays in before Baby Ravenscroft arrived. We did a cruise around the Caribbean in January which was amazing. I finally got to fulfill a lifelong ambition of drinking a Pina Colada under a tiki hut. We did a shorter cruise around the Norwegian Fjords in June. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves in both cases. The flight to the Caribbean was a bit painful whereas Southampton cruise terminal is just up the road from our house so we can be on a ship and on our holiday within 90 minutes (something my parents have stayed with us in order to benefit from too). We also made a few short trips and day trips this year to local landmarks and places of interest that we’d not explored much: * In May for my birthday we went up to London to see A Comedy About Spies and we stayed overnight and had a meal out afterwards. * Later in May we took advantage of the good weather on a few occasions and visited nearby Lee on Solent for a stroll up the beach and a (alcohol free for Mrs R) cider. * In July we visited nearby Beaulieu estate where they have a stately home and a classic car museum. * In August I was lucky enough to get to see BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall thanks to my employer having a box and some spare corporate tickets going spare. * At the end of August for the bank holiday weekend we had a mini baby-moon and spent a night at nearby Carey’s Manor Spa hotel. We got to spend some time in the spa facilities and we had a lovely breakfast in our room the morning of our departure. ## Home, Hobbies and Health At home we’ve mainly been doing work to spruce up the house ready for the arrival of our baby. We had new floors and carpets installed and redecorated Mrs R’s home office to turn it into a nursery (when she goes back to work she will work from a new desk in our main bedroom). We had some solar panels installed which is just as well considering the amount of additional washing and drying babies generate. This year I’ve managed to read 21 books - I’m hoping to get 22 by new year’s day but we’ll see. I really enjoyed burning through Martha Wells’ MurderBot diaries over the summer and concluding part of Mark Lawrence’s Library Trilogy but I also read some really interesting non-fic this year including the critically acclaimed Facebook expose, Careless People, and Sarah Kendzior’s They Knew which dives deep into some political goings-on. A surprise favourite was John Scalzi’s When the moon hits your eye which poses the hypothetical question “what if the moon really _was_ made of cheese?” It’s a very fun, somewhat silly sci-fi epic with multiple viewpoint characters. I’ve been trying to get out and walk regularly which is fairly easy when I have a 20 minute walk to the station to get the train into London 2-3 days a week. However, earlier in the year I lamented about how I find exercise boring. Then over the summer, I re-discovered swimming and managed to go 1-2 times a week up until the end of October with baby arriving in November. I will try and get back into swimming again once she is a bit older and I am a bit less sleep deprived. For now though, taking her out for walks in her stroller is providing me with some decent exercise. In April I bought myself a new mac mini which I wanted for a few reasons but I ended up spending some time messing around in garageband with my mini keyboard and my wind synth which was good fun. I haven’t done much in the way of music production for a little while now and I doubt I will have time in the near future with baby Ravenscroft here but we’ll see. In terms of music consumption, I’ve not listened to that many tracks this year- around 5000. Cory Wong’s Starship Syncopation was my top song of the year followed by a bunch of synthwave tracks from Mitch Murder, Zayaz and others I think Zayaz was probably the most important discovery of the year for me (although technically I found them last year but I ramped up listening to their stuff more recently). I’ve also been doing a bit more gaming this year. I got into the habit of booting my main desktop computer and streaming from there to my Steam Deck so that I could be with my wife in the living room and play from the couch. Before the baby was born, I put some hours into the Oblivion Remaster, Control and Spider-man. Then more recently I’ve been playing stuff that’s easy to dive into like Vampire Survivors and Yet-Another-Zombie-Survivor. ## Overview and Goals/Predictions for 2026 This year I felt like I made massive improvements in terms of my work-life balance. I still did some programming in my spare time but I really took the opportunity to chill out and do more at home with my wife. The arrival of Baby Ravenscroft has completely upended our lives and routines and I’m so grateful that my new employer has given me such a generous paternity leave to adjust to our new lives together. In 2026, I suspect that many of my goals will be baby-focused. There are a few things I can focus on for myself though. * I want to sped less time on my phone in general. This is a hangover from last year that I haven’t done brilliantly well at. When I am settling the baby after a feed it is very easy to doom-scroll one-handed. Instead, I want to try to use that time to read more books. * I want to get back into swimming. I am currently too sleep deprived and if I get 1.5-2 hours to myself I tend to use that time to do some chores and then a low-energy hobby like gaming, reading or napping. I’m hoping to get to the point where I have enough energy to continue swimming at least once a week soon. * I want to try to take more notes when I am reading. I enjoyed Ton’s recent posts about Hypothes.is which I also think is a cool tool. I think it would be cool to try to more pro-actively engage with the material I’m reading so that I remember more of it and it might inspire me to write more too. * I want to try and get away on at least one holiday with the baby. A lot of preparation goes into making trips with her. There’s a lot to pack and remember. Going on holiday would be a nice milestone for us an help us get used to being out of the house for prolonged periods with her. * I want to build something useful in Rust or Zig. I often write software in Python because I already know it well and it’s easy for me to slip into the language. I want to learn and use one of these lower level system programming languages to build something practical and useful this year. So with that, kind gentlefolks, I will sign off for 2025 and wish you all a happy new year!

My daughter was born in early November. Since then, I’ve been experiencing parenthood for the first time. It’s incredible but it’s also frequently rubbish. Like everything, it’s a very polarised subject. Other parents will tell you that it’s the best thing you’ll ever do. Anti-kid people will tell you that you’re being irresponsible bringing a life into the world with so many systemic problems as yet unsolved. It’s amazing, it’s everything they tell you it will be. Holding a tiny life in your hand and having them squirm and make contended snuffling noises. When they look at you adoringly and make cute little faces like “ooh” and “ahh” it’s adorable. Can’t beat it. On the other hand it’s horrible. They are exhausting, esoteric little milk demons from hell. They cry for hours for no reason. You’ll go around in circles trying to meet their needs and, they just won’t stop. They wake up every 2-3 hours at best because they have stomachs the size of a walnut and, they can’t actually drink enough milk to keep them sated for longer than that. When they are having a growth spurt they wake up every 30-60 minutes hungry. They call the first 3 months the neonatal trenches because it is like being at war. At this age the baby is too young to do much other than cry, poop, drink milk and sleep and, they don’t smile socially so, it can feel pretty gruelling with no pay off. Surviving on 4-5 hours of broken sleep a night and being woken up every 90 minutes to feed and change completely saps your energy and mental fortitude. Things that have helped are: * **Avoiding doing anything too stimulating near bed time.** If we bathe her, she is fully awake and alert for at least 90-120 mins afterwards so, we stopped doing baths as part of the bedtime routine because she wouldn’t go to sleep when we wanted to. * **Doing sleep shifts.** I am a morning lark and my wife is a night owl. That means that I am particularly grumpy if the baby refuses to sleep at midnight but don’t mind getting up with her at 6am. Instead of both of us doing all the night feeds and changes together, Mrs R covers 12-4am and, I cover 4am-8am and that way we can both have 4 hours of unbroken sleep a night. This made a huge difference to my mental health. * **Baby sleeping/swaddle bags** - I was a bit dubious about this at first but, they’re amazing. Newborns have this weird reflex where, when startled, they throw their arms up in the air like they are flipping an imaginary table. This is often quite disruptive to baby sleep. Swaddle bags prevent babies from moving their arms and simulate the cosy environment of the womb. They love it even though it’s akin to an adult straight jacket * **Schedule some me time** - Mrs R and I cover each other and make sure we both get the opportunity to have some ‘me time’. We started just with making sure we both get a shower each day but, we now also do things like take the baby out for a couple of hours so that the other person can nap (or write a blog post). We are about 6 weeks in now and starting to get into a bit of a rhythm but, it has definitely taken some adjustment. I’m so glad we’ve had her and, she’s very cute. I wouldn’t trade her for the world. Let’s see what the next 6 weeks bring.

I’ve been struggling with my motivation for writing weeknotes recently - hence there being a few missing ones. I should try to keep up the habit though. I’m going to try bullet-points instead this time - hopefully easier to write and easier to read too. * I managed to convert one of my summer interns to a permanent hire and extend the other’s internship 6 months so that he can go back to uni next summer. * Started antenatel classes with NCT. We paid for a block of lessons about birth and early development. The other couples in attendance seem nice and we’re hoping some of them will become friends while Amy is on mat leave. * Had an electrician install some new plug sockets in our house so that we can reorganise our rooms ready for baby. * Went to see Mary Poppins musical at the Mayflower theatre on Thursday evening. It was really well done and some of the stage stunts were great (Bert went for a tap-dance on the roof during “Step in Time”). * **reading** : * Murderbot Book 7 - Systems Collapse I’m about 1/3 into the book so far and I’m enjoying it so far * Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff - it’s taking me a while to get through because I’m taking copious notes and I’ve not been picking it up that often. * Cribsheet by Emily Oster - a methodically researched book of parenting tips. It debunks a lot of wives tales but also some old “scientific studies”. For example, it talks about breast-feeding is strongly correlated with income in the US so there may be some underlying effect (rich parents more likely to breast feed, richer children more likely to succeed => breast fed children more likely to succeed?) * **playing** Control - I sunk a few hours into Control a couple of years ago but it’s great to be back in The Oldest House. I really want to spend more time in the paranormal/government agency style universe. It’s probably time for a reread of there is no antimimetics division again soon too. Not to mention Antimemetics, a non-fiction book by Nadia Asparrouhova inspired by the aforementioned story by qntm. * **listening** to 90s jam bands which for me is part of the autumn experience. The contemporary jazz will be here soon too. We have another packed week coming up with hospital appointments, car services and a dinner out with a friend who moved to Australia and is visiting the UK.

It’s been a little while since I blogged and my weeknotes have been a little bit inconsistent over the last few weeks. Today, instead of a weeknote, I have a personal update which is slightly different to my usual musings about software development or the scifi books I’m reading. It turns out that Mrs R and I have a fairly big lifestyle change coming up in the sense that we’re expecting our first child. We’re at week 27/28 of pregnancy with the baby due in November. I’ve sat on the news for a few months because early pregnancy is fraught with risks and we’ve had a few health scares. I think we’re both particularly sensitive to these risks since we had to go down the IVF route and that was a bit of an ordeal in itself. I won’t write about the nitty gritty but it’s been quite tough on our mental health and our decision to go down that route was a large contributor to my choice to move on from my previous, much higher stress role. I’ve also been reluctant to share too much information because, since my 2010s-facebook-oversharing phase, I’m a little bit more careful about what I put on the internet. I’ve seen a lot of other bloggers tastefully write about family members, referring to them with “Baby ” or their first initial and I think this is a reasonable compromise. We won’t be sharing any photos of the child in any public online spaces. I’m currently somewhere between over-the-moon and terrified. As far as I understand, this is “par for the course” for first time parents so I’m glad to be on track. My fears range from the basic practicalities of “how will I manage on very limited sleep?” all the way to “is it ok to bring a child into the world when things are so unstable?” On that latter point, I see a lot of doom and gloom about the general state of things in the world that feed my worries. My parents helped me to put things in perspective. My mum talked about having similar concerns when I was “on my way” under the thread of thermo-nuclear annihilation in the late 80s and early 90s as the cold war and soviet union petered out. In 2025 we have an awful lot of amazing technology and medical treatments that wasn’t around when I was young. Mrs R and I are in a privileged position and we can hopefully afford to give the child a reasonably good life. On the lack of sleep, I’ve just been told “you’ll manage” which sounds a bit ominous but I am trying to take it at face value. Anyway, enough with the worrying part. I cannot overstate how excited I am too. I am looking forward to taking on the responsibility of teaching and raising them. I’m excited to watch their personality develop. I’m incredibly aware that it will be challenging and test my patience and resilience too. I imagine I’ll be walking them up and down the nearby beach to try and get them to sleep. I’m hoping that the child will give us an excuse to get out and do more together as a family - particularly in the early years. Mrs R and I previously joked about borrowing someone else’s child so that we can go and see Legoland without looking like two strange adults in a kids’ theme park. I’ll try to resist the usual cliched stuff to the extent that I can (that’s what writing in my personal diary is for). My parents and in-laws are all excited too.

A selection of my projects and works. ## FreshRSS FlareSolverr Plugin Plugin for FreshRSS that uses FlareSolverr to bypass captcha and Cloudflare challenges for RSS feeds. RSS feeds are generally meant for automated consumption and sometimes people misconfigure their bot protections, preventing FreshRSS from collecting new posts from feeds. This plugin helps in those situatons. It should be used responsibly with a low refresh rate. ## Turbopilot A weekend experiment where I attempted to use GGML quantized tensors to run a state-of-the-art code completion model on commodity hardware including laptops, desktops, ARM machines like Macbooks and even Raspberry Pis. The project became obsolete when llama.cpp moved to the GGUF spec which supports arbitrary model architectures out of the box. ## Partridge Website | A scientific paper indexing system that uses machine learning to enrich papers in order to make them more easy to search and filter. Originally written in Python 2 with xml-rpc worker processes and recently updated to use Python 3 and dramatiq for concurrency. ## Sapienta Website | Live Instance | An NLP pipeline for processing and enriching scientific papers with sentence-level information about their core scientific concepts (CoreSCs). This is a Python 3 implementation of Prof Maria Liakata’s 2010 paper. We provide a free web service for low volume requests and a simple to use docker configuration for those who want to run the software over a larger number of papers. ## CDCRTool A tool for annotating co-references of entities that occur in linked news paper article/scientific paper pairings. Some ‘sharp’ code but this was my first venture into ‘full stack’ using ReactJS on the frontend and Flask on the backend. The repository also contains the final corpus which we made available as part of our EACL21 publication. ## TimeTrack A small command-line tool I wrote for monitoring my time spent on projects - it has API integration with the popular SaaS timesheet tool Harvest ## Academic Publications Below are links to my various publishing profiles in case you prefer to follow me on an external site/silo: * ORCID * Google Scholar Profile * Semantic Scholar ### 2022 * Maufe, M., **Ravenscroft, J.** , Procter, R., & Liakata, M. (2022, December). A Pipeline for Generating, Annotating and Employing Synthetic Data for Real World Question Answering. In Proceedings of the The 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations (pp. 80-97). ### 2021 * **Ravenscroft J.** , Cattan A., Clare A., Dagan I., Liakata M. CD2CR: Co-reference Resolution Across Documents and Domains In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume (pp. 270-280). ### 2019 * Steffens A,, Campello A., **Ravenscroft J.** , Clark A., Hagras H. Deep Segmentation: using Deep Convolutional Networks for Coral Reef pixel-wise Parsing _technical notes_ ### 2018 * **Ravenscroft, J.** , Clare, A., & Liakata, M. HarriGT: Linking news articles to scientific literature. In Proceedings of ACL 2018, System Demonstrations (pp. 19-24). ### 2017 * **Ravenscroft, J.** , Clare, A., Duma, D., Liakata, M. Measuring scientific impact beyond academia: An assessment of existing impact metrics and proposed improvements PloS one, 12(3), e0173152. ### 2016 * **Ravenscroft J.** , Oellrich A., Saha S., & Liakata M. Multi-label Annotation in Scientific Articles - The Multi-label Cancer Risk Assessment Corpus * Duma D., Liakata M., Clare A., **Ravenscroft J.** , & Klein E. Applying Core Scientific Concepts to Context-Based Citation Recommendation * Duma D., Liakata M., Clare A., **Ravenscroft J.** , & Klein E. Rhetorical Classification of Anchor Text for Citation Recommendation ### 2013 * **Ravenscroft, J.** , Liakata, M., & Clare, A. Partridge: An Effective System for the Automatic Classification of the Types of Academic Papers

We had quite a busy week last week. On Tuesday, I woke up, to London and got to go to the BBC proms at the Royal Albert Hall where I watched Anoushka Shankar play with an orchestra. It was nice to see something a bit different and the music was great. Expressive, melancholy and at points, rich and heavy. At some points it left me reminiscent of a heavy metal band. I stayed at the Holiday Inn Kensington and on Weds I was able to take advantage of their swimming pool which was a welcome way to wake up and start my day. _**The pool at the hotel was quite nice and pretty much empty when I got there at 6:45 on Wednesday morning.**_ On Thursday it was our 4th wedding anniversary and to celebrate we went out for dinner at Koh Thai in port Solent which is one of our favorite eateries nearby. It was a beautiful and warm evening and lots of other families were out and about due to A-level results day. _**The food atKoh Thai is always brilliant. I highly rate them**_ I’ve been enjoying swimming for fitness which I started doing a couple of weeks ago. After complaining that I found exercise boring, I got myself a cheap set of bone-conducting headphones off amazon and it allows me to get into a meditative state quite easily, and just swim up and down listening to instrumental music. I’ve shaved about 30s off my 100m personal best from 3:27 down to 2:57. I’m still slowly making my way through the Murderbot novels and novellas at the moment. Last week I spent a lot of time on my phone on Lemmy and Mastodon so I’m making a conscious effort to stop that and try to read more when idle. I also did a little bit of open source stuff this week pushing a small PR to AudioMuse-AI to unlock GPU support for the track analysis models. I was able to process my whole Jellyfin library very just (5 hours) with that change in place. This week we have some time off and we are combining tasks around the house with fun stuff like going to the cinema to see Naked Gun. It’s the last week off we have together before christmas and we managed to tie it in to the late August bank holiday so we get 10 consecutive days off which is nice. We might look at last minute deals on local hotels in the New Forest and see if we can find somewhere with a spa and a pool to spend a night. I am planning to work more on PenParse this week and get it to a closed beta if possible.

Today I have been playing a lot with a plugin for Jellyfin called AudioMuse AI. It’s a tool that uses the actual audio features of your music library, including things like tempo, tone and timbre to profile your music library. It uses this information to make recommendations about similar tracks, genres and styles. It seems to be a pretty powerful tool and so far I’ve been quite impressed even though I’ve only had time to play with it a little bit. ## Speeding Up The Analysis Step When you first start the system, it runs a sonic analysis over all of your library to capture information about the songs in a database. I noticed that it was taking a very long time to analyze my music library. When I read the logs I saw that it was running TensorFlow models to provide analysis of the music, but was not making use of my GPU. I spent a couple of hours adding GPU support to the docker images so that I could speed up the processing time. I managed to get it working with my GPU in the end and I sent a pull request to the project. The analysis step is still running and it’s taking a while but songs are processed in about 4s instead of 30s. ## Generating Smart Playlists AudioMute AI is still fairly young software. It currently has its own standalone web UI that allows you to generate playlists and send them back to Jellyfin. There are a few different modes that you can generate playlists in. ### Chat Playlists In this mode, you ask the system for a particular style or theme using written English and it uses a language model to convert your question into an SQL query for the database. You can use local models running on your own system rather than having to send your query off to OpenAI or Google. I found that it works quite well with Olama and Mistral Small 3.2. I did try it with some of the smaller llama models but I found that they were less able to generate sensible SQL queries. ### Similar Tracks Another way to generate playlists is to find sonically similar tracks. You start by entering a song you like into the form and the system finds songs with a similar sound. I was quite pleased and impressed by the results of this approach. ### Other Modes You can create a ‘sonic fingerprint’ which takes your listening history and tries to find other tracks in your library that are “similar”. I believe this is based on the centroid vector of all the songs that you’ve listened to before. There’s also a musical “path” feature which allows you to build a playlist that transitions between two songs. I guess you could start with something easy going and end up with something quite intense and fast (or vice versa). I haven’t worked out how to make this work yet, it just gives me errors. ## Jellyfin Integration At the moment integration is minimal. There is a plugin that allows Jellyfin to ping your AudioMuse AI server and refresh the index periodically but currently no direct integration of the playlist generation stuff. I guess it will get better over time. ## Conclusion I’ve had a fun afternoon messing with this stuff and some of the playlists it’s generated are really good. I’m looking forward to experimenting with the “chat” playlists more and seeing how the software develops over time.

I've spent a bit of time today updating my FreshRSS plugin that integrates with FlareSolverr to bypass CloudFlare challenges. ### Why Generally an rss feed is supposed to be machine/bot readable so hiding one behind Cloudflare is a bit of a strange thing to do. The idea of this plugin is to grant access to RSS feeds that are being over-zealously protected by cloudflare. ### What's New Previously I was doing some janky stuff with FreshRSS, copying files around and adding new endpoints to support my plugin. This was causing issues for people who wanted to install the plugin in the official Docker container because it was giving a permissions error which had to be bypassed by chmodding a directory inside the container while it was running. The FreshRSS maintainers recently added a new api_misc hook that means I no longer have to do things the janky way. That makes things a bit easier. While I was in there I also did some tidying up and added some more troubleshooting hints to the README. ### What Next The plugin is still a bit fiddly to use. You have to manually add a prefix to all affected feed URLS. I guess it would be nice to add automatic support for that and maybe also support fetching article full text through this mechanism too (someone has already requested this).

A short note this week due to an acute lack of motivation. On Monday Mrs R and I had the day off and spent the day entertaining my mum and her partner who came down from the midlands to visit us. My mum is a bit of a history buff so we took her to nearby Portchester Castle. I was able to climb all the way to the top of the tower and take some photos looking across the bay. The rest of the party weren’t interested in the windy stairs. My legs are mostly recovered from my shin splints now, so I’ve also been doing lunchtime walks as part of my exercise regime. **The view from the top of Portchester Castle. It’s a great spot for keeping an eye on the surrounding estuary if you are a cunning norman king.** Work continues to be busy at the moment and, I’ve been juggling a few different projects. I’ve also had a cold this week, so I’ve done minimal travelling to/from London again this week while I recover and to avoid spreading it. After work, I’ve been mainly napping or reading. We are also continuing to watch Here We Go which I’m still enjoying except for the occasional cringe. We’re still in the middle of our big cleanout at the moment and I’ve been giving away a lot of stuff. I reshuffled my office yesterday and then got distracted setting up pihole on an old 2nd generation Pi B+. I’m pretty impressed by how lightweight pihole is. It barely uses any CPU or RAM and so far it’s blocked several thousand requests to domains that look a bit… suspect… Next week I will try to get into London a couple of times and continue on the house clearout. I’m feeling pretty exhausted at the moment but we’ve got a week off coming up soon so I just need to hold off until then.

Publishing last week’s weeknote a bit later than usual due to having my parents visiting this weekend. Last weekend I recognised a regular pattern in my thoughts: it was time for my annual caffeine detox. I first noticed that caffeine makes me really anxious around this time last year. I tend to inadvertantly increase my consumption of caffeine in the summer months via iced lattes and diet cola. On monday I decided to go cold turkey and… ouch! By monday afternoon (about 24 hours since my last caffeinated drink) I was hit with a massive headache and lethargy. I had to take a nap. The headache lasted until Thursday, peaking at it’s most intense on Wednesday. That tracks with NIH guidace which suggests headaches normally peak 20-51 hours after cessation. I was also feeling a quite depressed. I eventually started feeling like my normal self again by Friday and I’ve since moved back to 1 caffeinated coffee a day and decaf thereafter. On Monday we went out to a restaurant that we don’t visit very often for my mother-in-law’s birthday. It was a lovely change from Nandos and chain restaurants. This weekend my mum and her partner have been visiting from Shropshire and Mrs R and I have today off to show them around the local area. We’re going to visit Portchester Castle and have lunch in the nearby, highly rated Cormorant pub. We’ve also been having a bit of a clear out of the house this week. I’ve given away lots of odd bits and bobs like laundry baskets and biscuit tins via the Olio app which has been hasse free for the most part. I like the fact tht they have a rating system to help police time wasters a little bit and you can also share food on there - like that bag of protein powder we bought for an overnight oats recipe and never touched again. Work continues to plod along. We’re still working on our project due in november and I’ve also been working my way through all my six month reviews with my team this week. I’m really proud of the work that they’re doing and it’s nice to have the opportunity to tell them how much I appreciate them. On Tuesday I met up with a university friend on my way into london which was great. When I’ve not been working this week, I’ve barely sat in front of a computer which has been nice. I’ve spent a lot of time reading the Murderbot novellas. I’m on to book 5 now (although they’re only short so it’s not like I’ve read 5 Brandon Sanderson books…) I watched Mountain head on the train back from london and I can’t say I was crazy about it. It felt a little too “easy” to make a film about uncontroversial things “billionaires bad, misinformation bad”. The last two acts of the film were better though. Mrs R and I have also been watching Here We Go which is a sitcom about the trials and tribulations of a rather inept british family. It has some heavyweight cast members and is occasionally laugh out loud funny but it can also be very cringy to watch. The father in the family is usually the butt of the jokes which brings to mind a recent study about how boys and young men are suffering a mental health epidemic with very few positive male rolemodels in the media. Thinking about sitcoms, I can’t think of many that paint leading men in a good light… Maybe Ted Lasso? I did briefly look at my FreshRSS FlareSolverr API extension on github this week as a new feature in FreshRSS should make it easier for me to make my extension stay enabled betwen upgrades. I’m going to try and find some time to make that change now that my caffeine headaches have subsided. I’m looking forward to a shorter work week due to the aforementioned visit from my mum. I’ll be trying to continue to build my swimming habit and also getting back into my walking regime now that my shin splints are basically healed. I’m also hoping to meet up with another friend for lunch on Thursday.

An article in Raspberry Pi magazine about building a self-leveling robot reminded me of a project that I undertook as a teenager. When I was in sixth form, we built a self-leveling platform in order to earn an engineering crest award. These days solid state semiconductor accelerometers are now commonplace and very cheap due to their ubiquity in smartphones and similar tech. In the mid 2000s, these were still quite expensive and we had a very limited budget so we came up with a very cheap but geeky solution.... We started looking at spirit levels. If the bubble in the spirit level moves that's a reasonable sign that the platform has started to tilt slightly. We started to think about an optical solution. Can we shine an LED through the spirit level and trigger a light sensor when the bubble moves in front of the light? If the bubble was in the spirit level segment to either side of the centre, we could wire up a stepper motor to start moving the platform in the opposite direction. Initially, it didn't work particularly well since found that the light was visible to the sensor even when the bubble wasn't present and we couldn't reliably calibrate the sensor on the other side. At the time we were studying our A-Levels and in A-Level Physics we studied the phenomenon of absorption spectroscopy. Simply put: different coloured materials and fluids absorb certain colours of light. You'll notice this if you put a red filter over a light and shine it on blue or green objects. They will appear black or brown. For any given material you can find out what wavelength of light it will typically absorb. We found out that the dye that is normally put into spirit levels is a chemical called flourescein. We also found out that flourescein absorbs light with a wavelength somewhere between 520-620nm. Then we used our paltry budget to purchase some LEDs that produce light in that wavelength. Sure enough, when we attached them to our model, it worked! The flourescein in the spirit level absorbed most of the light and when the bubble was in front of the LED, it let most of the light through. It was much easier to calibrate our sensor to these much larger thresholds between "off" and "on". Baby James (Left) with two fellow students at our booth. The self-righting platform on a block of wood in the middle We took our model to a big expo event in Birmingham where other colleges were showcasing their projects. Some of the inner city colleges had big prestigious sponsorships from companies like Jaguar Land Rover and Qinetiq so the little self-levelling platform made on a budget by country bumpkins looked quite out of place but the competition judges said told us our solution was probably the most cleverly engineered on display at the expo.

This week was an absolute scorcher with some respite over the weekend and more hot weather expected next week. I’ve been busy working with my science manager counterpart on some product scoping work. We’ve got an ambitious deadline in November which when we work backwards, doesn’t give us much time at all. I’m also running an intuitive round local/small models which I’m pretty excited about. _**Rupert the cat has not been impressed by the weather**_ Earlier in the week I did some updates on my digital garden that added information cards for books and TV series so that the bits of metadata stored in Obsidian get pulled through. I also finally installed Anubis in front of my Forgejo instance after I noticed have CPU usage and traffic spikes from scrapers. So far it has been doing a great job. I took my first sick day since changing jobs on Thursday as I had some kind of stomach upset. Sadly that meant I missed the event at the Alan Turing Institute that I was planning to attend in person. I’ve been spending time this week reading Seveneves and playing Oblivion Remastered on my Steam Deck. I’m really enjoying getting back into Oblivion. It’s an immersive if charmingly janky environment. On Saturday we went to the Beaulieu Estate and saw some old cars in the national motor museum which is on the estate grounds. They also had some pretty gardens, the ruins of an abbey that was demolished by Henry VIII and, we got to go on a Monorail. We had a nice lunch too. I didn’t realise that there was a WW2 spy finishing school at Beaulieu. Apparently German intelligence knew all about it and, they even knew the name of Lord Montagu (the owner)’s dog. _**I love a monorail**_ I’ve managed to give myself a shin splint somehow which is surprising since the only exercise I tend to do at the moment is walking. I tend to find exercise is boring. I’ve bought myself some new prescription swimming goggles to help with not being able to read signs or recognise people in the pool. Hopefully I can get to the swimming pool soon and, it won’t aggravate my leg. This week we are braced for more warm weather and I have a busy week of meetings and house projects. Hopefully, I can keep my brain operating in these temperatures.

I was reflecting on the fact that I’ve put on a little weight recently. Nothing crazy but I’m feeling a bit “round” and some of my favourite clothes are feeling a little tight. So I need to eat a little better and do more exercise. The problem is that exercise bores me a lot. ## I Don’t Like Sport I can’t stand competitive team sports like football, surely they have decided who who has won the football by now. It just doesn’t interest me and I couldn’t say why. I guess it’s just the way I’m wired. I’m not really into one-on-one sports like tennis either. I’ve tried a few and the closest I came to enjoying something was badminton at high school. I have terrible coordination thanks to my dyspraxia. I am a bit of an introvert so ideally I’m looking for an activity that I can do alone after a day full of meetings at work and recharge some of that social battery. The gym feels incredibly pointless to me. Instead of moving around outside we’ve invented this artificial sterile environment and we burn fossil fuels to power these machines that allow us to move around on the spot inside. I tried running and not only is it not fun at all, I’m awful at it and it’s really bad on your joints. I’m in my 30s and with any luck I’ve got another 50 years left in me. I’m not looking to do my knees in just yet… I have a HIIT app that I start using every few months, decide is too much like torture and then ignore for another few months. ## What Could I Do Then? I used to enjoy dancing but I haven’t done that for a long time. Maybe I could pick it up again, it’s a great workout. I think the commitment to going multiple evenings a week may be difficult. I’m usually the most energetic and have the most free time first thing in the morning… I don’t hate swimming but it is a bit dull swimming up and down in an artificial pool. I was considering buying a set of waterproof bone conducting headphones so that I could listen to podcasts. I can get access to my local swimming pool through work as a perk. Might be worth a go. I actually really enjoyed cycling. From 2014 to 2015 I went through a phase of cycling to work from my flat in Eastleigh to IBM Hursley. Since then I’ve moved jobs and houses and the roads around where I live now are quite scary (I’m pretty sure drivers have gotten more careless since COVID too). Maybe if I can find some dedicated cycle paths and quiet roads I could get out on the bike… I also quite like walking. I just put an audiobook or podcast on and walk. It doesn’t burn loads of calories but if you do enough of it, it can make a big difference. To maximise my chances of actually sticking to this exercise, it needs to form a seamless part of my routine. I’m sure that was why I got quite good at cycling to work back in the day… Because I had to get to work anyway, might as well cycle and just shower when I get to the office instead of at home… Eurgh, I don’t know….any ideas reader?

This week I’ve been catching up with work after my trip to Norway. I was able to get up to London a couple of times. I got the opportunity to meet my new intern in person for the first time and we had a good chat about what I’m hoping to get him to help me with during his time in my team. I’m also continuing to work with the product team on a big strategic pivot which was triggered by the outcome of a hackathon I organised in may. We’ve been doing lots of whiteboarding and brainstorming sessions about how to do the new thing. I’ve had a fairly busy week at home too. On Thursday we went to see a play called Ghost Stories which was pretty scary but really enjoyable. They had some really impressive set pieces and the thrills and frights were interspersed with comic relief. We also went to see M3GAN 2.0 which was also great fun. There was quite a lot of similarity in how the plot evolved between M3GAN and it’s sequal and between Terminator 1 and 2. In the first film M3GAN is evil and “the villain” and in the second one she’s helping the heroes to defeat a new bigger baddie. In less fun news, I’ve noticed I’m getting headaches and ear ache a lot at the moment and struggling to hear a fair bit. On friday I went to an ear specialist to have a check up. After they did micro-suction to remove some wax build up, they said I have glue ear. I thought that was something children get but apparently it’s a condition that can affect adults too. I’ve got some breathing exercises which should help to unblock my eustachian tubes over a few weeks. If that doesn’t work, there are some surgical interventions that can be done. I’m reading SevenEves by Neal Stephenson which I started on holiday and am about 2/3 of the way through. As I mentioned on Mastodon the other day, my head canon is that President Julia Bliss Flaherty looks and sounds like Mary McDonnell in her Battlestar Galactica role. I’m also continuing to listen to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan audiobook. The weather in the UK is scorching this week. It’s been high 20s celcius for the last few days and its predicted to be 31 tomorrow and 34 in london on Tuesday. South Western Railway already have a notice up on their website predicting delays and the tubes are likely to be truly vile in this weather. I might give the office a miss on Tuesday and go up later in the week. I’ve been invited to an event at the Alan Turing Institute on Thursday by my PhD supervisor, so I’m looking forward to that. The weather is supposed to have cooled off a little bit by then too.

I've recently noticed and zeroed-in on something that I've been doing for years. I'm a very verbose writer. More specifically, I write with a lot of asides and footnotes which makes the structure of my sentences overly complex. I also write long documents when short ones will do. I offer a lot of surplus explanation and exposition where it probably isn't required. My writing style is such because I like to "show my working" when it comes to my thought processes. I do this to try to clarify my intent and second-guess possible critiques of my writing in advance. I'll typically do this if I'm talking to someone that I'm worried will be critical of my writing. Essentially I'm over-thinking but in writing... Unfortunately this often has the opposite effect of making my writing harder to read and confusing my intent. Two recent examples come to mind: * I needed to schedule a 30 minute meeting with a colleague and we both have busy calendars. I over-shared and over-thought putting in an early-for-me call: "I don't mind starting early, I have a medical appointment later so I need to make the time up anyway..." We are on good terms socially but I still don't imagine my colleague doesn't care about why I'm happy to start early. * I wanted to share an event with a group that someone else at work owns. I could have asked them "do you mind if I share X event with the group?" Instead, I sent a long rambling email about how I didn't want to tread on any toes and I'd already checked in with Y person and the event is on Z date and..." you get the picture. In both of these examples, I undermined the clarity of my messages by overthinking the reader's reaction and trying to account for possible negative reactions. Sometimes context is necessary but nobody should have to read multiple paragraphs of overthinking answer a simple yes/no question. Not a good look... I've been told by a lot of people that I write well but I look at the amazing work of people like Keenan and Annie who are able to concisely and clearly write about emotive topics and I realise that I could do a lot better. A lot of my blog posts end up being unnecessarily long. I plan to practice writing more clearly and concisely starting with this post.

This week we set sail aboard the P&O Iona to Norway. We visited a number of places including Haugesund, Olden, Flåm and Stavanger. We’ve been to Norway before, but I think this time we enjoyed it even more. We were better prepared for the weather and it was further away from the initial shock of Covid than our last trip. I’m a huge fan of the country from its rugged landscapes to its handling of government policy. I don’t think it would take much arm twisting for me to live there. ## The Ship P&O Iona is one of two sister ships that are the largest in their fleet. She can support approximately 5,000 passengers and has a whole bunch of stuff on board including shopping malls, cinema, swimming pools, splash zone for children and various bars and restaurants. I think my wife summarized it well as we were waiting for a bus to pick us up for an excursion. She looked at the ship and said “She’s a big bastard, isn’t she?”. We sailed from Southampton which is just up the road from us so it was very easy and we were on our holiday within half an hour of arriving at the dock. Compared to a holiday where you have to fly for hours and hang around in airports for hours too. This was a breeze. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post one of the major benefits of cruise holidays is the opportunity to switch off from the internet and break my cycle of toxic productivity. I was able to read, play my steamdeck and engage with the onboard activities on the ship in between our day trips off the ship. ## Haugesund, Åkrafjorden and Langfoss Our first port of call was Haugesund where we took a couch ride to Åkrafjorden to visit Langfoss, one of the tallest waterfalls in the region. Along the way we stopped for lunch at a nearby farm and we were served a variety of yummy Norwegian food with lots of smoked salmon and goat cheese. We tried a brown goat cheese which is essentially caramelised goatmilk whey. The farm owner was very welcoming and explained that she regularly hosts groups of tourists from cruise ships and is very grateful for the trade. This would be a common theme. Many of the Norwegian guides and hosts that we met expressed their gratitude for the booming tourism industry. After lunch we were whisked by a coach down to a dock on the fjord and we boarded a cataract which took us right up to the base of Langfoss. It’s a really impressive waterfall that sends glacier meltwater cascading down 600 metres from the mountains above into the ffjord. Our boat took us right up to the base of the waterfall. ## Olden Our 2nd port was Olden, a small town on the Nordfjord which cruise ships can sail right up to. On this particular day it rained the whole time we were ashore but we came prepared with waterproofs and raincoats (unlike other cruise passengers who we saw braving it in hoodies and jeans) and we had a great day out visiting the Briksdal glacier by troll car. The troll cars, are actually John Deere utility vehicles with passenger seats and are used for transporting tourists up the mountain path to the Briksdal glacier. It’s a gruelling climb by foot and we were glad not to be hiking in the heavy rain. The troll cars dropped us off arround 500m from the top of the mountain and we were able to walk up the path ourselves to the foot of the glacier. After our trip up the mountain, we got the troll car back down to the inn at the foot of the mountain and had coffee and cake. Our tour guide was a really nice norwegian guy who was very proud of his country and the management of Norway’s sovereign wealth. He boasted about how much money was being spent to help asylum seekers moving to Norway and the establishment of a universal welfare state that could care for its people. He also told us about the extravagant fines and prison sentences one can expect for infractions like drink driving. This is a country that takes pride in caring for its citizens. The norwegians generate 94% of their electricity via hydroelectricity and almost exclusively sell electric cars. Unfortunately, they are still one of the world’s biggest exporters of oil and that’s how they can afford their high standards of living. ## Flåm Flåm is a relatively small town, again located near a large ffjord that cruise ships can pass through. We got up early to take a catamaran ride along the fjord to nearby Gudvangen - circumnavigating a large mountain on a leisurely cruise that took around 3 hours. We then took a coach back from Gudvangen to Flåm, passing through tunnels under the mountain that were approximately 5 miles long. As our guide explained, these tunnels are a lifeline for the locals in the winter, helping them to quickly and safely pass through the mountain and avoid the adverse weather above. Once we got back to Flåm, we carried on driving to nearby Stegastein mountain viewing platform which is a concrete platform that juts out 30 metres from the mountainside over the valley below. The coach driver had great difficulty getting us up the tiny mountain pass to the top of the platform but we made it and were rewarded with a breathtaking view. When I realised the platform was wobbling in the wind, my body decided it was time to step back to the relative safety of the mountain car park. ## Stavanger Our final stop was Stavanger which is a city in the south of Norway and has a population of about 140,000 which is relatively big for Norway. It was the only day that the sun shone and we took a guided tour around the city on foot. Our guide showed us around the city and showed us some of the most famous sights in Stavanger including the Stavanger Cathedral which is one of the oldest cathedrals in Norway and has ties back to Winchester Cathedral, just up the road from us. The city has a real metropolitan vibe that reminded me of Brighton or maybe San Francisco. Our guide talked a lot about local businesses, coops and ‘authentic experiences’ in the city. She showed us a colourful street full of bars and restaurants and we stopped for coffee in a cafe that had a storied history dating back 300 (it was originally an administrative building for Stavanger port that had fallen into disrepute and revamped as a coffee shop more recently). ## Coming Home I’m back home from Norway and back to work tomorrow. We had a great time and I still can’t get over how much I liked the country and its citizens. Everyone was so friendly and welcoming, the weather was nice and cool and the food is amazing too! I really like the norwegian style of government too. If I could convince Mrs R, I’d love to live there! We’ll definitely go back again some time soon. Next week I’m back to my 2 days in london routine and I’ll be meeting a new starter in my team who joined while I was away. Yesterday was 28 degrees c which was a shock after the 14-16 degrees we’d been experiencing all week. I think I preferred the rain and the cold! The weather is supposed to cool off slightly for the rest of the week which will be a relief for me and the cats.

We’re back home in blighty again after a week sailing around Norway on P&O Iona cruise ship. We had a lovely time, but all good things must come to an end. I love being on a cruise holiday because it’s one of the few places you can go in 2025 where internet access is hard to come by. You can buy access from P&O for £20 per day or access the Maritime 4G mast at the princely rate of £1/MiB. Alternatively, you can go without until you reach the next port. That means a full detox from the bad news machines is actually pretty easy to achieve. It also has a surprising effect on my brain. When I have internet access and a modem with SSH or similar, I feel like I must be productive and coding or blogging or something, and I feel guilty if I stop to rest. At this point, this is a fairly well understood phenomenon that [[Anne-Laure Le Cunff]] describes in her book Tiny Experiments: “We treat ourselves the way the stepmother treats Cinderella - ‘from morning until evening, she had to perform difficult work, rising early, carrying water, making the fire, cooking, and washing’” - a kind of toxic productivity and perfectionism that prevents us from resting or making time for ourselves. When I don’t have internet access, I find that the and I’m away from home, I find that I can relax a little more guilt free. Being back at home puts me straight back into take productivity mode. “There’s so much to do, so little time… don’t just sit here reading or playing video games, the grass isn’t going to mow itself…” After a week at sea it is much easier to see this behaviour through a critical lens than when I’ve been at home in my usual routine and I’m stuck in the habit. One of the biggest problems with this cycle of behaviours is that it tires and burns me out and forcing myself to be productive ends in a perpetual cycle where I resort to activities that aren’t productive but feel good, like scrolling mindlessly and getting irate about the stuff I read. I’m going to try some tiny experiments to see if I can find the right balance of activities: * Firstly, every time I feel guilty about an activity I’m going to commit to an hour of that thing. I might not be able to do the hour there and then if something time sensitive comes up but I will do that hour later on the same day or next day. * I will also commit to a combined 30 mins of Mastodon and Lemmy a day, at maximum. I think scrolling mindlessly does eat up time where I could be doing something else. I’m going to try both of these things for 1 month and see how it goes.

A day late today as we didn’t have internet access yesterday from our ship on our way to Norway Last week flew by and we spent a lot of it preparing for our holiday. I got my car serviced this week and due to a mistake, the garage replaced my brake pads and then didn’t charge me for it since I didn’t ask for that to be done. Woo free brakes! I was up in London twice and caught up with a friend for lunch on Thursday. I’ve been listening to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan audiobook. It’s been on my list for a number of years so it’s nice to finally get around to that. Very strange book, very strange chap! This week we are in Norway. We visited before in Septemver 2022 and the weather was awful the whole time so we decided to come back in the summer time. It’s raining of course but we’re out and about enjoying ourselves anyway

A short post this week, I’m feeling lazy and I want to get back to enjoying my sunday evening. #### Stuff I’ve done: * Spent some more time working on adding new features to PenParse. I’ll be posting a bit of an update on that fairly soon. * Finally finished The Book That Held Her Heart which I felt was a pretty weak ending to the trilogy. It’s a shame since the universe was pretty cool and the world building had so much potential. * Started reading Naked in Death which is a sci-fi noir that’s started reasonably strongly. * Mrs R is learning to drive and we’ve got her a Kia Rio to practice in. We’ve been out a couple of times to do some driving around car parks with L plates on. She’ll be graduating to actual roads soon. * I started a couple of draft blog posts but got writer’s block. I felt quite annoyed about well **_gestures at everything_** this week and decided I should try and disconnect and get some rest and fresh air. * I met up with some of my ex-colleagues from Filament for a cheeky nandos lunch on wednesday. * Went up to London for a couple of days. It rained pretty badly but once I get to the station near my house, I’m mostly on the train, underground or indoors. * I’m also working on porting my website from Hugo to Astro. That’s nearly done now. I’m going on holiday next week so I might wait until I’m back to actually put the new layout live. * Wrote up some notes about how I’m using ngrok, quill and micropub.rocks to test my micropub endpoint since I’m making some changes. * I made 4 CrucialTracks entries this week although I missed TuneTuesday over on mastodon this week. * Spent some time trying to work out why Oblivion wouldn’t start on my PC. There was some issue with the latest Nvidia drivers not installing themselves properly. I wrote up some notes about #### This week I plan to: * Get up to london twice * Read more * meet up with a friend for lunch on Thursday * get out for a walk every day * prepare for our upcoming holiday * play my SteamDeck - maybe I’ll put some more time into Oblivion Remastered.

This week was slightly shorter thanks to the bank holiday. Monday was a bit of a washout but we went to see Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning at the cinema in the evening. The film was okay as it goes and there was lots of interesting action sequences. There was also a whole bunch of implausible stuff as usual. It was nice to see Nick Offerman playing a disgruntled government employee once again. I had planned to go up to London for work this week but on Tuesday all of the trains were completely fubar in the Southampton Portsmouth area so I ended up giving up on trying to get to the office after a couple of hours of trying and work from home. Not a great look for the newly nationalised Southwestern Railway, but they are running with years and years of technical debt. During the previous week I helped to run a company hackathon with my team focused around using LLMs in an agentic way. The hackathon went really well and we produced a cool proof of concept. This week I’ve been supporting the product engineering team who want to build on top of the proof of concept and recovering from my hackathon hangover. Most of my colleagues in the Zug office in Switzerland had Thursday and Friday off as a national holiday and a bridge day. That meant that I’ve only really had two days of overlap with my full team this week and that led to a fairly quiet week. On Friday we had an interview with someone who was using chat GPT to provide answers to our questions in semi real time. It was a really weird and uncomfortable experience. I plan to write about it in more detail in a stand alone post, but it was a weird first for me and not one that I’m looking forward to repeating. However, it does seem that I will inevitably face this again in the current climate. At home I’ve been continuing to make some small improvements to my PenParse project and reading my Mark Lawrence book slowly but surely. My motivation has been fleeting this week. I find that my mind has been alternating between anxious and overwhelmed and motivated to take on side projects and do jobs around the house. Going for a walk and trying to do 10,000 steps a day does seem to help when I’m in a bit of a funk. But the human condition is strange.

A short update as we are visiting my parents for the bank holiday weekend. This week I did a lot of the legwork running and coordinating a Hackathon at work. I only went into London once on Tuesday. This weekend we have eaten far too much and had a lovely spread of tapas with my dad and his partner. Tomorrow is late may bank holiday, the last for a little while until August. We’ll be doing our washing and going to see the new Mission Impossible movie.