The **summer holidays** flew by in something of a blur. It was a change of routine for all of us. The kids spent several weeks at a (very affordable, open 8-6, thank you!) holiday club near Belsize Park. They love it there and come home every day tired and filthy. A- and I were busy with work most of the summer too, so the days were long and hot. We did take a week off in **Barcelona**. A- has an old friend who lives in La Llagosta around 30mins by train into the centre of the city. We had a few brilliant days exploring the city with the kids (A- and I had been together before) including a trip to the excellent CosmoCaixa science museum. We also spent two days at the Portaventura theme- and water-park where A- and N- took on some of the bigger roller-coasters while F- and I cowered with Elmo in Sesame Street. _A page from my sketchbook with two sketches made in Barcelona. One of sandwich shopCan Paixano the other of a tree-lined street in Sant Adreu._ Back in London we saw **My Neighbour Totoro** at the Gillian Lynne Theatre. In terms of stage craft it was one of the most spectacular performances I’ve ever seen. The music (by Joe Hisaishi) was also fantastic, as it is in the film. I really recommend seeing it, if you can. I’ve been finding it increasingly hard to cope with the **goings-on in the tech industry**. I can’t bring myself to use “AI” coding tools but their presence is absolutely unavoidable in almost every professional and online space now. Coupled with the take-over of open source projects by out-and-out authoritarian racists, it’s all a bit too much. I’ve found myself compulsively checking social media (Mastodon) and news aggregator sites like lobste.rs looking for any kind of hope or reassurance. This is really not doing my mental health any good. I’m planning to scale a lot of this stuff back for the next month and then reassess, as suggested in my re-read of Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. I have been having some **fun with computers** , though. I’ve enjoyed resurrecting my old 11-inch macbook air with Fedora Linux and the Sway window manager. I loved this machine when I got it over 10 years ago and it seems to run well. I might need to replace the battery. I’ve also been messing around with esoteric programming language sequencer thing Orca.

Taking a short break from being spitting mad about AI, to just being sad about how it never needed to be like this

There’s a rather popular flavor of social media content focused on helping unhoused people. The creator will give out sleeping bags, socks, and care kits; sit down and have a meal; or take the unhoused person shopping. Sometimes they help them find work or start a GoFundMe to get them off the streets. It does a lot of good. But it’s also gross AF! Imagine you’re cold, hungry, and desperate, and someone offers to get you all the things you need… if you consent to having a camera shoved in your face and the footage of you at your lowest blasted on the internet.

* Brighton Ruby was really good. I particularly enjoyed Elena, Craig and Tekin’s talks. But the whole programme was great and I had to chance to catch up with old friends too. I even managed to get there and back more-or-less on time despite the heat. My air-conditioned room at Drakes Hotel was very welcome. * I got up early on the morning of the conference for a swim at Sea Lanes. A slow and steady 1,000m as the sun rose over Kemp Town was perfect. I enjoyed a coffee and sandwich at FIKA afterwards. This swim meant a bit more to me. I’d said to myself I’d do the same thing at last years Brighton Ruby, but that plan went out of the window as soon as I had a drink in my hand. It feels good to be able to make plans and stick to them (sometimes). * I saw American Football with some friends at the Kentish Town Forum. They played a good mix of classics and new material - a more varied set than when I saw them in Las Vegas a couple of years ago. Marconi Union were in support. * As a York City and Arsenal fan it’s been a fairly intense 2026 of football. But I’ve still managed to get stuck in to the World Cup - enjoying England and Colombia’s extended run. Football you corrupt, brilliant bastard. * A-‘s parents arrived safely and will stay for a few weeks. The boys have a couple more weeks of school left before the summer holiday. Unfortunately most of their planned trips have been cancelled due to the heat, but the excellent “international evening” went ahead as planned. Great for the school, less good for my waistline.

* I enjoyed a day out in Cambridge with my Go Free Range colleagues on Wednesday. We had a coffee at Bould Brothers, a ploughmans at The Free Press and then a walk along the river to The Plough where we watched some of the May Bumps. I was struck by Orchard Street as we walked past and took a quick photo. I made a sketch from the photo the next day. * I’ve been following the drawabox drawing lessons for a little while in an attempt to learn some more fundamental drawing skills. I did a fair bit of technical drawing at school but not so much “artistic” drawing. I’m taking the courses advice to sketch for fun regularly and go straight to ink (as above) rather than draft with pencil. * I took N- and F- to the New Forest at the weekend. We camped for a couple of nights at Ashurst Campsite with my brother, Neil, Jack and their kids. The campsite is very close to Ashurst station with direct trains to Waterloo. My brother took a bunch of camping gear for us to use, which made things much easier. The weather was great and the kids loved climbing tree and watching the ponies exercising their free-roaming rights all over the place. * A- and the boys bought me a copy of Replay by Jordan Mechner for Father’s Day, which I’d heard about through a Guardian interview. I really like his sketching style and Replay is a real treat. I can’t imagine the amount of work that went into it. * My friend George sent me, in the actual post, an actual mix-tape complete with handwritten track list. It’s full of stuff I haven’t heard and has given me an excuse to get my cassette deck home from the office and set up for some evening listening.

* A- arrived home safely. We were all very happy to see her and decided to travel to Heathrow to meet her in arrivals. Although the giant orange nonce’s attentions seem to have drifted from South America for a little while, having her home and safe reduced my 😬 a fair amount. * Harry Hill’s new /podscarf/ with Stewart Lee was an unexpected joy. I particularly appreciated the 15 minute serious diversion into the history of castles. I see the next episode features Nish Kumar. The man, if nothing else, knows his audience. * I had to collect F- early from school on Friday. Thankfully we’ve got to know some of parents who live a similar train ride away from school and one of them was able to collect N- for me. Finn spent the afternoon with bad stomach pain, sitting on my and coughing in my face. These weeknotes are late. Are those two things related? Reader, you’ll find out next week.

* A- was away all week, so there’s been even more routine (getting kids to school, home, doing chores) than usual. * We’ve got a leaky gutter that’s causing water to seep through the brickwork. As we live in a fairly high building we first need scaffolders to construct safe platforms for the roofers to do their work. I spent a couple of days letting them in and out and upping my swearing game to fit in. * I sat in on some user research sessions at work on Thursday. I really enjoy this process when I get chance to do it, it’s great to see how things _really_ work and I hugely admire the stamina it takes for my research colleagues to run a whole day of these sessions. * I found this Introduction to screen-readers tutorial that you can follow with along with a screen reader very useful. The default screen-reader on Ubuntu is pretty terrible though, so if anyone has suggestions of how to improve that I’m all ears. There’s no comments on my blog but mailto:blog@chrislowis.co.uk. * I spent a couple of evenings gluing card and various junk together. I’m drawn to the dystopian sci-fi terrain/modelling of Eric’s Hobby Workshop but I think I mostly just need excuses to do something with my hands rather than on a screen. * N- and I continue to play some Stardew Valley together. He _loves_ it and some intricacy of the rules is usually the first thing he asks about when he gets up. We built a shed full of preserving jars to give us some “passive income”. You gotta learn to love the grind. Because life IS the grind, kids.

* A- left for Colombia on Wednesday evening. I’m gritting my teeth because of that-part-of-the-world events but I’m really happy she’ll be able to spend time with her parents for their golden wedding anniversary. * Not unrelated to this change in routine, I managed to lock myself out. Fortunately our kind downstairs neighbours kept the kids warm and entertained while 1st Metro Locksmiths performed open door surgery. * I met Murray for lunch on Thursday - a restorative catch-up over falafel, chips and Hibiscus tea at Palmyra’s Kitchen. * My brother visited at the weekend. He played a lot of Stardew Valley with N- while I took F- to music centre. We sheltered from the cold for most of the rest of the weekend, dipping in and out of various third-round FA Cup matches on a plethora of seemingly unrelated media streaming services. * I’ve been pretty impressed with my new desktop computer - a GEEKOM A6. It’s very fast, running test suites for a couple of projects I’m working on at least as fast as my M2 Macbook. * I was up-and-running with my emacs config, Dropbox and 1Password pretty quickly. I also grabbed a couple of Greg’s amazing desktop images. The painful part has been video conferencing. Google Meet makes the fans spin in both Firefox and Chrome, while Pop doesn’t allow screen sharing (something to do with “Wayland” 🤷‍♀️). To be fair, none of this stuff works particularly well on OS X either. * I watched an episode of Camden on Disney+ - in particular the one featuring The Roots. I remembered reading in an old interview that they’d lived on the Queen’s Crescent while working on Things Fall Apart and this episode confirmed it was above the (pretty good) Blue Sea Fish Bar. As A- will confirm, I bore anyone who’ll listen about my “campaign” to get them a Blue Plaque. The letter writing continues.

## Moving Moving house took up a good chunk of the first half of 2025. We’d decided to keep our kids at the same primary school - they’re happy there, it’s great - and look for a new place within a sensible journey. We found a larger, older place in Archway. It’s a short overground train ride away from the school. We completed at the end of March. We came to a great arrangement with the person who bought our old flat allowing us to stay for a few weeks, and were able to get some decorating done in the new house before moving in. We moved in at the end of April. It’s certainly started to feel like home for me - having family from Colombia come to stay in the summer and being able to make them comfortable made the whole process feel worth-while. We also spent Christmas here with my side of the family which was a special time. ## Kids The kids are happy and settled at school. N- is in year 4 and F- in year 1. Their teachers say positive things and I think they really enjoy being there. I often feel guilty that they have such long days (they go to the after school club most days until 6pm), but we don’t really have an option and they always seem to have fun “just playing” once the formal school day is over. I volunteered for a couple of school trips with them this year, to London Zoo and the panto with F- and swimming lessons with N-. I take F- on Saturday mornings to music centre in Camden. He seems to love it and is learning how to read music and clap our rhythms. He sings and makes up little songs all the time when we’re out-and-about. N- loves games and puzzles. We sometimes play chess together but he’s also keen on Pandemic, Catan and card games. We’re enjoying playing Stardew Valley together, but I need to keep an eye on the amount of time we spend playing it - I find it addictive, and I can tell he does too. We discovered a huge board game cafe near us, and N-‘s eyes lit up looking at some of the larger tabletop games. I picked up a PDF of some simpler tabletop gaming rules and we’ve played a couple of Star Wars skirmish-type games using a bunch of lego figures. N- asked for a box of Space Marines for Christmas which I “volunteered” to paint up. Another slippery slope, I think! ## Health I continue my visits to Royal Brompton as part of a long-term open label trial of a new medicine for my genetic heart condition. I only need to go there for a day every 6 months or so now and I look forward to the visits. I feel a lot better on the medicine and can mostly manage any symptoms I do have (occasional breathlessness and chest pain). I still can’t quite believe my luck that I’m a) alive to see the development of this medicine and b) have a clinical team that encouraged and helped me to sign up for the trial. I stopped drinking in November (40 days today). There’s some backstory to this, but it feels a bit early in the journey to get into it in detail here (although I’m very happy to talk about it). In general I’m sleeping better, feel happier and have successfully tackled a few “firsts” without alcohol that I was worried about (trip to the pub with a friend after work, Christmas party, gig). ## Work We spent a large part of the year working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation buidling a new service called Experience CS. This includes a great curriculum of classroom activities to teach programming and an integrated, “classroom-safe” version of MIT Scratch. I spent quite a lot of time on the front-end (particularly CSS) aspects of the project and really enjoyed that part of it. I feel like I learned a lot about structuring CSS, new (to me) features and working with a designer on a shared design system. As with most post-pandemic work I wish more of the project could have been spent working together rather than remotely. A lot of technical aspects of project reminded me of my early days at FutureLearn and I think that made the remote/in-person working contrast starker for me. After that project came to an end we decided to spend some time working together on jam.coop our co-op music store. I’ve really enjoyed getting half-formed ideas out of my head and seeing Chris and James run with them. We’ve been writing a bit about what we’re working on in a newsletter. ## Hobbies I’ve done some music-making this year but it’s been restricted by house-moving. I’m playing guitar more regularly and learning some fingerstyle jazz standards again. I’ve also enjoyed messing around with scripts on my monome norns in particular a sample-chopping granular thing with an amazing UI. I’m trying to be disciplined with chess study, playing focussed rapid games on lichess and doing puzzles “properly” with a pencil and paper. I also play far too much 3+2 blitz. I really enjoy the chess nights at Coffee Zee and want to make it along more often in 2026. I’m also sketching and painting. Watercolours are a battle, but I enjoy working with ink and markers a lot. I find the compendium of sketches in The Art of Urban Sketching endlessly inspiring. Most of these artists have instagram, YouTube or other accounts to help distract me from the absolute f–king state of things. ## 2026 Seeing people and doing things makes me feel loads better, so I’d like to do as much as that as I can fit in. If you’re reading this, I’m always up for gigs, lunch, walks, food, games, chats in the pub etc! I might need to find a new office in the next few months. My current place has been amazing for keeping me connected so I’d like to stay nearby if I can. And maybe this year will be the year I get fit and lose weight…

SuperCollider's powerful scsynth audio synthesis engine running in the browser as an AudioWorklet. Zero installation.

GM Daniel Naroditsky, the popular U.S. grandmaster, commentator, creator, educator, and author, unexpectedly passed away on Sunday at the age of only 29.

“...and could just as easily make differently.”

Dear David, Ruby has brought me immense joy during my life and I’ve made many close friends thanks to a shared love of the language. Rails, thanks to the contributions of you and hundreds of others, has allowed me to experience that joy at work too. However, I can’t describe how disappointed I was to read your recent blog post “As I remember London”. I remember when you visited the London Ruby User Group. We didn’t speak but you came to the after-talk drinks at a packed Lamb and Flag pub. I’m sure when you looked around that pub you saw, like me, a couple of hundred rubyists of many different nationalities, backgrounds, ethnicities. I’m sure several of those rubyists shook your hand, welcomed you to London and made sure you had a drink. That, to me as a Londoner, is London in microcosm. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) does not campaign for “Britain for the Brits”. He campaigns, as I’m sure you’re aware from the Wikipedia page you cited as evidence, for Britain for White Brits. As a White Brit he doesn’t make me feel proud, or patriotic. He makes me feel scared - scared for my wife, my non-White British friends, my neighbours, the teachers of all races and religions who teach my kids. But we won’t give up. We did survive the Blitz (my grandparents fought the Nazis). Britain hasn’t gone anywhere. Minaswan, Chris

🔗 Quoting Jason Gorman > Most managers see teams as vehicles for delivering software. This misses the bigger picture. The value of any iteration of the software is ephemeral, and the code itself is a liability: it has negative value. > > What has far more value over the lifetime of a software product or system is the capability of the dev team to keep hitting a moving target - to rapidly, reliably and sustainably adapt the software. > > I see software delivery as a vehicle for building teams. The team is the _real_ product.

🔗 Emacs Lisp Elements > The fun part is how you go about writing the code. There are no duties you have to conform with. None! You program for the sake of programming. It is a recreational activity that expands your horizons.

🔗 The composer still making music four years after his death > Under a magnifying lens sit two white blobs, like a tiny pair of jellyfish. Together, they form the lab-grown “mini-brain” of the late US musician Alvin Lucier – composing a posthumous score in real time. Artists grow stem cells taken from Alvin Lucier and incorporate it into an artwork. There’s always a lot of “AI will destroy us all” commentary around stories like this, in practice I suspect whatever is in the petri-dish is behaving more-or-less as a random number generator. I love Lucier’s collection of lectures on contemporary music Music 109 and I’m sure he intended this project to be thought-provoking and make for a good yarn.

🔗 Photographs of Old Japan > These pictures, the work of several different photographers,1 were assembled by a pair of collectors named Henry and Nancy Rosin. They were originally shot in black and white, then hand-coloured by artists — a technique common at the time. All were taken between the years 1860-1900, meaning the earliest of them just predates the Meiji Restoration, when the last shōgun still ruled Japan. I visited the Daibutsu statue in Kamakura a long time again. I remember thinking at the time that for the rest of my life it would also be there, sitting. These photos were taken long before then, between 1860-1900.

CSS Naked Day > The idea behind CSS Naked Day is to promote web standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of HTML, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good old play on words. In the words of 2006, it’s time to show off your <body> for what it really is. On or around April 9th a little bit of code disables CSS on our co-op’s website. The web, and the world, has changed a lot since 2006 but traditions like this still make me feel part of something. A reminder of a gentler web, but one that still exists if we want it to.

Comradery - co-op run Patreon alternative > Comradery is a digital platform where creators can receive monthly payments from supporters, and optionally give those supporters exclusive access to posts and media. > > What makes Comradery different is we are a worker cooperative democratically owned and controlled equally by all the creators in our organization (that means you!). Interesting Patreon-like service run as a co-operative. It seems like they are considering the governance and co-op structure up-front which is something we talked about when starting jam.coop but decided to iterate on as we grow. I really like > Comradery rejects the “hypergrowth” paradigm of the tech industry I don’t think Patreon creators (or supporters) really want it to keep growing and changing. It’s infrastructure, not a product in itself. /via James

<p>For Christmas 2023 I bought A- some more rollerskating lessons. On the first lesson back in 2024 she fell and broke her leg in two places. This had a pretty big impact on the first half of 2024! The surgery went well and she was able to make it home to us after a week in hospital. As soon as her Mum heard she flew over to us and stayed for several weeks. We were extremely grateful for this as handling the day-to-day with the boys as well as looking after A- was a lot for me to take on. It was really hard to watch A- in pain, and as the pain gave way to the frustration of being immobile it was hard to find things to keep spirits up. But as the year went on with some physiotherapy and a hard work on A-‘s part she started to become more mobile and able to handle the day-to-day routine. Her parents visited us during the school summer holidays and we were able to explore <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portreath">Cornwall</a> together for a week.</p> <p>I spent a lot more time indoors in the first part of the year than I would otherwise. I spent some of that time working on <a href="https://jam.coop">jam.coop</a> and made a little progress, but I soon got quite burned out. I find it mentally harder now to work on “serious” side projects alongside the (programming) day job. I think the reality of jam.coop is that it is only likely to gain traction if there is a serious move away from Bandcamp. In the meantime, there’s features I know I need to build and conversations I know I need to have, but finding the motivation is hard. Despite this, I’m proud that it more-or-less runs without too much intervention. Later in the year I found some time to improve the design and make <a href="https://github.com/freerange/jam-coop">some other improvements</a>.</p> <p>Another consequence of spending time indoors was that I fell into a chess rabbit hole. N- had started to show a bit of interest in the game and I decided to “brush up” a bit so that I didn’t pass on too many bad habits. Soon I’d started playing regularly myself on <a href="https://chess.com">chess.com</a> (and later on <a href="https://lichess.org/@/theharvestbow">lichess</a>). I even played a tournament at the <a href="https://www.hendonchessclub.com/">local chess club</a> where I was roundly humbled by a parade of kids. I really enjoy solving chess puzzles, and that - combined with a less helpful interest in <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8npkrey66o">chess drama</a> - turned out to be surprisingly useful when I needed a distraction from global events.</p> <p>I spent less time making music this year, but still kept up a bit of a habit. I’ve been enjoying a few music-making apps on the iPad - in particular <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/samplr/id560756420">Samplr</a> and <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/borderlands-granular/id561369733">Borderlands</a> which really make the most of the touch screen.</p> <p>Work was mostly enjoyable too. We worked with the Government Digital Service and the Raspberry Pi Foundation again, as well as a fun shorter project doing some client-side-only prototyping. It was a more stressful end to the year than we’d hoped when work dried up and it seemed very hard to find something new. Fortunately we agreed a new project for 2025 just as we broke up for Christmas.</p> <p>I’ve continued to make regular visits to the hospital as part of the <a href="https://chrislowis.co.uk/weeknotes/2024/01/01/yearnotes">clinical trial</a> and on the whole I feel well. The new medicine is proving to be very effective in a scientific sense, and is also working well for me personally.</p> <p>I spent the Christmas holiday’s in Colombia visiting family. A- and I were able to sneak away for a fun couple of days in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medell%C3%ADn">Medellín</a> and the whole family had a relaxing few days just outside Bogotá in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anapoima">Anapoima</a>. I say relaxing. F-‘s first action upon arriving at the holiday house was to take his clothes off and jump into the swimming pool. F- can’t swim. After an unscheduled, fully-clothed dip to rescue him I was grateful of the glass of whisky my father-in-law passed me.</p>