It’s Sunday night with just a few days to go until Christmas. Not really any links, but here are my happenings.

Happenings

  • Been a busy one, hence the lack of activity on here. There has been a lot of sickness going around. I’ve managed to get away with only a mild cough so far, but both my kids have been sick; one of them is sick now, asleep next to me. Hoping that now school and nursery have broken up they may be able to recover by Christmas.
  • How has digital detoxing going? I don’t know, it’s hard. There are good days and bad days. But encouraging family and friends to email rather than text has been great. I really enjoy reading and replying to them. That’s one change I’d like to stick.
  • I went back to the gym yesterday for the first time in a few months. I kind of stopped going because a) my work timetable changed and offered fewer opportunities to go during the work week and b) the amount of food I was needing to eat to build strength felt unsustainable, and was upsetting my gut. To be honest, b) is still a problem, but I was getting miserable and inactive, and part of me hopes I’ll be able to find a strategy that makes it sustainable. Anyway, I’d like to say that I feel great for having worked out, but actually, I feel like I’ve been hit by a bus.
  • After following a link from 82MHz, I tried the terminal-based email client aerc, and I have to say I’m really enjoying it. It’s surprisingly easy to use, and not difficult to set up. I just have a wrapper script that gets my email passwords from bitwarden, and then I can read and write email from aerc, using Neovim as the editor. All I want to know now is where is the good TUI calDAV client?
  • In more boring email news, I quit Mailfence and went back to Zoho. Mailfence is the clear winner in terms of privacy and is great and has all the features I want, too… but email goes missing with far too much regularity, and those that do arrive often fall foul of the zealous spam filter, even those that are clearly not spam — so there’s a lot of manual whitelisting to do, and the length of the whitelist is capped! The missing email thing is the real kicker… it’s always most noticeable with confirmation and verification emails that you expect and/or require to come through pretty much immediately, but I’ve also had other important email go missing such as stuff from my solicitor when buying a house. This is a known problem with the service, frequently complained in the subreddit… but it has been going on for years.
  • I did a nice Rosé Pine rice of my Pocket Reform, which looks great as the device itself is purple.
  • Last day of term: usually we take the kids to the cinema (which is a nightmare, they cannot conceive of just watching the film, it is chaos), but the cinema priced us out this time. So the school hired a big screen to be set up in the hall, and thus we recreated the cinema experience. It a mixed bag; it was still chaos with the young years but the older students seemed to be capable of just watching the film.

Links

Games

I’m back playing Sekiro, after the light relief that was Hollow Knight: Silksong. I’m not joking about that, by the way, or being contrarian. Silksong is a hard game, but it is nothing compared to Sekiro, which is probably the most demanding game I’ve ever played. Every boss in Sekiro I just expect to take hours, whereas most Silksong bosses fell in single-digit attempts for me. Silksong has more punishing run-backs, though, and so far no area of Sekiro has been as much of a slog as Bilewater.