Weeknotes 1

Following a trail already blazed by Nat Buckley, Alice Bartlett and Chris Zetter and at the very real risk of over-sharing, here are my first weeknotes:

• I thoroughly enjoyed playing Lucas Pope’s multi-award-winning “Return of the Obra Dinn” which is now available for the Nintendo Switch, a game I finished while walking C back to sleep at 6 am. From the use of music and text alone, you can tell this is from the creator of Papers, Please;

• I keep wanting to talk to people about how fantastic “Succession” is but so few people have heard of it, let alone seen it. I assume this is because it’s not on Netflix, Prime Video or the regular telly in the UK but I hope it gets the audience it deserves;

• On that note, I was simultaneously amused and dismayed to read that Connor Roy’s “hyperdecanting” is a real thing coined by Nathan Myhrvold;

• While I can’t really make time for London Computation Club any more, I have been thoroughly enjoying the #bread Slack channel, learning how to troubleshoot bad bakes and experiment with long autolyse times, baking from cold and scoring with scissors (in fact, as I write this, I have some dough in bulk fermentation);

• Having C in my life has predictably altered my perspective so it’s been with some trepidation that I’ve been listening to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Ghosteen” given its subject matter but it is rather wonderful;

• On a similarly morbid note, I’m considering re-reading George Saunders’ “Lincoln in the Bardo” but I am having too much fun learning about the Shrike at the moment;

• As a lot of care for C in the first few weeks involved staring directly at my phone, I went through a bit of a panic after reading Nir Eyal’s guide to avoiding digital distraction and followed quite a bit of advice on how to configure your iPhone to work for you, not against you especially around restricting notifications. I’m not entirely convinced it has helped though as I now compulsively check applications that may notify me and moving applications onto secondary screens and into folders hasn’t really increased friction significantly;

• While I have very rarely opened my laptop in the past two months, I couldn’t resist the urge to format it and do a clean install of macOS Catalina (despite the growing criticism of Apple’s recent software quality). I decided to use it as a bit of a Disaster Recovery test to see how easily I could recover my files if my hard drive was lost or failed.

  The most straightforward recovery were my photos and files stored in iCloud and passwords in our 1Password family account (though downloading over 15 years of photos took quite some time). Less successful was the restoration of my music library and many software projects from a full Backblaze backup as I hadn’t realised that Backblaze does not backup file permissions (including whether a file is executable or not). Michael Tsai wrote about Backblaze’s shortcomings in this area over five years ago and I ended up restoring those files from a Time Machine backup I’d done as a failsafe instead (I would have used David Nanian’s SuperDuper! but it doesn’t support Catalina yet).

  Following advice from others, I’ll probably relegate Backblaze for total disasters and introduce a network-based Time Machine backup, most likely connected to my Raspberry Pi;

• Thanks to Nat Buckley mentioning Claire Saffitz in their weeknotes, I binged quite a few episodes of Bon Appétit’s “Gourmet Makes” and ended up baking Dorie Greenspan’s “World Peace Cookies” mentioned in the Oreo episode and they were the best home-made cookies I’d ever made. Chris Zetter recommended Kate Davis’ “Brown Butter and Toffee Chocolate Chip Cookies” recipe so I might have to give that a go soon;

• I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time reading and talking about why the latest series of the Great British Bake Off went wrong but I was overjoyed to discover a recent episode of “Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness” about series 5 winner, Nancy Birtwhistle;

• I have a very long, unfinished blog post about React Hooks and my attempts to implement debouncing with them that I really should finish and publish on my consultancy website (especially since Chris Patuzzo mentioned it in his latest blog post) but it’ll have to wait for another day;

• Reader, you won’t believe me but I ran for the first time since I got married and, what’s more, it was my first time around the park we’ve lived next to for over six years;

• I have now been a dad for nine weeks.