Weeknotes #217

I’m sick. It feels like the kids have rotated through a variety of colds over the past couple of weeks and while I’d hoped my immune system would provide sufficient protection, my luck has run out. So far, it’s just been a head cold and with any luck my body will fight it off successfully over the next couple of days.

The diet is not going well. I had hoped that the ‘AI’ assistance in FoodNoms would allow me to avoid laboriously looking up the details of the food I’m eating but it hasn’t really worked out that way. I still want to track everything accurately but doing that is such a pain that I find myself writing down less and less of what I’m eating. Of course, I realise that’s not the real issue: I want to eat the foods I like (which are often unhealthy) and I don’t have the willpower to stop myself a lot of the time.

On the plus side, the Japanese study has gone better. I don’t know if I’m improving all that much but I remain hopeful that the sheer consistency of it will produce something over the next few months. Sadly, the focus on Japanese has come at the expense of programming. I was working on a JavaScript project but I haven’t opened the Safari Tab Group I set aside for it in more than two weeks.

The thought behind the renewed focus on Japanese was that I’m not happy with the ‘product’ of the attention I’ve spent over the past few years. This is admittedly an evergreen theme for me. Well, it’s on the basis of similar logic that I decided to move the Ivory and Bluesky apps off my primary Home Screen and impose more discipline on my web browsing. Anything I come across that I want to read, I add to Safari’s Reading List. Throughout the week, I read when I feel like it and then every Monday morning, I delete everything and start fresh. It’s admittedly a bit indirect but the goal is to actually increase the amount of time I spend reading books. The thought if that if reading on the web is more deliberate, it’ll help me open the Kindle app instead.

It isn’t all self-improvement. I played a little more of Jedi: Fallen Order with John and finally have made it off Kashyyyk. The game only started crashing there so hopefully that means the end of that.

I started using Signal now that they’ve finally added usernames. You do still have a phone number associated with your account (which I don’t like) but you can at least hide it from the people with which you communicate. Mostly this has been to Eugenia’s benefit. Apparently, I was only the iMessage user with which she was communicating regularly.

Apple has introduced a new playlist called ‘Heavy Rotation’ (MacRumors). When I checked in with Brandon about it, he wasn’t impressed but I wonder if that not because of ‘how’ he listens to music. I think that tends to be more album-oriented than not and in my brief experience with the playlist it doesn’t work well if you do that.

I will say that the playlist does seem to be updating inconsistently. Supposedly it refreshes every 24 hours but I’ve seen longer delays than that and I’ve also seen songs I know I’ve listened to repeatedly over the past few days not appear for a while. Like Boyce Avenue’s cover of ‘Radioactive’ (Apple Music).