-
It was Emma’s birthday. She requested a Pikachu ice cream cake (for some reason) from Baskin-Robbins but they were out of that and so I ordered a Sanrio cake instead. The main present is meant to be a new bicycle since she’s outgrown her current one but with the upcoming move, we’ve put that off for the time being.
-
Brandon returned to Singapore without me finding a way to catch up with him. I felt pretty terrible (to be clear, the fault was all mine). There was the outside possibility of us meeting up on his last night in Tokyo but he had an early flight and hadn’t felt that well so we decided it wasn’t worth risking things for one hour of griping about the iPhone 16e.
-
Speaking of which, the iPhone 16e came out and it was pretty disappointing (Apple PR). The iPhone SE is the phone my mother has been buying for a couple of generations now and I thought was a great choice for budget conscious users. The iPhone 16e isn’t a bad phone, but it’s not a cheap phone and I’m worried former SE buyers don’t really have a great option any more. I’m also very confused by the decision to call it the iPhone 16e, that is to tie it numerically to a particular series of iPhone. Does this mean there’ll be an iPhone 17e next year?
-
I’m almost two months late but I finally got a budget drawn up for 2025. Looking at the predictions for the rest of the year’s finances was a sobering reminder of why I’d avoided doing this. I did admittedly make a number of conservative assumptions which will hopefully prove to be far too conservative but I won’t know that until later in the year and so in the meantime, will be trying to live as frugally as you can with three young children.
-
Eri and I had originally planned to get television piped into the house over the fibre optic connection that’s being installed but decided in the end to go with an old-fashioned aerial. With installation, it’s not exactly cheap but it does have the virtues of no monthly fee and one fewer box to plug into the television itself. Oh, and it might mean more bandwidth for Internet use. (It was never clear to me how that would be impacted by getting TV over IP but surely it must have meant some of that bandwidth was going to be consumed, right?)
-
Maciej Cegłowski wrote another entry in his excellent series on the problems with a manned mission to Mars. If you have any interest in spaceflight, this is a bracing read on some of the difficulties with getting humans to Mars and back.
-
Danny Boyd of CinemaStix has a great little video essay about Quentin Tarantino and Pulp Fiction which, well, unless you’re already familiar with Boyd’s essays is built around a conceit that you might miss so apologies for the ‘spoiler’ but the entire essay is simply excerpts from interviews Tarantino has given. The essay is now blandly titled ‘yeahhh, the dude’s just on another level’ but the title when I watched it was far better: ‘when you just can’t talk over the director’.
-
Teenage Mike is sad how little rock there is in my life these days and so was a little perked up when I came across the Wombats’ 2024 release Oh! The Ocean (Apple Music).
