Weeknotes – 1744 of 4175

Hi all 👋 Hope you had a good week. My week was pretty quiet (as the short weeknotes will reflect).

🏡 Life Update

The theme of this week continues to be me and my girlfriend looking to buy our first home. We’re having to pull out of the one we’ve put an offer accepted for¹. Our cirumstances have changed and we have fallen in love with a gorgeous cottage.

All my life I’ve wanted to life in a cottage, so the chance to fulfill that dream is too good to miss. It is gorgeous and has everything you want from a cottage: wooden beams, cubby holes, slightly quirky (but large) layout, and a log burner We’ve put in an offer today. Let’s hope they accept.

Oh also, my Honda Civic turned 20 years old this week.

💭 Short Thoughts and Notes

Because I’m going to be a home owner at some point in the next few months I’ve gotten serious about budgeting again.

Many years ago I used YNAB, which I still like. But it’s $15 a month. So I’ve looked elsewhere. Actual is a good one. But I decided to go really geeky and am using hledger. Will I find it too tiresome and ‘manual’? Eventually. But right now it’s mostly fun.

Has a main character on a TV show ever actually died by drowning? It’s always just a cliffhanger.

I use Arq to backup files on my MacBook Pro. But it can feel a bit ‘heavy’ and slow at times. So I looked for other options for my Mac mini and I went with restic.

It uses the CLI – unlike Arq with its GUI.

But to be honest, the GUI of Arq doesn’t do the main thing I want anyway: quickly preview different versions of a file to work out which is the one that I want to restore.² So it doesn’t make too much of difference that restic lacks a GUI.

I’m impressed by restic thus far. It’s fast, and uses a tiny amount of CPU.

I’m using it to backup my most important files to AWS S3 – with backups being sent to S3 Glacier after a month, so save money.

And my slightly less important media files are backed up to Scaleway Glacier, which only costs £1.66 per TB a month.

And you know what they say, your backups aren’t truly backups until you’ve confirmed you can actually restore data from them.

Well I had to this morning. I made a mistake when doing a git rebase and lost some files. So I ran the restic command and restored the data in seconds. I’m impressed.

Food labelling around how the animals were treated before they were murdered really needs to be changed.

Maybe I’m just thick, but it’s all so vague and I’m not sure exactly what they mean. “Organic” and “Higher Welfare” are meaningless to me. At least “Free to Roam” is somewhat descriptive.

But I think most of the UK public is in a similar boat to me.

I went to a pub and at one point had three dogs in my eyeline. That should be a legal requirement for all pubs.

Something I like about 4K BluRays is that old films are being ‘rereleased’ on them.

It’s a great way to discover films you might not have seen before.

In May, a film I very much have seen before arrives on BluRay: A Knight’s Tale. It’s a film I love.

Looking forward to watching it on 4K.

🔗 Short Links

• “21 Things I Wish I Knew in My Twenties”

🍽️ Food

Usually when I buy a whole chicken I use it for a roast dinner. But this week we mixed it up a used it to make a Nandosesque chicken dish with chips and coleslaw. It was a success. I love a roast, so it was a bit of a risk potentially ‘wasting’ that chicken making something else.

It was a extra-large chicken. So the next day we used the leftovers to make chicken wraps, which were delightful.

🎵 Music

I listened to a bit of Jackson Browne. His music is gorgeous. His songs have a melancholic beauty that hits the same part of my brain as Van Morrison. He’s also a rare 1960/70’s musician in that had some very good albums outside of those two decades. With songs like Hold Out, Call It a Loan, On The Day, In the Shape of a Heart, Sky Blue and Black.

I saw someone rate Low as David Bowie’s best album. Not having heard it for a while, I gave it a listen. I don’t know what the best Bowie album is. But it’s Low.