Now
Living
Living in a small town in Brandenburg after many years in Berlin. We're slowly renovating an 90-year-old house which had exciting original features like Third Reich windows and a DDR-era electrical system. The big construction stuff is done, now it's the making it look nice stage.
Working
Right now, I'm on a break. The last five ten years have been pretty relentless; so after my previous employer ran out of money, I spent the back half of 2024 renovating chunks of the house, working on some side projects, and generally unwinding my head a bit. Eventually I'll run out of walls to paint, but I'll see where I'm at in a couple of months. One of the upsides of a relentless five years is a healthy "fuck you" budget so this time I can afford to be a bit more deliberate about what to do next.
Reading
The Kindle backlog isn’t getting any smaller, because I haven’t been commuting since the Before Covid Times. I’m trying to add more German language into the mix, but it’s a balance between things that are too-far beyond my comprehension level which get me lost, or things which are easy to read but not well-written. The first 3 entries in the “most recent” list: Glenkill; [Wool](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(series); Poets of Matter
Watching
Silo - I would never have looked twice at this if I’d seen the „dystopian“ label, but I’m glad I did. The setting reminds me very strongly of Romania.
Yellowstone: not a single sympathetic character amongst them, but still oddly-compelling.
Slow Horses - slightly spoilered by having read the books, but worth watching anyway.
Listening
I tried Apple Music as an alternative to Spotify for a while, but it didn't stick. My Spotify auto-generated weekly playlist changes so much from week to week bu it's more-or-less impossible to summarise, but there's a lot of Bach in there at the moment. It's maths set to music, which appeals to my inner nerd.
The podcasts on rotation are [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl/episodes/downloads](In Our Time), https://www.luxcapital.com/riskgaming and [https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/the-joy-of-why/](The Joy Of Why)
Coding
The various side projects of the last few years are still running, so I have a huge list of dusty half-completed ideas lingering on GitHub.
The joy of a new old house is the chance to try to automate it all by retrofitting new technology to resolutely-analogue ausyems, so there's a pile of ESP boards and various sensors on one end of my desk. And I’m still trying to figure out the best stack and processes and workflow for keeping this site more up to date.
Running
I’m still not back at pre-Covid levels after most of a year. That could equally be aging-related, of course. I’m deliberately trying not to overdo it this time.