2025

Warning: statistics ahead.

As various services either encourage users to write a year review, or in some cases just do it for you, here is the summary output of my lifelogging for the last 12 months.

Travel

I'm not a big fan of travel, particularly by air, so until this year I'd not actually left the UK since 2020. Somehow I ended up taking two long multi-stop trips which meant I visited four countries - one of which I'd never been to before - in the space of a year, which for me is a lot. I also left the northern hemisphere for the first time in my life when I travelled to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands.

Countries visited: Portugal, Spain, Netherlands and Ecuador
Longest journey: 6309.39 miles, flight from Amsterdam to Quito
Times equator crossed: 8
Time spent in southern hemisphere: 8 days, 17:09:41
Distance driven with no MOT or insurance: 103 miles

Health

I'm not particularly fit, but I try to log when I'm doing healthy things. I've had a bit of a lull in my cycling distance since the pandemic, so to log over 500 miles this year was a pleasant surprise.

Cycling distance: 501.87 miles
Walking distance: 430.71 miles
Total steps: 2,111,988
Steps per day: 5786 (mean)
Parkruns attended: 5
Parkruns actually run: 0

Communication

Phone Calls: 63 (33 made / 30 received)
SMS messages: 642 (228 sent / 414 received)
Phones: 4

Music

Tracks played: 3922 (1554 unique tracks)
Artists played: 354 (27 artists discovered)
Albums played: 577 (31 albums discovered)
Most played artist: Battle Beast
Most played song: Вогні by Go_A
Gigs as sound engineer: 4
Gigs as keyboard player: 1

Movies

My cinema trips this year were limited mainly due to my own laziness and the fact that movies are on streaming services somewhere in the world at the same time, if not before, their UK cinema release date these days.

Movies seen: 25
Best movie seen: Train to Busan
Movies seen in a cinema: 2

Misc

Transformers bought: 2
Hedgehog House visits: 26
Rats in Hedgehog House: 6
Dead cats found on driveway: 1
Hedgehog fights: 1

PSA: For those who use Edge and don't like the new sidebar that seems to have appeared whether you want it to or not, in the registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Edge, set DWORD value HubsSidebarEnabled to 0 (zero). Go to edge://policy and click 'Reload' to apply changes

Conference organisers: if you need to point out that your conference is "prestigious" in the spam emails you send to random uninterested people like myself, then I'm going to assume you don't know what the word "prestigious" actually means.

Today's achievement: solving a rubik's cube using only one hand. Which marginally beats yesterday's putting up a shelf.

This article mirrors my experience of ChatGPT (and current AI/ML in general); sometimes correct, often very confidently wrong https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/dont-believe-chatgpt

Because ice cream shops are the one thing Southampton is short of... https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/leisure/23328423.scooperb-ice-cream-parlour-open-southampton/?ref=rss

"This is then expressed in such a way that a machine delivers a convincing but completely fictitious answer". Oh, you mean like Google often does? https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/national/uk-today/23322507.google-issues-warning-anyone-used-chatgpt/?ref=rss

It'll be a shame if Twitter restrict access to the API to paid customers only ... my second screen that displays tweets related to the current TV show will stop working, which will remove half the fun of the Eurovision Song Contest final.

I can't help but think that somewhere at Microsoft there's an email to someone high up saying "Do a Google on us and this'll happen again, and we won't be around to fix it."

I don't get the obsession with 'readable' code. My PHP code from 2001 is readable, whether you understand it or not is on you (...and possibly how drunk I was at the time... but mainly you.)

Every time I've opened my garage door of late the same cat appears from nowhere and sits at the door looking at me. I think they want to come in out of the cold but I don't know the catspeak for "this door stays locked, you come in here, you don't get out". So "shoo" has to do :(

An addendum: spoofing the user agent ID to make the site think I was using Chrome solved the problem. And the page rendered (IMHO) completely normally. This just seems like arrogance on the part of the web developer to me.

I just followed a link to a site to be told "your browser is not supported". No context or best attempt to render the page, the site just saw I was using a browser it didn't like (Firefox) and refused to serve me content. I like nostalgia, but the late 90s Browser Wars can do one

Is it just me that feels there needs to be some kind of ASA crackdown on broadband providers? I don't think there's a single broadband advert on telly at the minute that doesn't have some kind of misleading claim, massive over-simplification or outright lie in it.

Me in 2003: a nerd online trying to convince users of MSN/AIM/Yahoo/ICQ that XMPP is the best IM protocol.

Me in 2023: a nerd online trying to convince users of Slack/Telegram/Whatsapp/Facebook that XMPP is the best IM protocol.

At a time when there are so many "productivity" apps on all the app stores, and multiple browser extensions for blocking "unproductive" websites, it's nice to know that the alternative also exists... https://www.productivityblocker.com/

Video from 2019: For this tutorial, we'll be using a Raspberry Pi, which is a really inexpensive single-board computer... Me in 2022: [uncontrollable laughter]

Always nice when I attend a product launch presentation and the main developer recommends a tool I wrote as a companion to their product. Especially when the aforementioned tool was written in less than a day and the intended user base was a total of three people.

Man in toy shop: "this takes four AA batteries, would you like to buy some?" Me (out loud): "it's OK, I have plenty at home, thanks." Me (thinking): "by the time I'm finished with this thing, it won't run on AAs any more, trust me."

If php were british... https://aloneonahill.com/blog/if-php-were-british/