Monthly report: April 2026

On the road, as it were, right now, so this report will be updated with the necessaries when possible.

Highlights of the month:

• Published a link to Photographs on the main site
• Seedlings still having a hard time of it, but other stuff on the terrace flourishing
• Sporadic meals outdoors
• Good bike rides
• Visit to the firefighters’ museum
• Sinners in the cinema at midday
• 300 issues of Eat This Newsletter
• Started on a Melt the ICE hat with yarn selected by The Squeeze
• A few days away as designated driver for The Squeeze
• Watering system working again
• Trains to and from Düsseldorf for IWC
• Visit with an old chum not seen in years
• Poor lecture on a fascinating topic; floods on the Tiber.

Activities

April:

• Walking with sticks: 1
• Reading: 12
• Steps (avge): 8356
• Podcasts: 14 (all of them logged)
• In bed/asleep 7:52/7:43
• Cycled: 3
• Weight (avge): 90.8
• Naps: 14

March:

• Walking with sticks: 2
• Reading: 24
• Steps (avge): 8383
• Podcasts: 14 (all of them logged)
• In bed/asleep 8:11/8:02
• Cycled: 2
• Weight (avge): 90.3
• Naps: 16

Daylight savings → less time in bed

Stuff Done

IWC DUS was a lot of fun, seeing old friends and meeting new ones. I didn’t achieve much on Create Day, unless you count learning how much more I have to learn to do the thing I wanted to do: style webmentions. Now that I know, it is equal top of my todo list, but I have not actually made a start, which may be contributing to a growing sense that things are out of control.

Hours logged per month

See Niggles; to be updated when I am back at the desktop machine.

Previous years are still on an archive page.

Goals

Five posts isn’t too shabby.

Niggles

About that out of control feeling: This often happens when I have been away from home too much, twice this month. Things back up while I am away, partly because I am busy with other stuff and partly because I am not as happy doing things on the laptop as I am on the desktop machine. At IWC I made a list of tasks I needed to finish to make the laptop more of a mirror in its capabilities. I did some of them, but that has to continue, which will require more learning. Still, that’s what I live for.

One example, in the spirit of thinking out loud. I have a few Python scripts that I rely on to do some tedious analysis, like make the graphs of how I spend my time. I very seldom need to run them from the laptop, and when I do, often the underlying data are not here. I can imagine a few solutions, with varying levels of complexity and fragility. I could share the entire Python folder using Syncthing. Inefficient. I could remind myself to copy the files from one machine to the other before any trip. Fragile. Or I could put the Python stuff on my Raspberry Pi and access it via Raspberry Pi Connect or Tailscale. How? But I can’t decide where to put my initial efforts. I suspect doing it on the Pi would have the biggest potential future payoff, but I don’t know, and that makes it hard for me to begin.

Final remarks

All is actually very good, and I am currently enjoying sunshine and stout in County Limerick, so, yes!

Here’s the table