Interests
Item 0004 / The matBikepacking
Bikes, bags and a tent, at a gentle pace. I have ridden the Outer Hebridean Way, 185 miles across ten islands, and I would still rather have a good day out than a fast one.
Home automation
Home Assistant runs the flat, on an Unraid server in the corner: the lights, the heating, and more automations than one flat strictly needs.
1 musing →Technology, all of it
A huge nerd, with no plans to recover. New tools get tried on a Saturday and either kept or written about.
1 musing →AI, and where it is taking us
Not a thought leader, more a curious tinkerer with opinions. I use it every day, and I think a lot about how it is changing everything, especially how we work and how we make things. Some of that thinking ends up in the musings, and some of it in Context Manifest.
5 musings →Workshop
Things in here I cannot show yet. When they are ready they turn up on this page first.
Films
Indie, foreign, big and small: a wide taste and opinions to match. Watched properly, on a home theatre and sound system I never quite stop fiddling with.
Video and photography
Video production, photography and documentary making. Most of it ends up in Room 78 at the moment, after bike films like marooned on Cramond Island and Falkirk in a day.
Board games
Playing them, and designing them. There is one of my own on the table, which is all I will say for now.
DIY
A lot of it. If something in the flat can be built, fixed or improved with a drill and a free weekend, it probably has been, or it is on the list.
Dancing
Techno and drum and bass, as loud as they come. Sober raving: all of the dancing, none of the hangover.
Transformers lore
Not just the toys: the lore. Forty-odd years of cartoons, comics and continuities, every incarnation and retcon, and I will happily talk about most of them.
Productivity tools, configured
I run Mac, PC and Linux, and I cannot leave a default setting alone on any of them. A mouse with a thumb grid of buttons and a keyboard's spare F-keys do different things depending on which app is in front and which desk I am at, all wired up with Hammerspoon; Helm is the write-up. And at home, an Unraid geek.
Camping kit
A gear geek, forever getting the pack down to the minimum luxury: light, but not miserable. The Helinox Chair Zero comes every time, and the camp coffee system is under constant review.
Coffee
A home barista since lockdown, on an Italian Lelit espresso machine with a proper steam wand, and an oat milk latte is my order. The machine is broken just now, which has the happy side effect of getting me out of the door to a good café.
The Robert Stevenson Pilgrimage
Robert Stevenson, the lighthouse engineer and grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson, is buried in Edinburgh. So I cycled, self-supported, from his grave to the Mull of Galloway, the southernmost lighthouse in Scotland he engineered: more than 175 miles with the tent, an Aeropress, a small camping chair and a vintage copy of Kidnapped. Part two headed for the Stevenson lighthouses on Skye and the Outer Hebrides. I filmed the lot, and the documentary is on my list to edit. The fundraising for VOCAL, who support carers across the Lothians, is still open.
Collecting
More Transformers than the cupboards were ever designed to hold. Four bikes. A record collection that is frankly out of hand. And LEGO: some of it still in the shipping box after fifteen years, plus a Star Trek shuttle I absolutely did not need. I gave up cataloguing it, so nobody knows how many sets are up that loft. Not even me.
- Scottish history1
- The Burns name1
- Mysteries and the unexplained
- Walking and thinking
- Self-hosting
- Unraid
- Gadgets