First, a happy new year to anyone who happens across this. I like new years, I know it’s ultimately meaningless, that the notion of ‘2026’ is pretty nebulous when you think about it, i.e. the earth has been round the sun 2026 times since the figurehead of a religion that many don’t even follow may or may not have been born, but we are where we are and it’s as good a time as any to pause and reflect. I always think of the beginning of January as like starting a new diary, putting aside the old one which is full of what went before, whether good or bad, and cracking open a shiny new book with blank pages ready to be filled. As for resolutions, I recently realised that the best time to start a new year’s resolution is in October or November… get into good habits, let them be derailed by Christmas, then start afresh. I joined a gym in September and I’ve been 2 or 3 times a week since (apart from a couple of weeks in early December when I had a bad back) so I think I’m more likely to keep it up into the new year than if I was starting now. I try to use my time more, do some reading, do some writing, I’ve set a couple of hours aside in the morning (I’m an early riser) to go to the gym (physical) or do something mentally stimulating. Got sidetracked by Christmas, but here I am!

I now have a laptop dedicated to writing, both private stuff and posts for this site. I’m writing this on it, it’s a Thinkpad T520 which I’ve had for a few years and which has had various OSes installed but I’ve settled (for now) on Endeavour OS with the i3 window manager. I’ve had ‘writing laptops’ before - they generally have arcane setups to persuade myself to focus but I spend more time setting them up than doing any actual writing. Hopefully this time it’ll be different! I’ve used Linux pretty much exclusively for a while, it started quite gradually installing it on spare machines, running into problems then going back to Windows at first, then took over to the point where the only Windows machine in the house is my work laptop and the only other iteration is a spare SSD that slots in to this very machine if required (although it never is). I’ve distro hopped, generally using the Debian/Ubuntu strain, with Mint being a particular favourite for some time, now I have this machine with Endeavour, which is developed from Arch, my ‘main’ laptop runs Fedora (XFCE desktop environment) and the server and backup server (which deserve their own post at some point) run FreeBSD. I’ve toyed with i3 here and there, thought it might be useful for a no-frills, no distraction machine so here it is. There’s quite a learning curve, I’m subconsciously reaching for the touchpad to open up a menu that doesn’t exist but my thought process is that the more I use it the more I’ll get used to it. The personal writing saves to a Proton drive connected via rclone and the website updates via github. It’s been quite an experience getting everything working; now all I need to do is start using the thing for its intended purpose…

I got into music at 15, which seems quite late but I soon made up for it. I was soon filling my bedroom with vinyl and cassettes, then three years later CDs. Live music came later, with my first gig in December 1987 at the tender age of 18 (The Cure). I’ll cover live music separately, that’s a post all of its own. My tastes are quite wide, my favourite decade is the 80s (oddly) but my hot take is that the best year for music was 1979 (I have absolutely nothing to back this up, just a feeling). Discovering music was tricky in the last century, you relied on the radio and music papers, neither of which is ideal, but the internet has made it so much easier to discover new music (along with pretty much everything else) - a double-edged sword because while it’s great having pretty much everything ever recorded at your fingertips, it’s also overwhelming. I just want to listen to it all! Also my interest in discovering new music waned through the 21st century, I guess part of getting older (why listen to something new when there was so much great stuff from 30 or 40 years ago?). ...

I started this site to reduce the amount of time I spend on social media, so it seemed appropriate to make the first post about just that. I’m not giving it up entirely, given the time of year it would be ripe fodder for a New Year’s resolution, but I am guilty of doomscrolling and want to cut down. Best way to do that I figured was to find another outlet. ...