I've read Austin Kleon's books so many times, but somehow I find new points to connect with each time.

Also have to highly recommend the Post-it brand "tabs" (i.e. reusable sticky page flags). They're really sturdy, very sticky but easy to reuse, and pretty cheap. They come in a bunch of sizes and colours, too. (They also have "flags" which are thinner and less sturdy—nothing wrong with those, I just really like how thick and durable the tabs are.)

• Finished rereading Under the Banner of Heaven. We gave up on the TV series after two episodes but it made me want to read the book again, and I'm glad I did. I think I took it in better this time around. It's pretty dense, and dragged a bit by the end, but worth reading if you don't know much about the history of the Mormon church (I disagree with the TV series calling it a true crime book)
• Josh sent me this list of popular Sci-Fi novels and I added quite a few to my wishlist. I started reading Girl One this week
• I'm playing Zelda BOTW on my Switch at the moment. I find it tricky sometimes and wouldn't mind a difficulty setting I could turn down, but it's also pretty fun
• We watched episode one of The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder's new show, and really enjoyed it. It definitely has Nathan For You vibes, but I think I like it more so far (If you're a fan and haven't already seen it, How to with John Wilson is also great)
• We started rewatching Borgen and I'm loving it. I'll forever call Birgitte Mrs. Borgen, or Borgen for short
• I've been writing more Javascript this week as I work more on the web parts of Exist and I'm slowly getting the hang of it

I've made some good progress with Python this week, and made a few more adjustments to my workflow.

Here's what I've been up to:

This week I've been doing a lot of fiddly work, as we've had some other stuff going on around the house. This kind of work is easier to pick and put down when reacting to what's happening during the day, as it doesn't require as much focus as regular work. And it's stuff that I wanted to get done to improve my setup and process for proper development work.

2020 review.

Highlights of 2021

A few months ago I released a new app called Hello Meds. It's a medication tracker for iOS. I drafted this post when the app was in beta but never got around to finishing it up, so here's a quick intro to why I built Hello Meds.

There are plenty of medication tracking apps available for iOS already, but most of them are based around the idea of taking the same medication, at the same dose, at the same times every day. While this is obviously a common use-case, my needs are different. My medication dosages and timings change often, depending on other variables in my life. Hello Meds is designed around this use-case in particular, where you want to keep track of the medications and dosages you take, but don't want or need to adhere to a pre-set schedule.

2019 review.

Highlights of 2020

It's a bit late, but I'm settled into my planner setup for 2020, so I thought I'd share what I've picked this year.

This is my first Jibun Techo-free year since 2017 and I miss it! I picked a Hobonichi Cousin Avec, which has very similar weekly pages, but next year I'll switch back to the Jibun. I've used the Cousin for logging meals, workouts, medications, health symptoms, events, and small notes about my day. For the first half of the year I used the daily pages to stick in photos and ephemera, but the book got really fat by the end of June (as my Jibun usually does, too). The Cousin Avec comes in two books, one for each half of the year, so when I switched to the second book in July I stopped sticking stuff into the daily pages. I'm using some of the daily pages for journalling, but some pages will end up empty and I'm okay with that.

I'm obsessed with

Mike Lowery's drawings. Poring over Mike's drawings recently encouraged me to draw on paper again, after exclusively drawing on my iPad Pro for the last few months.

I'm obsessed with

Austin Kleon's blog again. Once or twice every year I go through a phase of reading through his archives and immersing myself in his ideas. I may even re-read his books this time around, too.

I'm obsessed with

Planners! I've got a Hobonichi Cousin Avec this year, which is split into two books, one for each half of the year. I only have a month to go before it's time to swap them out, so I'm spending lots of time thinking about how I might want to change things up for the second half of the year.

I'm obsessed with

My health. I've been doing telehealth calls with my doctor recently to figure out some bothersome-but-not-serious issues I noticed around the start of lockdown. It's a nice bonus that telehealth calls are all bulk billed, since I've had a few follow ups.

I'm obsessed with

Workouts! I've finally started to get back into going to the gym consistently after a lot of disruption to the start of the year. I've started using the GZCL method for my lifting program, and I'm really enjoying having a bit more structure to my weights routine.