Weeknotes 2025, week 2

16 Jan 2025

✈️ Spent a lot of this week planning for a trip I’m taking in Feb. An opportunity came up out of the blue and after some thinking and discussion, I decided to go for it, so I’ll be in the U.S. for all of Feb. I booked flights, a hotel for my layover in Auckland, and looked into travel insurance this week. I also organised orders for small bits and pieces I’ll need, like a GaN charger with a U.S. plug, a solid lotion bar so I don’t have to take liquid hand cream on the plane, and some ink cartridges for my fountain pens, so I can take them without needing to take ink bottles.

For years I’ve traveled with carry-on only, and I don’t miss the hassle of dealing with checked luggage at all. It’s so much quicker and easier at both ends of a flight to skip checked luggage. But it was pretty tough to pull off a 3-week trip to Europe in 2023 with carry-ons only, and that time there were two of us so we could spread the load a bit better. I’d really like to go carry-on only this time, but I’m worried it’ll be too restrictive in terms of clothing, since it’s winter in the U.S. right now, and/or that I won’t be able to stay under the 7kg limit, since I’ll need to bring my laptop for work, which is around 2kg itself (I didn’t choose it with travel in mind, but since I almost exclusively use it at my desk with an external monitor these days, I’ll get something smaller and lighter whenever I upgrade it in future).

👩🏻‍💻 I went back to work this week, a bit earlier than last year, since studying part-time means I often take time off work to prep for my exams, so I decided to even it up with a shorter end-of-year break.

I made some good progress on the redesign of Exist for iOS and caught up on the backlog of support emails from the holiday period.

🔨 I gave Ghostty a try recently, and Hyper (again) but neither of them stuck, so I’m sticking with Tabby for now. I like to rename and colour-code tabs in my terminal, and Tabby supports this while neither of the others do. I also found Ghostty didn’t recover my open tabs when it restarted, which Tabby does.

I also tried Zed this week because Pycharm kept freezing every time I opened a project in it, but didn’t like Zed at all. It’s a shame nothing really comes close to Pycharm for Python development on Mac, because I find it often has annoying bugs (the previous version froze whenever I quit the app, so I had to force quit to get it to close every single time).I’m also not impressed at how much the newer versions are focused on AI features. Alas, it’s the best option for now, and when it works it’s great.

🚘 Did a short drive by myself this week, just to run an errand. It’s important that I keep practising, since I haven’t had my licence for long and I’m still not a confident driver, but I don’t make the effort to practise much because I don’t really enjoy it, still. So a little forced practice sometimes is helpful, and it reminded me that I can drive, and it’s nice to be able to when needed.