Now

Inspired by Derek Sivers’ Now page

2026-08-14

In Perth. Looking at “Theming” per Mike Vardy as an approach to productivity now I have more control over my day.
Just ordered magnetic USB cables to try and simplify charging. The Piantor came with these and they are great so far. Small plugs for micro USB and USB-C that stay in the devices and a cable with USB-C at one end and the magnetic connector at the other. Cable stays plugged in and doesn’t care if the device was Micro USB or USB-C. Plugging in the charger is just waving the end in the general direction of the device plug. No more repeated plug fails in the dark.
Ordered an ESP32 to experiment with.

Reading: Other Plans by Caimh McDonnell (Loving the Bunny books) and still reading The Productivity Diet by Mike Vardy.

2026-07-27

In Perth. Bought a Piantor split keyboard and loving the thumb keys. Re-establishing muscle memory for typing. Now trying VoxType for speech to text. More experimentation with Claude - it has fixed the blog contact page and created an Obsidian plug-in to solve a checkbox progress bar issue I couldn’t find an existing plug-in for. It continues to be mostly impressive.

Thinking about productivity in retirement.

Reading: The Quiet Man by Caimh McDonnell and The Productivity Diet by Mike Vardy (a re-read).

2026-06-14

In Perth. Looking at split keyboards and voice input on Linux. Using WisprFlow on Android. HLedger experiment is going well. Going (slowly) through Justin Guitar course and planning on using the Ulooper pedal with my Spark 40 for improvising.

Reading: Disaster Inc by Caimh McDonnell and The Mosquito by Timothy Winegard.

2026-05-12

In Perth, looking into recording with Ardour. Experimenting with HLedger plain text accounting and trying to get VIM motion keys embedded in muscle memory.

2025-08-27

At home in Perth. Experimenting with Linux Mint. Learning a lot and googling/AI searching even more.

2025-08-05

Back in Perth after a month in Malaysia. Awesome scenery, lovely people. Re-working Obsidian vault to remove Dataview/Inline fields in favour of YAML metadata and Bases/Datacore Experimenting with Claude Code and Android apps. Effectively retired now. Still on the books (gotta love long service leave) but no longer contributing.

2025-05-15

At home in Perth, Western Australia. Using and impressed with cursor ai which has fixed some of my mistakes with the blog. Learning Python and stepping into retirement.

2024-12-15

At home in Perth, Western Australia.
Learning Hugo for the blog
Last Swan Necked Turtle tracking session for the breeding year. 4 predated nests.

Reading: Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, Relight My Fire by Caimh McDonnell.