Alex Marshall

Deploying blog posts straight from my phone

2026-10-21T11:19:00Z

One of the reasons I built my website was because I wanted to write more stuff. I added a blog page for longer pieces of writing, and a notes page for unstructured snippets; random thoughts, status updates and links to cool stuff I'd found

An issue I very quickly found was that my workflow (if you want to call it that) was awkward considering when and where I wanted to write, versus when and where I could actually publish.

My site is built with eleventy and deployed with Netlify and when I finally understood that publishing a blog post just meant writing an .md file, putting it into the right folder and deploying my changes, I was amazed at how easy it was - I was expecting it to be much more complex than CMS website builders that I was previously used to.

The problem was, especially with short-form notes, the time gap between me writing a post on my phone, and sitting down at my computer to copy the post, fix the formatting, and publish the changes was pretty significant. So much so that I've got a pile of posts that have never made it out of my drafts folder

I'm pleased to say though that I've finally found a solution

I use an app called Working Copy that clones my GitHub repo to my phone, and then syncs every time there's a change on either side. (Auto-syncing is a pro feature but manual syncing works on the free version. The pro upgrade is a one-time fee for £30)

I then use Outerline - a simple app for writing markdown (£9.99 one-time-purchase). Outerline can save files wherever you want, so I've set my Library to the Posts folder in my cloned repo. I write a new post, rename it to match my naming conventions, move it into the right folder and hit save. Working Copy notices the change and commits it, which triggers Netlify to deploy a new build

To make things even more straightforward for publishing Notes, I've got a Shortcut set up that gets the current date & time, and asks me for the content and any links or tags, then converts it into frontmatter and opens the file in Outerline for me to review and save

I'm glad to finally have this working. If all has gone to plan then this very post will be published directly to my site, all from the (moderate) comfort of my train seat as I travel up to Newcastle for Converge 2026

Pokédex 2.0

2026-02-24T16:03:39Z

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a blog post about starting a Pokémon living dex. 12 months on and I’ve made some progress! When I wrote that blog post, I clearly didn’t expect to make much tbf, but some is better than none

Am I underestimating how difficult this challenge is going to be? Probably. Am I going to get distracted by something else in a few weeks time and then forget all about this? Almost definitely. Am I going to have a good time along the way anyway? I bloody well hope so

Well in creating this new website, I thought it’d be a fun opportunity to revisit the Pokédex and, most importantly, break out of my nightmarish Google Sheets

So just to recap, I’m trying to

Complete an Origin Form Dex
Complete every National Dex

But what the h*ck does that actually mean? Well an Origin Form Dex is more complex version of a Living Dex. A Living Dex requires storing one of every Pokémon (all 1025 of them) in Pokémon Home (it’s iCloud but for Pokémon). This means storing, for example, Bulbasaur, Ivysaur AND Venusaur, rather than just registering the pre-evolutions and storing the final evolution.

A Form Dex requires storing all form, regional and gender variants for all 1025 Pokémon. That includes both Original and Alolan Geodude, all 28 Unown variants (A-Z and ! and ?), and male and female Gyarados (male has blue whiskers, female has white)

And an Origin dex means catching those Pokémon in the game (or at least the region) that they first appeared in. This means catching a Pikachu in Pokémon Red, Blue or Yellow

As of the time of writing, this means that I’ve got 1394 Pokémon to catch and store in Pokémon Home to complete my Origin Form Dex

And as a separate challenge, just for funsies, I’m trying to complete every National Dex too. This is much more straightforward - it just involves completing the Pokédex in every game. The Pokédex in Pokémon Gold and Silver for example contains 251 Pokémon - 151 from Kanto (generation 1) and 100 from Johto (generation 2). I want to catch all 251.

I’ve been playing Pokémon since I was a kid, but I’ve never actually completed a Pokédex. Now as a grown-ass 33 year old man, it’s probably about time I did

Adding a next event widget

2026-02-10T22:38:02Z

This year I’d like to meet more people irl. I’ve not done a particularly good job of building an irl network over the past few years, and I’d like to change that. To help with that, and just because it was a bit of fun to put together, I’ve added a 'Next event' widget to my dashboard that shows the next irl event I’m attending

I’ve got an events.json file where I can add details like event-name, location and date

[
    {
        "name": "bristol coffee festival",
        "date": "2026-09-12",
        "city": "bristol",
        "country": "england"
    }
]

And then a nextEvent.js script that finds the next upcoming event (I did have to chatGPT this because it’s way out of my league atm).

module.exports = () => {
  const events = require("./events.json");
  const now = new Date();
  now.setHours(0,0,0,0);

  return events
    .map(e => ({ ...e, dateObj: new Date(e.date) }))
    .filter(e => e.dateObj >= now)
    .sort((a, b) => a.dateObj - b.dateObj)[0] || null;
}

And then with a little bit of nunjucks it magically appears on the dashboard (yay!)

Hey, it’s been a while

2026-02-10T16:01:39Z

Hello, it’s me, remember me? Somewhere through 2025, I pretty much dipped out of social media. It was the usual stuff of feeling burnt out with creation, and fed up of consumption. I gradually began lurking again and now I’m kinda back, so hey, what’s up

A few updates from the last few months

I’ve got back into running after knackering my hips last year. On a pretty good routine so far. Still using Runna as my coach
I became an uncle! My niece is a straight up cute lump of mashed potato
I lost my job boooo. I’m now on the hunt for a Design System Lead or Senior UI/Product Design role
I finally got my act together and rebuilt this website into something that I’ve always wanted it to be. It’s not quite perfect just yet, but I am STOKED with the direction it’s heading in
I got engaged wooo! V. excited about this

I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things but anyway, this was just my way of announcing that that I’m going to try and be more active online. If you want more, you can find me on Bluesky, Mastodon and LinkedIn

A crisis of consoles

2025-02-28T11:45:35Z

These are going to be mostly disconnected thoughts that have popped into my head whilst I’m waiting for my Wagamama to arrive, about a confused situation I find myself in concerning video game consoles

I’ve been an Xbox gamer for years. I bought an Xbox One on launch because all my mates were getting one. Then I got a One X and I’ve now got a Series X. Before I got the One, I had a PS2 Slim, and I now also have a PS5. That being said, I’ve always been into the Xbox ecosystem - consoles, exclusive games etc - much more than I have with PlayStation.

The Forza Horizon series on Xbox is my favourite video game series of all time. I’ve got a lot of hours across the five games and a lot of warm memories of playing them over the years. Forza Horizon has been an Xbox exclusive since day one, and was one of, if not the main reason that I’ve stuck with Xbox all these years. Microsoft however recently announced that Forza Horizon 5 would be launching on PS5 this year. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for getting rid of console exclusives - just let people play games - but this leaves me in a bit of a predicament.

I’ve been playing on my PS5 a little bit more often lately - I’m playing through Spider-Man: Miles Morales - and the UI and UX of the PlayStation OS is so fun. This is boosted drastically atm because of the 30th anniversary celebrations allowing my PS5 to boot up to the sound of the PS1, but nevertheless, all the little interactions in the dashboard, the subtle animations as you move around, the way that game previews play that game’s title music, it really feels like an entertaining entertainment device. When I jump back on to my Xbox, it feels flat and bland and boring and, in my Apple-fanboy opinion, like a Windows PC. I’m sure there’s some preferences and colours and backgrounds and things that I could change, but moving from console to console feels like a black and white shift between play and work.

On top of this, my girlfriend, whilst not a gamer, is a PlayStation fanboy - she exclusively plays GTA V on her PS4. She has a sense of nostalgia for PlayStation and prefers the familiarity of the controllers. She hates the PS5 design though. Because of this, I’ll definitely be buying GTA VI on PS5 for us both to play.

However (buckle in for some flip flopping), we’re absolutely loving playing through the new Indiana Jones game, which, at the moment, is an Xbox exclusive.

But I’ve recently been growing a bit more of an affinity for physical media. I think I’m just getting sick of subscriptions and I’ve realised that I could happily play the same 10 games and watch the same handful of movies for the rest of my life. The problem here though is that I bought a discless PS5… it was quite a bit cheaper and the time and less of an ugly monster than the one with the disc tray. This means that, at least until the PS6 comes out (although I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s discless only), I’m only going be able to buy digital games

All this is to say that I’m not really sure what my future of video game console ownership looks like. If Microsoft is opening up their library to PlayStation, including franchises like Forza Horizon, why do I need an Xbox any more? Do I continue to buy both consoles with each new generation? Am I going to switch my allegiances after all these years? I was hoping after writing all this I’d have an answer, but alas, I do not. I did have a cracking Wagamama donburi bowl though

Only I could go to a gig and leave with coffee beans

2025-02-16T21:10:41Z

My friend is in a hardcore band (they’re called Maelstrom, check them out - Apple Music / Spotify) and last night they were performing in Newport, so we went along to support them. When we were buying our train tickets, we noticed that it was only £5 more expensive per person, to go first class. So because everyone needs a little treat from time to time (I do not. I’m always treating myself), we went ahead an upgraded.

We arrived into Newport feeling like royalty with our free cans of diet coke. We made our way to the venue, met with our friend and headed to their merch table to store our coats. All of the bands were selling the usual stuff; t-shirts, stickers, CDs etc. But one of them, to my surprise and delight, was selling coffee beans?! The band was called Positive Reaction, and they’ve collaborated with Durston’s Coffee to release a blend called Hardcore Gold, based on their Welsh Gold blend. The tasting notes say Biscuit and Burnt Caramel. Coffee origin: Vietnam, South America & Central America. I obviously had to buy a bag. I’ve not tried it yet but I’ll stick it in the hopper this week and see if it tastes as hardcore as they promise

Coats & coffee secured, we headed to the dancefloor (this was my first hardcore gig, idk what they call it). I spent the next hour or so with my fight or flight response going haywire, trying simultaneously to enjoy the music whilst also protecting my face from the flying fists and windmilling arms. All power to those that enjoy this scene but I’ve spent the last 32 years trying to avoid getting smacked in the face, so this scene is certainly not for me

Post-gig, we popped to Tesco to grab some barista coconut milk ready for flat whites on Sunday morning (bougie) and then headed to the station to catch our first class train (extra bougie). But the best was yet to come. The train host asked if we wanted any biscuits to go alongside our fresh orange juice (I’m old, I need my vitamins). I told him I was an annoying vegan but if he had anything I could eat, then yes please. He brought me the best vegan snack box I’ve ever had. Everything was vegan and gluten free; there was a bag of cheesy crisp snacks, a bag of sweet & salt popcorn, a nakd bar, some crackers and, get this, a little pot of tomato & olive tapenade.

We spent the whole train journey giggling about how ridiculous it was going from a dodging fists in a hardcore mosh pit to eating crackers and tapenade on a first class train within the space of an hour. Here’s a picture of me, absolutely over the moon about the situation

oh no, I’ve started a Pokémon living dex

2025-02-14T16:36:06Z

It was the evening of Wednesday 12th February 2025. An ordinary, middle-of-the-week, spaghetti-bolognese-for-dinner kind of evening. And I decided it’d be a good idea to start a Pokémon living dex

If you’re unfamiliar, a Pokémon living dex is a collect 'em all challenge where you catch one of every Pokémon across the various video games, and store them in Pokémon Home (it’s iCloud but for Pokémon). As of right now, there are 1025 Pokémon in the Pokédex, and there are variations of the living dex to make this challenge more manageable or more difficult. I’m going for a living form dex which means storing one of every Pokémon, including

Regional variants - Original & Alolan Geodude
Pre-evolutions - Bulbasaur & Ivysaur & Venusaur
Form variants - all 28 Unown variants (A-Z and ! and ?)
Gender variants - male & female Gyarados (male has blue whiskers, female has white) This means that instead of collecting 1025 Pokémon, I’ve got to collect 1394

I am aware that some of these Pokémon are very difficult to collect, and some are virtually impossible. My theory is though that there’s so many Pokémon to catch, that this is going to take me a while. And in that time, more new games will be released with increasingly broader lists of Pokémon available to catch. Therefore, as time goes on, it’ll get easier to collect the currently difficult-to-collect Pokémon.

I don’t have a plan of attack, nor do I have a deadline, but I do have a spreadsheet. I’m using this spreadsheet from Austin John Plays and Pokéjungle. You can view my copy of the spreadsheet here, if you want to see how my progress is going. Head to the 'LivingForm' sheet. Column J is what you want to look at; 1 means I haven’t stored it, 0 means I have, x means I’ve got a pre-evolution, just need to evolve it

I’m also keeping track of my progress in my Arcade

Am I underestimating how difficult this challenge is going to be? Probably. Am I going to get distracted by something else in a few weeks time and then forget all about this? Almost definitely. Am I going to have a good time along the way anyway? I bloody well hope so

I’ve become really old

2025-02-01T15:30:06Z

I turned 32 a couple of days ago and to celebrate the momentous occasion, I went out into Cardiff with some friends. The plan was the same as it has been for the past couple of birthdays; pizza and wine at Franco Manca followed by cocktails and retro video games at NQ64. It’s a classic combo and one that has delivered a lot of joy in the past

After leaving Franco Manca, we fancied a little something something before heading down to NQ64. Totally fine. We had time and we were still on course to complete the original plan.

We popped in to a really cool little bar called Vermut - it’s an Andalusian vermouth bar. (I’m not sure where he gets his stats from but according to the bartender, vermouth is “making a comeback”). For real though, it’s delish.

We ordered a round of vermouths, sipped on them for half an hour or so and then got the bill, ready to head to NQ64. But as I was paying and my friends were getting their coats on ready to leave, I had a realisation. I would rather get another vermouth and sit around chatting, than head to an arcade bar. It makes me shudder to think who I’ve become.

So that’s what we did. Much to the confusion of the bartender who’d just given us our bill, I went back to the bar to order another round. And it was fun and enjoyable and worth it and I have no regrets!

NQ64 will always have a special place in my heart (I mean we did pop in for about 20 mins whilst waiting for our train), but maybe now I’ve just reached that level of maturity where I put down the video games and pick up a vermouth*

*As I write this Super Mario Wonder is playing in the background on the TV, ready for me to pick up the controller as soon as I write my final word, so I’m not too worried.

Anything but the big light

2024-12-12T16:58:16Z

I had some new internet installed this morning^[1], which means that the last few hours have been spent setting up all of my devices to work on the new network. For most of my devices it’s been a piece of cake, but I’ve got a lot of smart home devices that haven’t taken the change so well. I’ve been reconfiguring smart plugs and disconnecting and reconnecting light bulbs for a few hours (and I’m still not quite done) just to use anything but the big light^[2]

It’s an undisputable fact that anyone that willingly uses the big light is a monster, and I will die on this hill. So to avoid it’s uncomfortable rays of light, I’ve got a house full of lamps; small lamps, big lamps, standing lamps, desk lamps, light strips, you name it. But without smart bulbs and plugs controlling them, I’d spend the first half of my evening running around from lamp to lamp, switching them all on, and then the second half running the route in reverse to switch them all off. I would simply not do this (although I’d still not resort to using the big light because I’m not a monster)

I’ve After spending the best part of the day tinkering with technology (or "wasting my time" as my gf put it); resetting passwords, rebooting routers, and eventually nuking my whole setup, I’ve realised I will go well out of my way to use anything but the big light

I switched from EE to YouFibre - same download speed, 10X upload speed, £20/m cheaper. It’s early days but so far so good. Shameless shill but here’s a referral code - we’ll both get at least £25 if you switch ↩︎
You know the one, the big ugly ceiling light in the centre of a room that violently illuminates everything it can when you bash the switch on the wall ↩︎

I was very brave today

2024-12-10T18:53:40Z

I’ve been doing daily Duolingo lessons for the past 2.5 years, originally motivated by the idea of learning a new language, but more recently only motivated by the idea of keeping a streak alive, not wanting to upset the little green owl

I spent the first two years or so learning Spanish, which I really enjoyed until I reached a point where I was just completing the shortest, easiest lessons each day, just so I didn’t lose my streak. To re-motivate myself, I switched over to Japanese, which, once I’d become somewhat comfortable with the written language, I also really enjoyed. But for the past few weeks I’ve found myself stuck in the routine of going about my daily business, and completing a 30 second-long 'match the pairs' game as I get into bed, right before I put my phone down for the night.

There’s only so long that I can keep fooling myself that I’m "learning a language" by repeatedly matching the same 30 or so words, day in, day out.

I love languages, and I love learning languages - I studied German at university after all - but I think I’ve hit a point now where Duolingo just isn’t the right method for me to learn a language any more. Call me old school but I reminisce of the days when I sat in a university lecture hall learning the intricacies of the German passive tense and obscure bits of vocabulary that I’ll rarely ever get the opportunity to use

I really enjoyed learning Japanese so I am going to be on the lookout for another solution, but for now, my Duolingo streak is done (unless the Duolingo owl is reading this in which case I promise I’m studying right now please don’t hurt me)

Generating frontmatter with Apple Shortcuts

2024-11-21T16:57:59Z

tldr; I created an Apple Shortcut that generates frontmatter for my Eleventy blog posts. Here’s the link if you want to remix it yourself

This website is built with Eleventy and my blog posts are written in markdown. Each blog post has uses frontmatter to set the title, summary, permalink, date and tags. To avoid having to manually write this out with each blog post, I’ve set up a Shortcut that I can trigger once I’m ready to publish the post, that generates all the frontmatter for me. Here’s how it works

When I trigger the shortcut, it asks for the blog post title. I then use Change Case to set the title to lowercase, followed by a series of Replace Text actions that replace punctuation like : or & with a blank space

This is followed by a URL Encode action that takes that formatted text string and makes it URL friendly - from what I can see it just replaces all the blank spaces with %20 although it might do other things that I just haven’t noticed yet. Because I don’t want my URLs to be full of %20, I follow this up with another Replace Text to replace %20 with -

All of this takes a blog post title like "Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit: A (sort of) review" and creates a string that looks like need-for-speed-hot-pursuit-a-sort-of-review

I’ve then got two more Ask for Input actions; one that asks for a Summary, and one that asks for Tags. After that, I get the current date and then assemble the frontmatter

I’ve got a text block that looks as follows

---
title: "Title"
summary: "Summary"
permalink: /blog/Formatted link/index.html
date: Date
tags: 
Tags
---

title and summary pull the un-formatted title and summary provided at the beginning of the shortcut. They’re wrapped in " " so that the frontmatter treats them as plain text, even if they contain punctuation or special characters

permalink includes /blog/ followed by the formatted link followed by /index.html

date pulls the current date and time in ISO 8601 format. I generate the frontmatter just before publishing so pulling the current date and time is fine for now. I could add a date picker earlier in the shortcut if I needed to be able to select a different date though

And finally tags pulls the text from the Tags action. When I enter the Tags I include hyphen on the front like -Life and when I paste this frontmatter into my file, I indent them manually because I can’t work out how to do that in Shortcuts

The final step copies this text to clipboard where I can then paste it into the top of my Bear notes file before copying the whole thing into a new markdown file

If you want to use the shortcut for yourself, here you go

Shortcut for creating a new blog post

2024-11-21T16:56:22Z

;tldr I’ve created a shortcut that generates a template file in Bear notes for a new blog post. You can grab the Shortcut here if you’d like

If I’m going to write blog posts at all regularly, I need there to be as little friction as possible in creating them. Similarly, having some structure and consistency to the way that I write and publish posts will also help me remain focussed. To that end I created a Shortcut that generates a template file in Bear notes, that I can trigger right from my desktop whenever I’ve got an idea for a new post. Here’s how it works

When the Shortcut is run, it starts by grabbing the current date. This is then followed by a Text block that looks like this

`[Date]`
# Blog post title
---
shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=Generate%20frontmatter%20for%20blog%20post
---



---
#1-areas/alexmarshallio/blog/[date]

The first lines formats the current date into yyyy-MM-dd and styles it as code. I use this as a "published on" date so that my posts in Bear can be sorted alphabetically (or rather chronologically) based on that date. I could sort them using the 'creation date' in Bear, but sometimes I’ll start a blog post, leave it for a while and in the meantime start another. When I return to the first post and publish it, I can then update this date to reflect that.

Next is an H1 title placeholder, followed by a section that will eventually hold the frontmatter for this blog post. It’s possible to run a shortcut from a URL so I’ve included that URL here so I can quickly access it when I’m ready to publish. I wrote a separate blog post on generating frontmatter with Apple shortcuts

I leave a few empty lines to write my blog content, followed by a divider and a tag that’ll sort this post based on the year it was created in. I use the PARA method for managing all my files in Bear

Whether or not this shortcut is enough to keep my consistent, only time will tell, but I have at least written and published three separate blog posts today, so we’re off to a good start

A genuine moment of joy

2024-11-19T13:43:27Z

This past weekend I had Sunday all to myself. The weather was pleasant and I’d been in all day Saturday so I decided to take myself for a little walk along the coast. I jumped in the car and headed to a delightful little cafe on the coast. Keep-cup in hand, I ordered an oat flat white and headed out

The coast path I was following is right on the edge of a cliff, overlooking the Bristol channel. Completely exposed to the elements, the weather was perfect coast-path-walking-weather; the sun was shining through broken clouds and the wind was gently buffeting me, reminding me constantly of where I was, and making me look forward to getting under a blanket with a hot chocolate when I got home

I followed the grassy path as it undulated along the cliffs edge until the end of the route where the path fades away as it joins the beach. At this point I could either follow right to the end of the path, through a gravel car park and down onto the beach, following the paths in place, or I could clamber down some rocks and land on the beach much more abruptly, and lets face it, with much more pizzazz

You’re damn right I chose the latter

I began my descent, planning my route on the fly as I stepped and lunged from rock to rock, careful to avoid the scattered tide pools that had formed where the sea had eroded sections of rock. Stretching over chasms, gently placing my feet on unknown rocks to test their stability I made it down the staircase of layered surfaces before ending my performance with a (considering the fragility of my 31 year old skeleton, unnecessarily risky) jump down onto the shale beach below.

I gave a bow and turned to the judges to see a wall of 10s

Nah I didn’t really, but I did happen to land near a group of very serious boulderers who I’m sure were impressed by my abilities

As I carried on walking along the beach I had this unusual feeling inside of me. I felt warm and clear and revitalised and happy and free and I think this was the feeling of genuine joy.

I grew up by the sea so as a kid I’d always be at the beach and walking along the coast. Much to my parents despair, I’d always choose to clamber along a rock wall instead of following a designated path, and I think doing this again as an adult filled me with feeling of childhood nostalgia

On a slightly deeper level, I think that I found myself in a state of flow whilst I was navigating the inconsistent terrain. I’m confident enough in my abilities to climb over rocks that as a task, it didn’t feel too difficult, but the unevenness and uncertainty in the rocks presented enough of a challenge that my brain had to stay engaged. This combination of familiarity and difficulty meant that I was free to let my mind wander, and almost able to meditate. I think this was why I felt clear and refreshed once I’d landed on the beach and, to quote Eminem, snapped back to reality

I should finish this by making it clear that I’m generally happy in my life at the moment; I’m cheerful, hopeful and excited, so it’s not like this feeling came in a time of negativity. I think though that no matter how happy you are, a feeling of genuine joy is a real pleasure to behold

Weeknotes 33

2024-08-19T11:24:27Z

Welcome to my first ever Weeknotes ✨

What’ I’ve been up to

I finally picked up an IKEA Billy bookshelf to organise all of my stuff in my office. It’s about the only shelf that’ll fit my massive Lego Technic Bugatti Chiron and Lamborghini Sián, and still leaves me plenty of space to house my growing manga collection

I’m decorating my home office atm and finally finished painting this week. I’m onto the fun stage now; putting up pictures and organising shelves

Had a delightful weekend in Bath with my girlfriend - we both studied at Bath University so we booked accommodation on campus for a real trip down memory lane. I left with such a strong urge to do a postgraduate degree just to have an excuse to be on a campus again

Media

We just started Season 3 of Peep Show. I tried Peep Show years ago but it didn’t click so I only watched one or two episodes. I’m enjoying it a lot more this time around

I picked up Minami Lane on Switch; it’s a delightful little management sim where you add shops and buildings to a street and manage what they do or sell in order to meet the needs of the townsfolk. It’s really cute and very affordable. I’d recommend it so far if you want a ~5 hour campaign to work through. It also reminded me of Unpacking so I downloaded that on Switch too. I’ve already played through it once before but I’m more than happy to play through it again. From a story perspective it’s one of the most impactful games I’ve ever played

Reading & links

"Over the past 16 days we’ve received just shy of one million photographs from the Olympic Games" - Shoot like a pro: how the best photos of the Paris Olympics were taken

"The kids are interested in no working and no responsibilities, wearing shorts and t-shirts all of the time" - a news interview from 1987 about the rise of Tony Hawk and skateboarding in California - Check out young Tony Hawk

Scroll to a billion - the best way to understand the size of a billion is to scroll

What the heck do I do with all these stickers?

2024-08-14T08:31:51Z

This is something I’ve been asking myself a lot lately. I’ve been redecorating my home office, which has, in turn, led to a bit of a clear out of all of my stuff that I’ve been hoarding for years. I was constantly finding stickers tucked into books or packed away into zip-lock bags.

I love a good sticker. They bring a smile to my face when one has been very kindly added to my Etsy order alongside a little thank you note from the artist, and they’re great at adding an extra quid or two to a basket to qualify for free shipping. But what the h*ck do I actually do with them

I think there’s something deep here about how stickers are designed to be single-use, stuck somewhere for the rest of time. But it’s so scary to commit to that, like what if I stick it in the wrong place?? - but I cba to get into that

I was inspired by Dave’s desk top, covered in stickers he’s accumulated over the years. But I didn’t have the balls to do that to my own desk.

Nevertheless, this got me thinking - what else could I stickerbomb? Naturally this led me to Pinterest where I found a pin of a stickerbombed serving tray.

I liked the idea of this more than using a picture frame because I knew that I’d be adding to it over time, rather than filling it all in one go. With a serving tray I could just stick new stickers on whenever I pleased, but with a picture frame I’d need to pick at all the little pins holding the rear cover in place, in order to add anything. I know what I’m like, I wouldn’t do this. I also liked the idea of wrapping the stickers around the edges of the tray, covering the "frame" with stickers too

I picked up an IKEA Ostbit for about £6 and began sticking. I’ve clearly not got as many stickers as I thought I did, so man am I glad I got a small tray - it’s about A4 size. Once it’s done I’ll stick some command strips on the back and stick it onto my wall. Does that make it a sticker too?

Link dump - July 2024

2024-07-31T10:20:45Z

Good reads

An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to build this site from scratch - I’m in a similar boat so this was a refreshing read. Keenan writes delightfully too

Design

Misc

"From January to April 2021, I cooked eggs 🍳 and then painted them 🖌. These are those eggs." - I love this so much
Morioka Shoten, the Bookshop with Only One Book
Large Horse - Very important piece of the internet
Initial D Omnibuses Announced for Spring 2024 Release - I’ve wanted a reprint of this series for so long. So glad to finally see this announced
Toyota shows manga-inspired GT86 Initial D project - The above link sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole where I found that Toyota had recreated the iconic tofu delivery car with the new GT86
Aygo into battle - Last one from this rabbit hole.. Toyota released a manga to celebrate the launch of the Aygo (if anyone has a link to read or download it, please let me know)

Videos

why you need hobbies in 2024
Need for Speed Hot Pursuit - Pagani vs Lamborghini live action - More video games should go this hard with their marketing budget. (p.s. here’s my (sort of) review of NFS Hot Pursuit)
Through the Fire and Flames - DragonForce [Speed Bag Cover] - Madlad plays Through the Fire and Flames on a boxing speed bag ???
How Strong Was Mark Henry Really?
AI is ruining the internet

Link dump - June 2024

2024-06-28T09:23:51Z

Good reads

Misc.

Tracking a mystery: Why are freight train timetables so popular in Japan? - I love this
TOKYO Y YO by Luis Mendo - This book is so cute and the illustrations are delightful
Coffee in a tube squeezes like toothpaste for brewing ... or eating

The internet being fun

One Million Checkboxes - One million checkboxes on a page. You check one and it checks for everyone

Design resources

Cera Mono - lovely monospaced font
Wakamai Fondue - The tool that answers the question “what can my font do?"

Videos

asdfmovie15 - I did not expect to see an asdfmovie in my recommendations in 2024
Why Did This Espresso Cost $335? - Another James Hoffman special
Spider-Man but he has brainrot & Spider-Man 2 but he has brainrot - these two are incredibly dumb but I’d be lying if I said they didn’t give me a laugh or two
a fan told me i couldn’t find his flight - Rainbolt figures out which plane seat someone was sat in, based on a photo they took through the window
It Took Me 1.5 Years to Make This Attack on Titan short film

I went to my first ever gig

2024-06-18T16:27:08Z

Last week I went to see 30 Seconds to Mars in Cardiff as part of their Seasons tour. I’ve reached the ripe old age of 31, and up until now, had never been to a (big) music gig. I’d been to a couple of comedy shows - Michael McIntyre and Bill Bailey - and I’d been to two tiny, indie metal gigs to watch my friends band, Maelstrom, but I’d never been to an arena, or a festival, or seen a (big) artist perform at all.

Don’t feel sorry for me, I’d had plenty of opportunities to go to gigs and festivals, and even some chances to see some of my favourite bands. But I was just never fussed about them. I’d never heard a live version of a song that I thought sounded better, or even as good, as the recorded version I’d find on their albums. That coupled with the high ticket prices, being surrounded by hundreds of screaming people and queuing for ages for everything; it just never appealed to me. Basically the same reasons I’m not fussed about theme parks either 🤷‍♂️

My girlfriend really wanted to witness The Kill live, so I got us both tickets for her birthday (because I’m #1 bf)

Anyway, here’s a random collection thoughts on 30 Seconds to Mars Seasons gig in Cardiff, June 2024. Maybe spoilers below, I don’t know if that’s a thing for gigs?

The ticket buying process was a breeze. I’ve heard about the nightmare that is buying tickets through Ticketmaster, but I had absolutely no problems. Tickets were available, prices didn’t seem inflated, and the website worked without a hitch. Couldn’t have asked for a better experience.

The tickets themselves were about £70 each which to me was an insane amount of money (reminder: the only gig I’ve been to cost £4 and you got free earplugs on entry). The kicker though was that there are no physical tickets. I get it, digital society, I’m 100% in on that, but when it’s a present for someone, it’d be nice to have something physical to give them. No fear though, I made my own which I’m sure is how they would have looked anyway

As the performance was starting they began a countdown. That started at 100. That was funny tbh and the roar of the audience at 69 was ~ n i c e ~ The countdown stopped at 30 which confused me for a good few seconds

When Jared Leto appeared on stage, I felt like I was seeing something I wasn’t allowed to see. It felt a bit surreal tbh. Maybe I’m just not used to seeing celebrities

The performance was really good. Jared had really good presence on the stage, was very entertaining and sounded great - far better than I was expecting. There were fireworks and flames and Jared even pulled out a flamethrower at one point. There were screens either side of the stage which would cut between cameras focused on each member of the band, so it was really cool to be able to see so much of the drummer (who’s Jared’s brother! Who knew..).

And the set list was great. The Seasons tour was covering all of their albums so I was worried that I wouldn’t know a lot of their songs, especially if they focused on their newer albums - I’m not really up to date with them tbh. But I was pleasantly surprised to know at least 80% of what they played!

The volume of the whole performance was much lower than expected too. The small metal gigs I’ve been to have been ludicrously loud, like can’t heard properly for a couple of days loud. (I’ve got earplugs now). I was surprised that the 'Loud environment' warning didn’t trigger once on my Apple Watch

Now if you’ll indulge my 'old man yells at cloud' moment. Why is everyone on their phones all the time? There was a guy in front of me watching a Facebook live stream of a guy playing pool in his basement? I saw a guy record every single song they played, alternating between rear and front camera from time to time to get those sweet, completely overexposed selfie videos. You do you friend but I think we both know you’re never going to watch those videos again. But worst of all, why are so many people making video calls? I saw a woman call (presumably) her kids - they clearly couldn’t hear a thing and just looked so unimpressed by what they were seeing on their side. The pool livestream guy later tried to video call his mum (cute), but she didn’t answer, so he went through his contact list tapping on each person until someone answered, at which point there was a futile attempt at communication before he just flipped the camera and held it in the air for a minute or so.

phew glad I got that off my chest

My final observation was that the audience was just pretty lifeless compared to what I’d envisioned, and certainly compared to my girlfriend’s expectations and previous experiences. Sure there were people singing along, but there was a lot less movement than I was expecting - no bumping or pushing or shoving - which I found quite relieving tbh, but it did bring the whole energy down, must to my girlfriend’s disappointment. She thinks it’s because there were two types of standing tickets; an expensive, inner-circle ticket, and a cheaper, outer-circle ticket. We had the cheaper tickets and were separated from the inner-circle by massive barriers - we were probably 10 metres apart. We think the energy levels would have been higher in that inner-circle.

So my final thoughts on my first ever gig are pretty middling tbh. I had an alright time. It was fun to hear some songs I hadn’t heard for a very long time, and to sing along to them at the top of my lungs. The performance was really good; the lighting, videos, fireworks, smoke, stage presence etc etc were all top notch imo. But would I pay £70 to see them again? Probably not. Would I pay £70 to someone else? Also probably not. I didn’t come away in the state of awe that I think I was expecting, and I reckon for that money that I could buy all of their albums and blast them through my speakers at home and have just as much fun. Not to mention I wouldn’t have to pay £9 for a malibu and watery coke…

I’ve finally found a comic series to collect!

2024-06-10T16:21:42Z

I’ve been slowly buying comic books for a few months now after randomly finding a couple of bagged & boarded issues in a charity shop - X:Men Legends #1, A.X.E.: Eve of Judgment #1 and Daredevil #1

I’ve never really read comics so I’m very out-of-the-loop where lore is considered, but also on the how-the-hell-do-I-actually-start-collecting-comics side too. I’d walk into my local comic book store and feel overwhelmed by the wall of comics, not sure whether I can buy a particular issue because it might be right in the middle of a complex story arc, and questioning why there are so damn many Spider-Mans(?!). This blog post from Mike Haynes helped me wrap my head around this world a bit better, but I still felt like my trips to the comic store, and what I ended up coming out with, were entirely random. Don’t get me wrong, picking up a comic on a whim, based almost entirely on the cover art alone, is fun and exciting, but I really wanted a series that I could sink my teeth into

And I’ve finally found one!

Ultimate X-Men is a new series by Peach Momoko that creates a new generation of X-Men.

From Marvel - Visionary creator PEACH MOMOKO (DEMON DAYS, STAR WARS) creates a new generation of X-Men for an all-new universe! Hisako Ichiki is a teenage girl who just wants to live a normal life - go to school, hang out with her friends, ignore the political strife broiling over after the events of ULTIMATE INVASION - but life has other plans for her. In Japan, urban legends have sprung to life and brought some unusual new powers with them…Meet Armor, Maystorm and a group of new Ultimate X-Men the likes of which you've never seen before!

I’ve been really enjoying Peach’s artwork in Marvel SNAP so I was immediately drawn in when I saw that she was the artist and writer for this new series. I’d already missed the launch of the first couple of issues but luckily was able to pick them up from Forbidden Planet.

I’ve not started reading them yet as I’m still finishing up my Spider-Gwen: Gwenverse series, but if nothing else, I’m excited at the idea of having a new release to look forward to every month or so. It’s nice to finally have a comic series to follow and collect. It actually made me re-download Up Ahead so that I can add delightful little widgets to my home screen showing up when the next issue is released

To coincide with this new-found excitement, I’ve finally added a Comics page to my website, showing my current collection. Full changelog details here

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit: A (sort of) review

2024-06-01T13:58:15Z

I’m going to see Thirty Seconds to Mars in a couple of weeks and whilst listening through their albums in preparations, I rediscovered Edge of the Earth, which in turn reminded me of the Hot Pursuit trailer (one of my favs of all time and a video I still occasionally rewatch), and after watching it I felt like I should start another playthrough.

There’s virtually no story so going from loading up the game to jumping into my first race took only a few moments and most importantly, very little brain power. I think I’ve reached a point with video games where I no longer have the energy to commit to long, deep stories with new characters, cutscenes and dialogue every few minutes, and Hot Pursuit is very much the opposite of that. I can go from event to event, unlocking upgrade after upgrade with so much ease and so little downtime that I don’t have time to distract myself by picking up my phone or something. It’s very much a dopamine fuelled, ooga booga caveman way of playing video games but my brain likes it

Without turning this into a properly structured review of the game (I warned you it was only sort of a review), here’s some other things I like about it

The sound of the Pagani Zonda Cinque Roadster is sublime and still to this day is one of the best representations of the car in any video game (this comparison video shows how NFS absolutely nailed the sound compared to everyone else). It’s nice that they let you preview the car in an early event before you then have to grind through the game to unlock it.

The achievements are fun! There’s a bunch of ‘Reach rank x’ and ‘Earn x medals’ achievements as you’d expect, but there’s also a handful of fun, relevant, car-specific achievements. Their requirements are somewhat novel and will often require you to specifically go out of your way to unlock them, but they’re not so challenging or grind-y that they’re not worth your time.

Iron Man - Get Distinction in a Hot Pursuit, Interceptor and Rapid Response using the Audi R8

Godzilla - Get any medal in 'Run to the Hills' driving the Nissan GT-R SpecV without using any weapons

Flight of the Bumblebee - Win the 'Muscle Reflex' race in a Bee Yellow Chevrolet Camaro SS

The soundtrack isn’t flawless but certainly has some bangers. I had a funny moment cycling through the songs and landing on Stronger by Lazee feat. Dead by April. I remember discovering Dead by April from this game when I played it the first time as a teenager, buying their self-titled album and listening to it on repeat. I’ve not thought about them for years but after rediscovering them now, I think they’ll be a staple in my listening rotation for a little while again

And just the way the game plays as an arcade racer. The handling model is exactly as you’d expect with the signature brake-to-drift mechanic at its core. It’s easy and requires little thought to execute but boy do you still feel like a boss when you fly towards a corner, quickly hit the brakes and slam back on the power to slide effortlessly around the apex. It also reminds me (unsurprisingly) of playing four-player Outrun on an arcade cabinet in NQ64; one of my favourite memories of recent times

I’ve beat this game a couple of times on a couple of consoles (it actually performs really well on Switch!), but there’s still something about it that makes me want to come back to it again and again. Fun game, would recommend.

Link dump - May 2024

2024-05-29T16:21:51Z

Portfolios

Portfolio | Amadeus Maximilian - really clean animations and micro interactions
anh version noir - one of the most unique personal websites I’ve seen recently

Design

Can't Unsee - a fun little test to see how keen your eye is for design
Motherfucking Website

Products

Standart Playing Cards - if you’re into coffee I would recommend checking out Standart magazine. They’ve just released these quirky coffee themed playing cards
Monpoké - adorable Pokémon picture books for kids

Good reads

Videos

A day in the life of Japan's most famous grandpa's hot dog shop. 今屋のハンバーガーホットドッグ - this whole video was an absolute delight to watch

Misc

Oatmeal comic - Why the mantis shrimp is my new favorite animal
I recently rehomed a tortoise! Of course you can buy a Jurassic Park gate to put in an enclosure

Run a Shortcut from a URL

2024-05-12T20:23:05Z

This is a guide on how to open a Shortcut using a URL. Full details can be found on Apple’s website

The URL structure looks like

shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=[name]&input=[input]&text=[text]

Use the following parameters in the URL:

name: The name of the shortcut to run

input (optional): The initial input into the shortcut. There are two input options: a text string or the word clipboard. When the input value is a text string, that text is used. When the input value is Clipboard, the contents of the clipboard are used

text: If input is set to text, then value of the text parameter is passed as input to the shortcut. If input is set to clipboard, then this parameter is ignored.

By using a text string, you can provide your own URL-encoded text as input to the shortcut. For example, a URL that uses the text “goetta is great” as input to a shortcut named Lookup Goetta would look like this:

shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=Lookup%20Goetta&input=text&text=goetta%20is%20great

A URL to transfer the most recently copied text into a shortcut called Add to Notes would look like this:

shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=Add20%to20%Notes&input=clipboard

Building a shortcut to automate link dumps

2024-05-12T19:49:29Z

I’ve wanted to get into the habit of sharing link-dumps on my blog for a while; sharing any interesting, useful or just straight up random links in the hopes that someone finds something that they also enjoy. Lots of other people are doing it and I enjoy reading them, so I thought I’d do my best to contribute to the community.

The problem was, I didn’t have a workflow that made this straight forward.

My setup

My website is built using Framer, which unfortunately means I don’t have a simple way of automating link submission, instead needing to manually publish a CMS item. A link-dump is the most efficient way of doing this; collecting several links at the end of a month and publishing one roundup blog post

I use Bear notes for writing blog posts. I’ve used it for ages and because I like the way it uses tags and nested tags for organising content. It’s also got really good support for Shortcuts which makes automating content creation much easier

And I use Anybox for saving links. I started using it a couple of months ago and it’s been a game changer for saving and recalling links. Amongst other things, it uses tags and nested tags to organise content, much in the same way as Bear. It’s got handy "quick" actions, support for shortcuts, works on all Apple devices and has an option for a one-off purchase rather than a subscription. It ticks all of my (Any)boxes

Getting the appropriate links out of Anybox and into Bear in a nicely formatted structure was a bit too manual of a process for me to get into a habit of doing it regularly. f my previous endeavours are anything to go by, if all the stuff that comes with writing a blog (formatting, publishing etc) takes any amount of effort, I simply won’t write the post in the first place

Investigation

Knowing that Bear and Anybox supported Shortcuts, I knew there would be a way to automate this process. I was comfortable with the Bear side of things as I’d made several shortcuts in the past, but I’d never done anything with Anybox.

I jumped in to Shortcuts and started with a Get Links action and left the source as All. I added Text afterwards, and added the Links in JSON Format variable, and then followed this with a Show Result action so I could see what Links in JSON Format actually looked like. I didn’t know anything about JSON before this although it’s structure did seem pretty self-explanatory. I found this article though that did a good job of explaining what I was looking at in Lehmans terms (as well as helping with a few bits later on)

Each link that I was pulling from Anybox contained lots of bits of information; a title, a URL, a date added, comments, stars etc. and these are represented in JSON as a key and a value. And this collection of keys and values is known as a dictionary. It looks a bit like this

`key` = "title" `value` = "YouTube"
`key` = "url" `value` = "www.youtube.com"

These keys are important later, so if you’re following along, I’d recommend repeating the steps above and familiarising yourself with the names of the keys you’re working with

I didn’t know specifically what I was going to do with this JSON but based on what I’d found so far, I was happy that there’d be a solution in Shortcuts

Setting up my Apps

I first needed to set up Anybox so that I was ready to pull out the appropriate links. I’d already got a tag called link-dump that I’d use to tag anything I thought was worth sharing. Because I plan to publish a link-dump at the end of the month, I set up a Smart List called link-dump-current-month that, you guessed, displays links with the link-dump tag that were added this month. (Something to note, 'added this month' actually means added to Anybox this month, not that the link-dump tag was added this month. I found an old link and applied the tag, but it doesn’t show up in this Smart List. Not a big deal but it took me a minute to get to the bottom of it)

After that I thought about what tags I wanted to use in Bear so that the post would be nested where I want it to be. I’m currently restructuring Bear to use the PARA framework (more on that soon) so I’ve got a top-level tag for Projects followed by website followed by CMS, where the link-dump post would be housed. It looks like this 1-projects/website/cms/link-dump

Building the Shortcut

The first action was Date that grabbed the Current Date, followed by a Text that I’d use to create the Bear note title later on. When you insert a date variable, if you click on it and change the Date Format to Custom, you can display the date and time in any format you can think of - pretty neat

Next I added the Get Links action for Anybox and changed All to the my Smart List link-dump-current-month. This grabs all the links currently in that list

Next I added Get Dictionary from Input. Input autofills to Links in JSON Format as it connects to the action before it. This creates a dictionary of every key and value that exists for a single link

Because I want this to happen for all of the links in my List, I needed to set up a Repeat action. I added a Repeat with Each action. Items autofills with Dictionary from the step above

In between the Repeat and End Repeat actions, I added Text where I could pull the specific pieces of data I wanted for each link (the JSON for each link includes a lot of data so I wanted to filter out the stuff I didn’t need here, rather than doing it later, manually, in Bear.)

This is where knowing the names of the keys is important

I added a variable into the Text box and selected Repeat Item. I clicked on that variable set the Type to Dictionary, set Get to Dictionary and in the Get Value for Key field, entered the name of the key for which I wanted to pull a value, starting with title and url

After the End Repeat action I added Combine Text which autofilled with Repeat Results and New Lines. This would take all of the data from Text, and repeat it for every link in my Smart List, separated by a line

The next phase was to set up what would be sent into Bear, so I added another Text box, and added the text that I wanted to appear at the top of my Bear note, namely the tag, and a Created On date which pulled the current date from the beginning of the shortcut. I added a variable for Combined Text and was then ready to set up the Bear side of the shortcut

I added a Create Bear Note action and set the title to Text that I’d created at the beginning. To avoid confusion by having lots of Textvariables, if you click on that variable within the action you can rename it to something more useful. The input is automatically filled with Text from the step above, and I then switched off 'Return to Shortcuts'.

Finally I added an Open Bear Note action and set the note to Bear Note from the action above. This way after I run the shortcut, the note will automatically open, ready for me to edit and publish to my Framer CMS

And that’s about it! I’m going think more about which pieces of data I want to pull through, and I’m going to look at whether I can add extra tags like 'Resources' or 'Interesting articles' etc so that I can further categorise my links, and have each link appear under the corresponding heading in the Bear note. But I’m probably getting ahead of myself though. At least now I’ve not got any excuses for not posting a link-dump on the regular, right?…

Designing a Banner component

2024-05-08T12:00:00Z

Context: Coherent is a web-app for managing coworking spaces. In the user hierarchy there are Hosts - who run the workspace, and Members - who have a subscription to the workspace

We’ve got a feature coming up that will add 'emergency contact’ fields to a Members profile. These fields are quite important, and whilst not required in order for the profile to work, they are fields that provide useful information for Hosts. Directing new Members to those fields can be handled as part of their onboarding flow, but directing existing users, who’ve already filled out their profiles, is a little more tricky. So we’re introducing the concept of "Your profile is not quite complete".

Hosts will be able to decide whether emergency contact details are a requirement of a "complete profile", and if so, a banner will appear in a Members dashboard if they’ve not already provided them. This gave me an opportunity to revisit our banner component, something I’d been meaning to do for a while

Our previous banner component was an over-complicated component, built many years ago when I was a bit too trigger-happy where auto layout and nested components were concerned. I’d built a Swiss army knife of a component where different layers and elements could be toggled on and off according to what was needed at the time. But after seeing how these banners were actually used in production over the years, I realised that most of the time, most of these elements would be toggled off.

Ripe with this knowledge and a desire to keep things simple, I set out to build a new banner component, adding element-by-element, judging slowly what was actually required. The goal here was really to reduce complexity in both the Figma component and the component that would be used in development. This meant simplifying layers, establishing content guidelines and tweaking the colour palette used in each banner

The text content was the most important part so that’s where I started; an auto-layout text layer. I then added a background colour for each of the four types of banner; information, positive, warning, negative.

Following this I considered how links and buttons would look. These banners should display important information to users, but should also provide some direction. This could just be a link to somewhere where they can find more information, or a link to a page where they can resolve the problem being presented. At first I tried adding a button component below the content but felt that they just didn’t fit. They had too much presence, made the banner quite a bit bigger than I think it needed to be, and offered little more than an inline link

The next thing to consider before moving on to finishing touches were icons. I wanted to use colour to convey the context of the banner; blue for something informative and red for an error or severe warning for example. I originally felt that an icon would therefore be redundant, but after testing a banner in situ, without an icon, it felt like a core part of a banner was missing. In addition to this, whilst our colour palette does meet contrast guidelines, we don’t yet support colour palettes for different levels of colour blindness, which means that relying on colour to convey the severity of a message is not always the best approach. In this case, the icons serve as a fallback to provide that context

The next step then was to tweak and add finishing touches, and the first thing I wanted to tackle was the text colour. I’d started by using our Grey900 on top of a 100 background like Red100. This served well for contrast, but I did feel that the text clashed quite a bit, especially in the green and red banners. Swapping the Grey900 for a coloured ~600 value helped with cohesion, but I had to drop the background colours to 050 to ensure that an adequate contrast ratio was met. For simplicity, I applied the same colour to both the text and icon. I think that if I was using bold icons rather than outline icons, I’d likely use a different colour for the text and icon to avoid them muddling together

The final touch was to try and make the banners feel a little less flat, and to add a harder border between them and the page in the background. Shadows felt messy so I ruled those out fairly quickly and instead opted for a coloured border, starting originally with a dark colour in the region of ~700. Whilst this helped to provide that distinction, it felt really severe and again lacked cohesion. I then went to the other end of the scale, trying a 200 value and felt that these made the borders feel much softer, whilst still acting as a sufficient divide between the page and the banner

I set up a .base component where I could set the basic layout variables like spacing and corner radius, and then created a component group where styles like text colour, background colour and icon instance are set for each of the four banner types.

Lastly, I worked on the documentation for this component, making sure to provide design notes for myself to refer to in the future, and also handoff notes for our developer to use. I’ve recently started adding usage guidelines to my component documentation, especially with components like this where their text content is so important. I made note of things like only using sentence case, keeping content concise by removing superfluous words and ensuring that inline links are detailed - '…~add payment details~' rather than just '…see more'. In my opinion these notes are really valuable as they help me to remain consistent each time I use a component in design, but they also give me some context years down the line about what design decisions I made at the time and why. There’s nothing worse than looking at an old component in the library and thinking "why is that the way it is?"

Overall I’m really happy with how these banners have turned out and look forward to seeing them in production as we roll them out over the coming months

MSO SLR HDK OMG WTF

2024-05-05T12:00:00Z

The Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren is a stunning collaboration between, you guessed it, McLaren and Mercedes. This iconic collaboration meant bringing together two titans of Formula 1 combining McLaren’s expertise in chassis design and carbon fibre technology, with Mercedes’ engine power. It also meant that 20 years down the line, the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren would be plagued by licensing issues and it wouldn’t appear in a Forza game since Forza Horizon (2012) sad noises

Video by tfjj: Wild 1 of 12 Mercedes SLR McLaren HDK by MSO

This post is part of WeblogPoMo2024. Read the others in the series:

Ferrari 360 Challenge Stradale 'Cornes Edition'

2024-05-04T12:00:00Z

Ferrari 360 Challenge Stradale 'Cornes Edition'

The Ferrari 360 was one of my poster cars as a kid. I don’t remember specifically why I loved it so much at the time, but even looking at it today, I still think it looks great. And the F430 that succeeded it is imo one of the most stunning cars ever made

I was scrolling through Alex Penfold’s Instagram recently and came across an album of photos from New Year in Japan. I swiped my way through the album with feelings of "woah that’s rare" as I saw a photo of a Ruf RT35, combined with somewhat numbed feelings of "well it is Japan after all" in response to a Lamborghini Diablo SV with a Ferrari F50-esque bodykit.

After reaching the end of the album, I tapped into the comments to see what others had to say, and spotted a comment mentioning a 'Cornes CS'. I’d never come across this before, so I looked back through the photos armed only with the knowledge that 'CS' often refers to Challenge Stradale - the hardcore variant of a Ferrari 360. Lo and behold I found a picture of a 360 that I’d previously just swiped straight past, not thinking much of it. Looking a bit more closely, it did look a little bit unusual with a white rear grill (which to my knowledge could have just been a paint job by the owner), but beyond that, it didn’t look like much more than a standard Ferrari 360

[This image is missing]

After a quick google, I found that the Ferrari 360 Challenge Stradale 'Cornes Edition' is pretty damn rare; only 25 in existence. It was built to celebrate 25 years of Cornes being the official importer of Ferrari’s in Japan.

It differs from a normal Challenge Stradale in that it has a white rear grill and rev counter, a carbon fibre fuel filler cap and paddle shifters, and carbon ceramic brakes with gold brake callipers. Oh and Michael Schumacher’s signature on the door.^[1]

Spotting a 360 Challenge Stradale is pretty rare as is, so spotting a 1 of 25 Cornes Edition in a parking lot is really something else. Props to the owner for driving it

This post is part of WeblogPoMo2024. Read the others in the series:

Ferrari 360 Challenge Stradale 'Cornes Edition' - William Loughran ↩︎

The Ferrari of Theseus

2024-05-03T12:00:00Z

Do you mind if I rip this intro straight from Wikipedia? Cool. Thanks

The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment about whether an object is the same object after having had all of its original components replaced.

In Greek mythology, Theseus, mythical king and founder of the city Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians would commemorate this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honour Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one after the other, was it still the same ship?

Well now, millennia later, we can ask the same question of the MIG-U1.

The MIG-U1 is an outlandish hypercar built by the madmen at German tuning company, Gemballa. Right from the early 80s, Gemballa were building ludicrous cars with wacky names; Avalanche, Mirage GT, Cyrrus and Mistrale to name a few. These cars are over-the-top and in-your-face, and look exactly like the sort of monstrosities that 12 year old me was "building" in Need for Speed: Most Wanted.

As it was a tuning company and not a manufacturer, customers would need to bring a donor car that would receive the Gemballa treatment. The Mistrale for example was based on a Porsche Panamera; not a wildly expensive or rare car and something that I imagine one could donate with little guilt. The Mirage GT however was based on a Porsche Carrera GT - only 1200 or so were ever made - now that’s a much bigger decision to make before sacrificing one to the German tuning gods

The MIG-U1 however is on a whole different level. Because it’s based on a Ferrari Enzo, and fewer than 500 of them were ever made. Nevertheless, a customer in Dubai decided they wanted to offer up their Ferrari Enzo to Gemballa to deliver something unique. And deliver they did.

Despite the fact that Gemballa offered to make 25 of these insane machines, only 1 was ever made. In fact the name MIG-U1 comes from the initials of the owner, U for Uwe (the founder of Gemballa), and 1 for production unit 1 (of 1). Couple that with the fact that this was the last car that Uwe Gemballa made before he was murdered by gangsters (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eYZnCx-02g), and you’ve got yourself a seriously unique car. It’s rumoured that the owner was offered $10m for it, about $6-7m more than a standard Enzo.

Even before you start looking at the wild bodykit and upgraded interior, just the fact alone that it’s finished in a white and black colour scheme makes it stand out amongst a sea of red Enzos. But then you notice the more aggressive front splitter. The completely new hood with intakes and louvres. The huge roof scoop to help keep the engine cool in the blisteringly hot Dubai desert. The vertically arranged exhaust pipes mantled by the coffee-table sized fixed wing on the back. And on the inside, even the Ferrari shields and badges have been replaced by those of Gemballa. The longer you look, the harder it becomes to find any remaining parts from the donor Enzo. And that’s because Gemballa really built the MIG-U1 from scratch. Stripping away every piece, panel and component of the original car, and building new ones from lightweight carbon fibre.

Which leaves us with the philosophical question

If you take a Ferrari Enzo and one by one replace all of its parts with new ones, is it still the same Ferrari Enzo you had at the beginning?

Personally, I would say no. What you have now is incredibly unique Gemballa MIG-U1 that has nothing to do with a Ferrari Enzo. And I can bet that if you asked Ferrari’s famously over-protective legal division The Real Reason Ferrari Sued Deadmau5 Over His Customized Purrari 458, they’d probably agree too

This post is part of WeblogPoMo2024. Read the others in the series:

If an Aperol Spritz was a car

2024-05-02T12:00:00Z

The Fiat 500 is a strong contender for the cutest car ever made. I think it being anthropomorphised in Cars, albeit as an Italian stereotype with a short fuse, certainly helped add some charm in my eyes. But even despite this, there’s something about how smol and round and bubbly it is with its two perfectly-spherical headlights up front that just make me go "awww 🥹"

I can only imagine that sauntering along the Italian coast in the 50s and 60s was as magical as it’s made to seem in the black and white stock photos you find adorning cafe walls trying to inject a bit of vintage Italy into their otherwise stale atmospheres.

Throughout its 18 year lifespan, the Fiat 500 remained fairly unchanged. There were of course some changes, and adjacent models like bread vans and panel vans, as well as derivatives like the 695 by Abarth, but the fundamental design was pretty untouched.

One of these derivatives was the Fiat 500 Jolly Ghia. It was designed by an Italian coach builder called Carrozzeria Ghia, inspired by the Fiat 600 Jolly (I should note at this point that "Jolly" is such a perfect name for this car). The Jolly Ghia just screams European summer, French Riviera and Aperol Spritz.

The Fiat 500 Jolly Ghia is completely open-air, has no doors, wicker seats and an optional striped canopy roof. Just imagine cruising in this little thing all the way down to the beach, popping up the canopy to shade yourself from the Italian sun and pulling out your wicker hamper full of fresh breads and olives. It’s perfect. A dream.

I’m of course romanticising things, making assumptions about the past and am certainly being influenced by a 'retro is cool' attitude. But, much like that first sip of an Aperol Spritz at a beachside bar in southern Europe, I can’t help but imagine that the Fiat 500 Jolly Ghia just hit the spot in a way that nothing else could

And as a little bonus for making it this far, let me show you the Fiat 500 Offshore. Yes, a modern Fiat 500 shell with a 100hp outboard motor chefs kiss

This post is part of WeblogPoMo2024. Read the others in the series:

The Swedish JDM

2024-05-01T12:00:00Z

Koenigsegg is a Swedish car manufacturer known for producing visually stunning cars, in very low quantities, with technical specifications that are borderline incomprehensible - their latest car, the CC850, has a gated manual and a nine-speed automatic gearbox ??

Back in 2010, Koenigsegg launched the Agera, a brand new platform following the CC platform. It launched to great success, being voted as Hypercar of the Year by Top Gear. Over the following 5 years, the Agera evolved into the Agera R, Agera S, One:1 and then the Agera RS

The Agera RS was pitched as a more track-focussed version of the Agera, with 1150 bhp as standard or a cool 1360 bhp if you opted for the "megawatt package". The Agera RS became the fastest production car in 2017 with an average speed of 277.75mph over two runs

Although rare, the 25 Agera RS’s are quite well documented by online car registries, Instagram pages and car spotters. I’d seen many of them online over the years, and became fairly familiar with them - sadly about as familiar as I’ll ever get to a $2mil+ hypercar

Not long ago though I saw someone on Instagram talking about an Agera RSR that they were looking to bid on in an upcoming auction with RM Sothebys. The RSR was not something I’d heard of before. My mind instantly connected that name to the Porsche 911 RSR, so my first thought was that it was an exclusive, track only version of the RS. I did a little bit of googling, and it turns out that the Agera RSR was a hyper-limited run of just 3 cars, produced exclusively for Japanese customers. The RSR was fundamentally the same as the RS but had some aerodynamic improvements taken from the One:1 project. I don’t know how or why these 3 cars were made exclusively for Japanese customers.

From what I can see, one of the three cars is daily driven by its owner (mad respect), but the other two aren’t seen nearly as often. So when one of them went up for auction, it was a pretty big deal; the first time an RSR had been sold, and potentially the first time one would leave Japan.

The car ended up selling for $3.38mil 2016 Koenigsegg Agera RSR | Dubai | RM Sotheby's (excluding VAT and import duties, yikes) to a lucky customer in UAE

This post is part of WeblogPoMo2024. Read the others in the series:

WeblogPoMo2024

2024-04-30T12:00:00Z

I’ve been trying to get into a rhythm of not just writing, but actually publishing blog posts. I’m getting really good at having ideas for blog posts, making a few notes and maybe even writing a paragraph or two, but I always get distracted by something else before I ever hit publish. I stumbled upon WeblogPoMo2024, and I’m hoping it might be a good enough challenge to help me build a bit of a habit. So, if all goes to plan, I’m going to write and publish one blog post per day, for the whole month of May.

If I’m going to stick to this then I need to make it as easy for myself as possible, so I’m going to write about cars. I like cars. I’ve got a bunch of drafts already about interesting cars that I’ve discovered lately, and it’s something I find I can easily write about. As an appetiser, here’s a post I’ve already written about an incredibly rare Ferrari 360

I highly doubt that any of these posts will be world class literature (after all, I’m not an essayist), but they will be little snippets of things that I think are interesting and worth writing about

In case you’re discovering this in the future, here are links to all of the posts I’ve written in this series

Launching Hotdesk

2024-03-27T12:00:00Z

We just released a new modal design and password input, and introduced design tokens into our codebase

We recently released two new components; a modal and a password input. But more importantly, these components are the first to use our new design tokens, and officially marks the launch of Hotdesk, the design system behind Coherent.

With these newly designed components we’ve introduced a collection of design tokens for variables like color, spacing, corner-radius, and effects like opacity and background blur. We’re using a system of primitives, aliases (for color) and tokens to give ourselves the flexibility to make fairly discreet changes in the future, but enough rigidity to ensure styles remain consistent throughout our components.

I’ve worked closely with our developer over the past few months to ensure that design tokens they serve design and development without introducing too much friction into our setup. We need to keep maintenance to a minimum, but also needed a way to improve our design consistency going forward, and we felt that design tokens offered a good solution to both

We’ve introduced these design tokens on a small scale for now, only adding the tokens we needed for the modal and password-input redesign. As a small team, it wasn’t practical to establish a complete library of tokens right from the start, but because of the way they’ve been set up, it’ll be easy to add new ones, and update existing ones as needed going forward

I wish I had a flashy website to show off our design system documentation, but it’s unfortunately not something we currently have the resources to build or maintain. Nevertheless, I want to shoutout all the folks working on design system documentation - you’ve helped me so much to wrap my head around design tokens. I’ve looked at so many existing systems over the last few months but there were a few I kept coming back to

I’m really proud of the work that’s gone into this, and I’m really excited for what it’s going to mean for design at Coherent long into the future

Longing for nostalgia

2024-03-19T12:00:00Z

What’s the German word for ‘wishing you experienced something as a kid so you can feel nostalgic about it as an adult?

I’ve been getting this feeling a lot lately; a feeling that I wish I’d watched or played something as a kid, so that I can now feel nostalgia for it

I’ve been watching the original animated X-Men series on Disney+. I never watched when I was younger (I was a Pokémon kid). But seeing how excited adults are getting at the release of X-Men ‘97 makes me really wish I’d seen it, so that I could reminisce and feel nostalgic about it

Similarly, a friend recently lent me Pokémon Silver and Gold on Gameboy - both of which I never played as a kid - I played Red to death but then somehow didn’t play another until Fire Red?! Don’t get me wrong, I’m really excited to play these with fresh eyes, completely unspoiled (at least when some new batteries have been soldered into the cartridges..) but seeing how excited he got talking about his childhood memories of these games make me a little bit jealous tbh. I hope they do, but I doubt they’ll hit as hard playing them today, as they would have done playing them as a kid

I know this is all whinging for whinging’s sake - after all, I have great memories of watching and playing Pokémon, and feel a sense of nostalgia when they get resurfaced, but I just found this recurring feeling of longing for nostalgia kind of interesting

My introduction to Super Mario

2024-02-24T12:00:00Z

When I was a little kid I got a purple GameBoy Color with Pokémon Red for Christmas. That thing became my whole life. I played it non-stop, burning through AA batteries so quickly that my parents bought me a rechargeable battery pack for it. I have fond memories of sneaking it under the covers with a torch so that I could play it instead of going to sleep, and of long nighttime motorway journeys to visit grandparents, fighting the Elite 4 as the screen became illuminated every 50 metres or so when we went past a streetlamp.

But outside of this little device and that specific game, I didn’t know much. I had no idea what Nintendo was, didn’t know any other games (apart from Pokémon Blue, Yellow and Pinball), and I certainly didn’t know who Super Mario was. All I knew was purple Gameboy, Pokémon Red.

Once when we were visiting grandparents, my uncle stopped by. Seeing my hands tightly gripped around my GameBoy, he went into his old childhood bedroom and grabbed Super Mario Bros Deluxe for GameBoy Color and handed it to me. I ran straight upstairs into the bathroom, sat on the toilet and fired up my GameBoy. (I don’t know why I ran to the bathroom, maybe just so I had an excuse for what I was doing? Or maybe to get out of helping make the dinner? I dunno..)

Anyway, I fired up the game and jumped into level select where it presented levels 1-1 to 8-4 in a big grid. I didn’t know what any of this really meant but I remember being drawn to 2-2 (which sounds like tutu), sniggering like the immature child that I was, and jumping in.

To anyone that’s played this game before, you might remember that 2-2 is the first underwater level in the game. And it was my first introduction to Super Mario.

Now I’m sure that if I played the level today as a grown ass man, this level wouldn’t be too challenging. But as a 10 year old kid with no knowledge of Super Mario games, and no real video game experience outside of Pokémon Red, this level was a nightmare; the floaty movement, seemingly erratic enemies and jets of water that drag you off screen - it was all too much for little old me.

Needless to say, I didn’t play much of that game. Luckily for Mario, the newer titles like Odyssey and Wonder have redeemed him in my eyes. But I will never be able to rid the scars that 2-2 left on my 10 year old brain.

I like cars

2024-02-22T12:00:00Z

I like cars. I’ve always liked cars, ever since I was a kid. I remember begging my mum to take me to Sainsbury’s, at the same time my best friend was begging his mum to take him to Sainsbury’s too, so that we could sit in toy aisle picking HotWheels off the shelves whilst our parents did the weekly food shop. I remember though that I would always prioritise the real, licensed models, whilst my friends would favour the over-the-top, fantasy models that HotWheels is known for

In writing this blog post I remembered two models specifically that I bought on one of these Sainsbury’s trips; a Panoz GTR-1^[1] and a Volkswagen W12 Nardò Concept^[2] - the colour of which is for some reason painted directly onto my brain. I rummaged through my storage and found them in an old Sainsbury’s carrier bag along with a bunch more cars. Perhaps the bag they originally came home in ~20 or so years ago??*

[This image is missing]

Anyway, before this becomes a blog post about HotWheels, this is just to introduce the 'Cars' category into my blog.

I like cars and I know a lot of cars, but I occasionally stumble upon a car that I’ve never seen or even heard of before and it always makes me feel a little bit excited. About as excited as 10 year old me sitting on the floor of a Sainsbury’s with my best mate, rummaging through a bargain bin of fantasy HotWheels and finally finding a Panoz GTR-1 or Volkswagen W12 Nardo Concept. And I think that’s something I want to write about.

Launching website 3.0!

2024-01-11T12:00:00Z

It really feels like there’s a big resurgence of personal websites lately - I’ve seen so many people bringing back their websites, relaunching a "writing about whatever I want" blog, adding and subscribing to RSS feeds, and just generally making the internet weird and personal again - and I love it!

Inspired by this, and in traditional January fashion, I’ve just launched a complete redesign of my personal website. Introducing Website 3.0!

New nav hu dis?

Over the past 12 months or so of tinkering with my website, I’d always had the thought in the back of my mind to make my website feel a bit more SaaSy. I’m a UI designer at a SaaS company so as a way of leaning into my strengths, and also as a better way of representing my skills online, I liked the idea of introducing typically-SaaS components into my site, most notably a side nav rather than a typical header nav. It was only when I saw Robin Spielmann’s website (iamrobin)execute this beautifully that I felt confident enough to give it a go myself

So with that, I introduced a new sticky side nav, replacing the previous headers and footers. I’m over the moon with how it’s come out, especially with the addition of placeholder nav buttons coupled with a 'Coming soon' label. I like to think that this might make someone revisit my site to see what’s new, but most importantly they serve as a reminder to myself to crack on and get those pages finished and released

Simplicity. It’s simple really

On both the design and development fronts, I’d really overcomplicated my website. My typography and colour systems were confused at best, and the structure of pages was overly messy and meant that a lot of content was hidden deep in the depths of the site.

I completely redeveloped my colour palette, reducing the number of colours I have at hand, and using my recent knowledge of design tokens to better assign those colours to avoid over-complication. I also simplified my typography system and made sure it scales more naturally across different devices (utopia.fyi made this a breeze)

I dropped a few pages, introduced some new top level pages and generally shuffled things around a bit to make navigation a bit easier and prevent so many pages from getting lost behind multiple button clicks

Change(b)log

As I’m treating this website as a digital garden; something to potter in and tweak over time, I wanted to keep better track of the changes I make, just for my own nostalgia really. I’ve added a changelog into the side nav and reworked my blog CMS to suit both blog posts and changelog updates. I plan to write blog posts for any significant releases I make, but will use the changelog for the odd tweaks I make here and there

General improvements and bug fixes™️

We update our app regularly to bring you the best experience. Make sure you have automatic updates turned off so you’re always up to date

Jokes aside, I just fixed a load of stuff and updated a load of stuff. Too much to list here

Anyway, hope you like the update! If you’ve got any feedback or spot anything weird, message me on Mastodon

Alex :)

Using ambient sounds to improve my focus

2024-01-03T12:00:00Z

I often struggle with focussing at the right time. I can sit for ages staring at the task in hand, but all I can think about is some other task. Or I can slowly work on something throughout the day with broken periods of attention, and then suddenly become laser-focussed at 5:30pm, just as I should be winding down.

I’m fortunate to have flexible working conditions that allow me to work around this but from time-to-time I do get stretches where I struggle to focus on anything for several days. It’s in these periods that I’ll look for tips, tricks and hacks to improve my focus.

I recently re-discovered the app Portal, coincidentally right after they launched their big 1.20 update. Portal takes over the audio and video of your MacBook to immerse you in peaceful and awe-inspiring places; volcanoes to meadows, shorelines to rainforests. When you enter a Portal, your wallpaper is replaced by a high-quality video stream of a particular location, and the sounds of chirping birds, rustling leaves or low rumbles of thunder from that scene are played through your speakers. It can even connect to smart lighting devices to further immerse you in the location, but don’t yet have the right lights to try this

I’m not sure what it is about these low-volume background sounds that get my brain out of a funk, but whenever they start playing I feel an almost instant reset. And pairing them with lo-fi beats on Apple Music really helps to set a much more focussed and productive scene.

Here’s some of the playlists and artists I rotate between Lofi Focus Kiroku Radio Brain.fm

One other bonus app that I use to help with focus is HazeOver. It’s a little app that lives in the menu bar on your Mac. When active, it dims the brightness of all of your open windows, except the one that’s currently active. Very handy if, like me, you’ve got a big monitor with apps and windows open all over the place

This isn’t a perfect solution by any means; I still get moments where I can’t seem to focus on one thing at a time, but it has so far been a pretty effective kick-start for focussed sessions

Thanks for reading! Alex :)

Subscriptions I’m taking into 2024

2023-12-29T12:00:00Z

Throughout 2023 I’ve been slimming down the number of apps I use to try and reduce the amount of digital clutter that I have. I’ve also seen my spend on subscriptions increase over the past 12 months however; partly due to streaming services bumping up their prices, but also because I’ve just got a bit more greedy adding another £5/m here and there without really thinking about it

Next year I expect I’ll cut some of these subscriptions as my monthly spend is getting a bit high, and whilst I’ve switched some of them over to annual billing to save a little on the monthly cost, there’s still some subscriptions that I’m holding onto because "I might need it one day" or because of the fear of losing my grandfather status - I could unsubscribe now but if I choose to resubscribe in 6 months, I’ll pay their new, increased prices For now though at least, here are the subscriptions I’m taking into 2024

Entertainment

Apple One Premium

This is a pricey subscription huh. I could probably drop this and subscribe individually to the services that I actually use regularly, but I doubt I’d save that much, so I’m really keeping this just for the convenience. I use Apple Music a tonne, TV+ a fair bit, iCloud storage all the time, Arcade more and more, Fitness from time to time and News rarely

Crunchyroll

I really got into anime at the beginning of last year and Crunchyroll had one of the lowest monthly costs of all streaming services so I thought I’d give it a try. My anime watching has slowed over the year, and with Netflix producing so much too, I wonder if I’ll keep this subscription. That being said, I absolutely loved working through Attack on Titan recently, so that was easily worth the cost

Disney+

I’m really just clinging on to this subscription for the odd occasion that I fancy watching a Marvel movie. I’m not really keeping up to date with all the movies and series but sometimes I just want to rewatch Avengers or something. But now at £120/y that’s becoming quite an expensive convenience so I’m not sure if I’ll renew next year

GamePass Ultimate

I’ve had this for a while as I only need to play a couple of games a year for it to pay for itself. With a Switch and PS5 too, my monthly spend on gaming is creeping up though, especially with the price increase to GamePass earlier this year. I’ve currently got a free year plan through my internet provider though, but we’ll see if it gets renewed next year

Ivory for Mastodon

I’ve only used one Mastodon client but Ivory is doing everything I want so this is an easy subscription to keep.

Marvel Unlimited

This is a fairly new subscription for me. I’ve been getting into Marvel lore lately through playing Marvel SNAP and seeing characters and references I’d never heard of before. I wanted to read some comics but physical copies are not cheap. Unlimited gives me access to 30k+ comics for just a few quid a month. This might be a subscription I drop soon though as I’m not sure how much I’m actually enjoying reading comics tbh

Playstation Plus Premium

I bought a PS5 earlier this year without the disc tray so I’ll only be playing digital. PS Plus had a good deal on their annual plan before Christmas which seemed like a no-brainer thinking about the PlayStation games I want to play soon

Health & Education

Duolingo Super

¡Para aprender español! Some days I spend 30+ minutes working through lessons, and others I spend 30 seconds just to extend my streak (I’ll hit 600 days today!). But I love languages and love seeing how my Spanish is improving slowly but surely, so I think the £60/y is more than worth it

Liftin’ Unlimited

This was my favourite workout companion that I tried last year and it only costs a couple of quid a month. I’ve not worked out for a couple of months (life got in the way), but it’s another one that I’m scared to cancel in case the price goes up and I lose any grandfather-status the developer might decide to offer

Productivity

1Password

1Password does everything I need it to, but that being said, if Apple adds a dedicated Passwords app, and assuming they include it in Apple One, I’d drop this subscription in a heartbeat

Bear Pro

I love Bear. I don’t write as much as I’d like, but when I do, Bear makes it a piece of cake. I was subscribed to Bear Pro before they launched Bear 2.0 and they’ve been generous enough to grandfather me in so I won’t be cancelling this any time soon

Figma

I use this for all my personal projects and for designing my website before I build it. It’s maybe a bit overkill to have a paid subscription just for personal projects, but I do enjoy all the benefits it brings

Framer

I jumped into Framer earlier this year, moving away from Webflow. I absolutely love how similar it feels to Figma and have really enjoyed getting to grips with it. It is a little bit pricey, but it’s also very good and very easy to use, so I can’t complain too much

Monzo Plus

Monzo has helped me so much to get on top of my finances and understand them better. I have absolutely no problem paying for this every month

Non-digital subscriptions

Roadrat Magazine

This magazine is absolutely stunning; incredible photography and really well written articles about all things automotive. Easily something you could pick up at any point in time and enjoy flicking through. I also like the joy of receiving something physical, through the post every 3 months

Standart Magazine

The same as above really, but for coffee rather than cars. The extra benefit of this subscription is that I get a back of speciality coffee beans with the magazine every 3 months. Very fun and very interesting articles. Plus they look good on a shelf

So that’s all of that subscriptions that I’ll be entering into 2024 with. A lot of them are on annual billing cycles, so we’ll see how many face the chopping block this year.

Thanks for reading! Alex :)

Next year I’ll be organised with gift giving

2023-12-20T12:00:00Z

I say this every year. Days before Christmas, as I’m frantically racing around town looking for last minute gifts because I’ve missed out on the 'before-Christmas' online delivery windows. "Next year I’m going to be organised" I optimistically tell myself, whilst simultaneously not putting any changes in place.

Well this year I have finally put some changes in place and set up a sort of workflow that’ll hopefully help me be organised with gift giving in 2024 and beyond

The setup

One of the most useful apps I’ve found recently is Anybox - it’s just a place to dump links, notes, photos and files that I might need to access in the future - very handy if you’ve got an easily-distracted brain like me

Items can be tagged, and tags can be nested, so I’ve set up a # gift-ideas tag and then a nested tag for each friend and family member that I’ll need to buy gifts for. Going forward, as I find things that I think someone might like, or as someone mentions something in passing, I can store a link and start to build a list of potential gifts for them

In Things 3 I’ve then set up a project called 'Birthdays & celebrations' and created to-dos for birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas etc. These to-dos are obviously set to repeat every year, and have a deadline 14 days before their due date, giving me a two week heads up that I need to sort out a gift soon. Tags in Anybox have deeplinks which I’ve copied into the Notes section of each to-do so that when the to-do pops into my Today list, I can quickly have a look at what I might want to buy

The final piece of this puzzle was the finance side. I like to budget and set aside money for purchases that I know are coming up, so I created a quick cash flow in Numbers. I figured out how many gifts I’d need to buy each month, and how much I’d like to spend per gift. I then chose an amount to set aside each month and looked at how the cashflow played out over the year. I tweaked the 'saving' value until the cash flow was positive almost every month. It’s unlikely that I’ll spend exactly the same on every gift, so there’s a bit of flexibility in the budget anyway

I set up a recurring deposit into a Gifts pot in Monzo and then added a virtual card to that pot (Monzo Plus required). Now whenever a birthday to-do appears in my Today list, I know that I’ve got two weeks to get a card and a present, I’ve already got a list of potential gifts for that person, and I know that I’ve got money set aside specifically for that

I’m hoping this will be enough for me to stay on top of things next year, but do keep your eye out for a follow-up "It didn’t work, I’m still disorganised" post this time next year

Alex

Website 2.0

2023-07-10T12:00:00Z

Website 2.0 is here! And it’s looking fresh, if I do say so myself 😎

Now I’m not going to say that "it’s been built from the ground up". Because it hasn’t. When I released the first version of this website at the beginning of the year, it was the first time I’d used Framer, and the first time I’d really designed a website for myself - all my previous endeavours were built on templates in Squarespace or Webflow. And whilst I was pretty happy with what I produced, I knew that the website suffered from two things; my lack or familiarity with Framer, and my desire to add everything I could thing of, in one go.

I’ve now been using Framer for about 6 months, tinkering away at my own website, and building new ones for clients under ninethreeone. As I’ve now become more comfortable in Framer, and as I’d spotted several things that I’d overcomplicated, I thought it was about time for a redesign

Colour palette

When I set up the colour palette at the beginning of the year, I decided to "future proof" myself by creating 9 values of varying lightness, for each colour, and included colours "just in case". This meant that my complete palette wasn’t far off 100 colours.

I don’t think this was the wrong move; I’ve worked on projects where I’ve initially created a much smaller palette to start with, and it’s much harder to fit new colours in, than it is to remove unused ones at a later date.

I looked through my site at which colours were currently in use - knowing that the site was more colourful than I wanted it to be anyway - and cut out the unused ones. I slimmed the palette down to 5 grey values, the primary orange, and 3 shades of each supporting colour that I actually needed

Colour consistency across pages

This ties in to the previous point; as I’d created a palette with so many colours, I wanted to make sure I was using them. So I decided that each main page (About, Work, Blog etc) and their corresponding child pages would each use a different coloured theme. This meant changing the colour of supporting UI like '.' at the end of an H1, or underlines and dividers, to the colour of that theme. But at that time I also remembered about the setting in Safari that allows the browser header to adopt the body colour of the website you’re currently viewing. Once I enabled this myself and started to see it in action on others' websites, I wanted to do the same on mine, so I changed the body colour of each of those main pages to correspond to their theme too

At first I thought this was quite fun and cool and novel. But it didn’t take long before I found it annoying that my browser would change colour with (almost) every click. And in addition to that, if I went onto a different tab, and then wanted to get back to my site by clicking on its tab, I’d sometimes think I’d clicked on the wrong tab because everything was purple for example.

It was all-in-all a fun experiment, but I’ve now undone all of this and use the same orange theme on every page, which in my opinion makes everything feel much more together

Nested pages

As I mentioned in the last section, I was applying those themes to the parent pages, but also to all of their children. And let me tell you, there were a LOT of children.

I think when I first built the site, I didn’t really have much of a structure in mind, beyond the main few pages. Similarly, whilst I’d drafted a lot of the content I wanted to include, I’d also left lots of gaps that I told myself I’d fill in, once the site was built. Combining both of these things led to an issue where I kept creating new child pages every time I thought up some content that deviated every so slightly from the content on the parent page. This meant that I ended up with pages that were 3 or 4 levels deep, which not only meant a lot of maintenance to keep all those pages up to date, but it also created navigation problems. If any website visitor had any chance of finding those pages, I needed to make sure I had buttons everywhere, links back to the parent (and grandparent??) pages etc etc

It was all too much to maintain, and a nightmare for anyone to navigate. So I’ve removed most of the children and instead opted for longer parent pages

New fonts and styles

This is probably the part I was most excited about. I can’t remember how I found it, but I stumbled upon Vault Alarm by Simplebits and I loved it. But more importantly, I loved the idea of having a thick, weighty, bold font that I could use to title my pages. Up until that point, I’d only ever used a single font on a single site, and relied on colour and font weight to provide distinction between different headers and body text. But now that I’ve seen how good it can look to have a "statement" font, paired with an easily legible, "default" font, I can’t imagine going back

Disclaimer: if you visit the Simplebits website and notice any similarities between it and my own website, I can assure you that this was purely coincidence, but seeing their website did certainly help me validate using orange as my primary colour 😅

Simplified blog

The blog was one of the first things I built when I first set up this website because I wanted a place to share stuff. I was encouraged by other internet folk who had blogs, posting short, ~2 minute long blog posts about whatever they felt like, and I wanted to do the same

Things started off fairly well, but I found that I’d accidentally designed it in a way that was putting me off writing new posts.

On the blog page, alongside the title and description of each article, I wanted to display a thumbnail that would hopefully entice visitors into clicking on the article. Once they got into the article, they’d see a full width header image, showcasing some of the things they were going to read about. And then if they decided to share the article on social media, I wanted a unique 'share image' to be used, again showing off what was in the article.

This meant that for each article I wrote, I ended up spending twice as long designing graphics for it, to the point where I lost interest in writing the post altogether

I’ve now removed these thumbnails, header images and share images, which should halve the amount of time it takes to publish a blog post, and will hopefully lead to me writing more, which was my goal right from the beginning

This website is still a 'forever work-in-progress' - I’m going to continue tweaking it, adding to it and improving it over time, whilst also using it as a bit of a sandbox for testing design ideas and any new stuff that I discover in Framer. I hope for now that you like what you see, and keep your eyes peeled for whatever updates come next

Thanks for reading! Alex :)

Combining analogue and digital memories with QR codes

2023-07-05T12:00:00Z

tldr; My mum wanted to link her iCloud photos to a QR code, which we achieved by using Shared Albums and Shortcuts. If you just want to copy the shortcut, here’s the link

My mum likes to scrapbook. Whenever she goes on holiday she collects tickets and receipts and trinkets, combines them with fancy ribbons, buttons and twine, and sticks them all onto decorative papers alongside photos from her trip

These scrapbook pages are great, but present two problems. Firstly, there’s only so much space to include her photos - and she takes a LOT of photos. And secondly, there’s no way of attaching any videos to the page - and she takes a LOT of videos.

So a few days ago she wondered whether she could add QR codes into her scrapbook pages, that when scanned, would link to the additional photos and videos she wanted to include - combining her analogue and digital memories.

All of her photos and videos are in iCloud so we wanted to avoid having to upload them to another cloud storage service, and she wanted these QR codes to be accessible to anyone who scans them, without uploading the photos anywhere public like Facebook.

I've been playing around with Shortcuts recently (like this one for cataloguing wines), and remember spotting a 'Generate QR code' action, so I figured that’d be a good place to start. I found that each photo in the camera library has an iCloud link but they expire in 30 days - not ideal for a QR in a scrapbook that might sit on a shelf for years and years

It took a bit of digging around but I finally found a solution using Shared Albums. Shared Albums also have iCloud links, but they don’t expire. And as they’re albums, it’s a little bit easier to manage linking multiple photos and videos to the same QR code

Here’s the steps to set up the Shared Album on iOS

Head to the Photos app and over to the Albums tab. Tap the + in the top left corner and choose 'New Shared Album'
When prompted, give the album a name and tap 'Next'
The next screen will prompt you to invite people to this Shared Album. You can do this if you want someone else to be able to to contribute to the album, but for the purpose of these scrapbook QR codes, this isn’t necessary, so just tap 'Create'
Tap the large + icon and add whatever photos and videos you want (you can add and remove photos whenever you’d like, so no need to do them all in one go)
When you’re ready, tap the ••• in the top right corner, then 'Invite people'. On the following page, enable the 'Public Website' toggle and then tap 'Share Link' and then 'Copy'
You can share this link wherever, and with whomever you’d like, and they’ll be directed to an iCloud webpage where they can see the contents of the album

The next step then is to add this link to a QR code. As mentioned earlier, I used Shortcuts to set this up as it’s a) free and b) easy and convenient to use over and over again.

But if you want to create it yourself, here’s the steps

Add an 'Ask for input' step. Tap 'Text' and change this to 'URL', and tap 'Prompt' and enter the prompt that will appear when the shortcut is run. I just set this to 'iCloud Link' so that my mum knows what’s being requested
Add a 'Generate QR code' step. The variable should automatically update to the value you entered in the previous step i.e. 'iCloud Link'
Then add a 'Show result' step that again should pull the variable from the previous step; in this case 'QR code'
And that’s it! Press play the 'Play' icon in the top right to test that it all works how you want - it should ask for a URL, and then once submitted, display the QR code

My mum is happy with this simple set up, as she can just screenshot the QR code and add it to a pages document. She’ll repeat this several times and then print out a sheet of QR codes that she can cut out and stick into her scrapbook.

If you wanted to build on this shortcut though, you could send that created QR code into a Note, Pages or many other apps. Or, if compatible, you could send it immediately to your printer, skipping the need to screenshot and format it

If you use this shortcut, or if you’ve got any suggestions for further developments, let me know on Mastodon!

Thanks for reading!

Alex :)

Creating a Shortcut to catalogue nice wines

2023-05-26T12:00:00Z

tldr; I had some nice wine and wanted to store its details so I created a Shortcut that prompts me to fill out various details, and then submits them to Bear. Get the shortcut (Shortcuts)

I was recently in a tapas bar in Cardiff and ordered myself a glass of white wine. Not knowing much about wine, I relied on two things when deciding what to get; price and the tasting notes. My general strategy when it comes to price is to get the second or third most expensive on the list, (on the assumption that there are maybe 3-5 options that are all somewhat reasonably priced). As it stood on this particular occasion, the tasting notes for that wine also sounded right up my street

Pale, sweet, smooth with peach, apple & honey

I ordered the wine and had a sniff and took a sip. It was fantastic. The peach was so obviously there but not so intense that it tasted like an artificial, gummy sweet and the crispness and acidity were really well balanced. My strategy had paid off again.

I wanted to make a note of this wine so that if in the future I saw it again on a menu, I’d know to order it. Or if I was browsing wine in a store, I’d know what to look for, rather than staring blankly at a wall of bottles and buying based on nothing but the label design

As is always the case, my first thought was that I should build an app to track the wines I drink (I don’t know a single line of Swift and don’t have the attention span to learn for long enough that I could build something myself)

But then I remembered about Shortcuts. I’ve been playing with Shortcuts recently and have enjoyed seeing what people are able to create on r/Shortcuts. So I started building out a shortcut that would request inputs for things like name, year, colour and grape variety, and then combine those with my current location and the current weather conditions. It would then take all of those text strings, combine them into a paragraph, create a new note in Bear and paste in the paragraph

One of the things I like most about Bear is that it supports tags and nested tags. So I played around in Shortcuts and figured out how to format text and insert variables to create nested tags that will eventually allow me to easily find all the red wines I’ve saved, or all of the chardonnays for example. If you’re curious, this is what my nesting structure looks like

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If you made it this far, I appreciate you! And if you were wondering what the wine was that kicked this whole thing off;

🍷 Marina Alta 🎨 White 🍇 Muscat of Alexandria

If you want to use my shortcut, you can access it below. If you do use it, or if you have any suggestions or feedback, tag me on Mastodon

My plan now is to expand on this shortcut so I can store the details of any drink, from a single shortcut. And perhaps most importantly, I’m going to have to drink some more wine to populate my new catalogue. ¡Salud! 🥂

Designing a detailed checkbox component

2023-04-21T12:00:00Z

Taking our checkboxes to the next level

I recently designed a new, detailed checkbox component for our design system. I was working on a new feature that would introduce some new user roles, increasing the number of roles from two to four. Accommodating these new roles and maintaining and easy-to-understand interface was going to be challenging with our existing checkboxes, so I took the opportunity to build something new

For context

When a user is inviting a new user to join their team, they would see a field prompting them to select the new users role. The checkbox content was the name of the role, and then the role descriptions were included as a field hint.

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As we were introducing two new roles, the differences between the now four roles became more subtle making the role descriptions more important. Relying on a field hint to describe four wasn’t really an option any more - the hint would span several lines and a short paragraph of text would be visibly overwhelming and difficult to scan

Aims

The aim therefore was to design a new type of checkbox that would allow us to display the role description, alongside the role itself as a way of a) avoiding a paragraph of text explaining roles, and b) providing context-in-situ to reduce the risk of a user selecting the wrong role having missed or misread the role description

End result

I explored a couple of options but fairly quickly settled on what I’ve now christened, a "detailed checkbox".

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Roles are always displayed as coloured labels to allow the user to more quickly scan the page content, so in the interest of consistency, I used the same labels and followed them up with the role description

I added a checkbox icon and a left-border colour change to indicate the checked state, and to ensure this component would be reusable outside of user roles, added disabled states, and created a variant that uses a text title instead of a label.

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February 2023 - Changelog

2023-02-02T12:00:00Z

Added footer
Added 'Now' page
Added About/Coffee
Added About/Gym
Added new Body fill to utilise Safari colour tint thing
Added mobile breakpoints for every page

Now that I’m starting to get the hang of Framer, I started building out my website this month, adding more pages, sections and content. I also fixed a few layout issues and resolved some inconsistencies between pages

I added a 'Now' page - this was something I was really keen to add - a page that shows what I’m up to now; what I’m watching, reading, listening to, what I’m playing, what I’m enjoying and more. I’ve seen a few people introduce these pages into their websites and I love the personality that it adds and how it helps my website to really feel like my little slice of the internet. In the interest of not having to update the page too often, I plan to use it as a 'this is what I’ve been up to this past month' page, and aim to just update it once per month

I added /coffee and /gym to my About page - two pages where you can find out more about two of my biggest interest; coffee and working out. Coffee details my current coffee setup and will be updated to show what beans I’m currently drinking, and Gym shows my current workout split and a few extra details

I added something fun that makes the most of a feature of Safari; using the body background colour to tint the tab bar. I remember reading about this when it was announced, but it didn’t override my default preferences, so I never actually enabled it.

I’ve now added body colours that correspond to the theme of each of the pages in my site, so that Safari will change colour as you navigate throughout my site. I’m still experimenting with this; I think it’s maybe a bit extreme and shocking that it changes on almost every page, but it’s quite fun. We’ll have to wait and see how long I keep it like this

I’ve introduced proper mobile breakpoints for every page now too so hopefully everything looks good on smaller screens. This was surprisingly easy to setup in Framer, once I realised how breakpoints were handled

I also added a footer. It’s basically empty and doesn’t always sit where I want it to, but it’s there

Thanks for reading :) Alex.

Making labels pop with indicators

2023-01-16T12:00:00Z

I was recently designing some labels for our component library that we could use for things like invoice status, integration category and tags on user profiles.

They’re simple labels containing text and occasionally an icon, and would exist in several colours to accommodate as wide a range of use cases as possible

Once I’d settled on the general layout of the labels, I started playing around with colours; trying different combinations of background, border, text and icon colours.

I’d just finished overhauling our colour palette so had plenty of colours to play with; each one with a scale from 900 to 100

As I’d recently reworked these colours, I already knew how to ensure that the contrast ratio between the darker text and lighter background colour met the minimum 4.5:1 requirement, so I set them up to use 100 for the background and 800 for the text.

I tested using a lighter colour for the icon but found that they were often difficult to make out as they were so small and mostly using an outline style. I felt that the label also felt a bit disconnected when the text and icon were different colours too

Once I’d finished this stage, I began introducing them into my current design projects as a way of "testing them in production" before we went ahead and built them

I quickly found that there were some locations and some colour combinations that felt a little flat or a little muted - they didn’t stand out quite as well as I wanted them to

Knowing that I didn’t have too much room to play with the contrast ratio, and without wanting to update our colour palette again just to accommodate this issue, I looked for other options

Shadows and borders made the labels feel overcomplicated, and whilst some labels looked good with filled icons, some didn’t, so I didn’t want to rely on this either

In the end I added what I’ve called an 'Indicator'. It’s a 6 x 6px square with a 1px corner radius and 8px padding all around. It uses a 500 colour, compared to the 100 background and 800 text and icon. And I think it looks pretty good if I do say so myself

Maybe there’s something scientific happening here, or maybe it’s just a placebo, but I feel like the lightness of the indicator tricks my eyes into thinking that the label text is lighter than it is, which in turn makes the whole label 'pop' a bit more than it did before

If you found this useful, or have any feedback or suggestions, feel free to message me on twitter! And if you want to show this some love on dribbble , it’d be much appreciated

Alex.

January 2023 - Changelog

2023-01-15T12:00:00Z

January was my first full month of using Framer after I switched my website over from Webflow. As a designer who spends most of his day in Figma, Framer felt a lot more familiar than Webflow ever did. That being said, I’m still finding my feet, learning the ins and outs and discovering what Framer is capable of

Most of the work I did this month was setting up my pages and configuring components like the header bar. I also added the CMS to launch my blog, including playing around with custom fields. I added categories and custom colours that could be used to create the labels you see on the Blog page - they’re fairly simple but I was really happy when I got them set up!

I also spent a bit of time getting to grips with how best to export content from Figma for thumbnails and banner images

That’s about it for January. I must say that so far, this has been the most enjoyable website redesign I’ve done - I’m really enjoying having a project to tinker with for an hour here and there, and it’s much more comfortable not having the pressure of needing to design and build a complete, perfect website before I launch it

Thanks for reading Alex.

New year, new website

2023-01-04T12:00:00Z

As is tradition almost every year, I started redesigning my website in the Christmas holidays. And, as is tradition almost every year, I felt myself reaching a point where I was tweaking and editing the same thing over and over again. If I’ve learnt anything over the past few years, it’s that when I reach this point, I never actually end up releasing my new site

So, to break that cycle, I’ve decided this year to launch my new site as a work-in-progress in the interest of launching as soon as possible.

So here we are. Welcome to my new website 👋

It’s a bit of a refresh on my old site; a little cleaner and less cluttered than before. I’ve also moved from Webflow to Framer so I’m excited to pick up a new tool and see what I can do with it

My plan now is to tinker with the site over time. I’ve got a big list of pages, content and design elements that I’d like to add, but I look forward to working on slowly and use this site as a bit of a playground and a living project, and hopefully carve out a neat little space in the internet just for me

So for now, if you don’t already know me, check out my About me, and check back in as I release new updates

Thanks for reading!

Alex :)

When was the last time you really immersed yourself in what you were doing?

2021-04-21T12:00:00Z

This post is brought to you by this dinner I made recently. Check out the recipe here (Sweet and Sour Tempeh)

It was only when I sat down to eat this meal that I realised how absorbed I’d been in the process of making it. It felt like I’d been cooking for 2 minutes and 2 hours and I couldn’t really remember what happened between taking the ingredients out of the fridge, and plating up the finished meal. I was feeling refreshed, relaxed, satisfied and accomplished.

By becoming immersed in the preparation I’d fallen into a state of flow which had been meditative and helped me be mindful of what I was doing.

I’m definitely no expert when it comes to mindfulness or mental wellbeing, but I do remember reading a little while ago about flow states, and there was one thing that stuck with me

To get into a state of flow, you need to occupy yourself with a task that is simple and familiar enough that you can do it on autopilot, but is complex and challenging enough that it keeps your brain stimulated

For me, cooking is a really effective way of me finding flow. I know how to cook, but I’m not an expert. I can prepare vegetables but sometimes their odd shapes require a bit more problem-solving. Even cleaning up after the meal can induce flow; I’ve washed dishes hundreds of times but sometimes a stubborn stain or particularly dirty pan needs just enough work to keep my brain on edge

And whilst I don’t think you can force yourself into flow, you can at least try to facilitate it. Discover the sorts of activities you can lose yourself in, that offer that middle ground between challenge and familiarity; maybe it’s making your bed, washing the car, creating wireframes, filling out a spreadsheet - it could be anything! And once you’ve discovered them, work out how you encourage immersion. I personally try to block out some time to focus on that task and try to remove other distractions - noise cancelling headphones and do not disturb are a good place to start!

I think the thing with flow is that you don’t really know you’re in it, whilst you’re in it. You might have fleeting thoughts, or feel a sense of clarity on something that’s been taking your attention, or just completely lose track of time. But I think once that activity is complete, and the state of flow is broken, you’ll feel relaxed and hopefully stress-free

When was the last time you were so immersed in an activity that you found flow? I think in a time where our lives are so hectic and full of things competing for our attention, it’s important to try and prioritise these little time-outs for ourselves, as often as we can.

What are some of your most effective activities for achieving flow? Do you have any tips on how to immerse yourself in these activities? Let me know on twitter @marsh931

Sweet and Sour Tempeh

2021-04-21T12:00:00Z

This recipe was originally written by Gaz Oakley - Avant-Garde Vegan. I’ve made a few tweaks, but you can find the original recipe here Sweet & Sour Tempeh - Avant-Garde Vegan

I was never a fan of sweet and sour when I ordered it from a Chinese takeaway, it always seemed too intense in all the wrong places; so sweet that it hurt my teeth, or so vinegary that it made my eyes water. This recipe seems to have the balance of everything just right chefs kiss

Ingredients

1 block of tempeh Rice Lime wedge

Sauce 120ml pineapple juice 60ml rice wine vinegar (I use apple cider) 120ml water 2 tbsp sriracha 4 tbsp tomato puree 1 tbsp soy sauce 3 tbsp maple syrup

Vegetables Tenderstem broccoli Red/yellow pepper Mushrooms Carrots

Method

Heat your oven to 180 degrees C, grab a baking tray and line it with greaseproof paper
Chop the tempeh into cubes, toss it in a drizzle of olive oil, salt and pepper and chuck it onto the baking tray and into the oven for ~15 mins
I put my rice on at the same time, but this will depend on what sort of rice you’re using, and how soft you want it
Mix all the sauce ingredients in a small pan and heat it until it starts to bubble
Once your rice is just about done, heat some oil in a wok (sesame oil is excellent, if you have that to hand)
Drain your rice and stick it back in the pan with the lid on. This will trap the steam in which should make it nice and fluffy. Just make sure you don’t put the pan back on a hot hob or the rice will burn to the pan (speaking from experience 😬)
Chuck your mushrooms and broccoli into the wok for a couple of minutes to soften. You could add a little splash of soy sauce if you like
Chuck in your peppers and carrots and toss them around. Don’t cook them for too long, the crunch that they add when they’re only part-cooked is the best
Add some of the sauce just to flavour the vegetables. I recommend not throwing the tempeh into the wok so that it stays nice and crispy
Serve up your rice, add the vegetables on top, followed by the roasted tempeh, and a splash of sauce
Add some sesame seeds and a squeeze of lime and you’re done!

February 2021

2021-02-17T12:00:00Z

February has been a pretty tough month. I’ve really struggled with motivation and focus both at work and in my personal life. I think the combination of a twelfth month in lockdown, the bleak Welsh weather and some lingering life admin left over from my move back from Munich, have all just knocked me off balance a bit.

This month has been my first full month with my standing desk. At the end of January I bought a Fully Jarvis sit/stand desk. I’d never used a standing desk before so I spent a long time researching different models and brands, and most of all the actual benefits of a standing desk over a normal desk, especially as they’re significantly more expensive. I have chronic lower back problems so I’m regularly standing up and walking around the room just to stretch my joints and stop my back from seizing up (I know it sounds like I’m 80 years old but I’m actually only 28…), so I thought a standing desk would help me achieve this without interrupting my work flow too much.

1 month in and I absolutely love it. I probably spend around 30% of my time standing, although this would probably be higher if I hadn’t bought an ergonomic desk chair at the same time. The ability to switch from sitting to standing within seconds is amazing; it really feels like two different working environments which is great for helping me maintain focus. I opted for a 160cm x 80cm desktop which gives me plenty of space for my Macbook, a monitor and my iPad when I’m sketching wireframes.

The complete desk setup wasn’t cheap, but it’s something that I’ll keep for a long time and use a lot. I’ll be working from home indefinitely, even post-pandemic, so investing in a decent home office setup (that doubles as a Lego building station) seemed like a pretty grown-up use of my money

Work life

I think this month has been the first time that I’ve felt burnt-out. At the very least it’s the first time I’ve properly acknowledged it. I’m grateful to work for a company that lets us take time off when we need it, so I took that opportunity to take a couple of days at the end of the month to clear my head and recharge my batteries. I know that losing control of my to-do lists has been one cause of this burnout so I’m going to spend the beginning of March getting back into a good rhythm with them to hopefully bring me back on track

I spent a lot of time this month working on our design system and components in Figma. It’s something I’d been putting off for a while as I couldn’t justify spending hours building components when I could be scoping new features or testing features ready for deployment. I knew that it would save me a lot of time in the long run so I finally forced myself to spend some time on it. There’s still a long way to go but I made a lot of good progress

Some things I’ve been enjoying

I’ve been loving this Focus Drum and Bass playlist and this Trip Hop / Downtempo playlist for focussed work sessions

My parents and I have been working through the MCU in chronological order which has been great fun, especially to see my mum finally putting all the pieces together. We’ve also created a Friday ritual of watching Wandavision with our lunch which has been amazing - fantastic series

I set myself the goal this year to publish monthly updates for the whole year, and here’s my second one 🎉 How’s your February been? What have you been enjoying this month? Tweet me or send me a DM @Marsh931 . Until next month, hope to see you then! Alex

Januar 2021 Lebensupdate

2021-02-16T12:00:00Z

Wir sind nur im Januar, jedoch ist 2021 soweit schon ziemlich chaotisch gewesen

Ein kleines Hintergrundinformation - vor ungefähr 18 Monaten bin ich nach München von Großbritannien umgezogen. Als Teil meines Studiums hatte ich ein Praktikum in München gemacht. Nach meinem Abschluss hatte ich immer die Erwartung, dass ich irgendwann wieder nach München umziehen würde, sogar wenn nur kurzfristig

Am Anfang 2019, mit einer kleiner Förderung von meiner Oma, bin ich zu dem Schluss gekommen, dass ich es tue. Ich ziehe nach Deutschland.

Im September 2019 war ich mit einem Rucksack und einem Koffer in München gelandet. Ich war am Ende des Sommers angekommen und hatte leider nur ein Paar Wochen die Sonne zu genießen, bevor der Winterzeit hereinströmt. Die nächsten 6 Monaten hatten richtig viel Spaß gemacht, ich hatte viele neue Menschen kennengelernt und fand mich ziemlich gut zurecht in der neuen aber bekannten Stadt. Ab März aber, waren wir in einem kompletten Lockdown. Während den folgenden 10 Monaten wurden die Einschränkungen entspannter und dann wieder strenger. Meine kurze City Breaks mussten gekündigt werden, ich durfte meine Freunde nicht besuchen und konnte die Stadt nicht mehr erfahren. Dazu mit der langfristigen Ungewissheit ob ich bald nach Großbritannien fahren dürfte, wurde es sinnlose in München zu bleiben

Am Anfang Dezember bin ich zu dem Schluss gekommen, dass ich wieder nach Großbritannien ziehen sollte. Im Januar war ich total mit dem logistischen Alptraum beschäftigt, wie ich und meine persönliche Gegenstände nach Großbritannien ziehen wurde, in einer Welt voller COVID und Brexit, und Einschränkungen die sich fast täglich änderte. Mein Stressniveau war auf keinem Fall unter Kontrolle…

18 Stunden und 4 Zügen später (ja ich bin von München nach Wales mit dem Zug gefahren und würde es ohne Frage empfehlen) bin ich daheim angekommen, mit meinen Eltern in Südwales.

Viele Änderungen diesen Monat, hoffentlich wird February etwa gespannter sein

Arbeit

Ich habe es ziemlich schwierig gefunden, mich auf der Arbeit zu fokussieren, trotzdem läuft alles soweit richtig gut. Ich bin organisierter und motivierter - ich benutze to-do Liste mit realistischen täglichen Zielen - Todoist ist schnell mein Lieblingstool geworden

Ich arbeite gerade im Bereich Aufgaben und Benachrichtigungen - dieser Bereich wird nicht seit langem entwickelt und braucht ein Bisschen Liebe. Wir entwickeln auch neue Features die viel mit Aufgaben zu tun haben und ich wollte deswegen diesen Bereich zumindest aufräumen und einigen UI/UX Verbesserungen einfügen um alles konsistenter zu machen

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Ich beschäftige mich auch im Bereich Integrationen und wie sie eingerichtet werden. Ich habe viele video calls mit Kunden in den letzten Paar Monaten gehabt, und wenn ich unsere Integrationen erwähne, gibt es immer Fragen wie 'Was ist Slack?' oder 'Ich kenne Eventbrite nicht' oder 'Was tut die Mailchimp Integration eigentlich?'. Ich habe deshalb aller unseren Integrationen überprüft mit einem besonderen Fokus auf den Einleitungen und Erklärungen. Ich will sicherzustellen, dass die Benutzter verstehen genau was die Apps überhaupt sind, und was für Vorteile unsere Integrationen anbieten.

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Dinge die mir diesen Monat gut gefallen

Also, das sind meine Updates für Januar. Hier sind einige Dinge die ich erkunden habe, die mir gut gefallen

Ein Spotify Playlist von Steve Schoger - Vibes 2021 - würde ich für eine fokussierte Arbeitssitzung empfehlen

POST HUMAN: SURVIVAL HORRO von Bring Me The Horizon ist mein go-to workout album gewesen

Dear Maria, Count Me In von All Time Low war ein Trend auf TikTok. Ich habe davon viele alte Liede von meinen Schuljahren wieder erkunden

Wandavision auf Disney+ ist der Hammer! Keine Ahnung was passiert, aber ich liebe es!

Ich habe mir das Ziel ersetzt, Updates jeden Monat zu schreiben und hier ist mein erstes 🎉 Wie ist dein Anfang zu dem Jahr gewesen? Was gefällt dir soweit? Schreib mir einfach auf Twitter @Marsh931. Wir sehen uns nächsten Monat, bis dann!

Alex

January 2021 Life update

2021-01-08T12:00:00Z

Given that we’re only one month into the year, 2021 has been pretty hectic already.

For some context, about 18 months ago I moved from the UK to Munich. I’d lived in Munich before for my work placement as part of my degree, and once I’d returned I think I thought I’d always want to move back at some point, even if only for a few months.

At the beginning of 2019, with a gentle nudge from my Grandma (she told me that when she was a kid, the biggest adventure she could go on was a weekend trip to Scarborough, so I should stop overthinking it and just move), I decided to move to Munich.

In September 2019 I packed up my rucksack and a suitcase and made the move. I arrived at the end of the summer so caught a couple of weeks of sun before the winter started to set in. The following 6 months were spent finding my feet in a new but familiar city, meeting new people and trying new sports and activities. But by March, we were in lockdown. The next 10 months or so were spent going in and out of lockdowns with varying restrictions; I had to cancel travel plans, couldn’t meet friends or explore the city, and with the uncertainty of when I’d be able to visit the UK again to see family, it just started to make less and less sense for me to stay in Munich.

At the beginning of December I decided it was time for me to call it a day and move back to the UK. I spent most of January figuring out the logistics of moving from Germany to Wales in a post-brexit, COVID filled world with constantly changing restrictions not doing my stress levels any favours at all.

18 hours and 4 trains later (yes I took the train the whole way from Munich and yes I would recommend it, it’s super chill) I arrived back at my parents house in south Wales. At the point of writing, 1 of my 8 boxes of belongings has arrived with 2 currently stuck in Cologne, 4 stuck at the UK border due to 'Brexit related disruptions' and 1 that’s been returned to my old apartment

So quite a lot of change this month, hopefully February is just a little more relaxed

Work

My focus has been a bit all over the place for the past couple of weeks but nonetheless the new year is off to a good start so far. I’ve been doing a much better job of organising my day and keeping myself motivated and on-task by setting myself a realistic to-do list each day - shoutout to Todoist!

This month I’ve been working on our Alerts feature - it’s an area of the app that hasn’t had any love for a long time and as we’re adding more features that trigger alerts, I wanted to revisit how they’re managed. This is an area we’ll be building out over the coming months, so the first step for now was a quick UI/UX pass to declutter the pages and make their design more consistent with the rest of the app

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I’ve also been looking at our integrations and how our users go about setting them up. I’ve done several product demos and support calls over the past couple of months and when I’ve been talking through our integrations, on several occasions people have said 'What’s Slack?' or 'I’ve not heard of Eventbrite' or 'What does a Mailchimp integration do?'. So out of this we’ve reviewed each of the pages for all of our integrations, making sure that the UI is consistent with the rest of the app, but more importantly focussing on the copy we use. I wanted to make sure we explain what the app is and what it offers, and then what the benefit is of activating our integration.

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Some things I’ve been enjoying

So those are my updates for the month. Just for fun, here’s a few things I’ve discovered or that I’ve been enjoying this month

This Spotify playlist has been great for focussed work sessions - Vibes 2021 from Steve Schoger

POST HUMAN: SURVIVAL HORROR by Bring Me The Horizon has been my go-to workout album

Dear Maria, Count Me In by All Time Low has been trending on TikTok which has been sending me down a nostalgic rabbit hole of songs from my school years

I’m hooked on Wandavision on Disney+ No clue what’s going on, but loving it!

Shiey’s train-surfing, urban exploration videos on YouTube are strangely absorbing and great for some background noise or something to play on an external monitor whilst you "work"

I set myself the goal this year to publish monthly updates for the whole year, and here’s my first one 🎉 How’s your start to the year been? What have you been enjoying this month? Tweet me or send me a DM @Marsh931. Until next month, hope to see you then!

Alex

Ein Ausblick auf 2021

2021-01-03T12:00:00Z

Willkommen

Ich wollte den Jahr mit keinem 'Rückblick auf 2020' Post anfangen, sondern mit einem Ausblick auf 2021.

Da ich noch nie ein Blog geschrieben habe, sollte ich mir zuerst vorstellen. Ich bin Alex und bin als Produktmanager bei einem Coworking-software-startup tätig. Ich interessiere mich für UX Design, Konsumentenpsychologie, und Technologie & Geschäfte die sich mit Umweltthemen beschäftigen. Ich treibe gern Krafttraining, fahre gern rad, spiele ab und zu Basketball und habe in den letzten Paar Monaten in die Welt von Bouldering getaucht. Ich zockere sehr oft, gebe viel zu viel Geld für Lego aus, und liebe veganes Kochen. Ich wohne gerade in München.

Also was ist dieses Blog?

Wie vielen anderen, bin ich zu dem Schluss gekommen, dass der Anfang Januar die perfekte Zeit ist ein persönliches Blog zu erstellen. Seit langem will ich einen 'personal brand’ entwickeln und meines Erachtens spielt ein Blog hier eine große Rolle da man die Möglichkeit hat alles aufzuschreiben was er will, mit dem genauen Tonfall was er will.

Daneben wollte ich einen neuen Platz finden wo ich meine kreative Fähigkeiten und Ideen voran treiben könnte, außerhalb meinen Job. Mein Ziel ist monatliche Updates zu meinem Leben zu schreiben und hoffe davon eine gesunde Gewohnheit und Verantwortungsbewusstsein zu entwickeln. Gleichzeitig möchte ich meine Kommunikationsfähigkeiten verbessern und mein schriftliches Deutsch zu üben. Ich arbeite in einem fully-remote Team wo klare und präzise Kommunikation am wichtigsten ist. Ich habe nie die Chance auf Deutsch zu schreiben und ich hoffe deshalb das dieses Blog mir die Möglichkeit anbietet beide Fähigkeiten zu verstärken.

Ein Ausblick auf 2021

Ich habe schon einiges vorgeplant und einige persönliche und berufliche Ziele auf denen ich mich freue

Persönliches Leben

Mein Hauptziel für den Jahr ist organisierter zu werden. Ich benutze nie To-dos oder Erinnerungen und schreibe sehr selten gut organisierte Notizen. Stattdessen bevorzuge ich alles in meinem Kopf zu halten und versuche mich selbst zu überzeugen, dass ich mich an alles erinnern werde. Ich hoffe, dass meine geistige Gesundheit sich verbessert, wenn ich organisierter werde. Mit Erinnerungen sollte ich meine Zeit besser verwalten und weniger Stress von kommenden Fristen bekommen. Liste zu verwenden soll heißen, dass ich große Aufgabe in viele kleinere Aufgaben aufgliedern kann damit sie erreichbarer und wenig abschreckend werden. Und wenn ich Notizen regelmäßig aufschreibe, kann ich mich einfache auf einer Aufgabe fokussieren anstatt mein Fokus jeden Paar Minuten zu verlieren da mein Gehirn alles umorganisiert hat.

Ich möchte auch auf meinem personal brand arbeiten. Es wird nicht so ernst genommen, ich möchte nur ein langfristiges Projekt mit vielen Themen und Aufgaben, die die Chance anbietet neue Fähigkeiten zu entwickeln aber vor allem, mich begeistert! Das Projekt fängt mit diesem Blog und der Webseite an und ich freue mich darauf neue Arten digitalen Inhalt zu erkunden.

Work life

Dieses Jahr will ich meine Designfähigkeiten auf einer höchsten Niveau bringen. Ich habe letztes Jahr in diesem Bereich viel Fortschritt gemacht und will deswegen weiter damit fortfahren. Ich möchte Figma besser kennenlernen und möchte unsere Designressourcen besser organisieren damit es einfacher wird sie zu verstehen und navigieren.

Aber auf einem fundamentalen Niveau, möchte ich mich Farbenlehre, Web-Zugänglichkeit und die allgemeine UX-Prinzipen bilden. Ich bin zufällig in diese Rolle gelandet; ich habe nie Design studiert und habe alles im Job gelernt. Dieses Jahr möchte ich diese Themen mit etwa Struktur angehen.

Ich will auch beurteilen wie wir unsere Remote-team unterstützen. Seit dem Anfang arbeiten wir fully-remote, aber wir haben kürzlich neue Mitarbeiterinnen begrüßt. Zusammen mit der Unsicherheit wann oder ob wir uns in den kommenden Monaten treffen dürfen, möchte ich sicherstellen, dass alle zufrieden, gesund und motiviert sind. Ich werde darüber nachdenken ob wir effizienter arbeiten können, ob wir besser kommunizieren können und auch überlegen was für soziale Events wir veranstalten können.

Also, das war’s. Wie sieht deinen Ausblick auf 2021 auf? Schick mir einfach ein tweet oder DM bei @marsh931. Ich bin am Ende des Monats mit einem neuen Update wieder da, hoffentlich bist du auch dabei!

Bis dann Alex

Looking Forward to 2021

2021-01-01T12:00:00Z

Welcome

I didn’t want to start the year with a ‘look back at 2020’ post, so instead, here’s my look forward to 2021. As this is my first ever blog post, I should probably introduce myself. I’m Alex, I’m a product manager at a Coworking software startup. I’m interested in UX design, consumer psychology, and technology & business for good, especially concerning the environment. I enjoy strength training and cycling, and have recently got into bouldering and basketball. I play a lot of video games, spend way too much money on Lego and love vegan cooking. I’m currently living in Munich, Germany.

So what’s this blog all about?

Like many others, I decided that the 1st of January would be a good time to start a blog. For a while I’ve wanted to try to establish some sort of personal brand, and I feel like personal blogging is a good vehicle for that; I can write about whatever I want, in whatever tone I want. But aside from that I want this blog to provide a creative outlet beyond what I do at work. I wanted somewhere else to express and exercise my creativity. I aim to write monthly life updates in the hope that this will keep me accountable and encourage a healthy habit to form. I also hope that it improves my comprehension skills and helps me practice my German writing skills (yes, I plan to write each blog in English and German 😬). Working with a remote team, it’s crucial to be clear and concise with all communication. And I never get the chance to write in German, so hopefully this blog gives me chance to work on both of those skills.

Looking forward to 2021

I’ve already got a few big plans for this year, and a few goals in my personal and work life that I’m looking forward to working on

Personal life

My main focus for this year is to get more organised. I’m terrible at making lists, setting reminders, making organised notes and instead opt for keeping everything in my head, convincing myself that I’m able to remember and manage everything I need to do from there. I think my biggest aim with getting organised is that it’ll help my mental well-being. By setting reminders and doing things on time, I’ll hopefully get less stressed about not meeting deadlines. By making lists, I’ll hopefully be able to tackle big tasks in small pieces, making them more achievable and less daunting. And by making notes I’ll hopefully avoid the paralysis of not knowing what thought to focus on first and the following hyper-active jumping from task to task as my brain reprioritises every few minutes. I also want to work on my personal brand. I’m not going to be taking it too seriously, I just want it to be an ongoing project, that spans lots of disciplines, that gives me opportunities to learn and develop skills, but most importantly, keeps me excited! This blog and website is the start of this project, and I’m excited to explore other avenues and types of content creation going forward

Work life

I really want to step up my design skills this year. I made a lot of progress last year, so I want to continue on that trajectory. I want to get more comfortable and competent using Figma and I want to better organise our design resources for my own benefit and for the benefit of our development team. But on a more fundamental level, I want to learn more about colour theory, accessibility and the general principles of UX design. I accidentally fell into this role; I’ve never studied design so I’ve very much been figuring it out as I go along. This year I think I’d like to approach it more formally, with a bit more structure. I also want to work on how we support our remote team. We’ve always worked remotely, but as our team grew last year and with the uncertainty of when we might be able to finally meet up again, I want to make sure that everyone is happy, healthy and motivated. I’ll be thinking more about how we work, how we communicate and also what sorts of social activities we can put on to keep everyone connected

So that’s what I’m looking forward to this year. What about you? I’d love to hear it - tweet me or send me a DM at @marsh931 . I’ll be back again at the end of the month with a January update, hope to see you then! Alex