2018; My 38th trip around the sun. So what’s been going on?

I’ve not written in this way before, and it’s mostly for my future self, but this seems like a suitable place to put these thoughts.

I’ve been meaning to write more, and the idea behind this post is to list all the things in 2018 of note that I’d like to share. I’ll then write about some of those topics in more detail and use this post to link to them all once written.

Health and fitness
I’ve gradually been ramping up my efforts over the past few years, and I intend to continue on this trajectory for 2019. I’ve been tracking a lot of new things and finding new ways to motivate myself. I’d say I’m now fitter than I’ve ever been and feel great for it.

We’re both eating healthier than ever and I’m drinking less than I ever have in my adult life.

Social media
I stopped using Facebook in 2017, I stopped using Instagram in...

Update: Eero have long-since been possible to buy in the UK directly.

Eero, is a new type of home wifi router. It uses mesh network technology to connect several routers using their own back channel radio frequency and spoofs devices into think they a single large network.

Mesh network routers have been around for a while, but they traditionally are only available for commercial use and cost large sums of money to buy, setup and maintain. Eero puts the power in the hands of the home consumer for a reasonable price, and frankly it’s amazing. However, at the time of writing this they are only available in the US. There are many reviews online that can give you a more technical perspective if that’s what you’re looking for. I’m interested in talking about using Eero in the UK and using the US power adaptor that it comes with.

You cannot buy Eero direct from the company outside of the...

Some time ago now we bought a One Fast Cat Wheel for our darling pussycats. They loved it since day one and enjoying showing off by jumping inside and going for a run when we are around. It wasn’t until we installed a camera in the kitchen (partly for security, partly to keep an eye on the misbehaving cats at night) that we realised just how much they use the wheel. And so I came up with the idea of using a cycle computer to track their usage.

I didn’t want this to be an expensive experiment so I found the cheapest cycle computer I could find on Amazon which could be set to any wheel circumference.

I had to dismantle the piece that connects to the spokes of a bike as they are not needed in this scenario. This involved smashing the piece of plastic to get to the magnet.

To test if this was going to work I used some blue tack to secure the magnet on the inside of the wheel...

I’ve always been a movie fan, and also a audio-visual hardware fanatic. I had a DVD player attached to my 32" Sony Triniton CRT TV in 1995 [ 1? ]. I bought a good DVD player that was chipped to make it multi-region so that I could order region-1 (North American) discs [ 2? ] and held regular movie watching sessions in my small single bedroom with my friends. It was ace. Over the years I have accumulated over 200 DVDs, and eventually bought a Blueray to play the small handful of Blueray discs I also ended up owning.

Time marches on and today in 2016 I think I have not played a DVD disc in at least 5 years, maybe more. I have put in storage both my DVD and Blueray players after several years being little more than ornaments, and my DVD collection has been sitting in boxes since my girlfriend moved in and wanted the shelf space the DVD’s were pointlessly occupying.

Five years and two...