Week 40: Gently Roasted

June 25, 2023

Home from Home Safe. I arrived home from my Black Isle & Highland Cross trip on Wednesday morning and enjoyed spending the rest of the week not really going anywhere. Other than a short, air conditioned Overground trip out for lunch on Friday, I've managed to avoid public transport altogether in this hot weather. One impossible to avoid is this missing cat ad everywhere in Highgate.

'The Plant Wall'™ is a wall in our bedroom featuring various plant-themed artworks. It's had some new additions this week, but isn't quite ready for the prime time on charlieegan3.com yet. We also have some new mugs.

Wining and Dining. We hosted some family and friends for meals in the flat this week and enjoyed sitting outside in the cooler evenings. I even cracked open a bottle of orange wine I'd brought back from Seville in November. It's very nice with ice on a hot day. We also went to Citro which was excellent as usual.

image of my left hand holding a bottle of orange wine The Orange Wine

Farewell Spotify. While I've been a Spotify subscriber for over 10 years, I've spent the last 18 months trying to get out. The having-their-cake-and-eating-it shit show with a certain podcast, coupled with the ramming of podcasts down my throat every time I opened the app were the main issues. The unreliability of the Recently Played API endpoint and in-app adverts following close behind. I've switched to Apple Music which is also remarkably bad in all sorts of different ways. Soundiiz seems to be the best way to migrate playlists, at least it seems to have far better matching than Song Shift on iOS.

Side pro-jecting. I spent much of Sunday hacking away on some issues with my home grown contacts database syncing backed by Airtable. It's a mostly non-compliant CardDav client which kinda works, at least I think it does now. One of the main issues was created by vCards changing due to Go maps being unordered. This caused a lot of unnecessary updates. I also made some updates to my music play tracker to stop certain types of duplicates from being tracked.