🤖 I bought a Gundam Gunpla model kit 1. I had a “Oh… these instructions are difficult…and in Japanese…and also difficult…and also completely in Japanese… However. I am the GOAT at Ikea furniture building and after composing myself with a cup of coffee it actually wasn’t that difficult and was pretty fun! Not sure if I’d get any others as I don’t have the room, but I’m glad another bit of Japanese nerd culture is ticked off for me now and I have a li’ll robot buddy 😊🇯🇵
👆I’m still very much enjoying playing with the Halide Mk III Public Previews B&W mode. I’m very excited to see how it evolves and it’s great whilst one of their team members have left that they seem to just be moving forwards with an energy and purpose. Very good stuff to see.
🙇 I missed writing an entry last week as I just didn’t have the time! Sumimasen!
A busy week at work and at home, a the UK continues to be battered with stormy weather. We have a yellow ice warning tonight that goes right into a yellow rain warning tomorrow. Oh joy!
After advising that the front chimney leaked again our builders have returned and performed the same level of repairs to the front as they did on the rear1.
This week had some monumental shifts for Apple’s applications with the launch of the Apple Creator Studio. I had some stuff to say about it and was interested for the launch. I wrote in that article
I already pay £50 a year for Final Cut Pro on the iPad. So upgrading to this suite would “only” cost me £70 a year.
Surely A company like Apple will have a slick way to onboard and uplift from current subscriptions to this offering? Much like when Apple One (Another Apple product I pay for) came around? I just flipped my sub over and was done!
Sadly no. I paid for a year of Final Cut Pro at a cost of £50 in November. When I subscribed to Apple Creator Studio it just started a new subscription for the full £129 a year.
Not to worry! Apple is renowned for their customer support! I’m sure they’ll be understanding about the issue if I raise a support ticket Right? Customer service is one of the pillars that keeps us using their products! My argument is reasonable, I’ve basically upgraded my sub and given them more of my money!
I was irrationally angry about this. Yes, sure I know it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I’m in the incredibly privileged place that I can eat that cost, yell at clouds, consider my jimmies well and truly rustled and eventually move on with my day (Well… move on after writing this massive rant… lol)
This has been my view all week as the weather across the UK has been utterly grim. Rain, rain and yet more rain. Seems like next week is going to be just as bad! Local areas have had flooding and high winds last night brought some trees down causing a bit more chaos and disruption. I have never longed for summer as much in all my life.
After watching this video about the Apple foldable being announced soon(ish?) I have come to the conclusion that foldable’s, especially this foldable is just not for me. Sure all the folding science stuff is neat, layers of glass and metal and all that. The engineering is surely fantastical. But what’s that do for me? 🤷
For a long time now I’ve had an extremely convoluted method of backing up my iCloud Photos by manually extracting files and then uploading them to an external drive and some cloud storage. Fiddly, awkward and generally not great.
I hate doing it. So you know what that means. I don’t do it as routinely as I should.
Which for something as important as photos of my family… is not great.
Lot’s of people don’t realise is that iCloud is not a backup. it’s just your files offloaded to the cloud. Sure it’s sorta on your computer and in the cloud, but really there’s still just one copy. Especially if you offload storage. It’s subject to outages, corruption and accidental deletion just like any other file on your computer.
“Two is one, one is none”
- Navy Seals or something apparently… I dunno but it’s a good quote
Welcome back to another E1HOAS post where I present some of the photos from Mastodon that have inspired me recently. You can read more about these posts on its series page here.
I thought I’d got back on track with these but alas, life and its many tapestries got in the way of posting once again. But better late than never, here’s the shots that have made me 👀 this time.
🇹🇭🎒 Eldest has been on his backpack through Asia for a week already. He’s been in touch every day sending lots of updates and photos which has been really nice to see. Looks like they’re having a wonderful time. We FaceTimed for the first time today. I used FaceTime with the Apple TV for the first time and it worked really well! Made it feel much more natural.
“One Powerful Collection, One Smart Subscription”
So it finally happened. Apples creative software has been dragged into the subscription world for good or for bad, with a bunch of AI smeared over it to make the shareholders happy. As is typical of modern Apple, there’s some good, some bad and some general confusion about how the heck the whole thing is gonna shake out.
Well, a big one this week as my eldest and his girlfriend set off backpacking Asia as part of their gap year for six months. I’ll miss them very much whilst they’re away, but I’m very proud of them and delighted they're off on such an amazing adventure.
Ok, let’s get the obvious out of the way first. I am a certified member of the pika fanboy club. I love this service and what they’ve added to the service this year. Check out the Features they’ve added already! including the absolutely massive steps forwards they’ve made in photo hosting. 1
This post serves two purposes. To thank Good Enough for such a wonderful platform as well as of course soapbox the specific little tweaks I want for my own selfish purposes 😈
So that being said, thanks Good Enough! I hope you have a wonderful 2026 and here’s my little wishlist for Santa next year 🎅
I would love love love the ability to have BBCode style spoiler tags on Pika for when talking about media and doing reviews. Sometimes I might want to talk about spoiler style content from games, TV shows etc. It’d also be a great way to content warn sensitive content on Pika as well. I have Tooted this to them and I hope it’s on the roadmap for 2026.
As someone who posts a photo series that can’t really responsibly post photos he features, I would love to be able to directly embed a Mastodon post on my site.
This is mega niche, but I have a realm of buttons at the bottom of my site. Some silly, some not. I have two sub-wishes for these.
Make them linkable
Be able to have them side by side (I cannot figure out the formatting for this for the life of me, maybe I’m just being silly)
And that’s really about it! I’m incredibly happy with my little cabin on the web. Here’s to another year of the indieweb and blogging! ✍️🤘
This one was huge and is such a wonderful addition!
Welcome back to another E1HOAS post where I present some of the photos from Mastodon that have inspired me recently. You can read more about these posts on its series page here.
Well we’re slightly past the weird Christmas/New Year transition period but still before I go back to work again properly on Monday. It’s been a pretty good Christmas and a nice break with lots of nice family time.
We’ve made it a family tradition for years since moving as a family to Dorset to welcome the new year in with a walk around Portland Bill on the 1st of January each year. It’s an extremely windy peninsula on the isle of Portland housing a Beautiful lighthouse. Our idea is that the wind helps blow away the old year and bring in the new.
Here’s a few shots from over the years and then some shots from this year.
I came across this post by Ay via EchoFeed Amplify. 40 Questions you should ask at the end of a year originally made by Obsidian CEO, Steph Ango, and I thought sure… why not! I planned to do an end of year post so why not use a framework I can answer each year. So here’s the inaugural attempt.
- Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.
I have been regrettably very poor recently at keeping a cadence with this series recently, but it’s something I really do enjoy, so we’re getting back into a rhythm for 2026!
I wanted to reset the clock by posting a couple of images I’d saved in the meantime before getting back into a proper routine in January. A soft reboot so to speak.
Sadly, some of the images are no longer hosted as some people set their posts to delete after x number of days, As I’m no longer using glass.photo as well, I’m not featuring the posts I’d saved from there (As I can’t now message the people to say they’re featured).
So what is this if you’ve not seen me do this before? Here’s the blurb. I look over Mastodon at people I follow as well as the #photography tag and some other more specific photo tags for photos to feature here.
I want to showcase shots I come across that influence my own eye. Shots that make me think about my own photography in some way. Essentially a shot that makes me stop and go “Oh!” when I see it. Something striking, Clever. Beautiful.
If I’m sure a shot is from a smartphone, I highlight it with a 📱 1
If I’m sure a shot is from a film camera, I highlight it with a 🎞️
Each post I’ll highlight my favourite with a ✨. This is just a bit of fun and doesn’t really mean anything…
If you’re pissed that I’ve linked to you, then I’m really sorry! 🙇♂️ I only did it because I liked what you put out there and it moved my heart in some way. If for any reason you don’t want your post featured here, fire me a message and I’ll remove my link to you asap.
So here’s the catchup photos from my disorganised pile over the past few months!
@Aeryn@social.lol
Some great autumnal shots here. Especially the red and yellow leaf highlighted against the floor. 🍁 Vibes
@digitalpardoe@social.lol
I really love the smooth foggy velvet whisper of the lighting and sky in this shot contrasted with the sharpness of the tree. Wonderful framing as well. Time of day and composition coming together fabulously. 😶🌫️ Vibes
@jimfrost@mastodon.scot ✨
A simply stunning photo from a beautiful part of the world. We visited the Cairngorms 2 this year and were blown away by how special a place it is. This almost looks like it could be an alien world with the colours and tones. A fabulous mixture of colour and texture. 🌄 Vibes
And that’s it for this catchup! As well as the two from Glass I’m not posting, one more was actually not taken by the person who took it and I didn’t notice until I was writing this up🤦
I do hope you enjoy reading these as much as I enjoy creating them, and here’s to a photo filled 2026
📷👍👋
I exclusively shoot with my iPhone 17 Pro Max and I like to highlight what’s possible with just a phone.
I so need to write up the other days of this trip…
🦃🎄 Christmas is nearly here! At the hospital I work at the canteen does Christmas dinners every day in December, and as staff you get a discount. How could I resist!
We were joking that next year we should do some sort of charity challenge where we try and have one every day for as long as we can go. I think I might actually end up admitted to the hospital if I actually try that though! 😅
Hats off to the amazing canteen staff who make this happen. It must be such an operation to do this for a whole month for 100’s of people a day. 👏👏👏 Just one of the many parts clinical and non-clinical that makes the NHS so special.
Last Sunday, it was the 2025 Tractor Run for the local charity #Willdoes. A charity that raises funds to support young people’s wellbeing and mental health. The charity is dedicated to the memory of William Paddy.
You can read more about their work, events, and donate if you’d like here.
I believe they had around 150 tractors take part this year. They festoon their tractors with Christmas decorations, horns and other Christmas styled bits and bobs then all set off driving a route through several towns in Dorset. The tractors pay £10 each to enter and there are prizes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place.
We always pop to watch them drive through town. It’s an amazing spectacle and for a great cause.
Here’s some photos and videos of the event.
👆 This will update to HDR at some point but YouTube seems weird about how long it takes to make things HDR.
