🗓️ Weeknote 2026-W28

2026-07-13 13:33

Ok, I thought my weeknotes would get shorter if I posted more individual posts through the week. I was wrong.

🌱 Cooking and Gardening

It's Plastic-free July so I thought I'd ramp up my sourdough baking again and forego buying plastic-wrapped bread. I keep undercooking it, though I've just found my old notes and now have a way forward. The next one should be better.

Looks good but it's totally undercooked

Surprised to find potatoes still storing reasonably well under frozen beds of dirt in my allotment. I'm baking a lot of wedges out of these instead of buying junky bags of chips. Still not very healthy, but they are delicious and free. I season with thyme from the garden, garlic powder, rock salt, and sometimes paprika.

Spuds reveal yourself!

📝 Writing

Trying to write on different things, especially around what I'm reading as a way to remember, rather than just ear-tagging and never returning to the topics. My life is changing direction a bit, so my writing will change with it. I absolutely do not consider myself a good writer, but it's an activity I enjoy.

💻🤓 Geekery

  • Gone brutal:
We'll see how long this lasts before my eyes burn

  • I'm attempting to rid myself of tmux. It is a great tool, but I don't need persistent sessions for what I do, and am now using a window tiling manager (qtile) with the Ghostty terminal emulator which both have some pretty nifty tiling functionality already. The screenshot above is utilising qtile window splitting and group workspaces combined with a simple script to load it via hotkey MOD+b. Going through the teething period now.

  • The comments section on my website continues to evolve. I fixed up how comments are spat out into the background for a better dispersion (I still run this script manually when I can be bothered), and made the commentbox look like a CRT monitor. See bottom of page.

💻 Tools discovered

  • KDE Kontact, KMail and KOrganizer - I have a soft spot for desktop email and calendar tools. I despise all the web-based ones. They're horrible. I really didn't mind Outlook desktop at work when I was just using my work Outlook account. I wanted something similar at home for my personal accounts, but something FOSS. These tools are hitting the spot. This is a KDE suite of tools, Kontact being the unifying application that pulls in the email (KMail), calendar (KOrganizer) and address book (KAdressBook) applications into the one interface. I haven't done address book yet, but the email and calendar is working great. The main reason I chose this over Thunderbird was because of the tagging colouring in the KOrganizer calendar is much better, and doesn't involve a whole lot of hacking to get it right. KMail is great too. I've pulled in my Outlook, Gmail and message.casa email accounts, but unfortunately Proton free doesn't have IMAP/SMTP support, and Tuta doesn't support external email clients full-stop. I am weighing a few things up here as to the future of my emails, and this experience is cementing a bit of direction for me.

  • FairEmail - On my Android, I also wanted a better, more consolidated email experience. This is absolutely amazing. Again I've brought in the 3 emails above using IMAP/SMTP, deleted my Outlook app, and disabled the Gmail one. FairEmail has an incredible amount of customisability. Free version is absolutely suitable for my needs and without ads, but I like it so much I think I'll pay the $15 to support the developer.

  • Conduit - A beautiful terminal app for Android. The UI is fantastic. A Termux replacement (some of Conduit's backend comes from Termux). I predominantly use it to SSH into my RPi, but it looks like it does many other things. There's even an Arch Linux shell which I'm thinking might be useful for hosting things off an old phone.

  • [Ghostty] terminal emulator - I just needed a quick fix so I could use the clipboard in SSH properly. This did the trick. Also didn't realise it uses the kitty image processor on the backend so I can preview images in yazi now. Double win, hoorah!

🏃 Activities

📚 Reading

My reading energy is back!

  • Finished Escape Everything! by Robert Wringham. So much hitting home. I'll probably refer to it a lot going forward. It has given me confidence and understanding of some of the actions I've been taking recently.

  • Started The Great Degeneration by Niall Ferguson.

📺 Watching

  • The Leftovers (Season 1, 2014) - Woah how did I miss this one? I don't totally get whats going on right now, but I like the slow unfolding. I think the core theme is something around human flaws, how none of us a innocent, we all have demons (the preacher casino scene was fantastic), we're hypocrites, there's something about addiction (the smokers cult), the animals, materialism, religion. It's fantastic and weird as hell.

🛠️ Projects

Screwed down the top battens on the pergola, and painted all the steel a matt black. Just waiting on stain pigment from the hardware store to arrive so I can stain both the pergola and house. Though it did just start to rain again...

Current projects keeping me busy via tree -L 1 ~/01-Projects/current/:

/home/zkbro/01-Projects/current/
├── 20251112-build-pergola
├── 20260118-fit2x
├── 20260418-stain-house
├── 20260513-prepare-for-nz-exit
├── 20260531-just-a-thought-course
├── 20260601-remote-network
├── 20260705-back-up-supabase-text
└── 20260710-crt-css

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