Weekly Notes 39/2024

Last week: birthday celebration, illness recovery, workouts, and tech updates. Upcoming Greece trip planned, land registration near completion, the usual bucket of links.

For folks not in the know, this is a weekly stream of consciousness zero-agenda “here’s what’s happening” or “here’s what’s interesting” post.


What’s been happening

  • I turned 40 last week. It was also a helluva of a rollercoaster week, which is why this post is delayed. I did however, manage to catch up with a few friends and cut a cake with family.
Prema and Vishak came over.
  • Both of us fell ill at different times last week, and probably caught and reinforced the flu from each other. Thankfully, both of us are A-OK now before the trip to Greece.
  • Workouts were good as well last week, and I finally finished the last set. You can see the result of my flu in the very last workout.
  • Upgraded to macOS Sequoia, and its new tiling feature is quite nice. It’s good enough in fact that I stopped using Amethyst. I wish the keyboard shortcuts for it were configurable, but the globe key seems like a proprietary key from Apple. I think Karabiner Elements can configure it, so I might look into that later.
  • Watched Thalavan this week. It’s just ok, and while there’s a setup for a part 2, I’m not really looking forward to it.
  • I was trying out the ChatGPT advanced voice feature, and it’s just amazing. The way it can simulate emotions, conveniently be interrupted, and interrupt me in turn was very, very close to human-like. I’ve also been trying to speak to it in German, and it’s super useful for learning language.
    • Our Greece trip starts on the 5th. We’ll visit Athens, and do day-trips to Delphi and Parnassus, visit Meteora and finally spend 3 days in Santorini. I booked the rest of the tickets last week. There is quite a bit of travel in the 10 days, but here’s hoping everything goes off smooth ??
    • Our house land registration is super close, but the land still looks like it’s a crater. Work seems to be proceeding faster though now that the rains are over.

    Links of the Week

    • Might try out this new eSIM service from the folks at NordVPN for my trip to Europe this time.
    • With Camera Control a reality, I’m increasingly thinking that iPhones can serve as better Ricoh GR 3s. I do wish the half shutter functionality was here today though. Ammu complains about my iPhone photos quite a bit (apparently I make her short-er) so I’ll probably need a remedial course such as this to get up to speed.

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    2 responses

    1. Camera control isn’t the hotness it was touted to be. Highly recommend the Ricoh when traveling. I recently took it to nice, Barcelona and Madrid. The iPhone is convenient. The Ricoh is richer and better. I have a gr II and even that has a nicer feel than the mobile phone.

      1. Probably you are right, I had the same feeling with my Fuji X100S. I do wish phones had a “camera-quality” experience for shooting though (if not the image quality), it’s high time somebody tried. Half-press shutter compose + exposure and a viewfinder is what I’m used to.

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