Author: Stephen James

Somewhere along the way I stopped using Literal to log my reading. I didn’t look at it that much and it’s a tad clunky.

Going to try doing it here instead. Creating a tag for books will help.

Listening to Philosophy as a Way of Life, a quote from Meditations really stuck with me.

‘Do not make more of things than your senses report. For instance, you are told that such an one has spoken ill of you. Right; but that you are really the worse for it is no part of the news.’ 8:49

This idea is reiterated throughout Meditations but somehow this particular version presents the idea more clearly.

I like the prompt to look at things just as they are, not to add a narrative on top, particularly one of ‘I am harmed’.

Having mentioned the BBC radio production of The Dark is Rising, I completely failed to listen to it as it was broadcast, each episode playing on the same date as the events in the book.

I often have great plans for all the things I will do over my time off during the winter, forgetting that often I just need to stop and rest. Usually I give myself a hard time about this, but somehow managed to be a lot more forgiving toward myself and accepting of the fact that a break, particularly at this time of year, is just that.

And as the series is available as a podcast or on BBC Sounds I can listen to it anytime I like.

I’ve been converting tracks in Apple Music on my Mac to MP3 files that can then be exported and saved elsewhere. This can’t be done with some. I remember reading somewhere that tracks bought before a specific date can’t be converted. A DRM issue if I recall correctly.

While using the old PC for ripping CDs I discovered that in fact most, if not all, those older purchases are in iTunes on this machine. And are in an exportable format. Along with many albums from CDs which I had evidently copied to ITunes back in the day. This is going to save me a lot of work.

I fired up my 15yr old Windows Vista pc today. The only thing it has on any of the other machines dotted around the house is a CD drive, and as such, it will be the means whereby I digitise our music CDs.

With some brighter weather and the need for fresh air, I ended up spending a bit of time in the garden today. Actually got around to cleaning out the nest boxes, so much earlier than usual. Which is good as I often almost leave too late.

I’ve already been hearing great tits singing so they’ll likely be checking out potential nesting sites soon.

These shortest of days are often a tad difficult mentally. This year is the hardest it’s been for a while. Once we get past the shortest day it starts to get easier, even though there is no perceptible difference for a couple more weeks. Just knowing the days are lengthening is enough to tip the balance of my perception towards something more positive. Like the shifting of a weight.

It’s been fun, if a head scratcher.

Moving from Hugo to WordPress, I couldn’t see a way to bulk import my posts, so took it upon myself to write a Python script to do the job. I save my posts as markdown files, so the script runs through each one and writes the content to a CSV file. Then I use an importer plugin for WordPress to import them all. A bit of tweaking to do here and there as not all the files are in quite the same format. Other than that, it works.