We bought a used car today. How do people get confident at this making this purchasing decision? Seems so hard to get the information you need to be confident you're not putting a fairly large amount of money into something that's not going to be scrap soon.

My wife and I hosted a Christian Harmony singing at Ushaw College near our house at the weekend. 70ish people came from all over the UK, and a few from Ireland and Germany too. Here's a little clip of the first song of the day

The devil will be in the detail but it looks like the UK government will actually start funding toddler childcare properly soon according to the Guardian.

The plan would provide an extra 30 hours a week to parents of one- and two-year olds

[and] increase the hourly rate paid to childcare providers by the government to deliver their existing 30 hours weekly entitlement

It's too late for my family. But it'll make the world of difference to parents like my brother and sister-in-law who were looking at £1k a month in London. For the government, it should pay for itself with increased tax revenue by allowing more people to work when they've got toddlers.

🤞

I just reworked my CLI to get data from LastFM about what I've been listening to lately. That last post is much better than the previous one of giving a sense of what I've been listening to.

I listen to albums mainly rather than playlists. So I've switched to getting the album data for the last 30 days that have had more than 10 plays. I think the play count is counting number of times a track from the album was played.

The CLI is written with Deno. It fetches the data from Last.fm, creates some markdown, and writes that markdown to a new GitHub issue which is the CMS for this blog.

My Top Albums for the last month

Measured using my last.fm account.

Artist: Dylan Denney
Album: 150th Anniversay Chattahoochee Scared Harp Singing Convention Day 2, Vol. 1 (feat. Sacred Harp Singers)
Plays: 43
LastFM Link to the album

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Artist: Radiohead
Album: KID A MNESIA
Plays: 18
LastFM Link to the album

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Artist: Caribou
Album: Suddenly
Plays: 12
LastFM Link to the album

---

Artist: Holy Fuck
Album: Latin
Plays: 12
LastFM Link to the album

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Artist: The Beatles
Album: Let It Be... Naked
Plays: 12
LastFM Link to the album

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Artist: 65daysofstatic
Album: No Man's Sky: Music for an Infinite Universe
Plays: 11
LastFM Link to the album

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Artist: Public Service Broadcasting
Album: Bright Magic
Plays: 11
LastFM Link to the album

---

I just saw someone posting about this demo of a button on a website the looks like it's reflective. It shows a slightly blurred version of whatever your camera can see inside the button. Very cool

https://shiny-button.vercel.app

My sons have really got into Lego recently. Here's a little castle we built this morning.

Visited the Isle of Wight yesterday including the Needles on the western tip of the island. They're stacks of chalk and more impressive than my photo suggests! Stuff like this make me want a camera with optical zoom for sure.

I shared a couple of photos of our visit to the Souter Lighthouse at South Shields last weekend with colleagues.

A colleague who also lives near the coast mentioned they don't her foghorns anymore.

Another colleague recommended a book about foghorns which talks about why they're not a sound you hear anymore. Turns out the author's obsession with foghorns started at Souter Lighthouse.

So I'm going to read this book next:

The Foghorn's Lament: The Disappearing Music of the Coast

Not surely weekly track charts is the right data here. Maybe weekly album charts would work. The album image isn't right for at least one of the albums here too.

It's really nice to have a CMS with a write API. I can see this being fun.

My Last.fm Weekly Tracks Chart

Playing around with programmatically creating a blogpost from my last.fm data. This below is the output of a script I'm working on. Album art isn't 100% accurate

Artist: Bicep
Track: Aura
Album: Aura
Plays: 1

---

Artist: Bicep
Track: Ayr
Album: Isles
Plays: 1

---

Artist: Bicep
Track: Glue
Album: Glue
Plays: 1

---

Artist: Bicep
Track: Kites
Album: Isles
Plays: 1

---

Artist: Bicep
Track: Opal
Album: Opal (Four Tet Remix)
Plays: 1

---

Artist: Bicep
Track: Orca
Album: Isles
Plays: 1

---

Artist: Bicep
Track: Rain
Album: Rain
Plays: 1

---

Artist: Bicep
Track: Vale
Album: Vale
Plays: 1

---

Artist: Explosions in the Sky
Track: First Breath After Coma
Album: Drifter
Plays: 1

---

Artist: Explosions in the Sky
Track: Memorial
Album: The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place
Plays: 1

---

Artist: Explosions in the Sky
Track: Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean
Album: Six Days (On The Run)
Plays: 1

---

Artist: Explosions in the Sky
Track: The Only Moment We Were Alone
Album: All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone
Plays: 1

---

Getting back into the band Holy Fuck

This is the description they get on streaming services and it is exactly what I love.

...dance music without modern electronic equipment, instead preferring to use standard rock instrumentation as well as unconventional devices and machines.

All the albums are good, including Latin

This is quick.

(Update: this video is me using an iOS Shortcut on my phone to open the Github app right at the spot to create a new issue. That issue is then a post on this blog.)

I built a macOS app with Tauri recently. It's called Draft One and it's for sale on the Mac App Store. Got really stuck trying to get it on the Windows store.

Looked into packaging with Electron instead. Sure it's a massive app this way but surely it's easier to publish? Right??...Can't get Apple to accept it onto the App Store.

One of the main reasons I made this microblog was to get back to websites and how good the publishing experience is here.

Had a fun time at Souter lighthouse at South Shields last weekend. World's first electric lighthouse. Massive foghorn! What's not to love?

Hi! This is my first post on this little microblog!