I want to set up a simple home sensor network, one that will initially monitor room temperatures, humidity and some utility usage. If it works I may try and add other things to it, but I want to focus on getting the basics working and trying to keep it as simple as I can, otherwise I'll never start.

I've wanted to set up some kind of basic smart home/home sensor network for a while. It doesn't have to control anything (yet), just be an easy way of recording and seeing temperatures and home energy use. But I've been struggling to get going on this project for two reasons; young children which reduces the time I have to anything else, and option paralysis. I just want a simple set up, but what is 'simple'?

Today I managed to save 900€ over the next year by switching gas contracts, which for a three minute phone call, even after twenty five minutes on hold, isn't a bad half hour's work, certainly more than my usual hourly rate1. But I'm not happy about it - because it's something I don't think I, or anyone else, should have to do; this annual make-work to dodge artificially inflated prices to try and catch people out. Regardless of what I pay, it's the same gas coming out of the pipe.

We have an IKEA Beddinge sofa-bed that lives in the basement room of our house. It's useful if we want to sit and watch films on the large screen I use at my desk, or to use as an extra bed for guests. Less is useful that, to do these things, it has to sit across the room, exactly opposite the door and gets in the way. To stop it being so stubborn we added wheels.

There is a point in your life when the best answer to a problem is Emacs. After that, the answer to every problem is Emacs.

The start of a new year is a good excuse to try new things. Yes, you could have done it earlier, but didn't, and now you're scrambling to add meaning to some time accounting, so you might as well hang that spare unrealised idea onto it. I want to give social media a try, about twenty years after it really became a thing.

The format is the same as it ever was; the six most interesting songs I've heard for the first time this year. It doesn't matter how old the songs are, or how late to the party I am - perhaps they're not even the ones I 'liked' the most, but the ones that sparked the most interest, and are worth sharing.

The Raspberry Pi team provide an easy way of testing the performance of your SD card, or other storage media, with the Agnostics tool. The only downside is that it's a graphical tool, and if you want to test your SD card while running headless, or without a GUI, then you have to do a little hacking to get it to work.

In September I wanted to focus on playing guitar to see if that could boost my sense of progress, but did it work? Sort of…

Over the last few years I've been struggling to find the time to play guitar, now I'm slowly getting a little more free time, but I'm struggling to balance that with other hobbies. In September I want to see if focusing on one hobby will help me make progress, and that I feel like I'm getting somewhere again.