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.

YouTube tracks what you watch to create a profile that can be used to power recommendations and adverts. It learns what you like, what you don’t, when you stop watching, when you’re watching, on what device you’re watching. But it seems unfair that only advertisers learn about me from my watch history. If a person is shaped by the books they read and the music they hear, surely you can understand a lot about someone from the videos they watch? What could I learn about myself from my watching history?

Space is unforgiving and uncaring. Living in a fast moving pressurised tin can does not make life much easier. The Expanse makes this brutally clear from the beginning. It’s also one of the best science fiction shows I’ve ever seen. There are lots of spoilers after the jump, and a very rambling reflection on trying to figure out why exactly I think this show is as good as it is, so don’t say you haven’t been warned…

E-Paper makes a nice, unobtrusive display, that is great for displaying slowly refreshing information in a low power and flexible way. I wanted to create a little clock/calendar that would display the day of the week for the children, but that doesn't look like a glowing digital display.