This week I continue to optimise my saving as interest rates have been creeping up a little.
I contacted Spatzwear again about their Shiftr3 Jersey and they finally confirmed there was a manufacturing issue with the rear pockets. Spatzwear have said they would send replacement jerseys, so I sent a picture of all 4 jerseys that have the issue along with the order numbers.
Quite surroundings at the start of the week as children start to go back to school 🥳
Optomised the Zensical docs publishing GitHub workflow by using the UV package manager.
Captured some thoughts related to Engineering Manager approach.
My health seems to be improving, in part thanks to the "30 plants" supplement from Zoe.com. It seems relatively expensive but if it keeps making a significant improvement then it will be worth it.
Found more documents from merged pensions that are now shredded, continuing to free up more space in my house and making it simpler to move if I find a new place I like.
After switching to the default Firefox rather than Firefox ESR on Debian Linux, I am able to take the UserCrowd desktop based studies. I've also applied for some interview studies, which can earn between 35-45 USD.
A bank holiday ride turned out to be a bit of a mystery tour. We had a route although the garden centre cafe we were heading to was not actually on the route 🤷♀️ Not everyone seems to be as fussy as I am about creating accurate routes.
I continue to have a few issues with my breathing, but specific exercises for my breathing during the day are starting to help.
Cat sitting this week, looking after a long haired fluffy cat whist my neighbour is away on holiday. I am trying to make my neighbours cat as fat as my neighbour makes mine when I am away 😺.
Another heatwave is over so I was able to focus on getting more work done on migrating the Practicalli books to Zensical.
The main Practicalli books are now using Zensical to build the site (locally and via CI workflow). However, due to challenges with the Zensical theme the books sill use the original mkdocs.yml configuration.
The root Practical.li website is still built with MkDocs and will remain so until Zensical supports blog sites. I could separate the blog site out of the practicalli.github.io repository, but as this site is so small it is not worth the effort.
Entertainment this week includes:
Its another week of uncomfortable temperatures, so I am putting even more effort into focusing on specific tasks. When the temperature gets closer to 30 Celsius I'll spend more time thinging about specific issues (or sleeping if it gets too hot).
Saturday was cooler and I stayed up late to start migrating Practicalli books to the Practicalli Megalinter Custom Flavor for Zensical projects.
The first run of the Megalinter workflow with the Zenical flavour took 54 seconds, significantly faster than the 6 minutes 14 seconds of the previous workflow that was using the Megalinter documentation flavor.
An AliExpress sale on Sunday gave me an opportunity to pick up some new disc brake pistons at a reasonable price 
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I bought a large standing freezer just before the pandemic and it was useful for handling larger frozen food orders I had delivered from Ocado.
During the pandemic this was useful to limit my exposure to Covid. I still suffered greatly from that virus but having to visit the supermarket more often would have exacerbated the issue (and at times it was just not possible to leave the house).
Feeling a little unfocused at the start of the week as it was too hot. Finished the week much more focused and with a nice cycle ride.
I finally seem to have resolved the challenges using a custom Megalinter flavor from the Practicalli GitHub Org. It came down to Package permissions set to private by default in the Org.
I'll continue testing with a Clojure and Zensical repository and if all goes well will migrate all the Practicalli repositories to use the new custom flavors.
The weather is cool enough to think now, so I continue downsizing my possessions to those I truly care about and rifling through more paperwork to see if its still relevant.
Over the weekend I found a pension I had lost track of. It was created back in the early 2000's and my contact details had never been updated. I found the company who now runs the pension and got my details updated. It seems I have enough in there for a few bicycles during my retirement 🚲 🚲 🚲
Its time to start planning my next role and to support my application I want to add more content to the Pracitcalli Engineering Playbook, especially around practices and the roles within software engineering.
It will be beneficial to build up content in the new Practicalli Clojure AI Tools book, so I can shape my thoughts around the effective use of 'AI' related technologies as they continue to evolve. Creating some 'thought leadership' blog posts on the challenges and constraints of the current 'AI' tools and services would also be valuable.
Entertainment this week
In Progress:
Prime Films to watch:
Prime Series to watch:
HBO Max:
Netflix:
A drop of temperature down to the mid 20's feels a huge relief. On Sunday it was a nice day and I could have the windows open all day without the house melting.
I have been riding on the hotter days so that when I come home the house is nice and cool.
On Sunday I organised all the pension documents I have gathered over the last 3 decades, much of which is ready for shredding. I amalgamated several pensions into one large one, keeping those pensions already in a sustainable plan.
Entertainment this week involved revisiting many classic movies:
I continue to work in the evenings and through some of the night (or all of the night if I slept enough during the previous day).
Experimenting with tools to generate data overlays for cycling videos. GPStitch looks promising and I can just generate the overlay video for editing later in Blender.
An appointment with the podiatrist this week has cleaned up my foot, after a blister occurred over the area where my hole appeared previously.
Tuesday was the 21st anniversary of the London bombings on 7 July 2025. I was a cycle courier at that time and was working that day, in and around the area where the bombings took place.
Luckily I wasn't near enough to be directly affected and didn't know about the incident until later in the morning, as I was busy delivering packages.
As the news broke, our controllers told us over out radios that something had happened, although details were not clear for several hours.
My working day finished early as most people wanted to get out of central London, so requests for package deliveries dried up quickly. London was eerily quiet for the rest of the afternoon.
I didn't really comprehend what had happened until I got home in the evening and watched the news.