My first day back at work and the internet went down. Maybe I should take the hint?
Year in books for 2025
2025 was another great year for reading, even if only to get away from mindless scrolling on my phone.
My favourite non-fiction book was Waves in an Impossible Sea by Matt Strassler and fiction was Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Those are narrow favourites though. I could have happily picked other books from the list.
No major changes planned for 2026. Maybe just some more targeted books on Canada, given the state of my nation and the rest of the world.
📚 Thanks to my family for a great set of books for Christmas this year.
Finished reading: Breaking Point by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson provides a very clear description of Canada’s challenges. Thankfully it also provides good ideas on how to fix them. Pairs well with Andrew Coyne’s recent book, though they disagree on electoral reform. Although daunting, I’m optimistic that this is an exciting time for Canada’s rejuvenation 🍁📚
🔗 The Telemetry - by Angus Hervey - Fix The News
This gap, between the world as it is and how we’re told to see it, comes down to a choice about what we do with our attention. Mission control doesn’t ignore danger. It’s acknowledged, monitored, taken seriously. But knowing which emergencies require immediate action means you need to watch all the instruments, not just the alarms. That’s the difference between panic and an effective response.
An important reminder about the sensationalization of news
Finished reading: The Random Universe by Andrew H. Jaffe is an interesting exploration of probability and models in physics and cosmology. I also appreciated the historical context that showed how the models developed 📚
🏃♂️ Burning off some Christmas cheer on today’s run
Finished reading: As a Canadian public servant, I’m not the target market for Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson. Nonetheless, I found the sections on managing teams and navigating conflict useful 📚
12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 12: Home
❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 11: Feast
🎄Merry Christmas!
❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 10: Travel
🎶 II by Voices from the Lake is good for getting focused
🎶 Great version of A Dawning at 9:34
❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 9: Baking
❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 8: Grinch
Finished reading: Seemed inevitable that The Last Town by Blake Crouch would become a mostly straightforward action plot with lots of shooting. Still entertaining, though not nearly as good as the first book in the series. 📚
Backup solutions for an iOS-only household?
Just over a month ago, I was booting up our last remaining Mac for some routine maintenance. After watching Dock icons bounce for literally minutes, I had to ask why we even have an iMac from 2019. Turned out the answer was: because I’ve owned a Mac since 1997. That didn’t seem like a good enough answer.
My wife and I both have iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches, plus we’re required to use Windows laptops for work. This is why I almost never used the iMac and, consequently, why whenever I found a use for it, I had to endure far too many minutes of waiting for it to boot up and launch an app. So, I decided to recycle the iMac and we’re now an iOS-only house (ignoring my son’s rarely used gaming PC).
The simplicity is nice and it helps keep me away from screens, since having a Mac was a good excuse to fiddle with software. This was partly made possible by my intentional adoption of mostly Apple default apps. Until the recent Apple ID debacle with Paris Buttfield-Addison, everything seemed good. Now that this glaring dependency is obvious, I do have some concerns. Specifically, all of our photos and files are only on iOS devices and only backed up via Apple’s backup service. This is no longer wise or sufficient. When we had a Mac, I’d happily used Backblaze for many years and now need the equivalent for iOS.
I asked for some advice on the friendly Hemispheric Views Discord and got pointers to some alternative webservices, along with this cool project. At the moment, I’m tempted by the Synology BeeStation, which seems to be a “local cloud” storage device. Having a physical drive in my home is appealing as a supplement to our online backups.
I’ll keep investigating. Any suggestions are appreciated.
❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 7: Solstice
Finished reading: Sword & Citadel by Gene Wolfe continues a great series. I can’t understand how I lasted this long without reading these books. So many elements that are what I look for in a book: sci-fi, fantasy, and an unreliable narrator 📚