Mnemozzyne

მხედრული

I’m attempting to learn the 33 letters of the Georgian alphabet (მხედრული, that is). It’s been fun revisiting spaced repetition and coming up with visual prompts. I’m not fluent, but I’ve memorised the letters in the space of a week with a few minutes' effort each day. Looking forward to a trip to ტფილისი and მესტია in late May and hoping to eat some ხაჭაპური and ხინკალი.

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Kākāpō Cam

I’ve been enjoying this application of webcam technology (nod to my friend Quentin) and feeling nostalgic for New Zealand recently. Rakiura is 24-years old and one of ~235 kākāpō alive today. The numbers are changing at the moment as it’s a breeding year. The birds only breed when the Rimu trees produce berries, so it’s a special thing when it happens. And we’ve been rewatching Flight of the Conchords at home.

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Anticlockwise round Cambridge

This is the third post in a row about running. Sorry. I’ve been training, and I ran a marathon. 3 hours, 40 and a bit minutes to complete the Cambridge Boundary Run. My timing made it 03:40:36 but the official time is slower due to the time to cross the start line. That was the first time I’ve run that far, and it was fuelled by adrenaline and quite a few energy gels: my watch simultaneously awarded me fastest Half, fastest Marathon and Longest Run.

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Alphabetically round the Colleges

My legs are recovering as I write: yesterday with some chums I ran nearly a marathon on a geeky stop-start route around the Colleges of Cambridge. Turns out the rules of the alphabet really matter after 30km of pavement and after Robinson College, it’s much more appealing to follow the University’s order, putting “St Catharine’s” after “Sidney Sussex” because it allows a lovely St John’s, Trinity, Trinity Hall hattrick towards the end.

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Solo g10k and arbitrary units

Time passes, things change. I’ve been conscious of this recently as I celebrated a not-big birthday. I realised in the run-up to this anniversary that my age in years was close to my smartwatch-predicted 10km run time in minutes. So I set out to prove to myself that I’m still young and relevant. By attempting this timed run challenge I suppose I was aiming at one minute per 10km per year, or something.

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Start your holidays with a meta-alarm

Back in 2022 I wrote about how annoying it is, with all the built-in smarts in a smartphone, they still wake me up even when there are like a hundred ways they could detect that I don’t want to be woken. I now have a solution! If you work, or have children to get to school on time, or otherwise just need to be up and about before you naturally wake up in the morning, you have doubtless got a scheduled, repeating alarm.

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PGN files from handwritten chess notation

Our family has been playing quite a bit of chess recently. The younger members - initially insistent that all games must be “full chess” - have been persuaded to complete a few exercises with just pawns, practise some end games and get the ideas about planning more than one move ahead. We got a chess puzzle/exercise book and it’s proved a hit. I’m now routinely losing to a 9.5 year old - he has had more practice than his big sister.

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Souvenirs des villes européennes

Visiting European cities I always notice big, green cross-shaped pharmacy signs. They’ve kind of worked their way into my memory and I feel a little tingle of holiday excitement when I see them. Spending most of my working days staring at glowing rectangles made of pixels hasn’t stopped me from admiring the glowing notrectangles and their dancing LED patterns. So it is with some nostalgia that I share my latest hobby project, pretentiously entitled “Souvenirs des villes européennes”.

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Pic'n'mix reinvented

What unites salted butter, cans of gin & tonic, Branstonnaise and Quality Street? That’s right: they’re all sold mixed up. Or as I’ve been calling it, “with added entropy”. Salt, butter, gin, tonic, Branston pickle and mayonnaise are all readily available. And now, in a move I thoroughly approve of, Quality Street have taken entropy out of their product. The individual flavours are being sold separately - John Lewis in Cambridge has a big fancy dispenser.

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Super slow-mo Tetris

A new gadget entered my life a while ago: Father Christmas brought me a Badger 2040W. It’s a wifi-connected computer, that runs python and has an e-ink display. It has fairly low power consumption, and is easily programmed to sleep most of the time. Also e-ink retains an image even when power is removed, so it ought to be able to show something that updates fairly slowly, and run on battery power for many days.

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