Week notes: September 18th

This week, I have mostly been working in an office, sneezing and full of cold. It's a horrible lingering cold, but there's no hot sweats, no shortness of breath - it's all very familiar. But it is lingering. TBH the fatigue is strong but any tiredness from a cold would be indistinguishable from the permanent exhaustion from the children waking up at all hours, every night.

Oh, the water main broke and we had brown-tinged water for two days.

• Walks - Enjoyed a nice walk up at Stanmer park, picking apples from the huge, ancient Apple trees in the old Orchard. They were heaving with Apples, including Bramleys. Naomi made a delicious Apple crumbell Saturday evening as we left with carrier bag full. Sunday we enjoyed a walk in Balcombe, around the reservoir and through the woods there. Plenty of big and interesting looking shrooms growing, and I saw my first chicken-of-the-woods there (not that I've been looking before). I'm not quite confident enough to eat them yet, but I would like to. Need to level up my foraging knowledge.
• Thought about moving house - Spoke to our estate agent and got an updated price for our house, after seeing a nice property locally (would have been a stepping-stone purchase to somewhere else). The property I liked sold almost immediately, however, but at least the price we were told was good. I like to check on these things. About 3 years ago I made one of my epic spreadsheets, for the house value. I took the sales data for Hanover over the last 3 years, averaged the prices per 2, 3 and 4 bedroom houses, to work out the % difference between them all. Then used that to extrapolate a projected value for our house over 4 different market scenarios, both with and without the loft conversion. None of the scenarios were unfavourable to the loft conversion, so we went ahead. Pleasing to see that none of my projections were wildly out, and the loft conversion was a sound investment.
• iOS 14 - I had the [very stable] beta already, but I downloaded the public release of this along with everyone this week. I really enjoy the little improvements they've made - Photos widget being my favourite, I think. Oh no - picture in picture video probably my favourite, for YouTube. Looking forward to trying Watch OS7 but the download has been stuck on "Paused" and no amount of restarting, wiping or resetting seems to get rid of it.
  
• Electric Brighton - We've had a few new chargers installs in the city this week, as work continues to finish installing lamp post chargers - and I've been keeping the site up to date with the latest locations. Had a great call with Fluid Dynamics who are developing some amazing tools for calculating where EV infrastructure deployments can benefit households with on-street parking the most.
• Thunderbolt Display repairing - Image was greyed out and the rear cable needed replacing, for the second time - still, it's doing OK for a ~9-year-old display. I've done loads of iPhone/Mac repairs recently. iPhone XS rear camera replacement, Macbook Air screen replacement, iMac Pro RAM upgrade (*definitely* the scariest operation)... So many repairs that I've ended up buying a proper kit of micro Torx screw heads, and other surgical type instruments for very specific and awkward device tinkering. Long live home repairs!
• Tesla Battery Day - Yes, I'm nerding out for this event next week. All the leaks seem to point to them announcing a million-mile, cobalt-free, energy-dense, LARGE battery cell for their cars. Battery tech is being pushed forward now at quite a pace, and we'll see plenty more breakthroughs this decade. The future technology for many vehicles is gloriously simple: an electric motor and a battery. Love it. We just need to get the full-cycle of batteries sorted, but JB Straubel is on that.