Week notes: September 25th

Another bleary-eyed week of half-sleep. Only this week, my watch told me how much sleep I was[n't] getting - 3hours was my longest uninterrupted period Monday-Thursday. Chaos in the house as we got a new sofa. Ohhh it's good. It was actually Naomi's 40th Birthday present - she used to have a lovely velvety rich turquoise sofa which we eventually had to get rid of because, well the house was a building site. So we sold it before the building work, and she's rightly not been too happy about it since then. So we now have a brand new one. It's nice to once again sit on a sofa where your feet don't touch the ground. Deeeep. Soft. Ouuummpphhhf. TV watching just levelled up.

OK, then what other activities have been taking place this week?

• iOS App tinkering - Since learning React, I've been meaning to see how easy/difficult it is to move over to React Native and make an iOS app. Well, turns out - not that hard. At least to get a simple app up and running. Initially, I used react-create-app and XCode to get running, but it was quite a bit faffy. So then tried out Expo, which made things splendidly straightforward. The test subject was creating a fast-loading map of [clustered] markers for UK EV chargers, using the National Charge Point Registry data. Just a day to fiddle with this but it felt straightforward enough that I could go back to the drawing board and think a bit more about design and purpose - if I want to or end up building anything at all.
• The Long Way Up - Started watching it this week. Fantastic! Really enjoying it. Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman are just two really lovely people, and good friends. I remember enjoying the last of the previous series they made, and of course, this one is slightly more appealing because they're mad enough to do the epic journey from Argentina to the United States on electric bikes. And they got Rivian involved, driving the support teams in VIN-000001 and VIN-000002 the entire journey too. Amazing! Shame you have to buy a new iPhone to watch the show... fnar fnar.
• Tesla Battery Day - Enjoyed this. 56% reduction in battery cost is huge. Range improvements, energy density improvements, manufacturing improvements. It's hard to imagine another automotive company making this pace of change with battery technology. Why wouldn't VW do this, for example? They should do it. They just don't have the purpose or mission to do so. They're still selling diesel vehicles. I find this level of disruption pretty exciting because the companies that are being disrupted have been shitting on the environment and causing climate change for the past 100+ years. Was disappointed that there was no zero-Cobalt announcement, was hoping it would feature in the new battery tech. Good to see a focus on recycling with investment though.