Pupdate

The boys had some fantastic long walks on our trip to the Lakes (more on that in a moment).

I did a separate post about Milo’s extended remission, but it’s great that he’s been able to enjoy the summer without vet visits for chemo.

Lake District

We returned to Graythwaite’s Dove Cottage and this time around $daughter0 joined us for most of the stay.

West Windermere Way

We used a little section of the West Windermere Way last year, and this year we walked all the way to Lakeside and back; a 15km round trip.

I was a little sceptical about the walking route veering off to a dogleg through Finsthwaite, which adds a little distance and elevation. But it was absolutely beautiful, and we really enjoyed that section of the route. Particularly when we were able to stop for a bite to eat at a park bench just as we entered some of the forestry land between Finsthwaite and Lakeside.

Blencathra

On our climbs of Helvellyn via Striding Edge and Scafell Pike $daughter0 really enjoyed the scrambles. That led to the ‘Best Grade 1 Scrambles in the Lake District‘ listicle, and Blencathra via Sharp Edge seemed the obvious choice for our next climb.

The climb was a lot of fun, and the views from the summit were outstanding.

We descended via Halls Fell Ridge, which is billed as another scramble but wasn’t anything like Sharp Edge. Though greater challenges lay ahead on a surprisingly tricky crevasse on the otherwise very pedestrian path running parallel to the A66.

CoMaps

I’ve used the Ordinance Survey Maps app for the last few years, but it seems to keep getting worse. This year I switched to CoMaps, which is based on OpenStreetMap, and it was excellent :) Easy to read, works offline, simple to get distance to a point, and lots more. Given that it’s free, and strong on privacy it gets a big thumbs up from me :)

LARQ bottle

GitHub kindly gave me a LARQ PureVis Bottle a few years ago and I really wish I’d had it with me on the Scafell climb as I ended up needing to top up from a stream. The ‘adventure mode’ UV purification would have given me extra confidence to drink that water.

This time around I didn’t need to get any stream water. But it was nice to know that I could make it safe(r) if I needed to; and in every other respect the LARQ bottle was excellent in terms of form factor (fits in the car cup holders and the pockets on my rucksack) and capacity (740ml is more than my other bottles).

RNEC Reunion

The parts of my Navy training that I most fondly remember happened at the Royal Navy Engineering College (RNEC) at Manadon just outside of Plymouth. Sadly it was shut down 30y ago, but that was an excuse for getting folk back together. It was great to see some old shipmates, and hopefully it’s going to become a regular thing going forward.

Doppelganger

At a local Humanists meeting about conspiracy theories I asked “who’s writing good stuff about this (apart from Renee DiResta and Cory Doctorow)” and Prof Tarik Kochi suggested Naomi Klein’s ‘Doppelganger‘. I listened to the audiobook, and it’s a really good exploration of the current (mis)information landscape, and touched a lot on what I call ‘Filter Failure at the Outrage Factory‘.

Urs Hölzle

I’ve know of Urs and his work for many years so I leapt at the chance to join him when I was invited to an ‘exclusive Developer Breakfast & Fireside Chat’. Of course ‘exclusive’ isn’t the same as ‘intimate’ so I didn’t actually get to meet or chat with Urs, but at least I had a spot near to him.

It was really refreshing to hear his pragmatism around AI adoption, and I loved his advice along the lines of “if you’re overwhelmed trying to keep track of stuff day to day then give it three weeks and see what’s still around”.

Solar Diary

Another sunnier July than the year before :)

I don’t know what happened on the 15th, as I was up in the Lakes, but something weird as the data logger seemed to only record up to 0900.