Sculptures by Tony Cragg and others

In my element

As always with these kinds of things, I will spend an impressive amount of time overthinking everything.

Requirements

These are my initial requirements:

1. Capsule wardrobe with everything I need, nothing more, nothing less
2. Every single item must get frequent wear (or address a special, recurring need, such as swimming shorts)
3. Enough items to do laundry every 14 days
4. Equipped for all 4 seasons in London
5. Low-effort, where everything can be combined without thinking
6. Relaxed-casual-as-default, with a minimum quantity of slightly smarter pieces as required
7. A bit more variation in terms of colours (my current wardrobe is very black), without going crazy

Draft numbers

After some initial thinking, I think the required numbers look a bit as follows.

MY 14-DAY CAPSULE WARDROBE PLAN
===============================

T-shirts:
- T-shirts ×12

Shirts:
- Oxford shirt ×1

Sweaters & hoodies:
- Hoodie ×3
- Sweatshirt ×2
- Knit ×1

Bottoms:
- Jeans ×3
- Cargo trousers ×1
- Joggers ×1
- Chinos ×1
- Shorts ×1
- Swim shorts ×1

Outerwear:
- Waterproof shell jacket ×1
- Insulated jacket ×1
- Packable lightweight jacket ×1

Footwear:
- Everyday trainers ×1
- Water-resistant trainers ×1
- Smarter trainers ×1

Accessories
- Cap ×1
- Beanie ×1
- Belt ×1
- Backpack ×1
- EDC bag ×1

Socks & underwear
- Socks ×16
- Boxer briefs ×16

Total: 37 items + socks & underwear

Next steps

1. Come up with a style description for the wardrobe
2. Translate that into concrete items (fits, colours, brands)
3. Check what I have that still works
4. Start planning purchases

I told you I’m overthinking it! 😆

Having to rely on public transport rather than walking does have a visible impact on my budget, but not as much as I worried in terms of my daily step count.

I never get tired of the view from Tate Modern 🤩

With it being Pride Month and all, I’ve been playing around a little bit with CSS to create a rainbow hover state for my site logo.

Here’s a static version of the active state, for those on mobile:

And here is the dynamic version in all it’s glory:

I quite like the effect 🙂

Oh, and here is a rainbow flag that was left over from the process:

Finally, here’s the CSS for that flag, in case anyone wants to use it:

.pride-flag {
    display: inline-block;
    width: 1.667em;
    height: 1em;
    background: linear-gradient(
        to bottom,
        #e0392c 0% 16.67%,
        #e2922f 16.67% 33.33%,
        #e8c93d 33.33% 50%,
        #3e8a30 50% 66.67%,
        #2c4fe0 66.67% 83.33%,
        #7e2289 83.33% 100%
    );
}

Happy Pride!

As much as I like this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, my favourite is still Smiljan Radić’s one from 2014.

I quite like this year’s pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery.

As a little evening project yesterday, I created a set of signal flags as icons, using CSS and SVG.

I’m making these Creative Commons and you are welcome to download the CSS in case you want to play around.

After importing the stylesheet, each icon can be displayed by using <i class='flag-a'></i>, <i class='flag-b'></i> etc.

flags.css

!

🇧🇪⚽️🏆🥇

It’s not even about privacy for me, and only a little about avoiding the ads. Instead, it’s all about getting rid of the nonsense AI response at the top of the results.

There’s been this example floating around the web for months:

Will it be 2027 next year?

It is 2026 right now, and will be 2028 next year, followed by 2027.

Source: Google

After several months of people posting screenshots and poking fun at it, Google’s AI is just getting more convinced, using those posts as a reference. Someone said so on the internet, so it must be true!

This is the most blatant example, but for most other things, the primary source seems to be either a random bloke on Reddit saying something or some page that, when you click through to it, says nothing about the topic at all.

So, no thank you. I’m quite happy getting real search results instead.

Aside from that, I’d say it was a bit of a yawn this year 😴

When going by bus, I always sit at the front, if I can. And now, when commuting by the DLR, I have a new front seat to go for.

The V&A East museum was a bit of a mixed bag for me, tbh, but I enjoyed the view from the roof terrace.

Ippudo chicken katsu don

A view from my new hood

This is my first commute by public transport in eight years. It takes just under 40 minutes door to door but I’m no longer getting my 10K steps per day.

We sometimes end up at Hoko for dinner after work, and it always goes a bit like this:

1x Hong Kong Classic French Toast
  1x With Peanut Butter
1x Scrambled Eggs Char Siu BBQ Pork Rice
1x Lychee Yakult Ice
1x Pineapple Ice
1x Swiss Wings (5pcs)

Bye bye, home 😢

I always find it sad to move out of a place, no matter where I’m moving to, and this place has been the place I call home for much longer than I could have ever imagined when I moved in in April 2014.

Flat 7 has been a nice little place, and I’ve particularly enjoyed how easy it’s been not to buy a lot of stuff when living here. It just wouldn’t fit!

All good things come to an end, and we’ve realised it is time for a bit more space. Getting up at different times or both of us working from home hasn’t been easy when there’s no separate room and no doors.

On Wednesday, we’re moving into a temporary flat until we can get our new home. Hopefully, it shouldn’t be too long now!

I’m moving on Wednesday, so today was the last Saturday with this particular routine.

The blog you’re reading right now is the first time I’ve let the AI actually build an application. Admittedly, it’s very basic: a static site generator in Python, using templates and publishing to the web, but looking back, I haven’t actually written a single line of code or barely even looked at one.

Here’s what I did...

1. First, I wrote a specification as a Markdown document. This is definitely where I spent the most time. I took some help from Claude (”What do I need to include?”, ”Will this give the AI everything it needs?”), but I wrote most of it manually, to make sure it was 100% like I want it. I described everything in quite a bit of detail.
2. Next, I asked Claude Code to read the specification and write automated tests for the first part of the application.
3. Then, I asked Claude Code to come up with a plan for how to implement the first part application, but it not only did that, it rushed straight ahead and wrote the code and made it pass the tests. Within a couple of minutes, including downloading and installing everything it needed to run, the first part of the application was done.
4. Next, I asked Claude Code to come up with a plan for writing the rest of the application in an incremental way. Just like before, it went ahead and built the first part, but then politely asked me to give it the go ahead to continue with the next part and so on. And then my static site generator was complete.
5. Next, I shifted to my actual blog and asked Claude Code to design it and create the template. It quickly generated something that looked good enough, and then made some tweaks based on my feedback.
6. To not keep the same Claude thread going forever (expensive in terms of credits), I asked Claude Code to write a doc to include all information needed when starting a new thread. I noticed it described some quirks and workarounds, including some caused by inconsistencies in my specification, so I told it to fix the issues instead of just documenting them.
7. Lastly, I’ve been making some tweaks and additions by tweaking the specification, and Claude has diligently implemented them.

Done!

But how do I feel about it? Well, I can’t say the journey has given me the sense of joy and achievement as building things did before. But does that matter? It’s been an incredibly quick way to get exactly what I want. I just wanted my blog up and running.

I code infrequently enough to forget most of how to do it in between, so the AI definitely beats any code that I would write.

If I can focus my energy on the blog content instead, that is surely a good thing.

We’ve just had the two hottest May days or record in the UK, and I’ve been wishing it was last summer again and I were in Svalbard.

(Photo from 26/8/2025)

It was too hot for a day trip, really, but even more too hot to stay in London! 🥵

Like so many things these days, it all started with an AI prompt:

I miss personal blogs and an Internet free of slop and ads.

I want to build a pre-algorithm kind of site for myself. I want it to kind of feel like a platform but don’t want anyone else on there, no likes or anything.

It will be a mix of photos and short text.

After spending a few hours writing a spec, I now have a custom-built site generator in Python resulting in the site you are looking at right now.

What a time to be alive!