Cycles: 20250101-20250112

Preface

This cycle is the first of its kind. I’m not quite sure of the format yet but as I wrote in my my post last year – Weeknotes? More like Weak notes! – cycles are meant to be flexible with the ebb and flow of life and writing about the things that are important to me.

New beginnings

As most years begin I’m filled with hope and optimism about what the next calendar year will bring. There’s a few things I’m particularly excited about:

• Research by the Sea conference – The research conference I’ve been curating since August last year is just around the corner. Most of my work is now done and I’m so excited about the event, meeting the wonderful speakers in person, and seeing everything come together on the day. I’m a little bit nervous too.
• My next career step – Aside from the wonderful opportunity of curation, I’m been exploring my career next steps. Things are moving the right way which makes it difficult not to get too excited, especially as they are exactly what I want from this next stage of my life. 16th of January, next week, is a particularly important day for me. Keep you fingers crossed for me!
• Supportive communities – I’m looking forward to continuing my exploration of environmental and social good with The Steps Collective, People’s Park for Nature, Lewes Climate Hub, Lewes Library of Things.
• Daily habits go a long way – I’ve started the first 12 days of this year maintaining small but important habits. There’s definitely something about small daily improvements that build awareness and momentum.
• Life without Big-Tech – I continued my Big–Tech Exorcism™ into 2025 by deleting my WhatsApp account. If you haven’t done so already please do. Signal is probably your best option for ease of migration. I did spend some time looking into Matrix, the decentralised messaging protocol, which looks like the Fediverse but for instant messaging.

Environment

It’s been strange waking to beautiful red and amber sun rises and larking about in the snow, when people across the pond are waking to red skies and extreme temperatures of a different kind. The stories of loss and trauma, and the projected social, financial and health implications of the LA wildfires will are truly upsetting and worrying.

The first of The Steps Collective’s monthly meet-ups was this Friday just gone which I unfortunately couldn’t attend. On the topic of “Renewal” John Wilshire and the Steps folks hosted a discussion on what it means for the group and regeneration. John has uploaded the video and it’s at the top of my watchlist.

Gardening

Organic

Aside from marvelling at the frozen winter make-over, I’ve not been doing anything in the garden. The pond seems very happy with the donated plants, kindly donates from two doors down, are finally taking root and looking a bit more happy.

I have noticed a lot of bird song when working from the garden shed. As soon as I’ve freed an appropriate Raspberry Pi from the stack I’m going to setup BirdNET-Pi, a realtime acoustic bird classification system.

Digital

I’ve been spending a lot of time using Obsidian. Its become my starting place for most tasks. I’ve been actively making structured and consistent entries, and making intentional connections between files and information.

I’ve also playing more with my website. Starting the year with Indiekit setup means posting to my site has become much easier. I’m also trying to use whatever procrastination time to good use by adding more of its features. I learned more about ActivityPub over the festive break and was excited to add Likes and Replies… yup, I can now like and reply to other website content using my own site! I loved the sentiment from Jeremy and Remy’s talk about how they helped to create the world wide web in 5 days.

The web is amazing, we should fight for it!

Hell yeah! Sign me up! ✊

(Bi)cycles

Riding off-road in the UK winter is mostly devoid fun, fact. The trails around the South Downs are either three inches of claggy mud or instant chalk deathtraps. But when the temperatures drop well below zero, as they did this week, it’s a very different story: trails become hard-packed as if it was the peak of summer, the landscape dusted with microscopic crystals refracting in the light. If you’ve got a good pair of gloves and enough layers, it can be magical.

I got my my own dose of this magic on Saturday morning. Riding out the back of Lewes to Offham, ducking out before Blackcap to race the sun home before it melted the temporary dreamworld into a nightmare.