The last month has been a whirlwind as we’ve moved back to Perth.

I’ve taken photos down in Margaret River and around the old haunts.

It’s good to be back.

Some photos of Brisbane before we move.

I’m taking on a 365 photo challenge this year: capturing at least one black and white photo each day and adding it to my journal.

I haven’t focused on black and white photography since parting with my film cameras, so I’m excited to get back into it and hopefully improve.

Six days in, and I’m enjoying it so far.

Clouds at sunset snare me.

K’gari (Fraser Island) is beautiful.

We spent a few days there between Christmas and New Years.

It was the busy season and the island was packed with four wheel drivers. It felt like there were about fifty vehicles parked up for a swim at Eli Creek while we were there. We never felt crowded though, the island is huge.

Everyone bangs on about Lake McKenzie, and for good reason, it is beautiful.

The Illumina light show was an audiovisual delight.

The island is well worth a visit.

Here is the 2024 edition of my yearly Spotify playlist.

You can also check out my previous editions.

And here is my Last.fm listening report for the year.

Let’s rip though a bunch more media, and a couple of products, that I enjoyed in 2024¹.

Music

Music is easily the most consumed media for me this year. Here’s a few albums I enjoy.

Love Changes Everything — Nothing like a Dirty Three album.

Little Rope — Hell of an album opener.

Teenage Snuff Film — Digging into my Australian music history.

Wild God — Good to have another Bad Seeds album.

Eleanor Jawurlngali — An ethereal voice.

Songs of a Lost World — I don’t listen to The Cure much. This new album is great.

I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a fuck anymore 👍 — Loving these guys.

No Name — Grimy Jack White.

TV Shows

Turns out I still watch quite a bit of TV.

What we do in the Shadows — Final season. Better than the previous one. It was the right time to bow out. Laszlo and Nadja forever.

The Diplomat — Caught up on the first two seasons. Bit of London. Bit of politics. Bit of espionage.

Fisk — Caught up on the first three seasons. Cracks me up.

Drops of God — Wine-based superhero comic story. Yep, that’s right.

Industry — Season three was the best yet. The finale was fantastic.

The Bear — Season three felt like it was a bit padded out, but it still had its high points, like the episode Napkins.

Outer Range — Weird as shit.

Shogun — Kept me rapt.

The Gentlemen — Geezers geezering.

Blue Eye Samurai — Makes me want to watch more animated fare.

Mr and Mrs Smith — Great mix of character and action.

Fargo - Season five was a return to form.

Black Doves — Worth it just for the Irish assassins.

Movies

I need to watch more movies instead of TV.

Dune: Part Two — Technically brilliant.

Furiosa — George Miller is a genius.

Books

I fell off the reading wagon pretty hard this year.

Wool — Read this after watching Silo season one. Good sci-fi.

Infinite — I’ve been fascinated with immortality stories ever since watching Highlander.

Rubicon — An ancient Roman violent soap opera.

Road to seeing — One of my favourite photo books.

Podcasts

My regulars with a couple of new entries.

The Rest is History — The lads continue to produce good series. The French Revolution and Custer hooked me.

Conversations with Tyler — The density of ideas in these remains high.

The Watch — One for the CR heads.

The Rewatchables — Makes me laugh.

Bandsplain — Love the Grunge season.

The Big Picture — The more unhinged the draft show, the better.

Dithering — I enjoy when they bring up new angles on tech-related news.

Lenny’s Podcast — New to the rotation. Good for getting a view of product management.

Acquired on Microsoft — Two episodes running through the history of Microsoft.

Games

Playing games is the most reliable way for me to “switch off”. I don’t play loads. There are a couple of new additions this year.

Balatro — Roguelike poker game. Is killer on iPad.

Astro Bot — Sony found their Super Mario.

Greed — Dice game that’s great for the whole family.

Products

Yeti stubby cooler — Keeps those drinks cold.

Apple Watch Ultra 2 — In Batman black for maximum stealth.

Le Creuset Casserole — Grab one on sale and keep it forever.

Fujifilm GF 63mm F2.8 Lens — A good sized, fast, 50mm prime equivalent for the 100S.

I’ve been giving Photomator a try for photo post-processing and it’s great.

I enjoy having the masking, healing, and rich editing features of Lightroom¹ in software that works natively with my Apple Photos library².

In effect, it replaces Darkroom and TouchRetouch for editing my native iPhone photos. If things get a bit tough to sort with my thumbs I can switch over the mac version of the software and everything is synced up.

Hopefully Apple keep the core experience the same now that they’ve acquired it.

My photo book tour continues with Australian Lustre.

Reading it transports me to every country town I’ve ever visited.

I enjoyed the juxtaposition of big things and suburbia the most.

It’s undeniably Australian and well worth a look.

Views of the new casino.

A bit of Brissy night light.

One feature Apple Music has that Spotify doesn’t is Smart Playlists. They are handy for honing in on favourite tracks for specific artists or genres.

I knocked up this smart playlist that I shuffle to unearth underappreciated tracks in my library.

It’s been throwing up some good gear.

I’m working on reading more photography books.

So, yesterday, I grabbed Colin Greenwood’s How to Disappear while I was out and about¹.

Colin gets some great candids of the recording and touring experience.

His collection of photos is another ode to the power of a plastic Yashica T4.

Time for another rundown post. Here are a bunch of macOS apps I use. You’ll see some entries from my previous iOS apps post mentioned.

Productivity

DayOne - Where I journal.

NotePlan - My knowledge base for work. It uses plain Markdown files and has calendar-based notes which suit my workflow. I’ve used it for task management too, but don’t anymore. It’s just a searchable knowledge base of work notes and references for me.

Alfred - My quick launcher for apps and custom workflows I’ve collected and written. My workflow collection warrants a separate post.

Things - Where I track everything I want to do at work and at home. Syncs to my phone which is essential.

Bear - My note taking and personal knowledge base. I keep work specific notes in NotePlan rather than here.

MindNode - A clean mind mapping tool. Sometimes I find the spacial nature of mindmapping helps me structure my thoughts.

Fantastical - A calendar that shows my iCloud and Google calendars together. It’s getting a bit pricey for what I use it for so it may not make it past its next subscription cycle renewal.

MimeStream - A native GMail client. Goes good.

Bike - I swear the only reason I use this outliner is because of its delightful animations. I wish this UI was embedded in NotePlan.

Ulysses - Good for long form writing. I do less and less of this so am struggling to justify the subscription cost.

Monodraw - I love ASCII art.

Web browsing and plug-ins

Safari and Chrome - I use Chrome for work as it enables a bunch of features in the Google Suite. I to keep my personal browsing separate so I use use Safari for that. I use Choosy on my work machine to route common sites accordingly. I don’t use Chrome at all on my personal laptop. I gave Arc a crack for a while instead of Safari, it was kinda cool but ultimately not worth the battery drain.

1Blocker - Ad blocker for Safari.

StopTheMadness - Deal with a bunch of annoying stuff on the web.

Kagi Search - Supporting the little guy.

Supercopy - Provides a hot key to copy links (I loved this on Arc).

Instapaper - My read later service of choice.

Music and video

Spotify - This cops a hiding.

Apple Music - I still have a bunch of my music in Apple Music (via iTunes Match) so I sometimes play music here. I use NepTunes to scrobble from Apple Music to Last.fm.

MusicBox - I save albums in here to listen to later.

VLC - O.G. video player.

Play - I save online videos in here to watch later. The Apple TV and iPad companion apps are killer.

DarkNoise - A white noise app. Goes great with over ear headphones.

Other internet reading

Unread - Viva la RSS.

Ivory - For trawling Mastodon.

Coding

iTerm - Still a solid terminal, though Warp looks like a fresh approach.

VSCode - I didn’t see a Chromium tool winning but here we are. I like the vibes of Zed but dev containers keep me on VSCode.

NeoVim - This old Vim guy still throws up some motions in a terminal from time to time.

OrbStack - A nice way to run Docker containers.

Postico - A solid Postgres client.

Fork - I mostly use this Git client to stage partial lines and, increasingly, to rebase commits.

Photography

Lightroom Classic - This is where I manage and process the majority of my photos.

Photoshop - For those times you need finer grained processing.

Topaz Photo AI - Mostly used for upscaling old photos and noise reduction. With that said, the noise reduction that’s been added to Lightroom is pretty good so I might retire this sucker.

Utilities

1Password - My password and secrets manager.

Moom - Adds a bit of window management for when I’m using an external monitor.

Karabiner Elements - Lets me customise my keyboard and mouse.

Apple Shortcuts - Handy for automation and gluing things together. Pairs well with Alfred.

ExpressVPN - 🕵️‍♂️

Soulver - Notes and calculations in one spot.

CleanShot X - Slick screenshots.