My annual recap of media and products I enjoyed over the year.

Music

Getting Killed and Heavy Metal – I’m on the Cameron Winter and Geese train along with everyone else.

The Thief next to Jesus – Spiritual stuff.

Manning Fireworks – MJ is a talent.

Dream River – I’m catching up on all the Bill Callahan.

Strange Love – My kind of supergroup.

Here is my 2025 playlist of songs I enjoyed throughout the year.

TV Shows

The Pitt – My show of the year. Bringing back the medical procedural.

Task – Tight and sharp.

Andor season two – Smart Star Wars.

Invincible – I watched all three seasons. It’s violent. It feels like a comic book show in a good way.

The Eternaut – Strong start. Faded a little.

Department Q – The plot shouln’t work and yet it does. Team Akram forever.

Adolescence – Incredible achievement. Brutal watch at times.

The Studio – Made me giggle.

Movies

Sinners – Loved it.

Black Bag – Slick.

Anora – Decent. Can’t believe it won the Oscar.

One Battle After Another – Made me laugh.

Predator: Killer of killers – I enjoy seeing good takes on the Predator universe.

Killers of the Flower Moon – Evil pricks everywhere. Too long. Still good.

The Wild Robot – Beautiful art. Pulls at the heartstrings.

Books

I still don’t read enough books.

Project Hail Mary – Like a science puzzle. Second half picked up steam. Good fun.

The Wager – A mad story of survival.

Count Zero – Getting my old school Gibson back on.

Products

Gozney Arc – Gas fired pizza oven.

Dictador 20 year old rum – Good booze.

Didgeridoona cooler bag – Good for transporting booze.

Huski Champagne Flutes and cooler – Good for drinking booze.

Inspired by uses.tech, I’ve created a uses page on here.

This new camera is getting linked all over the place. I like the minimalist industrial design.

Loads of internal storage instead of SD cards makes sense.

The feature walkthrough video is worth a watch.

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.

A couple of games that are fun, cheap, compact, and handy to take traveling are Greed and Cockroach Poker.

Greed is a breezy dice game where you decide how far to push your luck.

Cockroach Poker is good fun in larger groups when you want to get your bluffing on¹.

Give them a crack.

Here’s a roundup of things, mostly media, I enjoyed in 2023.

Music

I create a Spotify playlist each year where I add songs I like. Here’s my 2023 edition.

I scrobbled about 6700 songs this year.

Here are my top ten tracks and top ten albums.

TV shows

Slow Horses — A season a year, six episodes each, sharp, great cast, Oldman ripping three zingers an episode, set in London which hits me in the nostalgia spots, can’t wait for this season’s finale next week.

The Bear — Season two built nicely on the first season. Episode seven of the second season was a highlight.

Scavengers Reign — Body horror stuff isn’t my thing but this show was great. The creativity on show in the flora and fauna design is incredible. The art reminds me of Mœbius.

What We Do in the Shadows — After each season I feel like the show is running out of steam but then each season I laugh during each episode. It has the best intro song ever and Matt Berry is a genius.

Hijack — Idris and some tightly shot thrills.

Deadloch — Everything is inverted. Finished strong.

Succession — They stuck the landing.

Better Call Saul — Finally finished this slow burn. Satisfying finish to the series.

Jury Duty — Wild that this worked. Made me laugh.

Station Eleven — Unexpectedly uplifting post apocalyptic story.

Silo — I love a good mystery. Made me start reading the books.

Movies

Dune (2021) — Well done. Sent me off reading the books again.

John Wick: Chapter 4 — So over the top. Beautifully shot. They shouldn’t make any more, though.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse — The best comic movie fare by a wide margin.

Dunkirk — I’m seemingly on a five year lag with Christopher Nolan movies.

The Killer — Fassbender and Fincher on one.

Books

Dune Chronicles — I reread Dune and then read Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, and most of God Emperor of Dune. I underappreciated Herbert’s world building which is incredibly influential. I lost steam about three quarters into the fourth book.

Faith, Hope, and Carnage — Whirls around creativity, spirituality, loss, religion, partnerships. Probably only for Nick Cave sickos like me.

The Psychology of Money — Principles around money and how to handle it. Hold strong and let the power of compounding do its thing.

This is How You Lose the Time War — Sci-fi time travel done well.

Rendezvous With Rama — Classic mysterious space objects baby.

Podcasts

The Watch — Chris and Andy forever.

The Rest is History — Educational and funny. (The live show was great too.)

Dithering — 15 minutes is a sweetspot.

The Rewatchables — Always makes me laugh.

Bandsplain — Yasi has charm for days. The Afghan Whigs episode was a particular favourite.

Conversations with Tyler — I love Tyler’s interview style. I always learn things.

Games

God of War Ragnarök — Nothing more satisfying than that axe flying back into your hand.

Elden ring — Only scratched the surface as I don’t have the hours or energy to get up the difficulty curve of this.

Diablo 4 — As addictive as ever. I ended up mashing buttons on this on many evenings.

Baldur’s Gate 3 — Throw back CRPG. Will crack this back open once time allows.

Cyberpunk 2077 — Cool world. Choices didn’t seem like that big a deal. Will crack this open again at some stage given the latest patch seems to have changed a bunch of things up.

King of Tokyo — The kids love playing this. Quick to set up and is great fun.

Products

AirPods Pro 2 — I use these every day. Apple’s best product in a while.

Leica Q2 Reporter — I’m back in Leica land. I carry this camera with me often and have shot way more this year as a result.

True Classic Shirts — These dadcore shirts go good.

Adaptive Audio on iOS 17 feels like an improvement over Transparency mode.

One thing that was driving me nuts however, was that whenever I’d put my AirPods Pro in, the volume would get dropped super low.

I thought it was Adaptive Audio doing it but in fact it was the Personalized Volume feature.

I’ve switched that off and things work a treat.

Years of rumours come to an end. It looks like a nice improvement over the Q2.

Folks seem down on the tiltable screen. I find that to be pretty useful feature on my GFX 100S so I reckon I’d dig it.

Leica’s industrial design is still number one in my book¹ but it’s always fun to see new interpretations and approaches to camera design.

This charger is great for travelling. It can power my laptop and charge my phone and watch or headphones at the same time.

I’ve been working from home full time for four years, and my desk setup has mostly remained the same during that time. But the recent spate of folks sharing their home office setups—this Basecamp post was my favourite—inspired me to spruce up my own.

So, now it’s tour time folks!

My work laptop (1) is a 13 inch 2017 MacBook Pro. It’s got the busted keyboard design. I mostly use an external keyboard, so mine still works fine 🤞.

My monitor (2) is a 27 inch Dell that’s six years old. It does the job. I’ll probably wait until it dies before I replace it.

I use a Kinesis Advantage 2 keyboard (3) which lets me hold my hands like a T-Rex while I type. It’s easy on the wrists but beware, it took me six months to type on this thing properly, and those six months were tough going so perhaps not a fun challenge to take up during already potentially stressful quarantine times.

I replaced my trusty stack of too-dry-to-read textbooks with the brutalist styles of this monitor stand by Brateck (4). It has a drawer where I can store my notebook and pens when I’m not using them. But what tickles the organiser in me the most is the cavity beneath it where I can store other things¹.

Pictures and plants are, of course, essential (5 & 6).

I used an Apple Magic Mouse for years, but it started acting flaky after I upgraded to Catalina. So, I switched to a Razer Death Adder (7) which is way more comfortable to hold. It doesn’t allow me to side scroll as easily but not recharging batteries regularly is nice. Also, it has disco lights and a USB cable. Actually, let’s talk about cables and wires for a minute.

So, wires. Yeah, they get in the way. Yeah, they can look ugly. But you know what else they are? Reliable. That’s right, like a blue heeler at dusk, they’re always there for you. They mean there’s no more stuttering when you move your mouse. You don’t need to worry about Wi-Fi turbulence when you’ve got an old fashioned Cat 6 cable plugged in baby ². With that off my chest, let’s get back to the tour.

Next up is the linchpin, the box that brings it all together. A couple of my colleagues recommended the CalDigit TS3 Plus Thunderbolt dock (9) and it’s tops. I plug everything into it, USB devices, my router, my display, my microphone and headset—and it all flows to my laptop via a single Thunderbolt cable (8). The TS3 Plus also serves as a power source for my MacBook so I can leave my power cord in my bag for that wondrous time, someday in the future when I can work outside again.

I spend a large portion of my day on video calls so a reliable audio setup is essential. I have a Jabra headset which is light and comfortable, but I also have an old set of Sennheisers (10) that I enjoy listening to music through. Again, some colleagues tipped me off to the fact that I can frankenstein a microphone onto any headset by using an Antlion ModMic. Its hardware mute button isn’t as low down on the cord as I like, but at least it’s there.

Another bonus of wearing this new set up is that I look like a helicopter pilot instead of a call centre worker and who doesn’t want to look like a helicopter pilot, right?

I run my headphones into a Magni 2U headphone amp (11) and plug that and the microphone directly into the TS3 Plus ³. So now, I have my favourite headphones handy when I need to concentrate and want to listen to something from one of my go to playlists (or White Noise).

When I want to listen to music without headphones, I stream it through my fairly ancient Jambox (12). It’s rugged and still trucking though I expect the battery to self combust any day now. I've ordered a pair of Audioengine HD3 speakers to replace it because my ears deserve it.

Update: (2022-05-22) There weren’t any HD3’s in stock so I instead went with a pair of Edifier R1280DB’s. They are cheaper, connect to the TS3 via digital optical cable, sound good, and look alright.

I’ve also ordered a Logitech C925E webcam which I’ll mount on my monitor so I’m not always side-eyeing folks from my laptop camera in meetings.

I spent a scandalous amount of money on a Herman Miller Embody (13) when I first set up my home office. I never worry about my chair, so I think I can say that money was worth it 🤷‍♂️.

Finally, there’s my desk (14). It is a standing desk that I put together eight years ago. Back then, it was tricky to find standing desks online, so to save money, I only ordered legs from GeekDesk ⁴ and attached a bamboo tabletop from Ikea to them. The top could be a bit larger, but maybe I’m just greedy.

Update: (2023-05-14) The motor on my GeekDesk died after ten years so I replaced it with an 1800mm wide Zen Pro Bamboo Sit Stand Desk. The extra width is much appreciated and the preset heights work a treat.

So, there it is—the throne of my weekday castle.

There are a window and couch out of shot to the left. The couch is mostly ornamental because if I allow myself to lie down on it and close my eyes for just one minute, all will be lost.