This probably isn't revolutionary, but I've been thinking about this for a while, and I think I have a perfect use case for AI. And that is property searching.

I heard Rory Sutherland^[1] talk about property searching a while ago, and he was explaining how the tools used to search for properties, and the housing market in general, isn't fit for purpose. Primarily because your search is built around what your perfect house is, e.g. you can look for houses in a good catchment area for schools. But he proposes that a better way of seearching for a house is to work out what can you live with, that other people would hate. His example was living near a railway line, he would enjoy this, most people would hate it.

This example alone got me thinking about AI. And especially tools like Perplexity, as you can explain your exact scenario and what you're looking for, but also what things you absolutely can't live with, and what you could live with.

For example, you could say "We are family of 4, I require school access, but as I work remotely, I don't require any particular transport links" or something like "I'm a single man, working in London, with no need for school or transport links, as long as I can get to work within 1 hour, and I don't mind being in a noisy area as I go to bed late".

There are probably better examples, but I'm sure you get the idea.

I think if you had an AI model that had full access to a property database, with enough information that it could understand the fine details of each property, placing a prompt-based interface on top of that would be perfect.

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1. British advertising/marketing genius. Wikipedia ↩︎

A younger version of myself would laugh at what I'm about to say. But if there's one thing that I can take from last year, it's that becoming a parent is the greatest thing a human being can do. Who would have thought?

When I think about games that had lasting effects on me, there’s honestly hardly any.

For starters, I have to give games like Pokémon and World of Warcraft their own category. I’ve played them both for massive chunks of my life, and even if a sequel isn’t great, I’m playing it. They’ve probably both affected me somehow, but in a more longer-term way that’s hard to measure.

I guess I could also say the FIFA and Call of Duty games are similar, in that it’s not really about the quality of the game, the benefit is really the experience playing live with other people.

The game that had the biggest “wow, this is incredible” was Firewatch. It was a really good length, the story had me hooked the whole way through, and the whole gameplay experience was great.

But there is one game that I seem to have a lot of nostalgia for, and that is The Last of Us. I can’t put my finger on the exact reason. Was it the gameplay, the story, or just my life at the time? I don’t know.

But when I think back to playing the game, or see photos on social media, all I can remember is being completely immersed, taking everything one step at a time, never wanting to miss a single second. I really want to play through it again. But I wonder if it just won’t have the same feeling as the first time.

One thing is for certain, I want to start playing more games. And I don’t just mean endless hours on Call of Duty or World of Warcraft. Real games, with enthralling stories, that leave something behind in me.

If using a ThinkPad on holiday has taught me one thing, it's that my next "main" laptop will have some form of a matte display. Whether it's some form of Linux laptop, or a MacBook with the new coating, being able to use a laptop with zero issues in the sun feels like a revelation after all the years using a Mac with a glossy screen.

Every single I see this advert, I'm amazed at how brilliant just a single bit of conversation is. It's probably my favourite bit of marketing ever.

Person 1: *spots Head and Shoulders*

Person 1: "I didn't know you had dandruff?"

Person 2: "I don't."

Is it weird that I find that absolutely brilliant? If you have dandruff (luckily I don't), then what better way could you have a product marketed to you?

★ Favourite: To question is to consider, not refute | Derek Sivers

This post is confirmation that I have somehow managed to set up blog posting via the Quill web interface

It also means that I have enabled IndieAuth correctly, and have built a Vercel function to power a micropub endpoint that creates and stores posts in the GitHub repo as Markdown files. Very interesting stuff.

Isn't the Indie Web great?

I wrote recently about how I don't have much time (or effort) to do spend much time on things like blogging. And that because this blog is a custom Eleventy site, which uses Markdown files, with specific frontmatter, kept track in GitHub, and then hosted via Vercel, it's becoming a bit of a faff when I want to quickly write and publish something to my blog.

I've spent 2 days looking into the possible futures of my blog, which essentially boiled down to WordPress or Ghost as the primary options. And to be completely honest, I wasn't happy enough with any of my attempts that I'd be willing to spend time in the short term to migrate to another platform.

With both platforms, I tried using various import tools, even using Perplexity to build various scripts that would take my Eleventy blog content and produce the correctly formatted files for each platform.

The one for WordPress was the most accurate, but the photos weren't working properly, so I'd have to go through all of the posts manually anyway. Which is one thing I really wanted to avoid.

Earlier today, I did even quickly sign up for a Business plan on WordPress.com, because it mentions it includes a free migration. Unfortunately, an Eleventy blog isn't the easiest to migrate, so they told me either to do it myself, or to pay $499 and their team would work with me to build "5+ pages". It's what I expected, but still unfortunate.

That leaves me with the realisation that any switch away from Eleventy will be quite a major undertaking. As in, it will require more than a few days effort on my part. 😅

So I'm going to try a bit harder to make my Eleventy blog work for me. Maybe there's an automation for publishing that makes it easier to write posts on my phone, and I'm sure there's a lot more I can be doing with Obsidian templates.

The bonus is that I'm now off work for nearly two weeks. So I've got a bit more time than usual to try and figure something out. Although, I still have a four month old child, so it's not a lot.

I became a father just over four months ago. While that is one of the best things that's ever happened to me, it means I have less free time to spend on the less important things.

That includes keeping up with my RSS subscriptions, being active on social media (Mastodon), and sharing photos and updates on my blog.

I don't want to be negative though. It's just a fact that I have less time to spend on these things and that I also want to spend less time on them. I have much more important things people I want to spend time on. But it does mean I post less to my blog, which is something I want to change.

I'm not sure if it will happen or how long any real improvement will take, but I think one first step has to be migrating this blog from Eleventy to something like Ghost.

The geek in me doesn't like the sound of that realisation. But with Eleventy, although I have total control of my site, how pages are built, the logic behind each template, and can also make changes to every minute detail, I don't find it that easy to just write a post.

Typically I use Neovim to write posts, which many people may point to as the main reason behind this friction. But it's also that my posts are plaintext Markdownfiles, with very particular frontmatter for the metadata, which is then committed to a Git repository, and deployed to Vercel.

That's cool, and somehow Vercel even hosts this blog for me for free. But it means it's a bit of a workflow to get even a simple blog posts published.

I'm sure there are various weird and wonderful workflows to publish to an Eleventy blog. But I don't have the time or patience to set them up. Which means when I have a quick idea for a post, or I just want to share a photo from my phone, it seems like too much effort and I just don't post anything.

I don't know if or when I will move my blog to something like Ghost or WordPress, but I'm starting to think that it's a likely future. Mainly because surely, whatever blog platform I move to, will require at least some level of migration work. And as the title indicates, I don't really have much time!

So you can take this post as an indication of where this blog may go soon, possibly a hint of positivity that I may end up writing more often in the near future. Or you could just take this as a sign that I'm still alive, and that there's at least a desire to keep a blog.

I guess I'll be back soon?