Wooooo! Friday!

It was an easy day at work today. No stress involved, and a few projects/tasks got cleared up, which is a very good thing. Because of our desk/floor move at work, we had to finalise all of our packing. If all goes according to plan, all of our belongings will be next to our next desk on Monday morning.

I’ve been reading more of my Essentialism book, and I’m now roughly halfway through it. It’s been very interesting so far.

This evening I went out for a quick coffee, and I also played some world of Warcraft.

It’s nowhere as early as yesterday, but it’s now time for bed. I expect tomorrow will be slightly more interesting that today.

It’s one of them days, where I’ve got back from work, eaten dinner, and I just want to go to sleep. I’m exhausted!

It was a pretty busy day at work. It didn’t help that some people that I was dealing with, weren’t quite at the level I expect. I know that’s a bit bitchy, but I have things to get on with.

I did change something on the blog today as well. I removed the ad from the website, and replaced it with a “sponsor” style advert. So any sponsors will have to manually do this from my website itself, rather than being part of a network. I’ll no doubt write about this tomorrow.

Right now, I’m going to sleep. It’s not even 9 pm yet, but I’m just too tired.

Not long after the week started, it already feels like it’s about to end. It’s not only because of the bank holiday on Monday. But there’s a big office plan change at work on Friday, where I’ll be moving to a newly decorated floor. So that’s another day essentially written off!

During fog the various bits of travel today, I’ve been doing a mix of three things. When I had chance to sit for a long period (a huge chunk of my commute), I read more is Essentialism. When I had to walk somewhere, for example before/after trains on my commute, and also walking around the house, I’ve been listening to an episode of the Tim Ferris Show that features Neil Gaman. It’s really interesting! And finally, any other time I’ve just been listening to some Avicci!

I did also watch the Arsenal game tonight when I got back. But we ended up losing 3-1, which is a big blow to the season, and is very annoying. But there’s no point worrying about that, I can’t fix it.

Now it’s time for me to ready a bit more Essentialism and go to bed.

I was totally not ready for today. It was an early 6:30 start, followed by an absolutely sweltering office. Hopefully the air conditioning is a bit more effective tomorrow.

While on my lunch break, I finished off writing my review of Castro, and published it to the blog today.

I also did some reading. I used my commute to force myself to start reading Essentialism. Tomorrow will be exactly the same.

Tonight, me and my girlfriend have been visiting her parents house for dinner. And now it’s time to go to bed and start it all over again tomorrow.

For quite a few years now, I’ve been using Overcast as my podcast app of choice. It’s a great app, and it’s praised by basically anyone that uses it. However, I had never really used an alternative. So I wasn’t sure if I really was using the best app that was on offer.

After doing a bit of research, and hearing about it in the past, I decided on Castro. It’s the app that I’ve seen the most talked about online, second to only Overcast.

As I mentioned on my journal entries on April 8th and 9th, one of the best features of Castro, in my opinion, is the focus that’s put into queuing episodes. And in particular, the idea of triaging new episodes, so that you can have a more refined queue. This helped me a lot, as I was getting to a place where I had so many episodes build up in my list, that I didn’t know what to listen to next. And in some cases, there were episodes that I knew that I would never get around to listen to, but I just didn’t want to remove them.

Starting with an import of my subscription from Overcast via the export/import OPML files in both apps, the Inbox in Castro was filled up with the most recent episodes of all my subscriptions. From there I started assigning each episode to either the top/bottom of the queue, or removing it from the list. This resulted in a pretty small queue, I think it was around 6 episodes, and my list would usually be around 20 in Overcast.

As new episodes continually appeared in the Inbox, I found it rather easy to sort through them, and pick out the episodes I wanted to listen to. It seems strange, but this feature alone made me listen to many more podcasts. It removed some of the unnecessary choice, so I could always find something I wanted to listen to. Because of the queuing, and the fact that you prioritise episodes in the queue when triaging the Inbox, it’s always ready whenever you just want to jump in a quickly listen to something. Or maybe in the morning, when you haven’t quite woken up yet, but you still want something for the commute.

I did think I would miss the two great enhancements that Overcast offers, Voice Boost and Smart Speed. However, Castro have their own versions, Enhance Voices and Trim Silence. I didn’t notice any difference in this regard. So either, they both work with a similar level of quality, or I just don’t notice the feature on either apps. Either way, it’s not an issue for me.

One thing I did notice about playback though, was when resuming an episode, I really missed Overcast’s “Smart Resume”. It’s really handy when you pause in the middle of a word, because Overcast will rewind slightly to the gap before the word. It sounds like a minuscule feature, but you soon get used to it.

Something else that caused me a bit of friction when I first started using Castro, was the way you found the show notes of an episode. In Castro, you swipe left → right and “activate” the Info button, which launches the show notes above the current context. However, I was really used to the interface in Overcast, where you swiped right → left to view the show notes, and then once more to view the chapters (if the episode had them). These are nothing major, and are mostly caused by muscle memory.

After using Castro as my podcast app for a while, I was in a situation where I wanted to listen to a podcast on my iPad. And that is when I discovered the lack of Castro! So after all the benefits I found with the queuing feature, the nice refreshing interface, and also a few pain-points, I literally couldn’t use the app anymore. I kept using the Castro app on my phone for a few days, but I had to stop, because managing two podcast apps would be crazy.

In conclusion, I would like to state that I really like Castro. And while there are a few things that I was used to in Overcast, that caused friction when using Castro, the overall experience was great. I just can’t use an app on iOS that isn’t universal anymore. I’ve gone back to Overcast for now, and I’m going to try and take small things I’ve learned from triaging episodes in Castro, so I can better handle my podcast list. But I’m always going to be hoping for the day when Castro comes to the iPad.

It’s the last day of the Easter “weekend”, and we spent that at my girlfriends sisters house. So that means we’ve visited both of our families over the break!

It also means that I’m back to work tomorrow, which I’m totally not ready for. Thinking of myself tomorrow, I did cook myself some lunch just now, so that’s one less thing to worry about.

Now I’m going to make sure I read at least the first few pages of Essentialism, as I’ve totally failed to do that so far.

Easter Sunday! 🐣

Today started with me watching some more Lost. I watched two episodes, and it means that I’ve finally finished all 6 seasons! I really don’t know what I’m going to watch next.

That wasn’t an issue today though, as I spent the afternoon and early evening at my parents house, followed by one of my aunts houses. As usual, my rather large family used Easter as an excuse to get together and have a bit of a drink.

After seeing my family for quite a few hours, I went out for coffee again. Other than that, I’ve basically been doing a bit of house work, and watching trash tv.

I have been doing some writing today, and hopefully I can get that finished tomorrow, and share it here on the blog. After that’s done, I’m going to try to start a book I bought recently, Essentialism.

Today was one of the most relaxing days I’ve had in quite some time.

Me and my girlfriend started the day with a little lie-in. I then made the tea/coffee, and we sat in the living room for a while.

After we were fully awake, my girlfriend went to read in the garden, as the weather was very nice! I watched a couple of episodes of Lost, and eventually joined her. I didn’t end up doing any reading myself, but I did catch up on over 24 hours of Twitter.

For lunch, she made nachos with the remainder of the chilli she made yesterday. While eating that, we discovered the “One Planet” series on Netflix. So we watched the first episode of that, which was very interesting as we expected.

After some more time spent hanging about the house, I cooked Mexican chicken and rice for dinner. It turned out pretty well.

In the evening, my girlfriend had to go to work for a night-shift. So I went out for a coffee with a friend, and since then I’ve just been playing some Fifa and World of Warcraft. I think I’ll get an episode of Lost in now, and then it will be time to go to bed!

It’s the start of a bank holiday weekend!

It started like a typical Sunday in some ways, with mySelf and my girlfriend relaxing for a few hours with our fluffy cat.

It was very good weather as well, which was very beneficial, as we spent the evening with her sister and her partner. We went to an adventure golf course, called Lost Jungle London. It was a pretty fun day our!

After eating dinner, we spent the remainder of the day at the pub with my family. And by family, I mean an absolute huge family. My mum has five sisters and a brother, and there’s tons more kids to go with them. It was a very fun evening.

I was a bit lazy today. Somehow I managed to sleep through my seemingly silent alarms. It wasn’t a disaster though, as my work are kind enough to let me work from home on these occasions.

It means I lost out on some of the real-life interactions at work, talking to people on my team more about problems, and just general benefits from being near the people you work with.

That doesn’t mean it was all bad, working at home. It meant that I could actually make myself a cooked lunch, and then when the work day finished, I was already at home. There’s also the monetary benefit, because I didn’t have to buy a train ticket.

After work, I linked to a great tip by Jeff Perry at Rocket Panda, about an alternative escape key on the iPad.

At home, we had quite a busy evening as well. We made dinner for my girlfriends sister, and her girlfriend. We were then greeted by my parents, who also came over for a few hours.

It was a bit crazy, but we had a cat that people were giving a fuss to, and the football which myself and my dad were watching. It was, of course, Arsenal. We played away against Napoli, and we won! With a beautiful free kick from Lacazette. 🇫🇷

Now it’s time to unwind before a long bank holiday weekend.