May’s update was short, as I was mostly recovering, whereas this month I have been able to do a little more, including returning to my standard blogging pattern of every other day. Still, here’s a few things that didn’t result in a blog post of their own:
Tom Scott’s creator advice
Tom Scott got asked by Wired Magazine to answer questions from content creators, and it’s well worth watching (video embedded above and linked here). In particular, I agree with his suggestion of always having a ‘buffer’ – i.e. content that is ready to go live and scheduled. Tom notes that, at one point, he had several months of videos ready – until lockdown happened in 2020. That reduced his ‘buffer’ down to a few weeks.
I almost always write posts in advance – indeed, I’m writing this specific section a couple of weeks in advance, although I expect I’ll be adding the sections below later. That meant that I still had a few posts go live when I was in hospital last month, and meant that there was only a relatively brief break in my regular blogging schedule. Normally I have a buffer of at least three posts, but if I know I have some busy weekends coming up, I may write posts up to three weeks in advance.
Incidentally, one of my friends went to university with Tom, and I’ve met him before – we both went to the launch event for a new gallery at the National Science & Media Museum in Bradford in 2012. He’s back releasing weekly YouTube videos again, and he now does a weekly newsletter on Mondays. A particular highlight is his visit to Cragside, which we visited ourselves in 2024.
Car insurance renewal
Well this ended up being a right old rigmarole this year. My renewal quote came out at 67% more expensive than last year, at over £700. And, unfortunately, I found it difficult to find any other quotes that were meaningfully cheaper with the same or better cover. Ultimately, we ended up remaining with our existing insurer but with some slight tweaks to the policy, including a higher excess, to bring the quote down a bit.
I assume the reason for the higher prices was because our car is electric, which insurers still seem wary of. The various reminder emails from the comparison web sites I used last year, for our previous diesel car, were quite a bit lower. Still, our electric car passed its MOT this month with no work needed, and it’s proving to be much cheaper to run. And in any case, it’ll only be Christine driving it this year, although I remain the car’s registered keeper.
Thankful for air conditioning
It got rather warm last week. Whilst we were outside of the amber and (rare) red extreme heat warnings, I’m glad that we bought our portable air conditioning unit last year. Unsurprisingly, my review has also been one of the most popular blog posts on here in recent weeks, picking up quite a few hits from search engines.
As that model isn’t in stock in Amazon, it hasn’t resulted in me getting lots of commission payments, which is a shame. Though it’s a noisy unit, getting our bedroom cooled down before we go to sleep at night has made a big difference to our sleep quality.
More films on Letterboxd
When I wrote about Letterboxd earlier this month, I had managed to tick off 378 films. That’s now up to the pleasing number of 444.
Some of those are films that I have watched this month, but most are because I’ve remembered watching a film or found it whilst searching through old emails or tweets. Even more pleasingly, 187 of those films are in my diary, meaning that I’ve recorded the date when I’ve watched it too. So far, 24 of those 187 films are from this year.
I’m sure there are yet more films that I’ve watched but forgotten about, but I’ve logged the vast majority.
