I meant to write about how my sabbatical/gap year is going much earlier - it’s been almost 4 months now - but never got around to it. I’m definitely enjoying my break so far, but I didn’t realise how much I needed a break until it started. When I wrote about leaving my job I did mention I wanted rest, but also liked the appeal of having more time to spend on hobbies and other things too....

I recently treated myself to a Powkiddy RGB30 handheld console. It’s a great little device with an unusual square screen, which is perfect for playing Pico-8 games on (which is something else I’ve been getting into recently - more on that in another blog post!). Anyway, it turns out it’s also really good at running emulators, so after a bit of playing with it I inevitably ended up revisiting probably the favourite game of my childhood: Sensible World of Soccer (or SWOS for short)....

As I write this, I’m one week away from leaving my role at Grab and embarking on a career break of (most likely) 6-12 months. Although I’m not looking for employment again yet, I thought it’d be good idea to note down my criteria for a future job now, for future reference. Type of Company My ideal company would be an already-successful startup or medium-sized company. I’ve worked for very large companies before and find earlier-stage companies to be more enjoyable and rewarding, although I have had negative experiences with startups that didn’t do so well....

This post is 100% written by a human. (me, obviously.) After just over 8 years at my current job, I’ve decided to leave. I don’t have another job lined up. In this post I’m going to try and put down some of the reasons behind my decision. It’s a personal decision, so if you’re expecting me to go on about my employer or some workplace drama, prepare for disappointment. I will be trying to avoid mentioning my employer here....

Something weird happened to me just over a week ago: I experienced sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL). I’ve just about fully recovered now, but it was quite scary and very different to what I thought it was going to be like. It started on Monday 20th February. I had just taken a shower and my ear felt strange, quite similar to the pressure from an airplane flight or some kind of blockage....

Lately I’ve been in the mood for discovering new music. I had mostly been relying on Spotify for this, either looking for new material by bands I already know, or by using the Radio feature, or by searching public playlists. None of these were very satisfactory - I feel like Spotify tends to recommend you the same few bands, even though their library is vast. So I thought, OK, I’ll try searching myself....

For a long time I had been using Google Drive to store all my important documents. It worked extremely well - always accessible no matter where I was, synced across all my devices, and never had to worry about my files being unavailable or deleted. Ultimately though, it didn’t feel like it was mine, and I didn’t like the idea of depending on Google. When searching for an alternative, I considered full-blown cloud solutions like Nextcloud/ownCloud, but they seemed overly complex to me....

I decided to try switching over to an iPhone, as I mentioned in a previous post. The main reason is that it’s the final step in de-Googling myself, which is an achievement that I’ve been wanting to unlock for a while. I don’t really know if it’s any better for privacy than Android, but it should at least not be worse when configured properly. My phone of choice is an iPhone 7, which I got a good deal on from Carousell a while back, for the sole purpose of setting up an Apple Watch....

I recently discovered alternative frontends - websites that let you use the ‘real’ version of Twitter, Reddit etc. through an alternate website. The advantage of this is that it stops those big sites like Twitter from tracking you, because they don’t see the connection from your web browser. Anyway, one of the most convenient ways to take advantage of this is through a browser extension like LibRedirect, which will automatically filter links and redirect you to the alternate versions of popular sites....

A few months ago I talked about online privacy, and how I’d been trying to give up Big Tech software like Facebook and Google products. Here’s a quick update on how that’s going. On Google: I still use one gmail account, though it’s no longer my primary email address. I use Google Drive only for a few files (spreadsheets) that I like to edit from my phone, but that’s it. I still use Android, although I’m considering getting an iPhone later this year....