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Category: jotter

jotter

Apple Watch 10

My Apple Watch 2 died last night after something like eight years of faithful service. Something in it went crunch, the screen detached from the case, and over an hour or so it slowly went white, and then black, and that was that. So, after battling with myself for another hour about the cost, I ordered an Apple Watch 10. Not happy about the expense, but I was told 1) it’s a thing I use every day and 2) the first one lasted eight bloody years.

It arrived at half past two this afternoon. That’s like eighteen hours after I ordered it? Maybe a little less? There’s a lot to dislike about Apple products and services, but that was incredibly fast and the devices take a matter of a couple of minutes to set up these days. I got the wrong band, it turns out – a sport band, argh – but it was easy to swap the strap from the old watch into this one. It’s a good few millimetres bigger than the old one, and flatter.

I’ve been using smartwatches since the day of the Pebble. Staying connected while getting the phone out of my hands (which means the phone battery runs down more slowly) has been crucial in the past, and helps keep me sane today. I doubt I do as much with an Apple Watch as most people – never used it to pay for anything, for a start – but, with a brand new one and a phone that’s only a couple of years old, maybe this one can do more for me.

I’ll be fiddling around with the settings in the days to come, but I tend to keep my watch faces pretty minimal and functional. And if you think you don’t need current weather conditions on your wrist, then you don’t live in England.

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Screener Season 2024 Begins

As a member in good standing of the Writers Guild Of America West, when awards season rolls around I get sent copy-protected editions of whatever’s up for a gong that year. This year’s first just arrived. Its a blessing, because my local cinema rarely gets anything indie and I don’t get out much anyway. Looking forward to settling in with this one.

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Wiping down the office boards, expiring chunks of my RSS feed, bailing out of a few news subscriptions, zeroing some newsletters. Bringing a couple of long-neglected projects front and centre tomorrow. Rigged for winter, more or less. I have a new notebook which allows me to work in three different sections, which means no more Moleskines and no more starting a new notebook on January the first. I will kind of miss the view of the dated and numbered notebooks standing on the shelf, but I’m running out of shelf space, and maybe it’s time to flow through time without signposts and hurdles. Moments matter more than years.

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Paprika scrambled eggs with walnut-infused saucisson sec and chive salt. Light rain mists away the last spears of frost.

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Winter has suddenly taken up residence like an aggressive squatter through a broken window: I live here now, deal with it.

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Removing the news podcasts from the app. I’ve had enough election politics for this year.

I want my new notebook to arrive (and I want to know why it hasn’t) so I can just check out and embrace the Urban Rustic.

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The Old New Bag

My daughter bought me this bag for my birthday a few years back. I don’t normally do browns, but she’s the steampunk generation, and she works on the assumption that if she loves something, it is therefore The Best and we should have The Best. It’s a gorgeous bag, but it hasn’t fit into my days over the last few years.

Until yesterday, where I took my old LOT 2046 sling bag out for a walk and had nothing but trouble wrangling it. And last night I bought myself an object for daily use that only comes in dark brown leather. At which point I looked at this bag, laying unloved in the living room, and thought: well, shit, that bag solves everything. It’s beautifully made, has the right pockets. And, perhaps crucially, isn’t black, like all my other kit.

There’s an interview with Adam Savage I read years ago:

I hate black bags. I lose things in black bags. I can’t find anything in them. I find them an anathema to the idea of storage.

I am belatedly considering that he may have a point.

My usual big Maxpedition messenger shoulder bag is still the go-to for a full day out, the Versipack for a very heavy full day or a quick overnight. But, for nipping out for a few hours into town or country, this is going to work beautifully.

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Sitting in a pub garden for the first time in years. There’s a Japanese maple in the corner gone gold, its upstretched fingers all bloody red.

Depeche Mode playing over the pub loudspeakers and I’m scribbling in a notebook and looking at the sky. It could be the 1980s. With my phone put away and an analogue watch on my wrist, I can see nothing of 2024. Old bricks and a magpie picking bugs out of a mossy roof.

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I feel like the Traveler’s Company (fka Midori) notebooks are the rich person’s notebooks. There’s a hint of stealth wealth to them. I get through between three and five Moleskines a year, at between 10 and 15 quid a pop depending on sales and, I dunno, is there surge pricing for notebooks? The Travelers’ Passport size is about the same as a Moleskine, but the fills are only 64 pages. Not convinced how the filled pages could be archived effectively, but I’m also looking at a growing length of Moleskines on the shelf with the dates white-inked on their spines and at current speed I only have eighteen months left before I run out of shelf. Also not convinced Traveler’s Company notebooks could stand up to the volume of material I cut out and glue into notebook pages, from photos to reformatted text documents.

All that said: perhaps Traveler’s Company notebooks, where you pay once for the cover and then just buy the refills, are more sustainable?

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I have just thrown out a pile of photocopies, faded faxes, random script pages and old magazines from somewhere between 25 and 30 years ago. Part of me thinks I should have kept them, but it’s probably the same part that holds on to old boxes on the fantasy that they’ll be useful one day. I preserve what I can, but, realistically, I sometimes have to just let the past be the past, let it go and allow the recycling service to hopefully turn it into something useful to someone else one day.

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