Looking at the autogenerated-by-the-script-to-gather-suitably-tagged-tweets drafts in here, I haven't written any weeknotes in over 80 weeks.

So why now?

Partly because I spend lots of time reading other people's weeknotes, feeling jealous that the work I'm doing isn't getting noticed in similar ways, and then pointing out to myself that it's hardly surprising given that I'm not talking enough about what I'm up to or thinking about.

And I'm slowly rebuilding the writing muscle that I'd let atrophy through "being too busy". I've reminded myself that talking about the work is part of the work and the work is the work so I just need to get on with it.

Finally, Giles' Tips for writing good weeknotes got me over the line for opening vim:

The best way to write weeknotes is as a genuine personal reflection of the week. Allow them to be personal. Allow thoughts and feelings to creep in, alongside news. Be open, be candid, be the sort of refreshing honesty that most colleagues are yearning for. That will result in excellent weeknotes.

So we'll see how I fare. I've added some prompts to the auto-generated draft blog post script, which will hopefully help on those weeks when things have been quieter. Plus I like the idea of talking about what maintenance work I've done or are certain things getting in the way or playing on my mind, etc.

Given the Climate Emergency, I wanted to pick up one of my longer-running research projects. The idea has been around for a decade, but it was only a year or so back that I had the spare funds to try the proof-of-concept. Frustratingly that had a hardware failure before I got it running properly. So this week I did some maintenance on that, and ordered some new-to-me-but-secondhand hardware to let me restart that.

I also managed some time in the workshop. Although we've put Museum in a Box into a just-ticking-over state there have been a bunch of new orders for boxes of late. Mostly George is dealing with that down in London, but I needed to replenish our stock of packaging inserts.

We're also working out when we should order the next batch of PCBs from our PCBA supplier. My design has held up nicely for this first batch, and there's only one thing that it would be good to look at for the next batch. I did a bit of prep work towards fixing that: desoldering two resistors on a test board. More on that next week.