Weeknote 07/2025
“In order to protect ourselves we must live like doctors and be continually treating ourselves with reason.”
Musonius Rufus
I received a comment this week on a blog post that was almost 20 years old! Hilariously, the commenter was pointing out that a link didn’t work any more. But it made me think: I started the blog that would eventually become this one in my early twenties. Before then, as a teenager, I curated a Monty Python appreciation site which had the extremely mature name “BiggusDickus.net” (context).
I’ve had a web presence since about 1997 when, as a 16 year-old, my Physics teacher gave me a cracked version of Macromedia Dreamweaver (and Fireworks). I’d connect the family’s video recorder to the sound card of my PC to record .wav files which people could use for incoming email sounds, etc.
I’ve always been a tinkerer. My very first PC was one I convinced my parents into buying me for both birthday and Christmas in 1995. I remember the Compaq Presario P75 was £1,500 and they bought it from John Lewis. That was a lot of money back then! Later, when I returned from university to stay with them for a year while doing my MA in Modern History, I turned it into a monitorless setup which auto-loaded Winamp. I imported an LCD display from Canada (getting stung with import duties!) and sorted out both a remote control, auto CD-to-MP3 ripping, and cross-fading between tracks.
I’ve always been an tinkerer. This week, I decided that I’m done with using ChromeOS Flex on my Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga, which I’d specifically bought to replace my Pixelbook. Instead, I’m now running Fedora Silverblue, which is fantastic. The fingerprint reader is working for the first time, and the immutable nature of the operating system makes it snappy. I’m impressed.
My February experimentation has continued, resulting in:
- Experiment 6 (11th Feb) — used Open Collective to create the option for organisations to sponsor WAO’s AI Literacies work via ailiteracy.fyi.
- Experiment 7 (11th Feb) — set up the ability to request and pay for a Critical Friend sessions on my Ko-fi page.
- Experiment 8 (12th Feb) — published a concise ebook about Systems Thinking based on the blog posts I wrote during the first year of my MSc (see header image).
- Experiment 9 (13th Feb) — added a distinct membership tier called the Holographic Sticker Crew on my Ko-fi page.
- Experiment 10 (14th Feb) — acted on feedback from first Critical Friend client to increase price and provide ‘add-ons’ for price differentiation.
I’m delighted that I managed to have my first paid Critical Friend session on Friday and I managed to publish a short e-book. Great stuff. One of the things about creativity is that it’s within all of us. Sometimes you need a forcing function to bring it out.
We’re waiting for the Amnesty work to start, finalising the statement of work and discussing alternations to the NDA to allow us to talk about some of the collaboration. I’m hoping that proposals we’ve got in with the BBC and Mozilla around AI Literacies come off. We’ve another few irons in the fire, as well.
While we’re still waiting for Irish NDLN report on microcredentials to be released, our Friends of the Earth article Harnessing AI for Environment Justice was published earlier this week. Laura and I are pleased with the result and she’s published a couple of blog posts about it:
It would be petty of me to call associated PDF ‘fugly’ and wonder why our names feature right at the bottom of the article. Especially when someone who didn’t contribute directly insisted that they were named more prominently. Ah well. 🙄
I had a chat this week with Tila McDonald about the upcoming Awards Network event that I’m facilitating and presenting at next month. I also created a GPT based on the ePIC Skills Mapper, but more focused on the Scottish context. I’ve already had a couple of people try it out and they think it’s great. I think I might include a GPT in my February experimentation, as there seems to be a bit of an art in making a decent one.
It was also great to catch up with Ivan Minutillo about recent development around Bonfire, John Evans about SEPHEO, and Eylan Ezekiel — with whom I ended up chatting with for almost two hours on Friday. We had a lot to catch up on! It was Valentine’s Day, so I my lovely wife, Hannah, and I went out for brunch after exchanging gifts. It might be over-commercialised, but it’s never a bad thing to have an excuse to spoil one another.
No football matches for my daughter this weekend. She did have a fantastic report from school and associated parents’ evening, which is in the run-up to her GCSE options. My son, Ben, didn’t have a basketball game, but earlier today he did have his last football match in junior football. HiMorpeth under-18s team beat Consett 12-2 and he got his name on the scoresheet too, so was happy. That’s six goals this season, which only featured around 20 games. Not a bad return for a defensive midfielder!
Next week, it’s more of the same unless some of the work I’ve mentioned above gets started. I’ve got a cardiology appointment on Thursday where I’ll be fitted with a Holter monitor. My chest has felt absolutely fine since I stopped doing ‘proper’ cardio and instead just slowly pedal my way through a podcast on the exercise bike in our garage.
Image: marketing image for What I Talk About When I Talk About Systems Thinking (ebook)