I forgot this in my roundup of 2025, party because it’s not the first time I’ve read it, and partly because I read it at the very end of the year.

I reread some Douglas Adams every couple of years, and every time I come away impressed. I discover details or a clever turn of phrase that I’d missed previously. I almost expect to be disappointed but it hasn’t happened yet¹.

Eight books last year, against my target of twelve. By my historical standards, not bad! Four fiction and four non-fiction is not a bad split, either.

Unusually there were a couple of books that just weren’t for me. Not objectively bad, by any means, but it turns out that comic books are really not my thing. On the other hand, William Boyd continues to entertain, and Mick Herron’s books are as fun to read as watch.

A few years ago, I read “Crisis? What crisis?”, which is about Britain in the 1970s. This is the follow-up book about the 1980s [affiliate link], though, as its author Alwyn W. Turner points out, the timelines are never quite that precise. It’s more accurate to say that this book follows Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister in 1979 to her downfall eleven years later.

Despite living through the Eighties, there’s a surprising amount of this book that I have very little recollection of. It makes me realise how little of what’s going on now that my kids are likely to remember.

I got a new iPad to replace my 2018 iPad Pro. Let me complain about it first.

It bothers me that it’s a computer, yet I can’t easily write my own software on it¹. Sure, there is Swift Playgrounds, but I don’t really want to use Swift. And even if I did, it’s not a proper IDE, it doesn’t support basic features like a debugger. It’s not 1985 any more. There are other languages (Pythonista looks good, though I’ve not tried it), but the vast array of languages that are available on Linux and on the Mac are missing.

I am late to the party. I’m not a purist who is going to tell you that the books are way better than the TV series, that I read the books when they first came out. Well actually, before they came out because I know somebody who knows somebody.

No. I watched the “Slow Horses” show on Apple TV+, enjoyed it, and belatedly thought that I should read the book [affiliate link] to see how similar they are.

I’ve lived in London for thirty years¹. Somehow.

I’m not entirely sure how it happened. It was never the plan. Not that I had a plan. If you’d asked me where I wanted to live, I probably wouldn’t have picked London.

I applied to a handful of jobs at the tail-end of my stint at university². The one job offer I received³ was in London. That’s how it started.

To give you an idea of how arbitrary it all was: my first employer had offices in central London and in Surrey. I looked at the train lines and found that Wimbledon was about half way between the two. That’s where I ended up.

For my first job after university, I worked for a company with a ISO9001 certification. This meant that every project had a complete, documented process for every aspect, from reporting, to finance, to bug tracking, to code formatting.

There was even a team whose sole job was to define the template standards and enforce them across all projects. Most people thought they were busy-bodies, meddling with things they didn’t understand. While the team was staffed by people who had started doing project work, most had not done any for years.

I hear John Elledge a lot on podcasts, so when his new book came out I was immediately interested. I saw it in a bookstore, almost bought it, and then realised that I have more than enough books at home. (Un)fortunately, Amazon were selling it cheap and I caved.

The good news is that “A History of the World in 47 Borders”¹ is an entertaining read. No regrets.

It’s well researched, and full of interesting tidbits, and connecting historical events in logical ways. What stood out for me, though, was the writing. It’s informal, and you get his voice and personality in practically every sentence. Here are a few.

I’ve gone through a number of RSS clients over the years. I used to be a big Google Reader user. I used Reeder on my iPad a lot, and now I use NetNewsWire. To ensure that my feeds are shared between devices, I’ve used Feedly. I’ve paid for it, as I use it a lot and I don’t want it to go away like Google Reader did.

But they keep adding stuff that I have no interest in, including jumping on the AI bandwagon. It has, however, been fast and reliable. I don’t have much to complain about.

In a world where everything is owned by a gargantuan commercial entity, RSS is subversive, an act of rebellion. It harks back to the early days of the Internet where freedom and open standards were the future, rather than Big Data, Big Tech, and Big Lock-in.

RSS is a newsfeed than you define. You subscribe to websites and they give you a list of stories to read. How is that different from social media?