Writings

Yesterday, we visited the Harry Potter Studios. Since it was quite far away from the center, it took some time to get there, and consequently most of the day. It was worth it. It’s one of those one in a lifetime experiences to see the actual set of one of your favorite franchises. And the butter beer was delicious 🍺!

More iconic even, was the visit to the Transport Museum Shop. Yes, to the shop and not to the museum itself. Sadly, we didn’t have time to visit the museum yesterday. I would say that this shop is quite dangerous for me since I like everything transit. I ended up buying what I think is the most iconic souvenir I could get: a pillow with the same fabric as the seats of the trains from the Elizabeth Line! I love it!

We arrived last night at St Pancras with the Eurostar. It’s the second time doing this trip using the train, and despite taking much longer than the flight, I’m glad I made that decision. It probably helps that I never took the flight from Eindhoven to London, which takes around 40 minutes.

The advantage of the train is, most often than not, that you can just hop in the train and not spend much time as you need to do in an airport. However, since we live in Eindhoven, we need to first go to Rotterdam, do passport control and security. Only then board the train. So the time argument is actually not in our favor, for us. Nevertheless, we still chose to do it.

I always forget how ginormous London is. According to Wikipedia, there’s around 8.8 million people living here. That’s almost as many as in Portugal and half of the Netherlands. It’s nice to be back.

I’m looking forward to enjoy the next few days in London visiting a friend of mine, and checking a few places where I haven’t been yet!

Today I had the nth appointment for my wrist. Yesterday, we had done an echo just to make sure that there’s no damage or cysts. Fortunately, when it comes to those types of abnormalities, everything seems fine. The conclusion seems to be that my wrists are slightly more mobile than they should and therefore it’s just much easier to get an injury. And that the tendons need to do a lot more work than they would usually need to…

The next steps were not fun: getting an injection directly in the inflamed tendon with some substance that is supposed to help it come to a more rested space. That was performed immediately. I wouldn’t recommend that.

At the end of the month I’m also getting a custom made brace to also ensure I can give my wrist proper rest. The injection plus the brace plus exercises to make sure that my wrist becomes stronger should do the trick. I’m cautiously optimistic.

Just like last year, a lot of “App Defaults” posts have started popping up in my RSS feed. So, I decided to join with an updated list, featuring more categories than last year:

• 📮 Mail Service: Migadu → Fastmail (why I moved)
• 📨 Mail Client: Apple Mail
• 📝 Notes: Apple Notes
• ✅ Reminders: Apple Reminders
• 📆 Calendar: Google Calendar → Apple Calendar (Fastmail)
• 🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: Google Contacts → Apple Contacts (Fastmail)
• 📖 RSS Service: Miniflux
• 🗞️ RSS Client: NetNewsWire (iOS)
• 📁 Cloud File Storage: iCloud, Google Drive
• 🟦 Photo Management: Apple Photos, file system for RAW
• 🌐 Browser: Chrome on macOS, Safari on iOS
• 💬 Chat: WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal
• 🔖 Bookmarks: Browser, Linkding → Browser, This Website
• 📑 Read It Later: Apple Reminders
• 🛒 Shopping Lists: Apple Reminders
• 📄 Documents: Google Docs, Markdown
• 💰 Personal Finance: Google Sheets
• 📰 News: NRC 🇳🇱, Público 🇵🇹, some tech blogs
• 🎵 Music and Podcasts: Spotify
• 🔐 Password Management: 1Password
• 🌤️ Weather: Apple Weather, Buienradar
• 🧮 Code Editor: Visual Studio Code and vim
• 👨‍💻 Terminal: iTerm with zsh and oh my zsh - see my dotfiles

In the course of 2025, I hope to further reduce the Google services from this list, especially when it comes to documents and cloud file storage. To be fair, I don’t really use it that much, only for maintaining one or two spreadsheets, and I rarely make slides or written documents. Moving these to local files would be ideal, but it is also undeniable that the versatility of Google Docs makes it very compelling to use.

Keep an eye on my uses for an always up to date version of this list!