Howdy, fine people. Remember when I said “once a month, if something interesting happened”? I did not take into consideration the “what if you do way too many things in a month” scenario. So here we are. It’s early February, but this one is a recap of late December and January.

I’ll get to some life updates further down, but as always, let’s to start with the good stuff: things you might not know existed, and might be interested in. Here are a few that I’m loving and using right now, plus my conclusions after I inevitably obsessed over the details.

A few links I loved

Fashion Winter season is sweater season. I took a chance on this 1941 USN Seaman Sweater (Anthracite). I’d only tried Pike Brothers for their pants before, and there’s a lot of talk online about their wool sweaters. I’m liking it, but I strongly recommend trying it in a store first. It has a very specific fit. I normally wear M, but I sized up because I didn’t like how the M sat on me.

Speaking of winter-season tips, this video on 8 winter wardrobe essentials is a great summary of what you’ll want if you’re aiming to be cozy and put-together.

Travel

• Copenhagen: Great architecture, excellent food, lots of coffee, cozy vibes, and Danish pastries that live up to the hype. Stay in the city center. Book brunch, lunch, and dinner spots ahead. Many places are tiny and fill up fast.
• Edinburgh: Unpredictable weather, but the city feels built for it. You’ll have a good time no matter what. Whisky tastings are worth it. The people are incredible and consistently helpful. I had some great conversations with strangers at bar counters. Locals are curious about your experience, and they have awesome stories too.
• Los Angeles: Not my first time. This was mostly for work, so I didn’t do much tourism. More on that in the “What I’m working on” section. I did have a lot of fun with coworkers, and yes, I went to In-N-Out, ate some excellent food,had coffee, margaritas, beer, and whisky cocktails.

Books I started reading Empire of Silence. I’m about to hit halfway through and honestly not loving it. My main issue is that I’ve read the Dune series, and this one feels heavily inspired by it (and a few other things I’ve read). It’s like a big mashup, and that takes a lot of the fun out of it.

Everyone keeps recommending Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, so I’ll probably drop the other book and start here instead.

TV I’ve had Yellowstone downloaded and ready to watch for probably a year. I kept thinking it would be “just a cowboy show.” It’s more than that. Last night I finished season 4, which I think is the weakest one so far (the show has 5 seasons), but overall I’m hooked.

A few characters grow a lot in interesting ways, and there are political structures in the US I genuinely didn’t know existed. This show made me appreciate cattle farmers more.

Fitness I’ve owned the 2.5kg, 5kg, and 7.5kg Rogue Dumbbells, and I just added the 10kg pair after a friend (who trains way more than I do) kept recommending them. They feel great in hand. I still haven’t felt the need to buy gloves, and the rubber hex shape makes them easy to set down and keep from rolling around.

Bonus nerd detail: these are the same style of dumbbells you’ll often see in Apple Fitness+ strength workouts.

On that same note, if you need a great mat, I would 100% buy the Manduka PRO™ 6mm yoga mat again. It’s dense, stable, and easy to clean, and it’s backed by a lifetime guarantee that I hope I will never need. If you have the space, they also sell longer and larger options.

A full gym floor would probably be better, but those are heavier and annoying to install if you need the room for other things. This mat is my current best compromise. It makes it easy to slide furniture around and turn the living room into a quick workout setup.

Computer nerd corner RAM pricing has been doing some truly wild things lately. The media, for example, projects a big DRAM contract price surge for Q1 2026, and coverage since then has tracked consumer RAM prices climbing sharply.

And that matters because memory pricing affects small boards too. The Raspberry Pi team has said memory costs are driving price rises, and multiple reports have detailed the updated list prices on newer models.

That said, the Raspberry Pi is still an amazing tinkering tool. Easy to wipe the OS, easy to mess things up, easy to start from scratch.

• Want to learn how to set up a personal VPN you can use across devices, with ad blocking on the go? Perfect.
• Want to get started with a home server? Perfect.
• Want to learn Linux by doing? Perfect.

What I’m working on I had an epiphany on one of those flights for the Digg mobile app. The next version (1.7.1+) will have all those changes. It’s basically a new app. Hopefully Apple hurries up their approval process…

I restructured how the feed rendering works to better leverage native platform improvements. It was a lot of React Native nerdery. I need to write an engineering post about it, but hit me up if you want details before that.