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Weeknotes 2

Welcome to another edition of Doug Davies' weeknotes! Brought to you by Doug Davies, all week, every week. What has Doug Davies been up to this week?

Travel related
non-travel related
Other weeknotes
The End

I've been travelling a lot this week. Last week, I was in Stockholm. This week, we're in Tallinn. But I got here over land (and a tiny bit of sea). The route we've taken looks a bit like this (S is Stockholm, HT is Haparanda/Tornio, H is Helsinki, T is Tallinn):

         _HT___
        /      \
     __/        |
   _/  \.        \
  /               |
 |                 \
 |                 |
 \                  \
  |                  H
  S                  \
                     /
                     T

Ways I have travelled

(train x2) We took a train from Stockholm to Luleå
(bus) Our connecting train was delayed from Umeå to Luleå so we had to wait in Luleå for ages and take the last bus to Haparanda late at night
(night train) see below
(tram) getting trams around Helsinki
(commuter train) getting commuter trains around Helsinki
(metro) I did not take the metro in Helsinki :[
(boat) the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn (a bit harder to go round via land for this one)
(on foot) crossed the border from Sweden to Finland on foot, that was pretty fun

Places I have stayed

a hostel in Stockholm with a sauna
a hotel with shared kitchen and common area (hostel without the shared rooms) in Tornio where we were the only ones staying (creepy in a fun way)
a sofa with not quite enough room for two people

Things that have been both a way I have travelled and a place I have stayed

A night train !!!! My very first. It was very nice. I had a shower.

Museums I have been to

Mostly the free ones. The city museums are always free, and interesting. Otherwise, I went to see a very large, very old boat in Stockholm. Payed for that one. Living in the UK is the wrong way round as I expect museums to be free and then they are not when I am in Europe. I'm sure it would be much more fun the other way round.

Food I have eaten

Liquorice! I love liquorice. Unfortunately, the UK as a whole doesn't seem to like it as much. There's lots of it up here.
MAX burger
food cooked in a hostel kitchen, when available
hesburger
bastard burger (I left them a sticker to offset their "random sticker" vibe - I don't know they'll be impressed)

Things I have seen that are snowy

lots of snow ! so fun
snowy trees
snowy floor
snowy lakes
walking in deep snow (is fun)
snow without slush ! when it stays below 0° C the snow remains so much nicer

Things I haven't seen that are snowy

Sheffield, apparently.

moomin tea
moomin towels
moomin map
the moomin shop

Welcome to the section of "here are the things that I'd be doing normally anyway".

I've been:

Learning about mortgages

Here's a copy-and-paste from a quick note I made:

https://www.uswitch.com/mortgages/first-time-buyer-statistics/
https://www.hsbc.co.uk/mortgages/first-time-buyers/rates/
https://www.nationwide.co.uk/mortgages/mortgage-calculators/borrowing-calculator/
## generic mortgage info
- you usually need to save 5% of the mortgage
- a mortgage loan will give 4-5x of income, so for £20,000 a year, about £90k
> a repayment mortgage of £175,000.00 payable over 33 years and 4 months initially on a fixed rate for 2 years at 5.74% and then on our current variable rate of 6.99% (variable) for the remaining 31 years and 4 months would require 24 monthly payments of £983.44 and 375 monthly payments of £1,125.30 plus one final payment of £1,125.75.
> The total amount payable would be £447,010.80 made up of the loan amount plus interest of £271,715.81 and a solicitors fee of £295.
## stats
in 2022-2023
  87% of first time buyers pay some of their deposit by savings
  36.5% with a gift or loan from family or friend
  8.5% with inheritance
  9.4% with other source
2022-2023 first-time-buyers by income
  6.2% £76 - £360 / week
  9% £361 - £596 / week
  27.1% £597 - £888 / week
  30% £889 - £1372 / week
  27.7% £1373 - 16805 / week
- based on Oct-Dec 2023, it takes 12 years to save for a deposit
- a typical deposit in 2023 was 19% of the property price
- in 2023 in Yorkshire and the Humber, the average mortgage was £171k
- in 2023 in Yorkshire and the Humber, the average deposit was around £30-35k

looking at StreetComplete

It's a neat app: https://streetcomplete.app/

You can go and feel like a small contributor to OpenStreetMap

I watched an EMF talk

The talk is 5 minutes long, and VERY good. You can watch it her- no- you MUST watch it here: https://media.ccc.de/v/emf2024-548-lightning-talks-saturday

I found out about `subfinder`

It seems like a neat tool to explore all the subdomains of a domain. I think the only subdomains it shows are ones with HTTPS certificates.

I registered alifeee.net and the email alifeee@alifeee.net

I'm not the biggest fan of the etymology of alifeee.co.uk. The first bit, naturally, is amazing. The second, co, I don't like, as I'm not a company/corporation. The third, I don't like, but a bit less, because I don't care for borders and to specify in whose I normally reside.

I mainly did this because I finally wanted to use my own (privacy-aware) email. I registered a https://mailbox.org/ account, tested it out for a bit, was happy with it, and now I can receive (the easy part) and send (the hard part) emails from any domain I own! I went with alifeee@alifeee.net as the default. It's a bit tautological, but I couldn't think of a better one (me@alifeee.net? email@alifeee.net? questions.queries.and.quandries@alifeee.net? [p.s., they should all work fine ! or anything beforehand ! try it out… maybe… send me an email? … 👉️👈️])

Soon (see: this year), I will move things from alifeee.co.uk over to alifeee.net. Very slowly. And I'll leave redirects on alifeee.net.

I started re-watching The Terror

It's a great TV show. I haven't yet put it on my list of favourite things, but I will soon, along with Devs and Around the World in 80 Days (both BBC miniseries).

I stopped Universal Credit

I was on a self-employment scheme, where they support you while you build up a self-employed business. I have one of those, so I was enrolled on the scheme, but I no longer am needing of their funds.

I used a 12-foot ladder

I wanted to read this article: https://www.wired.com/story/gravy-location-data-app-leak-rtb/. Wired told me I'd run out of free articles. I'd seen a while ago a website called some foot amount of ladder, so I searched "11 foot ladder" and found only B&Q results. However, "12 foot ladder" worked a charm, and got me to https://12ft.io, where I was able to unlock and read the article.

I'm annoyed at Outlook

As I said above, I switched emails. I want every email to one of my old accounts to redirect to my new account. This, it seems, is simply not possible. This is because some emails go to spam. You cannot at all turn off spam for Outlook, you must simply live with it. I relate heavily with the poster of this forum post about that fact (which made it onto my "list of favourite forum posts", currently 1 item long).

I want my spam.

I wrote a note

It's about ActivityPub: https://blog.alifeee.co.uk/notes/finding-the-account-information-of-a-mastodon-account-manually-via-curl-requests/

Other weeknotes

Finally, here are some other weeknotes that I've read this week!

The End

Thanks for ~~reading~~ skimming. I hope you had a nice time, and the font was not too distracting.

When I next write, I'll be in Paris. C'est bon.

Ton prix, ce serait son lit.

until next week

alifeee

Comments

Email me :) -> alifeee@alifeee.net or message me on any social :) -> https://linktr.ee/alifeee