I’ve been slowly getting my head around personal finance over the last few years. Nothing dramatic — just trying to understand where money goes, how to save it, and what to do with it once you’ve saved some. Here’s a collection of frameworks, tools, and resources that have helped. Budgeting The first step is knowing what you actually spend. Most people guess and are wrong. Monarch Money – A budgeting app that connects to your accounts and categorises spending automatically. I’ve found it useful for seeing where money leaks out each month. YNAB (You Need A Budget) – The most aggressive budgeting method I’ve tried. Every pound gets assigned a job before you spend it. Steep learning curve but changes how you think about money. PocketGuard – Simpler than YNAB. Tells you how much “spendable” cash you have after bills and savings are accounted for. Google Sheets budget templates – If you prefer manual control, a spreadsheet gives you full visibility without linking bank accounts. Tracking and the Quantified Self Once you’re budgeting, tracking specific metrics helps you see progress. ...

I’ve been looking into international trade for the UK and collected a few useful resources along the way. Nothing original, just links that might help someone starting out. Training and courses Think Sandwell – International Trade – A Typeform questionnaire from the Think Sandwell programme. Seems aimed at businesses in the West Midlands looking to get into export. Black Country Chamber – International Trade Training – Structured courses on the mechanics of trading internationally. Covers things like documentation, shipping, and compliance. ...

Self-promotion gets a bad reputation because people confuse it with boasting. Done well, it’s just making sure the right people know what you’ve done. Use “I” when it’s your work If you led the project, say “I led the project.” Saving “we” for genuinely collaborative work means your individual contributions stand out when they matter. Performance reviews are your moment If your organisation does annual reviews, prepare a list of accomplishments before the meeting. Don’t rely on your manager to remember everything you did over twelve months. ...

The stages of publishing a book, in rough order: Writing — research, drafting, revising until you have a complete manuscript. Editing — developmental editing for structure and narrative, then line editing for prose, then copyediting for grammar and consistency. Proofreading — final pass for typos and formatting errors before anything goes to print. Design — cover design and interior layout (fonts, margins, page breaks). Production — printing or e-book formatting. Offset lithography for large runs, digital printing for shorter ones. Marketing — promotional materials, advertising, media outreach, social media. Distribution — getting the book to readers via publishers, online retailers, bookshops, or direct sales. Writing Start with a concept, do the research, outline the structure, then draft. The first draft doesn’t need to be good — it needs to exist. Revision comes after. Get feedback from beta readers or a critique group before you consider the manuscript finished. ...

The quickest way to get a BIOS serial number on Linux: sudo dmidecode -s system-serial-number That’s usually all you need. dmidecode reads the DMI/SMBIOS table and prints the serial number directly. Other options If dmidecode isn’t available or doesn’t return what you need: # lshw sudo lshw -C bios | grep serial # /sys class interface (no sudo needed) cat /sys/class/dmi/id/product_serial The /sys/class/dmi/id/ path is the cleanest option if you want to avoid sudo. It exposes several DMI fields: ...

Bathukamma is a flower festival from Telangana. Women stack seasonal flowers into tiered arrangements, sing songs while dancing around them, and at the end of each day float them in water. It runs for about ten days in the autumn, usually September or October, and coincides with the end of the monsoon when flowers are at their peak. The name comes from “Bathuku Amba” — may she live long — and is directed at Goddess Gauri. It’s not a festival with a single grand ceremony. It’s something that happens in neighbourhoods, courtyards, and public squares across Telangana, with each group making their own arrangement and singing their own songs. ...

Introduction to Maison Horta Maison Horta is one of those buildings that makes you stop and stare. It’s on a quiet street in Brussels, tucked away behind what looks like an ordinary façade, but step inside and the whole thing opens up into something that feels almost impossible — a house made of curves, light, and ironwork that looks like it’s growing out of the walls. Victor Horta built it in 1893, right at the tail end of what we now call Art Nouveau. The style is easy to recognise: flowing lines, organic shapes, a deliberate break from the stiff, symmetrical architecture that came before it. Horta didn’t just adopt the style — he helped invent it. Maison Horta is his first major work, and it’s still one of the best examples of what Art Nouveau could be. ...

I’ve been reading Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain, and it’s one of those books that makes you immediately want to reorganise your entire digital life. The central idea is straightforward enough: your brain is for having ideas, not storing them. Everything else – notes, articles, voice memos, half-finished projects – should live somewhere external that you can trust and search. The framework he proposes is called CODE: Capture, Organise, Distill, Express. It’s simple, and that’s the point. Most people I know (myself included) are terrible at the first two steps. We capture everything – screenshots, highlights, random thoughts – and then we never look at it again because there’s no system for getting it out. ...

I spent last weekend trying to find decent colouring pages for my toddler and ended up making my own. The ones you download from the internet are either too fiddly — tiny intricate patterns designed for adults who want to unwind — or they look like they were drawn by someone who has never actually seen a lion. So I generated ten simple pictures. Big outlines, thick lines, nothing that requires a magnifying glass and a steady hand. The idea was that a two-year-old could pick them up, scribble inside the lines if they felt like it, or colour the whole page blue and call it done. Both are valid approaches. ...

I’ve been running a small homelab for a few years now, mostly just to tinker and escape the subscription treadmill. Over time I’ve collected a bunch of services that actually earn their keep, and this is a running list of the ones I’d recommend to someone starting out or looking to fill gaps in their setup. Nothing fancy. Just stuff that works, runs quietly, and gives you back control of your own data. ...