Thomil's Random Ramblings

Blogs have been an important part of my life over the last decade, primarily this blog and its currently dormant German predecessor . It’s been the primary way for me to share content with the wider world in a way that suits me and my communications style best. However, as the years have gone on and platforms like Facebook, YouTube and that most questionable of all platforms, TikTok, have grown in popularity, blogs have fallen out of favour. Personal blogs like mine seem to be dying out at an alarming pace, and blogging seems to be morphing more and more into a domain of sterile corporate blogs or of scammers and spammers. So you can imagine my surprise when, in early January 2023, I stumbled across an opinion piece in The Verge arguing that personal blogging should be brought back. Now, I have a lot of things to say about The Verge and its recent website design, none of them complimentary or suitable for a family blog such as this, but the story by blogger and activist Monique Judge ...

It’s early January, the company has cancelled all kick-off gifts for the year, so what’s a gadget hound like me to do? Well, in my case, burn the annual holiday voucher on a smart mug. No, really. You read that right, a smart mug. Can you guys just let me know when you’ve stopped laughing so we can continue? Thanks. Anyway, leaving aside the obvious cringe factor, this mug, called the Ember Mug 2, is actually surprisingly useful. But let's take this step by step, shall we? At this point, I basically run on coffee. Seriously, my blood group is arabica robusta. I’ve been working from home ever since being released from hospital back in early October 2022 and health issues related to this hospital stay have not only left me largely confined to my home, they also seem to be stretching longer and longer. At the same time, changes at work as the company prepares itself for the oncoming recession have made work more and more strenuous, so a nice cup of coffee is really needed to start th...

Okay, I admit it. I‘ve written a blog post on this specific topic before, all the way back in 2015 . But that’s now what, eight years? A lot of things have changed since then. I’ve changed jobs twice, had seismic changes in my personal circumstances and lived through a pandemic! What’s more, my work method has changed massively since then, so I guess it’s high time to let you in on how I actually map out and write my blog posts. Besides, it’s an easy way to recycle an already existing idea! However, before we get to the meat and bones of this post, I do need to point out a few rather important caveats. For starters, this doesn’t apply to an spur-of-the-moment posts, mostly opinion pieces, that I put out. These tend to go straight from brain into the draft and then onto my blog. I also won’t be able to with regards to style. Blogs are a highly personalised medium, meaning that any advice I could give would be so generic as to be almost useless. Finally, this post should not be taken as ...

You’d be forgiven if you got a bit of a deja-vu when you opened this blog post. Another keyboard & mouse review? This seems familiar. Hasn’t he done one of those before? And honestly, you’d be right. I did one of those before, a little over two years ago . But you know, things change. Besides, after seeing how 2022 had turned out, I just needed a bit of retail therapy. Of course, it didn’t hurt that my company had brought back its WFH reimbursement yet again. My previous keyboard and mouse had been purchased under the influence of the COVID-19 lockdowns and as such, portability hadn’t been much of a concern. However, a lot had changed since November 2020. My company had returned to working from the office, whilst at the same time moving to a hot desk model, which meant that if you needed a foreign-language keyboard, you had to bring one in yourself. I need a German keyboard, and had helped myself by bringing in my large K780 keyboard from home. But given how bulky that thing is, th...