Thomil's Random Ramblings

Three years ago, I made my first forays into proper e-Readers with my first Kindle. I’d always been fascinated by these little things and the tail-end of the first pandemic summer seemed as good a time as any to try out one of these. The fact that Amazon had a sale on for their Kindle devices certainly didn’t hurt, but it was my desire to get reading a bit more that was the deciding factor behind my decision to get a 10th generation Amazon Kindle. And, not to beat round the bush here, I was impressed. My original review at the time was pretty positive , something I hadn’t expected. However, that was in 2020 and as anyone will tell you, three years can be a long time. Given how much the world has changed, how well does the baseline Amazon Kindle hold up three years later? Even after nearly three years, a coffee and a Kindle session is still one of my favourite ways to spend an afternoon. Pretty well If I’m honest. Granted, the case has picked up more than a few scratches, but that’s to ...

Remember when the pandemic started? All of a sudden, working from home was everywhere, out of sheer necessity. After years of prevaricating about the issuer, it seemed like working from home was here to stay. Open-plan offices, the “industry standard” for decades, went from the default setting to seething cesspools of filth and infection, a status heretofore reserved for the newsrooms of Fox News or the Daily Mail. The birds were singing from the rooftops that, come the end of the lockdowns, all those shiny new office buildings that had been built in recent years would be reduced to empty husks, forlornly waiting for a new purpose. Yet, if you look at the news websites here in Cork, this is clearly not happening. Penrose Dock, where my own employer has their Cork office, is fully let. The two blocks of Navigation Square across the river are also nearly full following an announcement by NetApp earlier this year. Next door to Penrose Dock, Horgan’s Quay is filling up as well, with a sec...

Public Transport – It’s always a bit of a hot topic here in Ireland. Everyone seems to have an opinion on it, and it’s usually negative. I myself have hardly been a cheerleader of Irish public transport in the past. However, is that really the case? Is Ireland as bad with regards to public transport as everyone makes it out to be? Or is it hugely overblown, which wouldn’t be out of the question in a country whose public opinion vacillates between fire-and-brimstone damnation and unquestioning adulation, with no space for nuance or grey areas? A recent opinion piece in the Irish Times certainly would seem to suggest the latter. And while my first reaction as a long-suffering Bus Éireann passenger was to think that the “expert” quoted in that opinion piece had been hitting the paint thinner pretty hard, upon second reading, the article made some valid points. For example, the article correctly points out that Ireland kept up public transport funding during the pandemic, even increasing ...

There’s no way of putting it gently – Twitter, a social media platform that I’ve enjoyed for years despite its many problems, is in dire straits. Granted, the platform has always had a plethora of issues, but things have really started going down the drain ever since Elon Musk took over. The self-titled “chief twit” has turned out to be a major twat, acting with all the moral authority and subtlety of a Freddy Krueger or a Jason Vorhees. Many of the key staff have been fired, the company has stopped paying rent on many of its offices, oversight has been reduced to next to nothing and what’s worse, Elon the Muskrat has recently been embracing openly neofascist loons and conspiracy theorists. The results have been entirely predictable. Advertisers are fleeing in droves, users are jumping ship, and the platform itself has shown more and more signs of being unable to handle the load, with bugs and even outright outages becoming more and more frequent. It seems like it’ll only be a matter o...

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 ...