As it’s the New Year and many people are thinking about reviewing their exercise regime, I thought this might be a good time to write about my experience with Couch to 5K (C25K), a well-known programme for training anyone to be able to run five kilometres.

I should point out that this isn’t a real-time diary. I started it late last year and, as I write this, I have not yet completed a full 5km run. But — spoiler alert — I’m still making progress. There have been a few bumps on the way which, I think, is what makes this worth writing about.

This is the time when people write lists about the past year and the year coming. Why have original content when you can have listicles? And why should I be the one to miss out? So here, just as I did last year, are a few notes about most of the books I read.

# Civil War¹

I’m a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and offshoots like their Netflix TV shows, but I’ve never really read the original comic books. I thought I should change that.

So here’s the thing that drives me crazy.

Having had a hard disk die on me a few years ago, I’m a little paranoid about backups. I have three:

1. Time Machine, over WiFi to a Synology NAS
2. Backblaze, “cloud” backup over the internet
3. SuperDuper clone to an infrequently connected USB hard disk

Time Machine and Backblaze run all the time, nice, seamless and hopefully pretty complete. I do the SuperDuper clone occasionally and every few months I try to reboot and check that the clone actually works.

It’s a sad day when a web service that you use dies. It’s extra sad when a web service you made a (tiny) business on goes away. So I wrote a few words about the demise of Delicious over on the Wandle Software blog.

Earth Day bugs me.

Okay, not Earth Day itself. The idea of respecting and preserving the world is difficult to argue with. No, what annoys me is all the big corporates jumping on the bandwagon just to be seen to be there.

These companies do, effectively, nothing, or at least nothing actually useful, just to say that they’re supporting Earth Day. It’s worth talking about a couple of examples.

My employer had committed to turn off the lights that illuminate the logos on all its buildings for our lunch hour. They also suggest that we turn off unnecessary computers and other equipment for the same time. They generously suggest that home workers to do the same.

With all the pieces printed or purchased, it was time to assemble Otto.

Since I’d already tested the Arduino and enlarged the holes for the eyes and stepper motors, the process of putting it together was actually fairly uneventful.

Because of the small size, some parts were very fiddly but it wasn’t hard per se. Kudos to the people who put the instructions together!

I came across three minor problems.

The first stage of building a dancing, obstacle avoiding robot was to build the body and legs using my 3D printer. The second was to test the electronics before assembly. This would prove to be more eventful than the printing.

I was least sure about all the electronics. They components arrived and… they sure looked okay. I didn’t think the buzzer looked quite right — it looked too big, but I figured that it even if a little lose it should make something approaching a buzzing noise.

The first stage of building a dancing, obstacle avoiding robot was to build the body and legs using my 3D printer.

Surprisingly, for someone who has been playing around with computers since I was eleven but only had a 3D printer for a month, I was much more worried about the electronics than the actual making stuff.

So confident, in fact, that initially I placed all six pieces into one print job.

My wife got me a 3D printer for my birthday/Christmas. I’ve printed a few little things since then, but I’ve been itching for a bit of a project. I didn’t want anything too ambitious but, clearly, there’s no point in doing something that can’t fail.

After much searching, I decided upon Otto, a walking, dancing, obstacle avoiding robot.

In this post I’ll talk about how I prepared for the project and my thoughts on its likely success (or otherwise).

Coming into the beginning of last year I decided I would try to read more books. I do most of my reading on my commute and the previous couple of years I had not had to regularly go to an office, so I managed few books and no novels at all.

While my total of twelve books may not set the world on fire, I managed to read some interesting ones so I thought it might be worth writing a few words on each one.