Everybody seems to be doing this weeknotes thing so I might as well give it a go too! I’ve been meaning to do it for a while.

Getting back into blogging

I’ve been AFKing on this blog pretty much since August 2025 (nearly a year ago!). There have been a few things here and there but by and large, my blog has not been a priority for me and I haven’t been updating it much or even thinking much about it! I’ve been meaning to get back into writing for a while but starting to write again after a break so long just seems like so much work, especially because my writing setup isn’t particularly ideal. I’m all over the place with text editors, sometimes I use Vim, sometimes Helix, sometimes VSCodium, so on and so forth. I haven’t yet landed on a text editor I’m happy with, partly because I really want my text editors to have proper Vim support. Some of the options, like VSCodium or even Obsidian have these, and they work well enough, but I’m just a bit iffy on Vim in general when it comes to long form writing. I really like the convenience of it but there are just some things, which I’m sure can be fixed with a bit of research, that bother me. Maybe I’ll write about it later.

Social media

Aside from that, I kind of ended up jumping on the social media train by signing up for Instagram, mostly to keep in touch with friends from my home country and also at my university. I still would rather not have done that, but at this point I consider having a social media like that a strategic thing I need to do rather than want to do. Regardless, I’ve now experienced doom scrolling and other symptoms of social media usage, which have most definitely distracted me from my blog. All things considered though, my usage still seems to pale in comparison to some friends.

Expanding this blog

Following from my point about social media, I’m going to be branching this blog out to Instagram and Facebook.

I understand! I’d rather not, but for what I consider strategic purposes at this point in my life, I feel it’d be a net positive.

What I’ll be doing on those platforms is posting my photography and experimenting with video-form content, though the specifics of that I have yet to iron out. If it’s longer-form videos, I’ll probably also be branching out to Youtube.

That being said, I still very much support content on the open web. So aside from that, I’ll probably branch out to Mastodon in a better capacity than I am currently, Pixelfed to post my photos, and maybe Odysee for video content. It’ll probably end up being quite a long list of platforms, but I’ll write an update once I’ve sorted them all out.

Phone upgrade

This happened about 3 weeks ago, but I finally bought a new phone. I upgraded from an iPhone 7, first used by my father and then my brother. All things considered, it was still usable but the battery and performance really got to me. I ended up going for a Nothing Phone 4a, since I quite like what they’re doing with software and their whole design language in general. I looked at quite a few competitor companies, but most of the Chinese options let me down in the software department (they’re the most common in Hong Kong stores!). Maybe I’ll write about it later, but at least the software from Oppo/Vivo/Xiaomi/Huawei/Honor are soooooo derivative of iOS that it literally makes the software feel quite cheap. But from those companies, relative to each other, I’d say I liked Oppo’s and Xiaomi’s software the most. Some of the Vivo phones’ hardware really spoke to me, especially the X200 FE and X300 FE because of their size. But yeah, software was a major reason why I went for the Nothing 4a.

Overall, I’m very happy with this phone. There are more stutters in the software than I would expect, but they’re uncommon enough for me to ignore it. The main gripe I have with it is just the size. Coming from a base iPhone 7, this phone is HUGE, but I’ll get used to it in time.

iPhones were never an option to begin with, not just because of price and stuff, but also because I’m just not a big fan of iOS. I vastly prefer Android. But even then, for the same price I bought my Nothing 4a for, I could have bought a used iPhone 13/14 Pro. Just not worth it in my books.

AI

This follows in a similar thread to my point about social media above, but I have begun to use AI for a lot more things than I used to over the past few months. I fully understand and agree with the ethical issues with AI, and personally, albeit with my limited knowledge, I think AI is a net negative for humanity; though, my situation is such that it’s just better for me to be familiar with using these tools to the best of my abilities. Not to mention, the degree I’m studying is an AI-centric degree, so I’ve kind of got to do that.

FOSS software

This is another thing that follows a similar thread to before. Back when I started this blog, I was doing my A Levels and honestly had little real work to do. Now, I have real work to do and also university stuff to do too, and a lot of that either requires non-FOSS software or is just better done with non-FOSS software. I still try to use FOSS where I can, but sometimes, I find myself not caring about it anywhere near as much as I used to.

One thing I do miss though is Linux. I’m still not a fan of macOS overall, and mostly prefer Linux from a general usability POV, but macOS just has a lot less crap to deal with than Linux. At least it’s UNIX based, so my terminal knowledge carries over.

I’m kind of considering just keeping my Macbook for university/work, and doing personal stuff on a cheap libre-booted Thinkpad or something, but I’m going to consider that for a bit longer.

This does extend to my phone upgrade too; I haven’t degoogled whatsoever, and I’m using my main 10 year old Google account on it. I’m trying to limit the number of Google services I use on it though; I got rid of Gemini (you can’t uninstall it, only disable it, wow!) and use other apps for Youtube and stuff.

Unfortunately, with the way Android is going, F-Droid might as well be dead by next month so I’ll have to see what I should do then. I also heard Google is going to stuff the age verification crap into Android too. I do like that Nothing phones have an unlockable bootloader, so if things go too south, I’ll just jump ship to Lineage OS if it’s feasible, but I’d rather not give up the Nothing launcher lol.

Bluetooth headphones

One of the few things I did write here post-August 2025 was my opinion on bluetooth headphones after using the Airpods I got with my Macbook. My opinion has quite literally done a 180 since then, and now I’m pretty much exclusively using bluetooth headphones. I still net prefer wired, but I’ve honestly gotten quite fed up with untangling cables and stuff that I’d just rather compromise and deal with constantly charging my Airpods and (now) Nothing Ear Opens (which I got for free with my Nothing 4a). The convenience factor I mentioned in that original article is most definitely not overrated, and I very much see the appeal of bluetooth audio now, though the whole thing with their unrepairability still bothers me.

Work

Since May, I’ve started private tutoring here, and landed an internship as what is effectively a programming teacher at a private tutoring academy. Honestly, I’ve had a lot of fun being a teacher, and talking to students, some aged as young as 5, up to around 16 years old, is just so refreshing. I find the 7-12 year olds to be the most fun to talk to. 7-ish year olds have literally no filter when they speak, so they say some outlandish stuff but it’s all good fun at the end of the day. One of the kids I privately tutor is 7, and we had a whole conversation on eating boogers! You can only do that with kids that young! 12-ish year olds kind of just remind me of how I was when I was 12, and I have lots of fun triggering them with brainrot. I’m actually quite out of touch with brainrot in general (I didn’t even know what the deal with 67 or TTTS was until a few months ago), but I love seeing them laugh at me when I do it. So far at least, teaching seems like quite an enjoyable line of work.

Music

I’ve gotten familiar with a lot of music as of the past few months. I got pretty hooked on the following albums for a while:

• Blue Morpho - Ed O’Brien

  Amazing album, has that Radiohead kind of energy but it’s still unique enough. I’m not a big Thom Yorke or Johnny Greenwood fan so I prefer not to listen to Radiohead in general, but the other guys in the band seem okay.

• Us Rah Par - Junaid Jamshed

  I’ve slept and continue to sleep on Pakistani music way more than I should. I’m generally not a big fan of a lot of modern Pakistani artists, but then again I haven’t really listened most of them, so that opinion isn’t very strong. Junaid Jamshed is one of the classic Pakistani artists; he was part of this band called Vital Signs back in the 70s and 80s I think which was quite well known at the time. This album in particular is one of his solo albums, but it just has such a wonderful 90s energy. I’d fully recommend giving it a go.

• Damon Albarn music in general

  I’ve become quite a bit Damon Albarn fan recently; a lot of his music is great! I’ve listened a lot to his 2 most recent albums, re-listened to the entire Blur catalogue, and got pretty obsessed with Gorillaz. I first started listening to Gorillaz in early 2023, for a while there I didn’t particularly like most of the music after Demon Days. Now, I’ve relistened to a lot of the albums I didn’t really like—Plastic Beach in particular—with an open mind and quite like them now.

Games

I’ve been incredibly slow on the gaming front for various reasons I’m not going to go in-depth into, but part of them is just busy-ness in general. I’ve started and abandoned a couple of games recently, including Trails from Azure (which I did get about 7 hours into) and Metroid Dread. This week though, I finished one game I bought on Steam: Sleeping Dogs. It was a random impulse buy during the Steam Summer Sale (it was available for relatively cheap), and I put about 15 hours into it over the course of the past week and finished the main story. It’s quite an interesting story, and there’s also a good retrospective video I watched afterwards that really explained how the story was deeper than I first thought (link ). Other than that, I started Half Life 2 a few days ago, but progress on that has been slow.

Movies

I’m generally not a movies person but I did get quite invested into the Infernal Affairs trilogy this week. The first two movies are honestly incredible; the tension in the first one is built so well, and the second really gives you some perspective into all of the main characters. The third is okay though, and the story is a bit confusing; it’s kind of hard to tell who’s good and who’s bad, but I’ll probably rewatch all 3 soon and try to understand the story properly. Full recommend though, I really liked these 3 movies.

Conclusion

This was more of a life update than a weeknotes thing, but I’ll try from now on to, at the very least, do a weeknotes once a week (duh!). Hopefully I can keep this up. I’ll also update this blog when I sort out how I’m going to expand the snblog empire. Thanks for reading!