What I'm doing now

Using AI in my personal life

I'm having a lot of fun building small projects with AI - things that fit my own needs, and seeing how far I can push them.

• optimus My always-on home-server caretaker. It works through all the services I run in rotation, applies routine updates in the small hours, and fixes what it safely can on its own. Its prime directive is stability, so when something goes wrong, it pings me.
• hermes I use Hermes as a personal assistant - somewhere to dump the tasks, notes and small bits of admin that pile up. It's a handful of single-purpose agents now, with the most interesting listed below.
• henchifier One of my agents pointed at a very specific goal: getting in shape ahead of my October wedding. It plans my meals, logs consumption and tracks macros and biometrics from my smart scale. It's working - 15kg down since January.
• stash My 'paste anything' inbox - links, notes, screenshots, whatever I want to hold onto, saved when I drop it in. It's a short-term memory layer, connected to a Paperless server as a long-term archive, so I can search both at once.
• reading list A pipeline to push saved Substack posts and other articles onto my eInk device for night-time friendly reading. Similar to stash above, but with the explicit goal of stripping out noise and creating a healthier way of consuming interesting content - away from notifications and other distractions.

Getting married in October

The big one. We're getting married this October, so a good chunk of life right now is wedding prep. We have a beautiful venue booked in Andalusia and are now project managing friends and family from all over the world to get them there.

Learning Irish

The weekly Irish classes are going well - I'm finally able to put together decent sentences on the page. "Chuaigh mé go dtí an pháirc le mo mhadra." Hardly poetry, but check out my séimhiú. This is my third Irish course: the first taught me to pronounce names and places properly, the second gave me a basic grasp of the grammar, and this is the one where it's finally starting to feel like a language rather than a subject. I love learning languages - it's one of the best ways I know to get a genuinely different perspective on the world.

Playing music again

I've started drum lessons, which means being a total beginner at something physical for the first time in years. The guitar has come back out at home too, most evenings now rather than once a month. The next step is finding a low-stakes open mic somewhere in Dublin where nobody minds a covers set. Suggestions very welcome.

Life with Tae

Most days start and end with an overexcited Shiba Inu trying to chew my fingers. Beyond dragging me away from the desk and outside at least once a day, living with something this stubborn and independent turns out to be decent exercise for those empathy and patience muscles.

Baking sourdough

Two loaves a week, every week. I'm trying to balance flavour against nutrition. I think of it more as cultivation than as cooking - you can't ferment for the yeast. You build the conditions for it to thrive and stay out the way. That way of thinking helps in a lot of other parts of life too.

Cooking over charcoal

I got a charcoal barbecue and I'm learning to actually use it while the unseasonably sunny Irish weather holds, which optimistically gives me a few more weekends.

Turning the phone down

Alongside my fasting, I'm also finding it helpful to turn down the dopamine in other areas. I started using ScreenZen - it sits in front of the apps I open on autopilot and makes me stop and think before opening. Like a speedbump for mindfulness. I'm also using an app called Grayscaler, which takes a surprising amount of the pull out of the fast-dopamine apps.

• Xteink X4 A little e-ink device I picked up that hijacks the muscle memory of the infinite scroll. It has a strong open-source firmware community and syncs with my Audiobookshelf server at home.

Reading & Listening

What I'm enjoying right now:

• 
  A Psalm for the Wild-Built Becky Chambers - my new book club's read, but it had been on my own list for a while anyway. An interestingly zen dialogue between a human and a robot - something that's becoming more science fact than fiction.
• 
  Design Unlimited Patrik Hübner & Larissa Lenze - this one caught my eye in Hodges & Figgis on Dawson Street. It looks like it takes generative AI seriously as a design tool, playing to what it's actually good at instead of using it to churn out six-fingered stock photos.
• 
  The Artist's Way Julia Cameron - the well-worn one about unblocking creative work. This book has come up a lot recently - there seems to be a big appetite for coping mechanisms in today's world. I just started my pages and my artist dates.

Writing my own thing

I'm starting a project for Substack and YouTube, picking up the thread of my master's thesis: how we inhabit a world of story, and how much of what we treat as real is collective delusion. More to come soon. The part I'm enjoying most is finding ways to use AI to speed up my writing instead of doing it for me - as a typist and fact-checker I can dictate to.