WeakNotes 2026-05-22

Another rough week as time flies by. Limited activity and progress on anything this week.

It’s been an entire year since I last worked, incredibly grateful to my employer for the sick leave, pay, and insurance that means I can support my family. I am very fortunate to be in this position whilst many of the others with my condition (approx. 400k in the UK) are living in poverty and reliant on limited government support that is often not enough to cover the basics whilst be also incredibly difficult to access.

• I had a thought that UK graduates should be able to opt- in to a government workplace scheme where they are trained to retrofit solar and batteries to houses, house building (energy efficient pre-fab social housing), general maintenance, and services to local communities like fixing pot holes, litter picking, care services, and other ideas that accelerate green transition and local environmental things. All for a minimum wage, but on completion of a two or three year service they have their student loans wiped completely - this gives valuable work experience for first jobbers whilst offsetting the huge student debt to the individuals and during this period it gives government/local councils a productivity boost. Fully optional of course.
• I installed Tailscale on all my devices this week, and updated the raspberry pi (200 updates, yikes).
• Installed Rustdesk so I can run my Mac from my iPad - helpful when I cannot move but want to change headphones, volume, or video I am watching. This is going to be a big quality of life thing for me.
• Cesar Azpilicueta has announced his retirement from football, joining Millie Bright. Both club legends in their own right.

Picks

• Cassidy used AI, for what I consider the best sort of use case - the small personal helpers and tools that remove friction, a user base of one.
• This, for Millie Bright is a thing of beauty and well deserved spot on the white wall. Captain, Leader, Legend.
• £4.75m in funding is welcome in the ME community - that’s approximately £11 per person with ME in the UK however. Nowhere near enough, but a step in the right direction.
• RSS Sync Python script from Lisa Charlotte Rost pulls in Tumblr into her blog - a sort of second party CMS with a UI.
• Issue 42 of scrolls not least for the fediverse and security content but teaching me how to count in latin.
• Fraude Design by Scott Riley - ‘an over-engineered parody’.