It's a bit late, but I'm settled into my planner setup for 2020, so I thought I'd share what I've picked this year.

This is my first Jibun Techo-free year since 2017 and I miss it! I picked a Hobonichi Cousin Avec, which has very similar weekly pages, but next year I'll switch back to the Jibun. I've used the Cousin for logging meals, workouts, medications, health symptoms, events, and small notes about my day. For the first half of the year I used the daily pages to stick in photos and ephemera, but the book got really fat by …

I'm obsessed with

Mike Lowery's drawings. Poring over Mike's drawings recently encouraged me to draw on paper again, after exclusively drawing on my iPad Pro for the last few months.

I'm listening to

Milow, and The Strumbellas.

I'm reading

The Baby Decision by Merle Bombardieri.

I'm watching

The newest season of Norsemen, finally released in English (I actually like foreign shows with subtitles usually, but the Norwegian accent is extra fun when they speak English, so it's worth waiting for the international version to drop).

Stuff I bought this month

Stationery from Tabiyo Shop.

These wireless headphones from Urbanears which …

I'm obsessed with

Austin Kleon's blog again. Once or twice every year I go through a phase of reading through his archives and immersing myself in his ideas. I may even re-read his books this time around, too.

I'm listening to

This fun banjo tune.

I'm reading

Murderous Contagion: A Human History of Disease by Mary Dobson (still), while also starting How To Be Alive by Colin Beavan.

I'm watching

The Swedish version of Taskmaster, since we've finished the original (UK) version and the Norwegian version. We also watched Staged, a short series about David Tennant and Michael Sheen attempting …

I'm obsessed with

Planners! I've got a Hobonichi Cousin Avec this year, which is split into two books, one for each half of the year. I only have a month to go before it's time to swap them out, so I'm spending lots of time thinking about how I might want to change things up for the second half of the year.

So far this year I've found sticking ephemera into the daily pages of the Hobo Cousin didn't stop it getting too thick to write in, so I'll probably move all of my ephemera into a completely separate journal …

I'm obsessed with

My health. I've been doing telehealth calls with my doctor recently to figure out some bothersome-but-not-serious issues I noticed around the start of lockdown. It's a nice bonus that telehealth calls are all bulk billed, since I've had a few follow ups.

I'm listening to

Folk pop/rock with lots of banjo! I've been trying out Old Bear Mountain, Clouds and Thorns, Hollow Coves, and Bellowhead.

I'm reading

Pandemic by Sonia Shah

I'm watching

Taskmaster (highly recommended if you like British panel shows—the later seasons are better, but it's all fun)

April goals

I missed my …

I'm obsessed with

Workouts! I've finally started to get back into going to the gym consistently after a lot of disruption to the start of the year. I've started using the GZCL method for my lifting program, and I'm really enjoying having a bit more structure to my weights routine.

I'm listening to

A fair bit of Dance Pop, since I've found it's fun for exercising to.

I'm reading

A Darker Shade of Magic. I gave up on the last two books I started reading, because neither really grabbed me. I'm hoping this one will do the trick.

I'm watching …

I was struggling with something recently in SwiftUI and thought I'd share the solution I came up with. Here's a simple example to demonstrate what I was stuck on:

struct ContentView: View {
  var tasks: [Task]

  var body: some View {
    List(self.tasks) { task in
      TaskView(task: task)
    }
  }
}

I have a List showing TaskViews made from Task models. Each TaskView includes a button which will set the task state to completed. When the user taps the button, a network call is kicked off, which changes the task's state on the server. When the network call completes (let's assume it succeeds …

Over time I've developed a list of open-source iOS libraries that I use in almost all my projects. These are my favourite, go-to libraries:

TableKit

Declarative table views! I hate the boilerplate involved in UIKit table views and having to work with index paths to make sure you're acting on the right cell. With TableKit, you have a reference to the cell when you work with it, and most of the design and logic goes inside the cell subclass itself anyway. It's a much neater way to work.

PromiseKit

I struggled a lot to get my head around promises at …

I'm obsessed with

Social events! Early in the month I decided to double down on my goal of getting more social in 2020 and threw myself into a bunch of new social events and activities. The upsides were that I got a lot more exercise from being out and about more, which helped me sleep better, and I also found that string a lot of events together without big gaps in-between helped me capitalise on the buzz of each one to be more confident going into the next. On the other hand, it quickly became exhausting, and I felt like …

My review's a bit late this month—oops! I'm also experimenting with a different format since there's very little to my reviews normally. So let's start with a few things I've been into lately:

I'm obsessed with

Cooking! I'm watching Bon Appetit Test Kitchen videos all the time and I'm trying lots of new recipes. I'm feeling more confident about my ability to attempt different recipes or techniques, and haven't had any major disasters to put me off so far. I'm most excited about my efforts with dough of all kinds: brioche, ciabatta, pizza, breakfast biscuits, and croissants coming up …