Week notes - 10 August 2025
I’ve been spending a bit of my free time this week messing around with Ghost. It’s going to take a (very long) while to get things the way I want them, but in the meantime the priority is to keep posting regularly.
I’m also (hopefully) posting this directly from Ulysses, as I’m fancy like that! 😆
🚗 MG HS PHEV
The big news in our house this week was returning our Hyundai Tuscon and getting our new MG HS.
I was looking at various EVs for this lease, but ultimately the MG was by far the best value car I could find. Its EV range is around 70 miles, which in practice means that we can do 95% of our driving in EV only mode.
Then we can use it as a hybrid for the seven or eight longer trips we do each year without any worries about range anxiety. That could very well turn out to be a non-issue, but for now it’s quite nice to still be able to top up 300 miles of range in a couple of minutes!
Unfortunately the vehicle only came with a Type 2 to Type 2 cable and omitted a granny charger 🤬. I was planning to granny charge for a few weeks to see how this worked for us, given the relatively small battery and our low daily mileage.
Having done my YouTube research, the current plan is to get a Hypervolt 3 Pro, both for safety reasons and to take advantage of smart energy tariffs.
At some point down the line, I’ll aim to post a proper update on how we’ve found the (PH)EV lifestyle.
🏏 England vs India
O…. M…. Goodness! 😆
What a spectacular finish to an all time test series. You literally (for real) couldn’t have scripted a more exciting end to what has been a quite brilliant summer of cricket. India’s win at the Oval to tie the series was by the smallest margin in their history and those 57 glorious, tension filled minutes on the final morning may never be bettered.
Most people will never understand cricket, but real anoraks will truly appreciate the beauty of a 25 days of hard fought sport ending in a very well deserved drawn series. It really would have been a travesty for England to have won 3-1.
🙇 Tim Cook bends the knee
It’s been interesting to see the furore caused by Tim Cook’s televised pizzo payment to ‘Don’ Trump. To my mind, the problem isn’t that he’s playing the game. What else is any responsible CEO supposed to do under the current kleptocracy?
The issue is that Apple have long espoused the rhetoric that they stand for something more and they’re now paying the price of not living up to those lofty ideals. As ever, it’s easy to have ideals when they cost you nothing.
Maybe it’s the accountant in me, but I’m inclined to agree with DHH’s take on this:
People seem to be continuously disappointed by the fact that public companies are run by professional managers who don't operate from deep principles. But they shouldn't be.
🎮 What I’m playing
I’m still working my way through ToTK. I’ve completed the Lightning Temple and and am now trundling through the depths towards the Spirit Temple. My previous complaint about The Depths still stands, I wizzed across the Thunderhead Isles in one sitting but then took most of the week finding Mineru’s construct parts in the four depots. Relative to everything else in the game, the depths just feel like a drag and markedly decreased my enjoyment of a fairly spectacular game.
🎥 What I’m watching
We’re working our way through the Infinity Saga with the kids, as they’re slowly progressing from cartoons to live action.
We finished Winter Solider this weekend and I loved every minute of it ❤️. There’s no question that it’s in the very top tier of Marvel movies and has a very strong case for being the very best of the bunch. The spy movie vibes and chemistry between Steve and Natasha are just 👌.
It such a delight to see how the kids’ reacti to every plot beat. I can only imagine how they’re going to lose their 💩at the end of Infinity War 😬.
See you next week!