I’ve been off work for three days this week. I had some leave from last year that I needed to use, and this was the first opportunity to take it. I didn’t have much of a plan apart from to listen to some music, read a book or two, and catch up on the episodes of Doctor Who that I’ve been ripping from DVD to my NAS over the last few weeks.

So far I’ve made fairly decent leaps towards achieving those goals (although I’ve only watched a few hours of Doctor Who due to American Horror Story hitting Netflix on the first day of my break), but I’ve also been dabbling with various bits of technology that are probably worth a mention.

Mac OS X 10.11.1 hit on Wednesday, along with iOS 9.1. AS I have a few Macs and iOS devices, I spent an evening making sure everything was up to date, and also checking the integrity of my backups. iOS 9.1 saw the introduction of Apple News, which I browsed for an hour or so, closed down, and have not looked at again. This is probably something I’ll come back to, but at the moment I’m happy with the news I get through my RSS reader and probably don’t need any more.

Wednesday was also the day that I had a serious look at Pancake which combines Markdown and Dropbox (two things I love) and allows the hosting of decent looking websites with little more than a Dropbox account and a text editor. I made something with this that I’m fairly happy with, but that probably deserves a separate post.

Yesterday was Ubuntu release day. A few years ago I’d always take this day off work to install the new version (if I wasn’t running it already) and sit on irc and on various forums to deal with support questions. I did some of that yesterday, and also seeded torrents of the installation media for a few hours seeing as I wasn’t doing much else with my bandwidth.

Today I’ve done nothing technical at all, but did head in to town for an hour or so to pick up the new records from Joanna Newsom and The Twilight Sad. I figured that seeing as I’m off work I might as well go and collect them rather than having to listen out for the doorbell.