Blog

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Last Updated on 2025-12-19

This blog is inspired by Simon Willison and his “what to blog about” post:

A TIL—Today I Learned—is the most liberating form of content I know of.

Did you just learn how to do something? Write about that.

Call it a TIL—that way you’re not promising anyone a revelation or an in-depth tutorial. You’re saying “I just figured this out: here are my notes, you may find them useful too”.

A map of my walking route from Cowes to Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight. The route I took is in magenta and the planned route in blue. The points where the path had been eroded and I had to detour are marked in yellow. It was supposed to be 23 km/14 miles, but this ended up at about 27.3 km/ 17 miles. There are two red dots marking where I saw red squirrels.

Walking from Cowes to Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight

TIL

Photos and notes from my walk on the 22nd of December 2025

Last Updated on 2025-12-22
Alistair Bailey

A photo the sunset in Southampton on 16th December 2025. It shows a road with parked cars and terraced houses and blue/violet sky with traces of clouds, oranges and pinks.

End of year bits and pieces

TIL

A few things I learnt/did/acheived in 2025

Last Updated on 2025-12-19
Alistair Bailey

Lia Wälti’s tips: “Drink tap water, enjoy the fresh air, go out a bit - it’s really nice!”

Seven Cathedrals in Seven Days

TIL

A trip around England in August 2025

Last Updated on 2025-08-31
Alistair Bailey

Solargraph, Southampton November 2021 to November 2022. The sun traces lines across the sky in arcs that vary in height throughout the year.

Sunrise Timelapse Bot

TIL
Claude
Raspberry Pi

Making a Raspberry Pi Zero bot that posts video timelapse of sunrise each day to Bluesky with LLM generated text. Featuring a lot of vibe coding with Claude.

Last Updated on 2025-08-03
Alistair Bailey

Raspberry Pi 4 B in its case with AAA battery for scale

Building a Raspberry Pi based music streamer

Misc

Replacing my old Sonos Connect in my Hi-Fi set-up with a Raspberry Pi running Mopidy Music Server and an external DAC

Last Updated on 2025-04-17
Alistair Bailey

Screenshot of a paywalled article.

Unpaywall: Legal alternative to Sci-Hub

TIL

Browser extension to find legal versions of paywalled academic articles

Last Updated on 2025-02-18
Alistair Bailey
 

Summary of Stofella et al. 2025

TIL
Claude
HDX

Recalibrating Protection Factors Using Millisecond Hydrogen/Deuterium Exchange Mass Spectrometry

Last Updated on 2025-01-30
Alistair Bailey
 

Old man advice to new PhD students

TIL
Claude

TL:DR My constitutive luck aside, almost everything required to do a PhD are learnt skills. I’m very average, so if you are average or above, you definitely have the ability…

Last Updated on 2025-01-23
Alistair Bailey
 

Why you don’t need turbulent flow

TIL
microfluidics
HDX
Claude

Molecular diffusion helps homogenise the distribution of molecules in laminar flow

Last Updated on 2025-01-05
Alistair Bailey

Screenshot of a Blueksy post by Chris Albon of a script he uses for logging.

Creating a work log

TIL
Bluesky
Work
Claude

Chris Albon’s helper script for logging everything you do

Last Updated on 2025-01-03
Alistair Bailey
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