nichobi’s blog
Tea Calendar 2024: Nio Teas Matcha
2025-03-06
2024 was my fifth year running of tea advent calendars, for most of which I’ve been trying to sample as large a variety as possible. This year, rather try a little bit of everything, I decided to narrow the scope and try a large selection in a small niche…
I’ve done things up a little
2025-02-21
After almost 5 years of the ASCII art, terminal-like design of nichobi.com, I decided to redesign the site from scratch. My main goals have been…
What’ve I been up to?
2024-11-04
One of my goals since the very start of this blog has been to make that classic post, seen on nearly all personal blogs, where the author apologises for the recent lack of posts and promises to do better in future. It seems that time has finally arrived, as more time has passed between my latest blog post and now, than between the blog’s creation and that previous post…
Smartphone Opt-out: A Few Months On
2024-02-28
It’s now been several months since I posted about giving up my smartphone for a dumbphone. You may remember I promised an update “in a few weeks” but, while I did start it shortly thereafter, I ended up having to put it on hold to focus all my writing energy on my thesis. Having finished that up and graduated last month, I can finally commit to providing some insight into how things have gone, for better and for worse…
Tea Calendar 2023 - Tee Kontor Kiel
2024-01-30
For a few years now I’ve been buying tea calendars each advent. At first, it was mostly the novelty of having a new (often flavoured) tea to drink each day, but as my interest in tea has developed, it has become more about expanding my horizons and trying out different kinds of tea…
Opting out of the Smartphone
2023-09-01
I recently blogged about my experience of social media in Social Media, Mastodon and Me. My initial outline of that post was quite a bit wider, also discussing my thoughts on today’s digital landscape and our increasingly smartphone-dependent society, but I decided to rein it in and focus on a single topic. This post is somewhat of a sequel, expanding on those thoughts and chronicling the first steps of me giving up my smartphone (for the second time)…
Passing on the SponsorBlock Chromecast torch
2023-08-21
In mid-2020, stephen304 developed a simple bash script called CastBlock which leveraged the SponsorBlock API and go-chromecast library to monitor Chromecast devices on your local network, finding community flagged sponsor segments in the videos you watched, and tell the Chromecast to skip past them…
Social Media, Mastodon and Me
2023-08-13
I’ve been spending a lot of time on Mastodon lately, and as much fun as I’m having, I’ve also been struggling to unify my enthusiasm for open, federated software with my more or less lifelong dislike of social media…
I created a blog!
2023-07-27
I started writing a Mastodon post earlier today, and it quickly grew too large for Mastodon’s post limit. Naturally, instead of simply posting it as a thread, I spent a most of my day rewriting my website to support blog posts…