I haven’t made a podcast in a good few years now but one part of the process I had a love/hate relationship with has been made so much easier by a new Apple Podcasts feature - auto-generated transcripts. I loved creating the transcripts in collaboration with our incredible community because it was an accessibility feature, it meant we could refer back to the text rather than audio to settle future …

A year ago, I reluctantly watched the first series of Traitors in the UK and was instantly hooked, binge-watching the whole thing in a very short space of time. I, like many others, eagerly awaited the second series which came to a dramatic conclusion yesterday, one finalist walking away with just shy of £100,000. I found this series harder to watch than the previous one. It was brilliant, don’t get …

It's been quite chilly in the UK recently, so it was a good time to finish off my latest scarf. This Kallik pattern was such a good knit, super simple but requiring an element of concentration to make sure the pattern didn't go awry. It's just four stitches knit, four stitches purl but shifting each row to make the diagonal pattern. At first, I had to diligently read the pattern …

I’ve had a vague draft for a blog post about the warm hug of familiar media for a while now, but as ever Kottke has written about it better than I ever could. In this post, the question is posed: What’s Your Go-To Comfort Media? > I reckon most of us have certain books, movies, TV shows, music, podcasts, and other media that we turn to when we need some …

Tennis has rolled into a new year and already we are into the first Grand Slam, with the Australian Open under way and as fascinating as ever. As a UK viewer, the last couple of weeks have been pretty disappointing, as Amazon dropped their coverage of the sport via their Prime streaming service and Sky have picked it up instead. We got a taste of this during the US Open …

I don’t have a good track record with Godzilla movies, I always go into them thinking they’re going to be great and then they disappoint. My shortened review of one of them tells you everything you need to know: So I wasn’t that bothered about the new TV series streaming on Apple TV+ that was a kind of sequel-prequel situation between movies, I’d been burned before. The only interesting thing …

A new year and new films. My count of films watched last year was a little low, partly due to less time but also because the time I did have I used to watch so much amazing TV. How can films compete with such great short-form content? Well, we'll have to see how this year goes and the next batch might help! January The Boys in the Boat A good …

This year my list of new year goals was very short and revolved quite a lot around the Playstation, but actually I have been thinking about areas I can reset and get organised, gaining a little bit of control. The first one is subscriptions. I don't know about you, but I find that subscriptions to various apps, streaming services, and even physical things, can get lost in the wilderness and …

I've done it, I've decided, phew. It's taken my a week or two longer than it usually does to decide my top five albums of the year just gone but finally I'm ready to put pen to paper, or pixel to screen, and talk about my finalists. There were only eight albums in the shortlist anyway, which somehow made it harder. I narrowed it down to six but then deciding …

My traditional new year post comes with a wrap up of the year just gone and a look ahead to my aims and goals for the next twelve months. The year just gone can be summed up quite simply as chaos - there was so much going on in both work and life that I was supremely grateful to have time off over Christmas just to rest and recuperate. And …

It's been another year full of reading and it's been wonderful, the only downside being I don't seem to be making as much progress on my bookshelf backlog as I would have liked. But nevertheless, each year I like to pick out ten of my favourite reads from the year. These are the ones I have hand picked, listed in the order that I read them, as I refuse to …