A collection of other stuff..
Languages
I enjoy learning Mandarin Chinese very slowly. My reading and typing is much stronger than my listening and speaking, but working on addressing that. I’ve been studying on and off for about five years, but wouldn’t say I got serious until about two years ago. I started with learning simplified characters but now I am focusing more and more on learning traditional characters.
I use Whisper to help me learn, through a process called sentence mining. You can find my current, crappy code for this here and learn more about sentence mining through this great video. I wrote more about this AI approach in this blog post
Photography
I recently rekindled a childhood enjoyment for photography by purchasing a Sony mirrorless APS-C camera. I’m still learning, but might start sharing some examples here soon.
Music
I play flute (practised for about seven years, then retired it) and more recently piano. I am not particularly good at piano yet, but improving over time. Nevertheless, it is quite a therapeutic hobby.
In terms of listening, I really enjoy soundtracks from movies, games, anime, TV shows. I’ve always been a huge fan of pairing music with visuals, and when I was young I used to want to be a composer! So now I enjoy making playlists associated with certain actions and moods, for example see here for my 🤔 playlist
Aside from that, I am a fan of Japanese and Chinese music, both old and new. I have created a few playlists to try show this side of music to other audiences, as they are not the most approachable genres due to language barriers. See these for Japanese and here for Chinese.