2026-02-11 07:06:42
The little number of followers I have on Instagram are probably going to unfollow me soon. I think I'm going to start sharing square-cropped and overfiltered photos again.
2026-02-09 08:00:00
Recently, I've been thinking about Instagram. What it used to be, and what it is now.
I wish Instagram was 2012 Instagram.
— Chris 💻 (@chrishannah) February 8, 2026
In the good days of Instagram, people shared over-filtered square-cropped insights into their daily life. It was a real social network. You followed people, usually your friends, and you can see what they were up to, they can see what you are up to. And you generally comment on each others posts.
YouTube recommended this 13 year old video from Casey Neistat about how to use Instagram, and that certainly made me feel more nostalgic about it used to be.
There are many reasons why Instagram isn't the same anymore. Part of it is down to the social media landscape, and habits of social media users. As I think we've now become a generation of consumption.
But part of it is down to the evolution of Instagram as a platform. Before you edited and shared photos, viewed other peoples photos, and exchanged likes and comments. Now you've got algorithms dictating your For You feed, Reels, and Explore page.
If you want to share something, you don't use the most prominent button in the tab bar, you tap on a button on the top-right of the screen. Which directs you to share a Story. A fleeting moment, that someone will quickly tap past as they're viewing the stories from all the influencers and brands they follow.
That's where I think it went wrong for Instagram, when brands joined in and "Influencers" started to pop up. For me, that's when Instragram started to become less about people sharing photos with people.
I want to start using Instagram like those days, posting more personal moments, less "perfect" shots, more just general life. And to "the grid", instead as a fleeting story. But I do feel that even if I persevered, Instagram simply may not be the place for that anymore.
If you want to find me on Instagram, you can do so: @lordchrishannah[1].
The Lord title is a bit of an inside joke, I was once gifted one of those 1ft x 1ft squares of land in Scotland with the title. ↩︎
2026-01-20 08:00:00
This year is already off to a productive start, as I've launched my first new project!
It's called Miniroll, and it's a way to create, share, and embed blogrolls. Along with many other things.
It's not just about your blogrolls either, as you can choose to make them public. Which means other people can too! So you can find other peoples blogrolls and find new blogs in the Explore section.
There's a whole bunch of features that Miniroll already supports, which is wild as it's only just "launched" today. But as of right now, every user can:
And if you're generous enough to sign up for the premium tier ($2 monthly, $20 yearly), you can:
There's all of that, and a bunch more on the way soon!
If that sounds interesting, check out Miniroll.
You can keep up with development on Mastodon or X.
2026-01-16 08:00:00
I heard about an app called Awake on MacStories. It's an alarm clock app, which is specifically designed for heavy sleepers, or people who tend to enjoy pressing the snooze button in the morning. People like me.
There are three main parts of the app: your schedule, missions, and morning briefing.
I haven't used that many alarm apps, so I don't know if this is a common feature, but I really like the schedule feature. I work from home on some days, go to the office on others, and enjoy more sleep on the weekend. And I'd rather not need to manually set this every night.
For times when you've stayed up a bit later than planned, the app will notice if you are past your estimated bedtime, and help to push back your alarm temporarily to ensure you get your ideal sleep time. That's pretty neat.
Now for the core of the app, the missions. These are essentially actions that will happen automatically, or activities that you need to complete in order to turn your alarm off in the morning.
I went with something simple, just five very basic maths questions. As my aim isn't to do anything spectacular, I just need my brain to be activated just that little bit, in order to help me to wake up. Otherwise, I'm going back to sleep.
As for the morning briefings, this isn't something that I've particularly used. I have it show me the weather and my calendar. But I don't tend to have much in my personal calendar, and the weather in Britain tends to be the same most days. But they do have a to-do app called Structured which can also be added here, so that is something I may look into soon.
But for the alarm clock itself, I have to say that I'm very pleasantly surprised with how effective it's been. I've used it since mid-December last year when the review was posted on MacStories, and for a while I still had an additional alarm set in the iOS Alarm app just as a backup. But it's never been needed. I just use Awake.
Previously, I found it pretty hard waking up on days where I travelled to the office, as that meant getting up around 6:30 to 7:00. That used to require multiple staggered alarms to ensure that a little extra snooze didn't mean I was suddenly super late for work. But now I get one alarm, I do my little maths questions, then I get up. Because otherwise, that second alarm sound is loud!
2026-01-04 02:58:39
A new kind of mobile communicator
Designed for doing, not doomscrolling.
That tagline definitely got my attention.
Based on the design and some of the copy, it made me think it was a more focused phone.
It's noticeably smaller, there's a smaller screen, physical keyboard, single camera, and a headphone jack.
But it's marketed as a companion device?
I don't see why it couldn't be used as a primary phone, but the second-phone idea feels a bit weird to me. Maybe they're just playing it safe? Is it easier to convince people to use this as an additional device than it is to get people to switch away from an iPhone to this "communicator"?
Nevertheless, I'm still interested.
There's a possibility that this idea of a dedicated device will fit into the growing use of other dedicated devices, such as iPods, cameras, etc.
It's obviously still a smartphone, but it's at least targeted as being a dedicated communication device, rather than an all-purpose handheld computer. The question is, will that actually make a difference?
2026-01-01 08:00:00
I'm not a massive life planner. However, I do have a few things in my head that I want to fix/improve/accomplish in 2026. So I thought I'd write them down and publish the list here, primarily to keep myself accountable.
I remember hearing this on a Relay.fm podcast years ago, and it was about each year having a theme. Which then could be quickly used when making big or small decisions throughout the year, to keep you on track.
For 2026 I don't really have a single word, but more of a rough plan. Which I guess could also work as a "theme".
My plan is:
Focus → Growth → Productivity
I want to first focus myself, whether at home or at work. I want to find my lane.
Next up is to grow in these areas. I want to be better at work, I want more time with my family, I want to waste less time, and I want to produce more.
Which leads into the third step. I want to produce more.
These steps may seem quite silly, of course I want these things. Everyone wants more focus, growth, and productivity. But I want it in a specific order. I don't want to produce 20 side projects that no one uses, and I don't want to work on improving in areas that aren't important.
I work at Ant International as a Senior Software Engineer, typically on WorldFirst products.
Most of my projects were related to the multi-currency World Card product, but I started carving out a niche with one of our systems, which I currently own. So next year I plan to spend more time on the architecture level of this project, and to work out how to grow this system[1].
But I'm not just an engineer, I also lead a team of three other engineers. This year was my first experience of leading other people, so I've definitely got areas to grow here. Primarily being able to delegate work, and to let them take projects on with full ownership.
There's not much I want to change regarding my technology usage. I will likely keep using an iPhone, and also continue using both a Mac and Framework laptop interchangeably.
In that regard, I should spend more time unifying my dotfiles for these machines, along with my work Mac as well.
Other than that, the only thing I want to change is my email.
For social media, I sort of want to use it less, but also more.
Currently I use Mastodon, X, and Instagram.
For X it's two things, following football, and the tech/programmer community that hasn't switched to Mastodon[2].
For Mastodon, it's sort of everything else that X/Twitter was.
And for Instagram, I share the occasional photo here, but primarily it's keeping up with friends and family.
But overall, I want to spend less time reading and consuming social media, and more time with actual communication. So less endless scrolling, but maybe more writing, and definitely more talking to people.
And as for talking to people, I want to find even more cool and interesting people to talk to this year.
I don't want to say anything too crazy when it comes to next years projects. But I have two main goals:
The Text Case project has already started. I've been using Claude to clean up the code and bring it up to speed. And in the new year, I have a few ideas of what I want to add to the app.
For the other project, this is intentionally vague. I don't really care what it is, a new app, or even a web service. But I haven't finished a big project in a while. And one way to incentivise myself to both build and maintain this project is if it generates some form of income. So that's the rough plan.
I travel a lot.
In any given year, I'll end up going to various cities in the UK, a few in mainland Europe, and a sunny trip to the Canary Islands in the winter time.
But if I could just note a few ideas for 2026:
You can read this post if you want more details on the split between the three. My only goal for my writing in 2026 is that I continue writing all types of content, and that I keep all three blogs active.
I haven't regularly listened to podcasts in some time. I want to explore them again, and maybe I'll find something to fill my commute time with.
This year I want to read 100 books.
But let's be honest, I plan on reading more books every year, and it doesn't really change.
So I want to focus on what I do read. And that is blog posts via RSS.
Firstly, I want to allow myself to skip more. Sometimes I feel like if I follow a site, I need to read everything from that site. I've now decided that's a waste of time, and it's a waste of mental energy. If I don't find something interesting, I'm going to follow Marie Kondo's advice.
And secondly, I want to expand what I'm reading. So now I'm becoming much quicker to subscribe to an RSS feed. Especially as I'm now releasing myself from the need to make sure I read everything.
In related news, I just went to my RSS reader and marked everything as read.
So now I've got a nice clean slate, ready for the new year.
