/reader

So you didn’t really need the physical phone and camera at all. If you happened to pluck that particular number from the infinite jar between 0 and 0.12, all you would need to do is strip off the 0. from the front and you’ll be able to watch the video anyway.

Every film, every news show, every photograph, every home movie that’s ever been shot lies somewhere on the number line between 0 and 0.12.

Now think back to your first date. You probably didn’t have a team of camera operators and sound engineers following you around, recording the moment for posterity.

But, if you had done, they would have produced a video that lies between 0 and 0.12. That number still exists. Go find it and enjoy a trip down memory lane.

How about the oscar winning best film of 2050? Maybe some of the actors aren’t even born yet. No problem … the video of that movie still lies between 0 and 0.12. If you stumble across it, you can glimpse the future.

Be careful when rifling through this video library though. You’ll also find a five minute video of you and Margaret Thatcher skipping through Central Park, playing the harmonica. Oh, and for good measure, you and every human that has ever existed. Or will exist in the future. An endless collection of five minute videos playing every possible instrument and wearing every type of outfit.

If we ever discovered a way to catalogue all those videos, what gems we would find. Uninterrupted aerial footage of the Deccan Traps eruptions for 1,000,000 years, in glorious 8K fidelity.

Everything that happened, and everything that did not, is all present in that small gap between 0 and 0.12.

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My last major portfolio re-allocation was in 2022, when I moved 40% into the S&P500 and the remaining 60% is FTSE100. These percentage allocations were more or less plucked out the air, but the underlying thesis was that London represents a slower growing, but more reliable set of utility type companies (banks, food, construction etc), whereas America represents the home of capital where growing industries seek to raise capital.

Now I’m in draw down, I use a two bucket strategy – four years of non-discretionary spend in cash (bucket one) and the remainder in equities (bucket two). The allocation between US and UK is a kind of “bucket within a bucket” in that I intend to withdraw from the UK index funds to top up bucket one, leaving the US side to grow more over the longer term.

This means that over time, the initial 60:40 split will drift towards 50:50 and beyond over the next decade or so. I review everything once a quarter, but don’t intend to re-balance the portfolio unless any substantial changes in macro conditions occur.

Disclaimer

I am not your financial adviser.

The information in this post relates to my financial journey. It may or may not be relevant to your own. You need to make your own decisions on your own financial strategy.

Do not buy or sell anything based solely on what you read.

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Thanks for being an RSS subscriber! If you have a blog, contact me and I'll add your feed to my reader.

And finally ... here's a couple of posts by other authors which I enjoyed recently from my own RSS feed:

• A Sociable Web

• How to do the RSS

I keep a photo collage with occasional videos on the snapshot page of my diary. It’s hosted on Google Photos and very easy to maintain. When I take a picture or video, I just add a caption and move it to a folder called “Instadiary” and it appears automatically on my website. No friction or fuss – all done from my phone when I’m out and about (or later in the evening).

I use a wordpress plugin called Phototonic and a little bit of custom CSS to display this how I want on my website, but you don’t even need to be that fancy. Google Photo albums come with a share link, so you can just create a cover image/button/link on your website that clicks through to that folder. It’s rough and ready (you have to click on videos/photos to see the caption), but it’s a free and quick way to display the montage on your blog.

One thing to be aware of if you share the folder directly – viewers can download the folder contents in the orginal resolution. If you care about that, then you might want to resize first before adding to the album.

I don’t use social media, and prefer to keep all my online journal activity on my own domain. Photo and video management can be costly and complex to manage yourself, so I don’t mind outsourcing that to Google. The important thing for me is ease of use – with my system, I can take a photo or video and add it immediately to my site. No need to post process or update a CMS or anything.

Since starting my montage in late 2022, I have added over 500 photos with captions. I don’t think I would have achieved that if I had to curate handmade galleries on my website instead.

Google photos can be exported using Takeout, but the caption data is stored in a seperate file which you would need special tooling to import into a new home. I have enough technical skill to not worry about that, but it’s a consideration if you want to avoid lock in.

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Thanks for being an RSS subscriber! If you have a blog, contact me and I'll add your feed to my reader.

And finally ... here's a couple of posts by other authors which I enjoyed recently from my own RSS feed:

• A Sociable Web

• How to do the RSS