I think the Chemex is overrated. Ever since I started making pourover for Charlotte, the Chemex has been almost an aspiration. The Chemex is what you get if you're serious about pourover. When Charlotte smashed her old V60 flask, I decided to upgrade to the Chemex.

It's an undoubtedly beautiful object. Wood, leather, glass. The flask itself is a lovely shape. The pouring channel is so satisfying, and when you pour, the liquid in your cup makes a satisfying double-ended swirl that reminds me of a goat's horns. The whole thing is very tactile and pleasing.

However, it's such a frustrating device to use. I've watched countless (well, probably 10, which is a lot of videos to watch about how to use a flask) videos on how to use this thing, and the filter paper invariably falls into the pouring channel, which creates a vacuum in the flask which stops your coffee from dripping through. So you have to lift the filter out of the channel and stretch it and hope it seats across with enough tension not to fall again.

And it's so slow. Even when it's running properly it takes 2-3 times what the V60 took for the same volume of water. Almost to the point that your coffee's starting to get cold by the time it's finished dripping (this is solved by wrapping a towel around the thing but it's not a great solution!). Owing to the integrated collar, you have to wait for the entire drip to be finished before you can start to pour, and don't try to pour past the filter. The whole thing just irritates me, and the fact that it is heaped in universal praise just annoys me even more!

It is beautiful though.

Apple finally updated iOS to allow you to disable typing suggestions inline, without having to turn off the word/emoji suggestion bar thing. This is a Very Good Thing that I have wanted since they added the feature in the first place. I do not want help with typing. Never have; likely never will. Whether I need help is a matter of external opinion. It should be illegal to add new features to something, without adding the ability to disable them.

In the same update they increased the smallest minimum font size in the Books app to something which has made my current book approximately 50% longer (you do the math/s). Above all, I just don't really understand why I have control over the font's kerning, leading, and paragraph spacing, but not the its size, and it bugs me.

Apple: adding features I actively don't want, and removing things I'm using, since 2003.

I'm not ready to let go yet. Or, rather, I'm not ready to start letting go. I always knew we wouldn't be the only things in your life forever, but I didn't prepare myself for how it'd feel for that to start decreasing.

It feels horrendous.

My phone keeps showing me pictures of when you were tiny, and I think about when you needed me, and now you don't. I worry that I've set a bad example and that one day we'll be gone from each other's lives, and you'll talk about how you're not that close with your dad. And maybe it'll only affect you sometimes. Most of the time you'll be fine not hearing from me.

I worry that your friends aren't really your friends. I know I can't protect you from this forever, but that doesn't mean I don't want to. I know that trying to protect you doesn't really help you, and doesn't even feel like you're being protected, but seeing you sad is something I'll never be able to bear. And I know that's selfish to a degree, but it's not all selfish. If I could protect you from everything forever, I would.

Mostly I don't ever want you to mask around me. I know you already do. When I seem hard, and I'm not just being grumpy, it's because the world is hard. In my experience, the world tolerates some things, and I'm trying to share that knowledge with you to make your life easier. It's likely that I'm failing and I'm sorry. I never want you to feel that I don't think you're good enough just how you are.

I just want to be in your life forever. The older I get and the further I grow apart from my dad, the more scared I am that that'll happen with us and I can't think of anything worse. I'm so sorry for the mistakes I make; I'm doing all of this for the first time, but I am trying.

I love you, kid.

Things that take four hours or more:

• writing an importer for WordPress blog posts that gets URLs from XML export, then scrapes those URLs because the site uses ACF and that's the only way to get rendered markup that is actually useful for importing into non-WordPress systems
• watching the classic 1999 movie The Matrix twice
• driving from Brighton to Birmingham
• two Formula One Grand Prix
• editing a 30 second video
• getting a terrible night's sleep
• implementing and debugging one single custom Google Analytics 4 event in Google Tag Manager when it fires fine in Tag Manager but Analytics is not picking it up, and even after four hours you're not really done you've just washed your hands of the entire thing because life's too short to deal with this absolute cesspit of a product. It literally isn't even fit for its own purpose and I am done interacting with it.
• watching a Best of Lee Mack compilation on YouYube, twice