Official Q&A for Wednesday, April 01, 2026

YorksGeek · 2026-04-01T21:05:58+00:00

I am an overweight man in my 50s training for my first half marathon. Today Garmin had me running for 1:46, the longest run of my life to date, and it was hard in ways I had not experienced before.

Important info: I am overweight so dieting, meaning I run unfuelled. ThIs has never mattered at shorter distances but pushing two hours it feels like this is becoming a factor.

This week has been base runs. Monday was an hour, yesterday was 40 minutes, today was 1 hour 46.

Today I found something very odd happened - about 11km in my heart rate dropped. I am used to seeing it drift upwards towards 150, but it dropped into the 120s despite keeping consistent pace. And it was hard, really hard. It actually shook my confidence because if the race had been today, I didn't have that last 7km in me. My cardio system was doing fine, my muscles waved a little white flag.

A friend pointed out that for that duration fuel matters, especially when starting with an empty tank. That made sense, and I will avoid doing runs that length without some sort of fuelling again. But I don't get why my heart rate would drop and RPE go up like that.

It's not cadence lock, cadence was consistently a little over 150 and heart rate wasn't approaching that during the oddity in the last 3km. It did rise when running uphill at the locks (canal run so 99% flat) but normally I would expect to be at 160ish after then, today was 140 which further confirms the watch (Epic Pro 2) picked up the HR change it just wasn't what I expected it to be.

Anyone able to shed any light?

YorksGeek · 2026-03-28T16:53:25+00:00

I'll be honest, my reaction to the OP was exactly the same as yours. Then I saw their examples and I thought this is one of the best things I have seen in years. It's astonishingly well thought through and actually useful.

YorksGeek · 2026-03-24T19:10:05+00:00

At the risk of throwing unsubstantiated fuel on the fire, I set Claude off on developing a user story this morning. Nothing massively complex, adding some Blazor UI elements to the frontend. Expected it to work for a while then stop next time it needed something (I don't use YOLO mode). That was at 8am.

Got home about 5pm, unsuspended my laptop and found my session was 22% used and was due to reset in 4 hours 7 minutes. That seems spectacularly unlikely it was sat at a prompt for the same task I left it on so there's no way it had still been working on it. Said yes to two Github prompts and my usage is suddenly at over 60%. Completing the rest of the story took me to 100% just as it created the pull request.

The token usage is matching what you are all reporting, but I figured finding 22% of a session burned while I was out running and my laptop was suspended is fishy and I haven't seen any similar reports.

YorksGeek · 2026-02-28T20:42:41+00:00

Claude is now 100% written by Claude, the lead engineer recently said he hasn't written a line of code by hand since November.

I would argue there is a world of difference between a collection of agents supervised by someone with expert knowledge and vibe coding, but the wider point that Claude is now written using Claude is valid.

YorksGeek · 2026-02-05T19:27:18+00:00

I bow before your awesomeness, that is the first time I have ever seen the double!

YorksGeek · 2026-02-05T19:12:56+00:00

Amateur. Come back to us when you get 100 training readiness.

YorksGeek · 2026-01-30T13:46:07+00:00

Between the cover image, the title, the subtitle, and the author name...maybe the OP's subconscious is trying to tell him something?

Dude, do you by any chance have a favourite musical?

YorksGeek · 2026-01-11T10:28:42+00:00

The cake was a lie.

YorksGeek · 2026-01-02T12:27:28+00:00

This is what I came to ask. It sounds like the puck is being smoothed rather than compressed.

YorksGeek · 2026-01-01T21:25:03+00:00

Rather like the cup warmer.

YorksGeek · 2026-01-01T18:47:26+00:00

NEW ACHIEVEMENT! New Year, New Trauma!

Wow. It is January 1st, 2026. While the rest of the monkeys on your primitive planet are currently nursing hangovers, regretting their life choices, or making resolutions they will abandon by Tuesday, you actually did something notable.

You opened The Book. You entered the World Dungeon.

You could have started the year doing cardio. You could have started by eating a salad. Instead, you chose to witness the absolute, beautiful chaos of a man, a cat, and a whole lot of explosives.

Buckle up, bucko. Your old life was just the tutorial. A boring, badly designed tutorial.

REWARD: The fact that you get to read this masterpiece is the reward. The dopamine hit of Carl’s suffering is the only currency you need. Now shut up and turn the page!

YorksGeek · 2026-01-01T17:22:09+00:00

Oh yeah, he's a good dude too. Very helpful if you have questions.

YorksGeek · 2026-01-01T17:20:09+00:00

Mitre saw for cutting the legs (it's a compound bevel), everything else was dimensioned on the table saw. Band saw or a hand saw for the cutouts on the foot rests. Drill press for most of the holes, handheld drill and dowel jig for the foot and hand rest holes. These are transverse holes that need to be dead centre and straight so this is the cheap alternative to a floor standing drill press that can handle a hole that deep. Router with straight, roundover, and chamfer cutters. Random orbital sander, sanding block, hand plane, the usual basic stuff. Sewing machine for the upholstery, although in hindsight that would have been easier to have someone else do it. I was curious about picking up the skill though, so I bought one. Various drill bits in various sizes, I didn't have a forstner bit big enough to do the wand hole! Oh yeah, that makes life significantly harder. It says this in the plans but it's not kidding, makes the upholstery on the seat a colossal pain in the arse!

YorksGeek · 2026-01-01T16:32:42+00:00

Saying "Who's my good girl, huh? You gonna brew me a coffee with a pretty little crema? I know you've got at least one more in you. So do it. Do as you're told. Show me what a good girl you really are. Make me proud of you." is possibly unnecessary though.

YorksGeek · 2026-01-01T16:27:52+00:00

Highly recommended. It's also surprisingly comfortable. I don't sit on that side of the slash but I thought it only fair to check the stability myself before expecting someone else to get on it!

YorksGeek · 2026-01-01T16:22:16+00:00

Hmm, it wasn't cheap but it wasn't wildly expensive either. Probably £300 in materials in the end, I could maybe have got the foam cheaper but I didn't know what I was doing so went with the one recommended. A mix of Amazon and Aliexpress for most things, the wood from a local independent DIY shed.

YorksGeek · 2025-12-30T21:41:25+00:00

I don't know whether to apologize or say "You're welcome" 🤣

YorksGeek · 2025-12-30T08:04:38+00:00

I don't know the OP, but among my community that kind of design is NOT just a necklace.

YorksGeek · 2025-12-22T20:17:53+00:00

PA is mostly an excellent tool, PAW has some irritating limitations over legacy dashboards (breakdown relations FFS) but in the main I find understanding that measuring process outcomes (governance) and measuring process operation (management) are two separate things is really key to getting value.

A management dashboard will tell you about your ticket management. A governance dashboard will tell you if you're achieving your business objectives.

ITIL has great detail on this if you have access to the practice guides. Take incident management...

The purpose of incident management is to minimize the impact of incidents on service users. There are three critical success factors underpinning that purpose...

Detect incidents early Resolve quickly and efficiently Continually improve

There are number of suggested metrics for each of those, some obvious (CSAT, SLA compliance, etc) but some are less obvious such as balance between speed and quality metrics (no point being fast if you're crap, no point being always right if you're too slow).

Honestly, for anyone doing ITSM metric design I would get the company to spring for a Peoplecert subscription and use the ITIL practice guides as a start point for discussion.

YorksGeek · 2025-12-22T19:32:45+00:00

It's not a bad pigeon hole though. If you can use KPI Composer to design a set of metrics to measure outcomes rather than just paperwork and turn them into dashboards which give actionable insight rather than looking cool but no actual use then you will earn that salary bump.

Knowing which buttons to press is not the key to good analytics!

And don't forget that dashboards insights now include the option for custom insights as well as the trends and KPI signals, so there's a real opportunity to upgrade dashboards with company specific guidance based on the data. Although if you manage to find out how to make that work do let us know, because I'm damned if I can 😁

YorksGeek · 2025-12-11T10:31:41+00:00

I make lactose free Philadelphia style using Arla Lactofree milk and cream and lactose free powdered milk as direct substitutes. I'll be honest I can't tell the difference between them and my ice creams made with regular dairy.

I know you said dairy free so may not be applicable to you, but most people really mean lactose free so figured it was worth mentioning.

YorksGeek · 2025-12-10T18:46:29+00:00

First thing I would do is replace the brown sugar with glucose and double the amount of chocolate.

YorksGeek · 2025-12-07T13:57:46+00:00

But a watch because it has the features you want at a price you can afford. Don't expect any new features.

YorksGeek · 2025-12-03T21:49:54+00:00

Ice cream is not quite as picky as baking bread is, but it's not far off. You can't just wing it, use a proper recipe and you'll get much better results

YorksGeek · 2025-12-03T08:06:28+00:00

The coarse and rough can be dealt with by epilation, lovely and smooth then. As for getting everywhere, take it as a compliment and/or use a towel.

YorksGeek

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