This evening we rented bikes and cycled into Amsterdam. It was about 12km in, but pretty flat, so we did it in about 35 minutes. When we got there we were both hungry so decided to grab a bite to eat and get a drink. We picked a random cafe. Hannah had her (not at all surprising) order of Fish and Chips and I had the worst steak I've ever ordered. After dinner we did a boat tour around the canals. I was hoping for one with some more narration, but we ended up on one that was more silly and boozy with minimal tour guide stuff. It was still fun, but I think I was after a little more mental nutrition especially since neither of us are drinking alcohol right now. Before heading back to Ripley, we took a detour to a coffee shop to pick up some supplies for the weekend. The cycle back was fun, but probably twice as far as we wanted given it was dark and cooling fast. Overall a really fun evening in Amsterdam
Thoughts
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We went for a little explore. There is a cool park just nearby with interesting scupltures, kids play activities, great trees and interesting landscaping.
We've arrived at a camper park about 12km outside Amsterdam. It's clean and well maintained, but a bit souless. I suppose that's what is actually useful here - it's a place to put one's van when visiting Amsterdam rather than an idyllic wilderness retreat. In the evening, we got the Metro into Amsterdam and wandered around looking at the city together. Our energy levels were low, so it wasn't a huge expedition, and after a bit of walking around, we found a really wonderful Italian restaurant called Santi & Santini (https://www.santiesantini.com). It was a 4.8 on google reviews and it was well deserved. We both had the Orecchiette al sugo di carne (Orecchiette, beef stew slow cooked for 8 hours in tomato sauce, pecorino cheese, celery, carrots, onion, laurer, red wine) - and it was really awesome comfort food - just what we both needed. Then, because it was late and we were tired, we treated ourselves to an Uber back to Ripley.
As part of our slow trip back to the UK, we're staying at a campsite near Eindhoven for a few days. This sunny Sunday, we went for a gorgeous walk in the nature around the area. There's a really nice lake nearby which we walked around. And I got to enjoy Hannah being excited at looking at animals.
Some more renders of the potential product
ELS Effigy happened early at 5pm. - It felt a bit weird it happening in the bright sun. But also the warmth made it feel a bit like being at Nowhere. Another strange dynamic is that it was open to the public, so there were loads of families and non burners there. It's obviously good to share our ceremonies and traditions with default world people, and the atmosphere was nice, but I think I'd have preferred something a little more intimate given I'd struggled to integrate with the ELS crowd as much as I'd have liked. Incredibly, my co-director of Burning Nest, Jeanne and I hadn't connected at the event prior to Effigy, but we found each other and got the obligatory selfie for the board Signal chat.
My friend Ben (and their partner, Ali) run an art project at Burning Nest called Troll Bar. There has been a Troll takeover at ELS.
I really like these posters for the Ten Principles of Burning Man.
The mornings at ELS appear to be conference style auditorium speaker slots. The event opened with the Burning Man CEO, Marian Goodell, giving a talk. I found it pretty alienating as the language was very much reinforcing their views that real burning happened at Burning Man and the regionals were like burning for kids who haven't graduated to the real thing yet. One line was "and there are some of you here that have never even been to Black Rock City - you should be so proud carrying on the culture without having experienced it". I've got so little interest in Burning Man - it seems so corporate and culty. And the American Burner scene seems so different to the Euroburner crowd. I honestly think they need to be looking to the regionals for culture & ideas. The fundamental problem is they see us as children rather than siblings. This trend carried on during the deep dive sessions where Burning Man type humans seemed to be saying that the reason that problem x existed at a regional is that as a younger event, they've not had time to implement Burning Man infrastructure / processes - but had an obliviousness that we actually want to do things our own way and sometimes explicitly differently. Our group was focused on "How to establish rules for acceptable behaviour (while allowing people to be free and self express, etc)". We got into interesting discussions about Implicit rules vs Explicit rules: Culture vs Values vs Guidelines vs Rules and how they interact.
Arrived at ELS! Ripley parked up at the venue with 3 or 4 other campers.
Morning coffee, watching the cows go by We just slept our first night in Ripley being able to share a bed at a farm just outside Nijmegen, Netherlands. The new side pods make a huge difference. I'm 5'11" / 184cm and was able to sleep all the way across the bed. Before fitting them, I had to sleep diagonally across the bed and Han would sleep on the sofa.
We arrived at the ferry. There was minimal departure fuss and we boarded straight away. We had a quick supper and then settled down in our lovely cabin. First time I've had a double bed on a ferry. Hannah was very excited about what a cute little room it was.
Disaster! We've spent the day cleaning every inch of Ripley, repacked every crate and stowed the garage neatly... We were leaving for the Ferry, just a couple of minutes late, but nothing bad. I pulled out of the driveway and, out of habit, turned as though I was in my car and not a 6.5m van. I swung into the gate post and heard a sickening crunch. The door is badly damaged and will almost certainly need replacing and repainting. So that's £2000 gone. On the plus side - new paint.
New 10" rack in place. From bottom to top: - Cat 6A Patch Panel - Unifi Flex 2.5G POE Switch - Unifi Cloud Gateway Fiber - Adtran XGS-PON (Fiber Modem) - GL.Inet POE KVM - Mac Studio (AI Lab) - Philips Hue Hub / Gateway Sad that the rack mount housing for my Mac Studio and the KVM haven't shown up yet, but it is now nice and neatly set up. The Mac Studio won't stay here forever, but is just going to sit here while my house is being finished and it can move into my home lab. The patch panel connects to the first wired access point a Unifi Pro 7 - But there's still 3 or 4 more to wire in over the next month or so
Unifi Flex 2.5G POE Switch doesn't come with a power supply?!? I get that in 2026, phone companies have decided not to ship chargers, nominally to prevent e-waste. And I get that this switch could be powered by PoE, so maybe some people don't need the power adapter... But not including power for this switch felt really cheap and shitty. It's not like it is even USB C powered - It needs a proprietary DC power supply for another £70 / $90. I think if there had been an AC bundle (that cost more) and a PoE option without the power supply, I'd be feeling less angry, but it feels annoying to now have to source the power supply mid project, because it feels like they were being sneaky with not mentioning in a very visible way that there was no power adapter. The only mention is the little tool tip buried in the product spec. To be fair, I could have clicked on "what's in the box", but it just never occurred to me that power would be optional.
The cupboards had a high lip in front of them meaning that any items stored inside, aren't visible to anyone under about 2m in height. In the food cupboard, this is bad as you can miss stuff that is there for eating and end up wasting stuff. In the other cupboards, you can find yourself fishing around in the bottom trying to find the thing. While she was in at Scandivans, we asked them to help solve the problem. They cut out a template and used the router to create this nice curved lip. It's now much easier to see what's in there and get things with minimal frustration.
Time to pick up Ripley from Scandivans. The side pods look awesome from the outside. They put coarse raptor paint on it and it looks really great. Inside, they've done a great job on fit out, but unfortunately, with the bed being so high and the mattress being so thick, there is not much space for feet or head. Peeling the mattress topper back shows that it will work well, but it's annoying that "new mattress" is an essential task now. It's always something. Either way - this is a massive upgrade for Ripley in terms of usability. Last year, we took a big awning with an attachable tent room to sleep in as the bed was unusable - hopefully this will allow for more ad-hoc nights.
We popped by Scandivans to visit Ripley mid surgery and talk to them about material choices for the interior fit out. They'd also replaced the main cabin window as the old one had started leaking badly, which is apparently not uncommon for these long vehicles as they flex quite a bit - and she's 7 years and 100,000+ miles old. Sam and his team are super detail focused and I am really confident we're going to get a result that we're really happy with.
I've started initially speccing the project. Here is a nice render done by ChatGPT of the concept. It maybe looks a bit more tactical and masculine than I was imagining, but it looks really cool.
My co-parent's home networking is a bit of a mess and doesn't work super well. She ended up getting a second fibre connection because the mesh wifi from the living room was really poor and her work calls were suffering. But then we've ended up with the situation where the printer is on one network, but not the other, so it's just an annoying and unreliable set up. My plan is to put Unifi Cloud Fiber Gateway and Mini PoE Switch in a neat 10' rack in a cupboard near her desk & access points in around the house via wired connections. With Unifi, it should be easier to give priority to work related traffic and solve a bunch of the performance issues.