Archive: 2024-02
Week 164: Under the Dome
I made a small accidental discovery that will improve my life: my waterproof Bluetooth speaker will send the forward command if I double-tap the play button. This means that when I’m in the shower and some irritating ad comes on (which is most of them, but especially Shopify ads with their repeated dinging antediluvian cash register sounds, and anyway I’m not interested in setting up an online store selling white supremacist merchandise at this time) I can skip right ahead past the annoyance.
Repairing a detached mandolin brace, laparoscopically
I picked up an Ibanez A-style mandolin with a collapsing top. I guessed that this would be due to a detached brace, and I’d seen a video of someone performing a repair via the f-hole, so I thought I’d try the same. It’s nothing fancy, just a plywood top, but that means that there’s no point paying a professional to repair it, and it’s ideal for me to have a go.
Week 163: Are those horses or cows?
I’m feeling much better at last. I’m coughing a lot less, which is great, because I broke a rib coughing a couple of weeks ago and it hurts to cough. At least that particular rib doesn’t hurt except when I cough or sleep on my left, and I usually sleep on my right. I have woken myself up a couple of times after rolling onto my left, however.
Week 162: It gets worse before it gets better
I spent most of last week curled up under a blanket. I’m not a person who likes to sit around doing nothing, but I really have done an awful lot of nothing. I don’t have a fever. It’s just a cold, but a pernicious one. It’s definitely worse than the time I had covid, which gave me only a couple of days of mild discomfort.
Everything I saw (and didn’t see) at FOSDEM 2024
If you share my interests, you might be able to consider this a curated list of FOSDEM talks from this year. But unless you’re actually me, you probably don’t. Maybe it’s useful as an indication of the kind of things you can see while traipsing across the ULB campus, up and down staircases and through occasionally dark and mysterious corridors.
Week 161: Across the Channel
I took the Eurostar to Brussels and back for FOSDEM at the weekend. I had a bit of a cold on Wednesday and Thursday, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to go. I didn’t sleep well on Thursday night, but I felt reasonably well on Friday morning, and decided that as long as it wasn’t covid (which it wasn’t), I’d catch my train that afternoon.