The programme was some of his older work followed by a UK première of his Dark Lights album for electronics and chamber orchestra. I sat right in front of the stage and felt completely immersed.

The hinge on L—’s laptop broke, though through wear and tear rather than an accident (like when I dropped mine on the floor). I looked on eBay for viable used ThinkPads and found one that was very cheap (about £80) and in excellent condition apart from some keys that didn’t work. It was a T470s, exactly the same as the one I fixed, which meant that I had a spare keyboard of exactly that model.

In fact, not only did I have a keyboard, the half-a-ThinkPad in the loft had a better processor, too, and I had spare RAM and an SSD that were an improvement on what was in there, so I transplanted the motherboard across, repasting the heatsink in the process, and installed the SSD and RAM.

The Frankensteined laptop needed an operating system, and for her needs that has to be Windows. Windows 10 is nearly at its end of life, so I went for Windows 11. That wasn’t straightforward, because the processor is slightly too old to be officially supported. It works – in fact, the original SSD had Windows 11 running on it – the installer just won’t let you install it without a bit of a workaround.

However, that workaround requires a computer running Windows, and I don’t have one of those. I first needed to run a Windows virtual machine on my computer, so that I could run [Rufus] and build an install image with the CPU check patched out (and, as a bonus, some of the bloat not installed by default). [Rufus]: https://rufus.ie/en/

But that wasn’t easy, either, because of AI. Let me explain. I used quickget and quickemu to download and set up a virtual machine. In the past, this worked very smoothly, and lived up to its promise that

quickget automatically downloads the upstream OS and creates the configuration

Nowadays, however, every second website has some kind of bot challenge, because badly-behaved LLM agents are DDoS-ing the web, and quickemu can’t fetch the virtio-win.iso CD image it needs at boot to give the installer the drivers it needs to see the virtual hard disk. Unfortunately, it doesn’t realise that it failed; all that happens is that the fragment of HTML that it saves in an unusable .iso file doesn’t load properly.

Jobs, a habitable planet, politics, culture, the very epistemic basis of knowledge itself, and now downloading a .iso file. Truly, there is nothing that the AI boom can’t make worse.

I eventually sorted it out, wrote the patched installer to a USB drive, and installed Windows 11.

I went about cleaning up the default installation and adding programs she wanted. The stock experience of Windows 10 and 11 is awful, full of annoyances and distractions and unnecessary software and services, but under all that there’s actually a perfectly usable and, actually, pretty snappy operating system. It wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’s not bad! If only Microsoft had any respect for their users, they could ship a good operating system.

Windows 11 comes with PowerShell and WinGet, so you can install software – including third-party software – via a command-line tool, rather than having to search for an installer and avoid getting scammed. You can also uninstall Windows components and programs, and it turns out that if you remove all the Bing components, and the widgets, and CoPilot, it runs very well, and no longer needs all that processing power and RAM just to stand still. Thus, another computer is saved from planned obsolescence.

The Pope released his encyclical, Magnifica humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. I wouldn’t normally find myself in the position of eagerly awaiting a papal encyclical, and I don’t think that you’ve entirely gotta hand it to the Catholic Church, and even though I’m sick of hearing about AI and even sicker of being obliged to engage with its output when other people employ the infernal machines to produce software, I am interested in what people who actually read, and write, and think deeply about these things have to say.

Unfortunately, he did not call for a Butlerian jihad crusade against the thinking machines. Alas.

It’s very long, and I’ve only given it a quick first reading so far, but there’s a lot of thought on the relationship of humanity to technology, and the inability of machines to make moral or artistic choices, and the antagonism of capitalism and war to human dignity and the planet. I would characterise it, more than anything else, as a very humanistic document. It’s very quotable:

If a system is designed or used in a way that treats some lives as less worthy, or excludes them without the possibility of appeal, then it is not merely a tool “to be used well,” since it has already introduced criteria that contradict the inalienable dignity of the human person. For this reason, ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes; it must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it.

Whether those of his flock in positions of power and influence (JD Vance or Tony Blair, for example) will read and act on it, I don’t know. I suspect not.

We now have a Green Party-led coalition running Southwark Council as a result of the local elections. There was an extraordinary general meeting of Southwark Green Party earlier in the week to vote on the proposed coalition, which we both attended remotely. There are dangers to any coalition, but they’re pretty normal in countries with less absurd voting systems, and I think if you have the opportunity to effect political change you should take it. And this means I personally know some of the people running the council after knocking doors and delivering leaflets with them.

Our Labour MP is taking it extremely normally:

This was, of course, in your former role before you jumped ship with other Marxists no longer welcome in Labour. I suspect your impact will be just as grim in your new role, but wanted to flag up some concerns at the outset.

Despite this atrocity in the community I serve, you shamefully ignored the police advice on counter-terrorism measures on Borough High Street — prioritising a cycle lane instead.

(I have no idea how a cycle lane is supposed to hamper counter-terrorism.) But there’s a backstory to his antipathy, and Coyle has form for behaving badly.

James McAsh’s reply was perfect:

I will not attempt to respond to the many factual inaccuracies in your letter, in which even my name is misspelled. Instead, I will liaise with the Chief Executive to find a time for the three of us to meet and discuss any issues affecting your constituents.

I’m glad it’s a bit cooler. I can’t really cope with the heat. On Saturday, I made it about halfway through preparing my bike to cycle to Sanshinkai practice before I realised that I was already so overheated and agitated that there was no chance of achieving anything. On such a hot day, there’s no good way to get there. Cycling involves hills. (I could hire an electric bike, but without a luggage rack I can’t take my sanshin.) Buses aren’t air-conditioned, and the Tube is whatever the opposite of air-conditioned is. The Overground and Elizabeth line are cool, but there’s too much walking at the other end for that kind of weather.

Some links:

• ESP-Osito. This is the kind of software development that inspires and excites me. “You can buy a ‘Cheap Yellow Display’ for $10. That is a dual core CPU, gigabytes of storage, a full color touchscreen and more. If we treat it like a real computer, that is a $10 computer. In our modern world, this is hundreds of times slower than your phone. But … it is hundreds of times faster than a Palm Pilot. And on palm pilot apps started instantly. And the device turned on/off in under a second. Have you seen how long your good pocket computer takes to TURN OFF? So, let’s take something cheap and make it good.”
• Harper: The Private Grammar Checker: Works locally and doesn’t use an LLM.
• Unintended Consequences. “As you read this, please think about the echoing thought of ‘this is what we are burning the planet for.’”
• Unlawful by design: Exposing the human rights costs of generative AI. From Amnesty International: “This briefing examines how standalone generative AI systems, based on unlawful web scraping, are in conflict with international human rights law (IHRL) and standards through their design, development and deployment. While these technologies promise sophisticated automation and efficiency, they rely on data collection and model training practices that abuse privacy rights, enable discrimination, and threaten freedom of expression and thought.”
• Package Manager Threat Models.
• The UK has 90 taxes. Here they all are. An interactive visualisation.
• Pinsent Masons: LA AI, MVB and NVB. A law firm gets in trouble. “Readers of AI hallucination cases have been to this rodeo before: rely on hallucinations, get found out, create minimal viable bullshit (MVB) to try and dig oneself out of the first hole, find the second hole is much bigger and deeper because minimally viable BS is in fact non-viable (NVB).”
• End of an Era: Iconic Shibuya Hands to Close After 48 Years I think I’ve visited this shop every time I’ve been in Tokyo. It’s a warren of three seven- and eight-storey buildings with different floor heights, linked by a staircase, full of all kinds of hobby paraphernalia.
• Under the Hood: Building a Real-Time Chord Recognizer. “Piano players often leave out notes that a dictionary entry might expect. Extended chords add notes that no fixed dictionary entry anticipates. […] What you actually need is a scoring model.”
• The Grove Remembers. The now-infamous AI-written Granta prize-winning short story, analysed. “Every overlapping n-gram in the story, drawn against a web-scale corpus — so you can see which phrases the writer invented, and which ones the world had already said.”
• AI-slop, GrantaGate and Bad Writing. It writes like that because it’s regurgitating sequences from bad fan fiction.

Friday was also hot, and I decided to spend it walking in the countryside. I followed Saturday Walkers Club’s Harlington to Flitwick route, cutting off a couple of kilometres between Priestly Farm and Flitwick at the end to get back home at a reasonable time. I don’t know the exact distance, but it was at least 20 km.

I saw plenty of wildlife: a deer (possibly a muntjac); a cock pheasant; a couple of red kites; some kind of large raptor being harried by a crow until it flew away.

It was hot and tiring, but a good way to spend a day off.

We did half of our Sanshinkai practice in the park on Saturday. I appreciated the cool breeze, but I think the dancers appreciated it more. A few curious passers by came to watch and ask questions.

I restored an old film camera. It’s an Olympus Pen S, a beautiful tiny manual half-frame camera (i.e. it takes portrait photos that are half the width of a normal 35mm frame) designed by Yoshihisa Maitani in the late 1950s. I have the version with a 30 mm f/2.8 lens. I picked it up cheap, and as far as I can tell there’s nothing wrong with it beyond some degraded light seals.

I measured and cut new seals and installed them. As to how well it worked, I’ll have to wait until I’ve finished off the roll of film and had it developed, and even the 72-frame roll of film (two frames per normal frame) and had it developed. If they’re good, I’ll post the SVG templates for the benefit of others.

Someone from Openreach came to carry out the initial stages of fibre installation. They couldn’t get the cable to the front of our house, though, because the duct is buried under two layers of paving slabs. It seems that whichever cowboys installed the ugly paving in front of our house just laid them directly on a set of very similar ugly paving.

The suction device he used to lift the paving – like a reverse hovercraft that stuck itself onto the slab and provided a grab handle – was impressive, though.

They’re going to come back and install a box in the pavement in front of our house, but we still have to figure out how to get the cable across. Ideally, we’d get rid of the slabs entirely, but I don’t think that will happen in time, and if we don’t we’ll end up with an exposed cable run across the top that makes it harder to sort out the front garden in the future.

That’s all for now: it’s too hot!

Sometimes I’m working on some code that is incomplete, or is speculative, or there’s another reason that I don’t want to push it to the remote branch yet, but I need to swap from my desktop to my laptop or vice versa.

Git is a distributed version control system, but I think people often forget what that implies. A git repository can be as simple as a directory available via ssh, which means that your other computer is already a git repository as long as you can ssh to it.

Furthermore, you don’t have to go through the ceremony of setting your other computer up as a named git remote; if you can ssh to it, you can access it directly using a properly-constructed URL:

git push ssh://mylaptop.local/~/path/to/repo

You can do this for pull, push, fetch, and any other command where you’d normally use a named remote.

There are some caveats:

1. The remote directory has to have a git repository already; if not, you’ll have to ssh in and create one with git init path/to/repo (it will even create the intervening directories for you).
2. You can’t (by default) push to the currently active branch on the remote; create or use a different branch instead.

But most of the time, I’ve already been working on the same codebase on the other machine. I have something that isn’t quite ready yet, so I make a work-in-progress commit on a new branch, send it across, and pick up where I left off.

I knew that some Kindles were going to be no longer supported, but I didn’t know mine was one of them, because their generation-based naming scheme is hard to keep up with, especially when it isn’t marked on the device itself.

It’s not just that you can’t download new books, it’s a complete cessation of service. If you reset the device, it will never work again.

You can continue to read books already downloaded on these devices, but you will not be able to purchase, borrow, or download additional books on them after that date.

That’s bearable.

If you deregister or factory reset these devices, you will not be able to re- register or use these devices in any way.

What the hell, man?

I have decrypted and backed up every Kindle book L— and I ever bought, and I don’t think I’ll be inclined to pay them for any more ebooks, even though I also have a newer model that is still supported, and I don’t think I’d buy another Kindle reader after this, not least because you can borrow books from the library and read them on a Kobo, but not on a Kindle.

I prefer reading paper books, but an ereader is useful on holiday when I want to minimise weight. For that, there’s the catalogue of Standard Ebooks to work through.

I’ve had enough of typing passwords and I was finally irritated enough to find the solution. I can now unlock my computers with a PIN and a hardware token and every day is slightly less inconvenient.

I stayed away from central London on Saturday out of caution after seeing the aggression around last year’s racist jamboree, but it seems like it was much smaller than last time. A rare example of a positive change in the current political climate.

Quite a few links this week:

• French researcher cracks 4,000-year-old Elamite script from Iran. The key that unlocked it was a repeated name.
• The Irish language is having a moment — and running out of time.
• Train Your Own LLM From Scratch: “A hands-on workshop where you write every piece of a GPT training pipeline yourself, understanding what each component does and why.”
• Height hunt is “a quest to find and visit every possible height restriction sign in the UK.” They’re more complicated than you might think. This kind of proper nerdy stuff is the internet at its best.
• Welsh names and places deserve basic respect. Dw i’n cytuno’n llwyr.
• [Unofficial] UK Government Mirror: “An unofficial mirror of every UK Government Github repository, to preserve repositories that are removed or made private. Updated at least weekly.”
• The Virtual OS Museum. “This is a virtual museum of [over 570] operating systems (and standalone applications) running under emulation, implemented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM.”
• Paterson Listings: “Tim Paterson’s DOS listings, containing source code of 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, various PC-DOS 1.00 pre-release kernels and utilities, and the Microsoft BASIC-86 Compiler runtime library.”
• Snack giant Calbee switches to black and white packaging as Iran war hits ink supplies. And gets a lot of free publicity, which might be the real goal.
• Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments.
• Ontario auditors find doctors’ AI note takers routinely blow basic facts. “Nine out of 20 AI systems reportedly ‘fabricated information and made suggestions to patients’ treatment plans” that weren’t discussed in the recordings.’”
• Who will maintain the web when PHP’s veterans retire? PHP is the asbestos of web development.

Recently, I ended up typing my password into a Slack window while trying to unlock my computer. By the time I’d realised that it wasn’t locked but had merely blanked the screen, my muscle memory was far ahead of my brain. As I went through the hassle of updating my password and brain, I couldn’t help wondering whether there was a better way.

The solution I’ve found lets me unlock my computer with a short PIN and my U2F key, and to use just the key for sudo.

These instructions are for Debian with Gnome; they will probably work on Ubuntu, and for other distributions and desktop environments you might have to make some changes.

Setting up the SoloKey

First, you need to set the PIN on your U2F key. I have an original SoloKey (two of them, in fact), so I need to use the solo1 command. This is afflicted by bitrot, but if you have Python installed you can work around the problem:

pip install pipx
pipx install --preinstall "fido2==0.9.3" solo1

This installs solo1 in its own Python virtual environment. You can now use this to set the PIN:

~/.local/bin/solo1 key set-pin

Obviously, choose a PIN you won’t forget, and/or make a note somewhere.

If you have a different type of U2F key, you’ll have to use their tools for setting the PIN; the rest of the process is the same.

Configuring PAM

Now, install the relevant PAM library and tools:

sudo apt install libpam-u2f pamu2fcfg

Next, you need to enroll your key. Plug it in and run:

pamu2fcfg | sudo tee /etc/u2f_mappings

You’ll be asked to enter your PIN, then press the button. You can enroll additional keys, but note the additional parameters:

pamu2fcfg -n | sudo tee -a /etc/u2f_mappings

For a multi-user system with multiple key holders you’ll have to do something a bit more complicated so that you end up with one line per user.

It’s a good idea to restrict permissions on the mappings file:

sudo chmod 600 /etc/u2f_mappings

Authenticating sudo

To authenticate sudo by clicking on the key, enter the following line into /etc/pam.d/sudo above @include common-auth:

auth sufficient pam_u2f.so authfile=/etc/u2f_mappings cue

Putting this before common-auth means that you won’t be asked for a password if U2F authentication succeeds. Using sufficient (rather than required) allows it to fall back to password authentication if you don’t have your key to hand.

Save the file but don’t close the editor yet. Open a new terminal, and test that it’s working:

sudo echo OK

You should see something like Please touch the FIDO authenticator followed by OK once you have done so.

Unlocking the computer

The procedure for unlocking is similar. This time, the relevant file is /etc/pam.d/gdm-password, and once again we add a line above @include common-auth:

auth sufficient pam_u2f.so authfile=/etc/u2f_mappings cue pinverification=1

The addition of pinverification=1 tells the system to prompt for the PIN in addition to asking you to press the button. This prevents someone who gains physical access to the key from authenticating unless they also know the PIN. You can add the same constraint to sudo if you wish, depending on your threat model.

Thanks to Jookia, Karubits and Yubico for helping me fill in some of the blanks.

I’ve been busy with the local elections recently, and especially on election day itself on Thursday. I woke just after 6 and spent a few hours delivering election day leaflets to identified Green supporters to encourage them to get out and vote.

After work, L— and I spent an hour telling outside a polling station – that’s the thankless task of standing outside in the cold asking people if you can check off their poll number so that they don’t end up getting disturbed later on. After that, we went to knock on the doors of people to encourage them to vote before polls closed at 10.

All that is a lot of work, and walking, and doing things that I really don’t particularly enjoy, but the past few months paid off: in the target ward (Rotherhithe) we got two out of three Green candidates elected.

Because the effort was focused on wards identified as winnable, in our own ward of Surrey Docks there was no activity and only paper candidates. In the final count, however, the Green candidate who came fourth was only 27 votes away from third place. It’s a shame, but it bodes well for the general election.

For Greens in Southwark it was a good result: Labour no longer have control (down from 52 out of 63 councillors at the last vote) and the council is now split: 29 Labour; 22 Green; 12 Liberal Democrat.

I completely wrecked my voice shouting over the din at the celebrations on Friday night; I was still a bit croaky on Sunday.

We dropped into the Surrey Docks Farm Spring Fair on Saturday, where a friend was singing with the London Sea Shanty Collective. That was a lot of fun to listen to.

I left after their first performance with the intention of cycling to Sanshinkai practice, but a busy week, not enough sleep, and a late night on Friday caught up with me and I took a 1½-hour nap instead.

I’m going to Electromagnetic Field (aka EMF Camp) 2026 in July. I went for the first time in 2024, and loved it. This year, however, the tickets sold out within seconds, before I could even open the drop-down menu and click “buy”, and I resigned myself to missing it unless I managed to snag a last-minute ticket again. But I also submitted a couple of talk proposals. One was accepted, so I was able to buy a ticket without needing gamer reflexes, at a bit of a discount.

It’s a talk proposal that I first sketched out a few years ago, and it’s been percolating in my mind for a long time. I’m looking forward to making it real at last.

I’ve heard far too much of that excessively auto-tuned new song by the Strokes on the radio this week. I hope it drops out of 6 Music’s playlist soon.

Links:

• PicoHDMI “leverages the RP2350’s dedicated HSTX (High-Speed Transmit) peripheral with hardware TMDS encoding. No bit-banging, no overclocking required: just near-zero CPU overhead for video output.”
• FastCGI: 30 Years Old and Still the Better Protocol for Reverse Proxies.
• Influential study touting ChatGPT in education retracted over red flags. But after a year and 504 citations, much damage is already done. “It really seemed like a paper that should not have been published in the first place.”
• AMY is a high-performance fixed-point synth library, written in C, that runs on almost anything and implements Juno-style analogue, DX7-style FM, and wavetable synthesis as well as sample playback.
• Palantir Workers Are Finally Noticing The Skulls On Their Caps.
• Your hex editor should color-code bytes. Makes a convincing case.
• AI as a Fascist Artifact.
• Beans is How: “A campaign to double global bean consumption by 2028”.
• Mythos: Backlash builds over NHS plan to hide source code from AI hacking risk. “NHS England is pulling its open-source software from the internet because of fears around computer-hacking AI models like Mythos. Opposition is growing among those who say the move is bad for transparency and efficiency, and will also do nothing to improve security”.
• Keep things open: it makes things better. An open letter asking NHS England to keep its code open.
• That “Pending PayPal Charge” Email Is a Scam — Even Though It Really Came From PayPal. “PayPal lets anyone send small amounts of money to anyone else, and that PayPal will dutifully email the recipient a notification. […] PayPal’s system then automatically generates and sends you a real, legitimate, fully-authenticated email confirming the transaction. Here’s the catch: the email’s subject line is whatever the scammer typed when they set up the payout. PayPal doesn’t sanitize it.” Eek.

I bumped into a few people I knew, and chatted as I followed the troupe for the first hour.

If you’re wondering about the huge (mock) cleavers, that’s the Deptford Gut Girls, who celebrate the women who worked in the Foreign Meat Market in Deptford in the late 19th century:

One of the most unpleasant jobs was cleaning cattle and sheep intestines, which were used for making sausage skins (and, according to a later source, condoms). Originally men’s work, in about 1891 they went on strike for more pay: management responded by assigning the work to women. The wages were still much higher than most working class women and ten times higher than ‘going into service, which is what they were eventually forced to do.

As well as drummers, there were pipers of various kinds, and people playing guitar, banjo, concertinas, accordions, and even a hurdy gurdy. Somehow, they all managed to play together, and it sounded much more cohesive than you might expect from such a motley assortment.

I peeled off at St Nicholas’ church (where Christopher Marlowe is buried) and walked down the high street for lunch at the Waiting Room.

When I set up my new phone a few weeks ago, I configured Syncthing to upload new photos, but without downloading the old ones to my new phone. At least, that was my intention, but at some point it had synchronised the other way and deleted the old photos everywhere.

I had set it to keep backups for a week, but more than a week had elapsed by the time I realised.

This still wouldn’t be a problem except that I hadn’t got round to sorting and importing pictures into my photo management program for a few months.

After a bit of panic, I realised that the photos were still on my old phone, which was switched off, so I just walked down the street until I was out of range of our home network, switched the phone on, and set it to aeroplane mode. Back at home, I plugged it in and pulled all the photos off via USB.

And then I remembered that I had taken a backup of that phone just before I bought the new one, so it was never going to be as catastrophic as it seemed in the moment.

Nonetheless, it’s a reminder: synchronisation alone is not a backup strategy.

Unfortunately, thanks to “AI” companies having bought up all disks (as well as memory and graphics cards) and made them unaffordable, backups are no longer quite so easy. Yet another thing ruined by LLMs!

I spent a quarter of an hour running around the house on Friday night trying to work out where I’d put my music stand. I searched high and low, and even in the loft, but it was nowhere to be seen.

It was in the middle of the living room with a score open on it. You’d think that would be obvious, but I was oblivious: I was looking for a small black folded package, not the deployed stand. L— saw the stand, but assumed I was looking for a different one, because surely I couldn’t fail to see something so conspicuous. No, really, I could.

The Sanshinkai performance at Yokimono Market on Saturday went well. We ended up playing both sets an hour later than scheduled because, although we had sent detailed instructions to the organisers, no one had communicated the staging requirements to the people responsible on the ground.

Whether in Dalston or Stratford, Yokimono always seems to be the most chaotic of all the events we play, but it’s popular. Both sets went well, and we finished before the rain started; we were covered, but the audience wasn’t, and it would be a downer if everyone ran for shelter in the middle of a performance.

Although it rained in the early evening, the weather was lovely for most of the day. Between sets, I took advantage of the proximity of Westfield to escape the captive pricing and massive queues, picked up a marinara pizza from Franco Manca – still good value, even if the price has now broken above £7 – and ate it on the river bank under a weeping willow. It would have been even better if I’d chosen a spot without ants.

I had a bit of success in speeding up a slow connection negotiation process at $CLIENT. This is a tool that attempts to connect to a router via a UDP protocol. The previous algorithm tried each network device in turn, and ran through three attempts with a generous timeout before trying the next one. If the relevant device was low down the list, it could take several minutes.

Instead, I rewrote it try each device once with a short timeout, then repeat with a slightly longer timeout, then finally a longer one still. This typically finds the connection in a few seconds.

My new toothbrush arrived, although as you’ll find out, that was really last week’s news. I didn’t necessarily want to buy a new electric toothbrush, but my old one stopped working. I replaced the battery last year and had hoped that it would manage another decade, but it seems that opening it up compromised the seal and it corroded on the inside.

I don’t mind using an old-fashioned manual toothbrush, but the dentist seems insistent that I should use an electric toothbrush (with a pressure sensor).

After reading around a bit, I ordered a Suri 2.0. It’s well reviewed, it looks stylish, it’s less covered in gunk-harbouring greebling than most of the other ones, and it promises less plastic waste. And as it uses vibration rather than an oscillating head it doesn’t have any moving parts to nip my tongue.

The toothbrush is great. The online purchasing experience, not so great.

16 April:

We’re busy putting the finishing touches to your SURI order and we’ll keep you updated on its journey and tracking details as we get ready to ship it soon.

22 April, after I enquired whether it would be shipped soon, given that it was supposed to be 48 hour delivery:

Your order is still being prepared and hasn’t been dispatched yet. You’ll receive a shipping confirmation and tracking details as soon as your order leaves our warehouse.

25 April, after I sent an email cancelling the order, because I realised I could just buy one in Boots instead:

We’ve finished packing your SURI order #XXXXXXX, and it’s now ready to leave our warehouse with our delivery partner.

If your delivery service includes tracking, we’ll send you an update once your parcel is on the way.

27 April, after they read the email asking to cancel:

I’ve checked your order, and it’s currently marked as delivered.

And there, in the screenshot, was a Royal Mail tracking number and the detail that it was delivered two days before they told me it was still being prepared, and five days before they told me they had finished packing it:

Your item was delivered on 20-04-2026

Maybe I should have checked the post room every day just in case they had sent it when they said they hadn’t, but it’s a big building and the post room is enough of a mess that I don’t generally go hunting for parcels I’ve been led to believe aren’t there.

Again, I’m very happy with the toothbrush, but it seems you’d be better off buying one from a retailer with more business-to-consumer experience.

I started trying to tidy up my office at home, which has been a disaster since I dumped everything in there after our house was renovated. There’s a long way to go, but it’s a start.

Everybody loves the London Marathon except for those of us for whom it’s an annual inconvenience. We don’t live near the marathon; no, we’re surrounded on three sides by it. You can’t cross the road; you can’t take the tube without queueing for hours to get into the station; there are crowds hooting and hollering everywhere. And, even worse, apparently they want to make it a two-day event next year.

At least we have a few underpasses and bridges that cross the route near here, so we were able to escape to the riverward side of the route and cycle along the Thames to the South Bank.

At the Hayward Gallery, we met a friend and visited a combined double exhibition.

Yin Xiuzhen’s installation was charming, and varied in scale from tiny and whimsical cities stitched from old cloths to a vast heart in which a dozen people can sit.

Pictures can’t capture the sheer amount of thread in Chiharu Shiota’s installation. It’s like several cat’s cradles, each the size of a room, and had me puzzled just trying to work out how you’d even construct such a thing.

If you time your visit well, I hear that you can even see performers get in and out of the beds through some invisible gaps in the webs. (We didn’t.)

I’ll be playing sanshin and guitar and singing with London Okinawa Sanshinkai at Yokimono Market in Stratford this coming Saturday. We’re doing two half-hour sets, one at 12:00 and the other at 15:30.

Fun fact: the Japanese word for set in the context of a musical performance is ステージ (sutēji), from English stage. And stage shouldn’t be mixed up with スタジオ (sutajio) which means studio. It can get confusing in a multilingual setting.

I slightly regret missing Haggis Ruby. It would have been an excellent excuse for a trip to Glasgow, and I was tempted.

However, I’m avoiding conferences this year because I can’t face the prospect of being trapped in a room having AI explained at me. I would be very keen to attend a 100% Generative AI Free conference somewhere reachable by train, if anyone wants to promise such a thing.

Slow Horses is good, isn’t it? We’re very late to the party, but that means we won’t run out for a while. I have a lot or respect for Gary Oldman for making himself quite so repulsive in it: I fully believe that that shirt wasn’t washed at any point during the making of the first two seasons.

I have a prediction: some time between now and the local elections on 7 May, BBC News will run another set of migrant-bashing headlines like their recent “undercover investigation” into immigration lawyers.

Links:

• The people do not yearn for automation. “But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! The entire human experience cannot be captured in a database. That’s the limit of software brain. That’s why people hate AI. It flattens them.”
• Do I belong in tech anymore? “Ironically, what I’ve gained from AI is a deeper appreciation for human communication, in all its messy imperfection.” This rings true to me too.
• parli_protect for Drupal. “The Parliament Protect module will protect your website from UK Parliament. There are two options for protection: A silly form asking for far too much personal information or a simple message to be displayed.” There’s a convenient list of IP addresses in the source if you too want to inconvenience the MPs responsible for the Online Safety Act.
• Tunera Type Foundry offers attractive and usable free SIL-licensed fonts.
• Nebula Sans is Nebula’s new brand typeface, based on Source Sans, free under the SIL Open Font License.
• How To Create A Responsive Navigation Menu Using Only CSS.
• FontCrafter: Create Your Handwriting Font for Free. Print page, write letters, scan, get font.
• On the acceptance of GenAI. “If any of these facts are new to you, you haven’t been doing your due diligence.”
• Debunking zswap and zram myths. “If in doubt, prefer to use zswap. Only use zram if you have a highly specific reason to.”
• Piper is a “fast and local neural text-to-speech engine that embeds espeak-ng for phonemization.”
• The Necessary Pain Involved in Blogging (if you want your work to be preserved beyond your lifespan).
• File Wizard is a “self-hosted, browser-based utility for file conversion, OCR and audio transcription.” Can be run via a Docker image.
• Document Converter Pro is “A powerful, Docker-based document and image conversion application with a modern web interface built using Streamlit. Convert between multiple document and image formats with ease, including batch processing capabilities.”
• Modern Frontend Complexity: essential or accidental? Presents an alternative: “We can utilize HTMX, HTML Web Components and a templating language to build websites and apps in a way much more aligned with how the browser works - without sacrificing user experience, complex features or developer experience.”
• DSPi “transforms a Raspberry Pi Pico or other RP2040-based board into a very competent and inexpensive little digital audio processor.”
• whosthere is a LAN discovery tool with an interactive TUI.
• Ultramaster KR-106 is an open source Roland Juno 106 emulator.
• On the abdication of Chief Prophet Tim Cook. John Ternus has been appointed as Steve’s representative on Earth.

An endangered Mexican axolotl, a species of aquatic salamander, has been found living under a bridge near Bridgend in south Wales by a ten-year-old girl. The amphibian is the size of a small cat, and it’s the first documented discovery of the species in the wild in the UK.

Evie Hill was on holiday with her family when they stopped at the dipping bridge over the river Ogmore.

I went down to the bank and there was this thing with gills on its head and I’m like, that’s an axolotl, and I went, Mum, there’s an axolotl in the river, and she said, no there’s not, you’re not going back in the water, though I went back in the water anyway because I could see it and then I caught it and brought it back and my cousin’s going mum, Evie’s caught the axolotl, she’s caught it!

So of course the first thing I did was to open a browser and search for a picture of this small-cat-sized critter. I found a slightly longer standalone version of the story with a small picture of the axolotl’s face, but nothing more.

I did, however, find something similar from September last year in an “Axolotls Lovers” [sic] group on Facebook.

Hi. My son recently rescued a axolotl from a river near us. Being the uk waters and fast flowing waters she must have had a really bad time and lucky my son found her. I managed to quickly get a tank together for her and shes setting well i think lol. I have done alot of research and hope im doing things right for her. Any tips on helping her gain weight as she was very skinny and help her grow her fluffy gills again?also finding it straige she has no black dots in her eyes they are see through. She obviously had a very stressful time being dumped in a river. Any information il need to know would be a massive help.

A few seconds of searching for the author’s name led to their Instagram account with a video of the axolotl.

So … is it really “the first documented discovery of the species in the wild in the UK”? (And do BBC journalists actually go beyond merely repeating what they’re told?)

An interesting detail is that this other person also appears to live in or near Cardiff: they are pictured wearing University of South Wales/Prifysgol De Cymru scrubs and talk about visiting Clearwell Farm. This raises the possibility that there are more axolotls living wild in south Wales, and perhaps even that they can survive over the winter!

And as if just getting used to work again wasn’t enough, Tuesday ended up being longer than anticipated. I hadn’t had a chance to check over my bike and pump up the tyres over the weekend, so I took the Overground to Peckham on Monday and Tuesday. That was fine until Tuesday afternoon, when I checked the time of the next train and saw that they had all been cancelled.

Something had caught fire at Clapham Junction, at the end of the line, and as a result trains on the entire Surrey Quays to Clapham Junction branch were cancelled all afternoon and evening. One might naïvely ask why they couldn’t just run the trains most of the way and back again, but I think all the platforms along that branch serve multiple routes, and using one as a temporary terminus would block other services.

I checked the options to get home: 56 minutes on the slow, winding 381 bus, or 58 minutes on foot. I chose to walk, as it costs nothing and it’s a bit more pleasant – on a mild light evening, that is; it would have been different in the rain. I used to walk home from Holborn fairly regularly when I worked there; that was a little further but more picturesque, especially along the river. However, I prefer to walk out of choice than out of necessity.

On Wednesday evening we went to a Green Party fundraiser comedy gig, conveniently located just upstairs from my desk. You never really know what you’re going to get at that kind of event, but the overall standard was good, and it was an entertaining evening.

I saw an unhappy-looking vole in the garden on Friday afternoon. It was just sitting there, looking unwell. It scampered away when I got close, but I put some water out in case that was the problem. I haven’t seen a dead vole, so perhaps it helped, but that’s all I know.

We met a friend for brunch at the recently-opened Simplicity Bakery in old Rotherhithe, in the premises that used to be the otherwise unconnected Simplicity restaurant. The coffee was good, and the leek and potato pastry was delicious. I hope it succeeds; that it was busy is a promising sign.

It’s been a while since I posted any links, so here’s a few:

• A Japanese Glossary of Chopsticks Faux Pas.
• Advanced Mac Substitute “is an API-level reimplementation of 1980s-era Mac OS. It runs 68K Mac applications in an emulator without an Apple ROM or system software.”
• The Media Let Mandelson Get Away With It for Decades.
• AI’s sinister takeover of British politics. “British laws are already being written by AI.” But of course! Of course those dunderheads would outsource their thinking to a machine.
• picoZ80 is a RP2350-based pin-compatible Z80 emulator plus RAM. It can also emulate a disk controller and other peripherals.
• Kindling is a fast, open source Kindle publishing toolkit that can also compile dictionaries and comics.
• Porting Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii.
• Self-updating screenshots. A simple great idea: capture your documentation screenshots in your build system so that you don’t have to faff around updating them every time you make a change.
• Bring Back Idiomatic Design. Modern web applications are idiosyncratic and lack the consistency, predictability, and consequent usability of older desktop environments.
• AI data centres can warm surrounding areas by up to 9.1°C. Is that good?
• On the foolishness of “natural language programming”. Edgar Dijkstra: “The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.”
• Let’s talk about LLMs. “Very few organizations have the strong fundamentals needed to absorb even a relatively moderate, incremental increase in the amount of code they generate, which I suspect is why so many studies and reports find mixed results and lots of broken CI pipelines. Not only is there no silver bullet, there especially is no quick or magical gain to be had from rushing to adopt LLM coding without first working on those fundamentals.”