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2025-07-21

Week 237: Please consider the environment before replying to this email

I thought I was doing well on Monday, after my exertions over the weekend, until I realised that I’d just run the washing machine for an hour without putting any detergent in. Maybe my brain wasn’t doing as well as the rest of me.

I went to bed early on Tuesday after no alcohol, slept well, and woke up on Wednesday cranky, bleary, depressed, and feeling as cognitively impaired as if I’d been kicked in the head by a donkey. Clean living is overrated.

Jira outdid itself by spinning out of control and using up all my computer’s memory until the out-of-memory killer terminated the desktop environment. I rebooted, but my sound was weird and distorted. The solution turned out to lie in the monitor: the crash had left its HDMI audio implementation in a weird state that was fixed by power-cycling the monitor.

Anyway, I’m sure this is fine and being able to glitch a monitor over the video connection doesn’t open any security vulnerabilities ….

I performed at Hyper Japan on Friday with some members of London Okinawa Sanshinkai. It’s a kind of weeb festival in Olympia in west (aka worst) London. Olympia is very poorly served by the Tube, and so by the time I’d walked to the station in the heat, experienced the sauna of the Jubilee Line, and trudged a further quarter of an hour from South Kensington, all while carrying stuff for the performance, I was extremely sweaty, and glad that I had a fresh costume for the stage.

The performance went well, but as we were on early on the quietest day there wasn’t a huge audience. It was nice to be finished, and I wandered around with bandmates, ate a mediocre lunch of yakisoba that wasn’t worth the queue, and sampled all the various drinks being promoted: chuhai, sake, umeshu, and even Japanese wine from Katsunuma Winery, which was a lot better than any Japanese wine I’d tried in the past. (I haven’t tasted much, but one sticks out in my mind: a very cheap Japanese domestic wine, bought from a convenience store, that was flavoured with lychee in a vain attempt to disguise the underlying taste.) The two wines from Katsunuma that I sampled (a white Koshu and a red Muscat Bailey A) were both very good, and I would drink them again.

It was a fun way to spend an afternoon, and it was pleasant to be in an air-conditioned space for a few hours.

Saturday was the first day in a while that I could properly relax with no upcoming plans or commitments. Even better, it was raining, so I didn’t have to feel bad about staying at home.

I spent the time reworking the templates and CSS for this website. The current theme is based on one that uses the SASS preprocessor, which has an annoying habit of deprecating features every time I upgrade, and the latest deprecated feature is one that I don’t know how to fix without a lot of work. But CSS has improved so much over the past few years that I don’t see any real need for preprocessing, so I’ve been redoing the templates and styling from scratch with as little extraneous markup as possible to rid myself of this persistent and recurring gremlin. It’s amazing how little you actually need.

It’s still work in progress, in a branch, but I’m more than halfway there.

Links for your amusement and edification:

• ai.robots.txt: A list of AI agents and robots to block.
• Open-DSO-150: Fully open source firmware for JYETECH DSO-150 oscilloscope.
• What I learned and observed doing the Dunwich Dynamo fixed – again.
• The Copilot Delusion. “And what’s worse, we’ll normalize this mediocrity. Cement it in tooling. Turn it into a best practice. We’ll enshrine this current bloated, sluggish, over-abstracted hellscape as the pinnacle of software. The idea that building something lean and wild and precise, or even squeezing every last drop of performance out of a system, will sound like folklore.”
• convoLV2 is an “LV2 plugin to convolve audio signals with zero latency.”
• “Even God Cannot Hear Us Here”: What I Witnessed Inside an ICE Women’s Prison. A firsthand account by Rümeysa Öztürk, the graduate student who was snatched off the street by masked regime goons.