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2024-07-23

Week 185: Furnished

We have furniture. The bedside tables I ordered arrived and I spent a few hours assembling them. Our bedroom is now complete, so even if there’s chaos elsewhere in the house, there’s at least one place where we can escape it.

The second-hand furniture I bought last week also arrived. It’s so nice to eat at an actual table, rather than the wobbly camping table and garden chairs we’d been using.

I also found some second-hand office furniture for my office. That will be delivered next week.

All we have left is to get a carpenter to build in some cabinets and bookcases under the stairs and on the oddly-shaped back wall of the office, and then we can get rid of the boxes full of books that are currently sitting in the living room.

I went for my health check, the one they give you every five years or so when you’re over 40 but there’s nothing more serious wrong with you. According to that, I’m healthy and my risk of heart disease is low, and the advice was “keep doing what you’re doing”.

My weight was almost exactly the same as last time, which didn’t surprise me: within the margin of error, I’ve weighted the same my entire adult life.

I fitted a new bathroom fan. I really shouldn’t have had to do this. We should have had a working fan as part of the new bathroom.

The fan we ordered was supposed to be quiet and powerful. First of all, the supplied controller board didn’t work. After several weeks, we finally got a replacement, and the electrician wired it in, only to discover that it was catastrophically unbalanced and vibrated extremely loudly. We sent it back for a refund and I ordered a new fan recommended by the electrician as being both quiet and efficient. It was also about a quarter of the price of the original one.

Unfortunately, because it took so long to sort it out, I had to do the installation work myself. I filled and repainted the old mounting holes and fitted the new fan. The hardest part was getting it straight – round fans are much easier to fit than square ones – but I managed it, and it looks good and works well.

I put together a new bike around an old early 90s mountain bike frame and some new components, with the intention of having something that I could ride on longer journeys, including on off-road cycle paths.

I took the bike on a ride along Route 21, following the Waterlink Way as far as South Norwood Country park, and it performed well. The big tyres are wonderful on uneven ground.

I still have to fit the mudguards, but for that I need to wait for some more parts to arrive, like P clips (there are no eyelets on the fork). I’m also not entirely happy with the handlebar position yet, so that needs some tweaking.

On Saturday we took the train (and replacement bus service) out to Surrey for a walk up and around Box Hill. L— is hiking up Kilimanjaro early next year, and needs some practice.

It was a good day for it, neither raining nor too hot, but I still ended up sweaty with the humidity and exertion. Shorts were a bad idea, though: part of the route ended up being more overgrown than I had expected, and my legs were scourged by brambles. They’ve only just stopped itching.

It might have been the largest outage in history, but I managed to avoid being affected by the CrowdStrike incident. I didn’t have a good opinion of that kind of endpoint security product before, and this has not changed my opinion for the better. It seems to me like the kind of thing you see advertised in airports at management folk who think that “cybersecurity” is just a third-party solution that you buy and install. Secure your systems with this one weird trick!

And what do you get for your money? A company that apparently doesn’t test its updates properly, gets root access to all your systems. How’s that checkpoint compliance working out for you now?

Links:

• Code comprehension: Chunks and Beacons. “We talk about making source code readable and it turns out that this isn’t just stylistic interpretation; there is actual research into this topic.”
• Noblman, Swerve! “The joy of broken English”.
• Fit-to-Width Text: A New Technique.
• Concerns about passkeys. The more I read about passkeys, the less I like them. It’s looking like DRM for passwords, with only commercial implementations allowed.
• Playing for survival: the blind Japanese woman keeping a music tradition alive. The music of the goze blind shamisen players.
• Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content. They’re not even trying any more.
• How a 555 Works as a Timer.
• Jailbreaking RabbitOS: Uncovering Secret Logs, and GPL Violations.