I ticked off another couple of inductions at the makerspace, which means that I can now use most of the woodworking equipment and I can turn aluminium and brass on the lathe.

A barge sailing on the Thames. In the background the towers of the City of London are visible, as are the cranes of the super sewer site at Wapping. The tide is high

A Thames barge under sail. An unusual sight in this millennium.

A friend just turned 40, so L— and I celebrated with them with dinner at Mallow followed by the new Barbie movie. The food was delicious and the film was great fun and surprisingly sarcastic and subversive for something so corporate.

I sold on the Yamaha DX27 synthesiser I repaired a couple of years ago for a decent amount, significantly more than I originally paid. I didn’t need a big, heavy, 61-key device taking up space when it doesn’t even have a touch sensitive keyboard and I have other instruments that can replicate everything it does.

My office is still a complete disaster, though. I need to spend half a day at least tidying it up.

I feel very pessimistic about the future of the internet. The propagandistically named Online Safety Bill threatens private communications, and Google’s Web Environment Integrity proposal would facilitate a future in which not only can you not run an ad blocker, but you can’t view a website in reader mode, or copy out a paragraph, or view it on an operating system and browser combination not explicitly blessed. Now that every browser except Firefox is just a lightly reskinned version of Chrome, we’re faced with a cryptographically enforced version of “best viewed in Internet Explorer”.

General purpose computing on an open internet was good while it lasted.

I’m also perturbed by the reaction of the Tories and Labour to a single by-election result, which seems to be to repudiate any attempt to improve the environment (in this case, the Ultra Low Emission Zone slightly ameliorating the lethally poor air quality) so that they can rule over the ashes.

British politics is an FPTP death cult.

Links I’ve bookmarked this week: