I started writing this on Monday, but it’s still late this week.

I had a good meal with a small group at Wulf & Lamb in Marylebone on Monday night, organised by Pat who’s over from Melbourne and on a very packed tour of Europe.

We had our house rat-proofed on Thursday. A man came and put metal grilles on every potential ingress point, and installed an elaborate one-way gate contraption on the sewer pipe so that rats can’t get back in.

No rats were harmed in the process, except for a lack of amenity.

I hope that’s the end of it.

I’ve spent a lot of time laying out PCBs for CMOS synthesisers. So far, I’ve managed to fit the panels onto a consistent grid and still have enough space between components that I can fit the circuits without too many compromises, even with through-hole parts.

A portion of a 3D render of a circuit board with components

A section of a PCB for a 40106-based oscillator I’m working on

It was a bad week for internet access. We had no internet on Thursday morning. Our ISP had switched us over to a new LNS overnight, and that had spuriously tripped their DoS protection. They were very responsive, and we had working internet again in about half an hour.

On Saturday, however, the problem was outside their control. The VDSL connection between us and the cabinet lost signal in the early afternoon. I suspect that this was not entirely unrelated to heavy rain shortly before. It fixed itself around midnight, and it’s been OK since.

One day we’ll get fibre to the home, but I don’t know when. This is the UK, after all, a country that has lost the ability to build infrastructure.

I started moving all my domains off Gandi, mostly to Porkbun. (Weird name, but then it seems like all domain registrars have weird names.) Since they were sold to private equity (always a death knell) and then on again, they’ve reduced features and increased prices, so I’m moving to somewhere that doesn’t seem to be in a downward spiral. Paying much less is another bonus.

The only inconvenience is that they don’t do .be domains, of which I have one. I’ll have to move that somewhere else.

Overheard in the pub from someone at the next table: “… and she was found two years later, mummified.”

Links of the week: