Archive: 2024

  • Week 206: The Queen Elizabeth II Memorial Sewage Treatment Facility

    I’m writing this extremely late this week, because the usual chaos of the last working week of the year has combined with some unexpected chaos. But that’s for next time.

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  • Week 205: Decades happen

    We both took Monday off and went to see the 80s photographic exhibition at Tate Britain. It’s an interesting mixture of big events (the miners’ strikes feature large), everyday life, and images of minority and subculture experiences that give a different view on the decade.

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  • Week 204: Gravitational event

    I broke my laptop. I normally cycle down to Peckham, but on Tuesday evening I discovered that one of my front brake pads was prematurely worn, so on Wednesday I went in on foot instead. I was dressed and ready in plenty of time to catch the infrequent-enough-to-need-planning (four trains per hour) service to Peckham and arrive before I had to join a Teams call. (That must be the most depressing four word sequence in the English language.)

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  • Subscribing to feeds that Cloudflare blocks

    If you run your own feed reader (I use Miniflux) you might find that you can’t successfully follow some feeds that are behind Cloudflare, because their aggressive “Bot Fight Mode” is doing what it says: aggressively preventing automated access, without any regard for the fact that automated access is exactly the point of RSS and Atom feeds.

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  • Week 203: Milk snatcher

    I achieved the dream of walking out of Tesco with something I hadn’t paid for. I bought a carton of oat milk that had a promotional price of £1.50 on the shelf edge, but after checking my receipt I saw that I’d been charged £2. Out of principle, I immediately headed for the customer service desk to point this out. The employee disappeared off to check and came back with the shelf edge label announcing the discount. She said that the promotion was supposed to have ended, but the tag had been left, so she was going to refund me the difference.

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  • Week 202: The Mystery of the Mutilated Minion

    The hardest weeks to write about are the ones in which it feels like nothing happened.

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  • Week 201: In a pickle

    I went to an interesting talk on A History of Sex and Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch at St Paul’s Cathedral on Tuesday. You hear a lot from people on the more conservative side, keen to denounce all kinds of “sin”, backed up by some very selective reading, and it was refreshing to hear analysis from a liberal perspective.

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  • Week 200: Be gull do crime

    I watched An Taibhse (The Ghost), the first-ever Irish-language horror film, on Oíche Shamhna. It was followed by a Q&A with the director and one of the actors. It’s genuinely terrifying. I guessed what was really going on pretty early on, but that didn’t make it less scary. It’s an amazing achievement for a budget of £5,000.

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  • Week 199: Embra

    The main excitement of the week was a trip to Edinburgh for the inaugural Haggis Ruby conference on Thursday. It revives the tradition of a Ruby conference in Scotland a full decade after the last Scottish Ruby Conference.

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  • Week 198: Cultural extravaganza

    This week, I saw two plays, two concerts, and two art exhibitions (although the last two were in the same place).

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  • Week 197: Teams player

    I started a new contract. So far, I have spent almost all my time on calls, which is absolutely my least favourite part of work in the modern age. In-person meetings could be bad enough, but it’s so much harder to have a conversation over dodgy, high latency connections with people talking over each other. It’s just really hard work.

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  • Week 196: Plumb forgot

    Have you ever seen the inside of your own stomach? I got to see mine, live when I had a capsule endoscopy on Wednesday. You swallow a little capsule, about 20 mm long, with a camera and some LEDs at each end, and a couple of coils around the middle, and it sends a video feed out to a recorder box via some antennae wrapped around your trunk.

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  • Week 195: Bristol

    We saw The Book of Mormon on Tuesday, my third musical in six days. I don’t think I usually manage more than one a year at most.

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  • Week 194: Pre-overdue

    It was a relaxing week. L— had the week off, I don’t have any work at the moment. It was a novelty to be able to relax in a home that isn’t a construction site for the first time in many months.

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  • Week 193: Small toe

    L— was away for most of the week at a conference in Vienna and then taking a long route back on trains via Zurich and Paris. I entertained myself by cooking unreasonably spicy food and attempting to render some of Bashō’s haiku into English while still being haiku (according to an English concept of syllables). Some were more successful than others.

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  • Week 192: Carpentry

    The carpenters came and spent five days making the built-in storage we wanted. We now have a couple of cupboards under the stairs, suitable for storing our Bromptons and other inconvenient items like the clothes airer, and a smaller cabinet with bookshelves above.

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  • Week 191: Merries-go-round

    Monday was a bank holiday, the last one before the depressing stretch of uninterrupted holidayless months up to Christmas. The sun turned out for the occasion and L—’s brother came to visit with his toddler daughter.

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  • Week 190: Going coastal

    I took a train down to Weymouth on the south coast to visit my parents for a few days. Unlike last time, the trains were on time and I had a very relaxing journey both ways.

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  • Week 189: Roaming

    I found a delightful new café in one of the new developments nearby while escaping from our very hot house in search of somewhere cooler. It’s called Chá-Fé. I assume that’s a portmanteau of the Chinese for tea ⟨chá⟩ and “café”, and they do indeed sell both tea (a range of interesting, good-quality teas from Taiwan and Japan) and coffee.

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  • Week 188: Toaster

    We bought a fancy Dualit toaster. We used to use a mini toaster oven, but now that we have two working ovens we don’t really need to dedicate counter space to a third, and it was never quite big enough for breakfast for two, so we gave it away.

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  • Week 187: Sealed

    I vacuumed, washed, and sealed the tiled floors in the kitchen and bathroom so that they’re now a bit more resistant to spills. It was only a matter of time before one of us dropped something, after all. It’s been a bit of a surprise to me how much stuff is still left to do after all the building work is complete, but at least this was a fairly quick and easy job.

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  • Ruby blue

    Why in the world would you call a colour “Ruby Blue”?

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  • Week 186: Banister

    I spent a couple of days finishing the new banisters. I sanded them, stained them (and repeated) and finally finished them with oil. They’re pine, but they’re now a good match for the oak floor.

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  • 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.

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  • Week 184: The Return of the Things

    I retrieved everything from the storage locker with the assistance of a man and van (from Relōku once again). It was made easier by the fact that I had replaced a lot of the flimsy boxes with proper 55 litre storage crates – they’re much easier to carry, they’re rigid, and they stack even when partially full. After everything is unpacked I’m going to use them for storage in the loft.

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  • Week 183: Over and out

    Our house renovation is over, but not before there was a little more tile-related stress.

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  • Election bingo

    I spent the afternoon putting together a little web application to play a distributed election night bingo with friends tomorrow.

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  • Week 182: A trip to the seaside

    I voted. I set up a postal vote while our house was being renovated, because I wasn’t sure where I might be staying at the time of the council elections. As things turned out, that mandate applied to the general election as well.

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  • Week 181: I am going to murder someone with a piece of broken tile

    It’s not going brilliantly, if I’m honest. Our house is very close to being complete, but getting that last bit finished is ever more hassle, like some variant of Zeno’s Paradox where you can only ever do 80% of what’s left. And in the meantime, living in a building site is miserable.

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  • Week 180: It’s beginning to look a lot like a kitchen

    We don’t have a sink or a hob, but we do now have an oven and a microwave, which means that we can heat up food that can be cooked in the oven or microwave. It’s an improvement. It will be even better when we have running water.

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  • Week 179: Back home

    We moved back into our house. We’re sleeping on a mattress on the floor in the second bedroom (my once and future office) while we wait for the wardrobes to be installed in the bedroom, and there’s no sink in the kitchen, so we have to do the washing up in a bowl under the garden tap, and neither microwave nor oven is wired up, but it’s good to be back.

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  • Week 178: Wræc-hwīl

    From the Old English Wordhord this week:

    wræc-hwīl, f.n: period of misery or exile. (WRACK-HWEEL /ˈwræk-ˌhwiːl/)

    This word feels appropriate to describe my life over the past months, banished from my own home by renovations.

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  • Electromagnetic Field 2024

    Electromagnetic Field is:

    a non-profit camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, artists, geeks, crafters, scientists, and engineers.

    It’s also been described as the “special interest haver convention” and “Glastonbury for geeks”

    It always sounded very appealing to me, except for the camping part.

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  • Week 177: Misplaced optimism

    My optimism about moving back into our house was misplaced: by the end of the week they were still painting upstairs and installing flooring downstairs, so we’re still relying on friends. We’ve been very lucky in that respect, even if moving every few weeks takes up a lot of time that I would rather have been spending otherwise.

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  • Week 176: Se non è vero, è ben trovato

    I went to the Interesting conference on Wednesday evening. I saw a lot of old colleagues and other friends from the gentler earlier days of the internet.

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  • Week 175: Communication breakdown

    I can communicate in quite a few languages, but one that causes me trouble is the modern scourge that is emoji. They weren’t so bad when they were reasonably limited in number (the original Docomo set had 176) but there are now so many variants of cartoon faces that I can’t ever be certain of their intended meaning.

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  • Week 174: Dawn chorus

    A variety of leaves and twigs, with three snails. All have their necks
out and their eyestalks extended

    Snails feasting at dawn in Russia Dock Woodland

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  • Week 173: Floored

    You wouldn’t believe how much of a palaver it is to buy flooring. After several cycles of order samples – choose one we liked – find it’s been discontinued – repeat, I was finally able to order something. That flooring had also been discontinued, but there was just enough remaining in stock.

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  • Week 172: Tear down this wall

    My train back from Weymouth was also delayed but as I was already entitled to a complete refund of my return journey, I couldn’t get refunded any more. They won’t pay you to take the train. However, my Delay Repay refund, applied for on Friday, is already in my account. That was surprisingly efficient.

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  • Week 171: Intense burst of activity

    The builders turned up on Monday, and told us that, contrary to previous plans, we really needed to have everything out of the house for them to be able to work effectively.

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  • Week 170: Serving the song

    Very late, very minimal weeknotes this week, for reasons that will become apparent in next week’s edition.

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  • Using the brown M&M’s trick on Freecycle

    As we’re having a new kitchen installed shortly, the old freestanding dishwasher that came with the house is surplus to requirements, and its most likely fate would be a skip and thence landfill. I don’t like that, and I’d rather see it live out the rest of its life in a loving home.

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  • Week 169: The calm before

    A carrion crow on a railing. Immediately behind it is the River Thames,
and on the far shore are buldings and a construction site with cranes and
diggers

    A crow on the Thames, with the Supersewer construction site in the background

    It was the last week of anything approaching normality for a while. I booked a storage locker nearby in Deptford, and booked a van and driver to help move things there. We aren’t emptying our house completely, but they’re going to start with the upstairs, and there isn’t room downstairs for everything that’s currently upstairs.

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  • A bookmarklet to download Aldermore statements for FreeAgent

    I have a business savings account with Aldermore. A few months ago, they changed their online banking interface. The new one is an improvement in some ways. It looks better. Instead of the typical old-school financial weirdness of several pages of login, “memorable” words, and picking letters out of a password, they’ve caught up with practice elsewhere and use a full password plus a second factor.

    On the other hand, the second factor is only available via SMS, something both inconvenient when travelling or out of mobile signal range and notoriously vulnerable to exploits. But what’s really annoying is that the new interface offers no way to get a statement in a machine-readable form.

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  • Week 168: Software updates

    I cultivated yeast from the bottom of a bottle of gueuze (a Belgian beer made with wild yeasts) and used it to make bread. I’ve made a couple of loaves so far, both of which have risen slightly better than my old home-grown starter. They taste good too, if a little less tangy than the other culture.

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  • Week 167: One for his nob

    We have (mostly) finalised the plans for the kitchen and bathroom. It’s not easy. There are so many decisions to make, and so little concrete information on which to base them, and it all costs so much money. At least we’re starting from such a low point that anything will be an awful lot better than the current facilities. Our current kitchen is poorly lit and laid out in a way that provides little useful preparation space. The bathroom is ugly, awkward, and dilapidated, and features a lot of the worst fake wood I’ve ever seen in my life.

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  • Week 166: Improve your memory with this one simple trick

    The missing section of Cycleway 4 has finally opened, which means there’s now a segregated route from Tower Bridge to Greenwich. As we live near the section that was just finished, it’s now a bit easier for me to get onto the route in either direction.

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  • Week 165: Building a bridge

    In a small pub basement near Barons Court, we saw a performance of Japanese folk tales from the village of Hinohara, performed by Doubtful Sound and, just a little bit, us. We had chosen some seats at the front, so we were asked to sit in on one scene as extras and drink some sake. It was a fun and intimate performance of stories I’d never heard before. The sake was nice, too.

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  • Week 164: Under the Dome

    I made a small accidental discovery that will improve my life: my waterproof Bluetooth speaker will send the forward command if I double-tap the play button. This means that when I’m in the shower and some irritating ad comes on (which is most of them, but especially Shopify ads with their repeated dinging antediluvian cash register sounds, and anyway I’m not interested in setting up an online store selling white supremacist merchandise at this time) I can skip right ahead past the annoyance.

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  • Repairing a detached mandolin brace, laparoscopically

    I picked up an Ibanez A-style mandolin with a collapsing top. I guessed that this would be due to a detached brace, and I’d seen a video of someone performing a repair via the f-hole, so I thought I’d try the same. It’s nothing fancy, just a plywood top, but that means that there’s no point paying a professional to repair it, and it’s ideal for me to have a go.

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  • Week 163: Are those horses or cows?

    I’m feeling much better at last. I’m coughing a lot less, which is great, because I broke a rib coughing a couple of weeks ago and it hurts to cough. At least that particular rib doesn’t hurt except when I cough or sleep on my left, and I usually sleep on my right. I have woken myself up a couple of times after rolling onto my left, however.

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  • Week 162: It gets worse before it gets better

    I spent most of last week curled up under a blanket. I’m not a person who likes to sit around doing nothing, but I really have done an awful lot of nothing. I don’t have a fever. It’s just a cold, but a pernicious one. It’s definitely worse than the time I had covid, which gave me only a couple of days of mild discomfort.

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  • Everything I saw (and didn’t see) at FOSDEM 2024

    If you share my interests, you might be able to consider this a curated list of FOSDEM talks from this year. But unless you’re actually me, you probably don’t. Maybe it’s useful as an indication of the kind of things you can see while traipsing across the ULB campus, up and down staircases and through occasionally dark and mysterious corridors.

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  • Week 161: Across the Channel

    I took the Eurostar to Brussels and back for FOSDEM at the weekend. I had a bit of a cold on Wednesday and Thursday, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to go. I didn’t sleep well on Thursday night, but I felt reasonably well on Friday morning, and decided that as long as it wasn’t covid (which it wasn’t), I’d catch my train that afternoon.

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  • Week 160: Infinite nattō

    The shredded inside of a steel factory building with its side torn off.
There isa digger in the foreground.

    The former Harmsworth Quays printing plant, more recently Printworks, being demolished

    I successfully made nattō in a yoghurt maker. A friend from Sanshinkai mentioned that she had had success with this method, so we bought a cheap Lakeland yoghurt maker specifically for the purpose. I chose this one because it allows you to set the temperature and time of fermentation.

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  • Week 159: Synthetic entrails

    We went to see Poor Things at the cinema. The Odeon cinema about five minutes’ walk away would have been more convenient, but they now have a completely opaque and unconscionably expensive pricing structure. When tickets came up at £30 for two, including £2 of booking fees, we decided to go to the Peckhamplex instead, where it cost less than half that.

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  • Week 158: Digital entomology

    A container barge pulled by a tug on the Thames. The Shard is visible
directly behind, on the far bank.

    The Thames on a sunny Wednesday afternoon

    You can probably track how well things are going by when I publish these weeknotes. First thing on a Monday? I’m probably feeling optimistic and energetic. Late on Wednesday? The dead weight of work has been pulling me down, I’ve spent days staring at the screen in futility, I’ve achieved nothing, and I feel like I can’t take time out to write.

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  • Week 157: In a world where everything is orange and teal

    A plane flies directly above, at low altitude, seen through a skylight
window of Surrey Quays Shopping Centre.

    Look up

    While watching a film on New Year’s Eve, I was struck by a visual migraine. Funnily enough, the last time I had one I was also watching a film. I don’t experience any pain, just a colourful distortion that makes me unable to perceive part of my field of vision. It’s disturbing to look at someone and see only half a face.

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