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.)

As I swung my bag onto my back, my laptop slipped straight out of the laptop pocket that I had neglected to close, and slammed into the floor. Having a special pocket to protect your laptop is a great idea if you remember to close it.

This wasn’t a financial disaster. I use second-hand business laptops because they’re cheap, adequate, easy to maintain, and cause less environmental damage than buying new, and because I don’t want to have to worry about carrying around a valuable, delicate device. Not for me the £3,000 MacBook Pro.

It wasn’t a data disaster either, as everything is backed up and synchronised.

My laptop, a ThinkPad T470s, wasn’t even particularly damaged, except in one important way: the shock had sheared the hinge clean off the lid, so I could no longer open or close it without a lot of careful fiddling.

A close-up view of a laptop hinge. The hinge has broken away and is in front of the screen bezel.

Broken laptop hinge

The corner of the laptop also put a couple of dents in the new flooring. This is why we went with the rustic flooring, though: it’s already full of filled-in knots and cracks, so a little damage doesn’t really show up. And as it’s wood, a little bit of work with some damp kitchen roll and an iron raised the dents out to the point that they’re not noticeable.

I do have a spare laptop in the shape of a ten-year-old ThinkPad X220, but as I hadn’t used it in three years it wasn’t set up for work, and while it’s fine for programming it almost certainly can’t cope with the shitty jenga tower of Too Much JavaScript that is Microsoft Office 365, so I spent the rest of my working week (i.e. Wednesday and Thursday) chained to my desk at home using my tower PC. It’s not a problem, but I pay for a shared workspace for a reason, and that reason is that I find sitting on my own at home all day a bit sad and lonely.

My laptop won’t be broken for long, though. More details next week!

On Friday afternoon, we went to see The Great Mughals at the V&A. It’s stunning. The level of delicacy and craft in the paintings and artefacts on display is amazing. Take a magnifying glass if you go, because there is minuscule detail finer than an agèd eye can resolve.

We went to the last Musica Antica concert of the 2024 season, featuring not one but two theorbo players. I helped out on the door before it started. It’s amazing how chaotic the attendees of an early music concert can be. They bought tickets together but turn up separately; their spouse is parking the car; they can’t find the tickets on their phones; they didn’t bring a ticket but hope that there’s a list on the door; they bought three tickets but one person can’t make it; they bought two tickets but there are three of them and they hope that there are enough spare tickets that they can buy another on the door; they wrote down the number of the ticket on a shred of paper. I say all this not to denigrate any of them, but as an observation of how messy event ticketing actually is. There’s a gap in the market for an event ticket system that works for small events with a diverse group of attendees, if anyone can ever work it out.

We finally have the option of a fibre-to-the-home internet connection via Hyperoptic, who we previously used in our old flat, but I’m in two minds about whether to take it up. It would be faster, especially on the upload, than our current VDSL connection, and possibly slightly cheaper if we went for a two year commitment. On the other hand, the quality of service and sheer competence from Andrews & Arnold, our current ISP, is so high that I think I’d miss it. I also need a static IPv4 address for some work things, which would be an additional monthly cost with Hyperoptic.

Contrary to my fears when we moved, 60 Mbit VDSL has turned out to be pretty much fine. I’m tempted to wait a bit and see whether the Openreach fibre rollout, which would let us stick with A&A over a faster link, gets to us in the near future.

There is a third option, that of using Hyperoptic for the connection, then L2TP to A&A for internet access. I’m thinking about it, but it’s more devices and more things to go wrong.

The hardest thing about writing these weeknotes is remembering what I did. I’ve taken up Frances’s recommendation and ordered a week planner and notebook for 2025. Maybe this will be a bit easier next year.

Links: