I had a short week of work as I travelled back from Brussels on Monday. The train left a little late and arrived 20 minutes behind schedule, but that’s on time by British standards so it wasn’t really remarkable.

The departure lounge in Brussels is larger than last time I was there, but they still don’t have a café or bar there, just a Duty Free shop where you can pay the same price for goods as you would at home, except that what you would have paid in tax and that might have supported the public good now goes to the vendor’s profit margin instead. Great work everyone.

L— has gone off to Tanzania to climb Kilimanjaro. She’s climbing with a big group of women. They’re taking the Lemosho route, which is about a week up and down, and she’ll be away for a fortnight in total.

In the meantime, I’m home alone. It’s OK, I know how to look after myself, but I do miss her.

I cooked a load of rice and side dishes in a big batch on Thursday night, and ate banchan-style for the next several days. I was craving a bit of variety by day three.

Going to fewer meetings has been a big success. I’ve still tried to do the important and useful ones, and no one has complained about my absence from the others.

—Looks like you’ve been missing a lot of work lately.
—I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it, Bob.

I went to a one-year-old’s birthday party. Obviously, at that age he has no idea about the calendar or a concept of a year, so it was mostly a party for the adults.

I started tagging bookmarks about the US with “coup” this week, so that’s all going well.

Apropos of nothing, it was the aftermath of an attempted coup that broke up the USSR in 1991.

I’ve been looking at where I depend on US services, on the basis that they can no longer be considered reliable. Just ask the International Criminal Court how well putting all their documents in Microsoft’s cloud is going now that the US has imposed sanctions.

Multiple sources in the prosecutor’s office said Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform is critical to its operations and suspending access would paralyse its investigations. “We essentially store all of our evidence in the cloud,” one said.

People used to say that “The cloud is just someone else’s computer”, but now it’s more like “The cloud is someone else’s computer, in the control of a rogue state run by a volatile mad emperor”.

My computers run Linux. My phone runs GrapheneOS, a non-Google version of Android. I still have a few documents in Google Drive, but almost everything else could be recreated if needed. Domain names are probably a weak spot, as anything that’s not a country-specific TLD is probably within the reach of the US régime.

However, the UK government and military are completely dependent on US providers, so there’s a limit to how much one can insulate oneself from that wretched empire.

Links, some of which aren’t about politics:

  • act lets you run GitHub actions locally (or anywhere else), which makes the development cycle much faster.
  • The NSA’s “Big Delete”: The agency plans to delete “websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including ‘privilege’, ‘bias’, and ‘inclusion’”. I didn’t expect the coup to be quite this stupid.
  • NTSB forces reporters to get plane crash updates on X. US government agency will no longer send press briefings via email, but only via the Prince Regent’s personal social network.
  • mise-en-place is an alternative to both asdf and direnv that claims to be faster and more secure.
  • the sudoku affair: “Software design is a deliberate process, and requires deliberate effort.”
  • open-atmos/jupyter-utils includes a drop-in replacement for matplotlib.pyplot.show() that displays figures inline as SVG vector graphics.
  • You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism. “The result is a media environment that keeps us in a state of debilitating fear and anger, endlessly reacting to our oppressors instead of organizing against them.”