As summer comes to an end, loft conversion season begins here in south London. From our back garden alone I can see two houses tented in scaffolding and polythene while they have the roofs ripped off, and there’s another one down the other end of the road.

We considered it, but you don’t actually get much out of it in these small houses: you lose the first floor bathroom to make the staircase, then have to put a new bathroom on the new second floor, which is already smaller because of the pitch of the roof. You lost most of the attic space, and end up with a room that’s hard to keep warm in winter and cool in summer. And having to go up to the garret every time you want to wee must be annoying.

But you get to advertise it as “three bedrooms”, which is the most important thing, I suppose.

I took my bike out after the weekend only to find that it had a flat front tyre from what turned out to be a very slow puncture. After reinflating it, I couldn’t even find a leak. I took a chance and it held up all day, twenty minutes each way to Peckham and back, and was only slightly soft by the evening.

Back at home, I took out the inner tube and submerged it in water until I found the tiny, slowly growing bubble. I tracked it back to the tyre and found the cause: a tiny wire that had made its way through the casing and protruded a hair’s breadth inside, where it had worn a microscopic hole in the tube. It was practically invisible, but once I knew it was there I was able to remove it.

A tiny piece of wire next to a ruler like some kind of archaeological find. It's very small, a little under 7 mm long

The culprit

It was my first puncture in the year or so I’ve had that bike. Not bad going.

I fixed the case that came with my banjolele. It’s made of thick cardboard, lined with cloth, and covered on the outside with what looks like painted canvas. The panels are stitched together, but the passage of a hundred years had weakened the thread and it was falling apart. I redid the seams with saddle stitch using a couple of curved needles and a reel of heavy-duty thread.

An old instrument case with a focus on one corner. There are marks where is has been restitched, but it is holding together well.

Should be good for another century

It was hard work lining up the needles with the existing holes, and my fingers were getting sore by the point that I asked L—, “Do you have a thimble, by any chance?” She did, and the rest of it went a bit more easily.

It feels a bit like a forgotten technology for constructing cases, but it’s cheap, effective, and lightweight. It might be worth bringing it back.

In the one-game-a-day genre, I’ve been enjoying Unzoomed, in which you are shown progressively larger aerial photographs of a city and have to guess where it is. So far, I’ve got quite a few on my first try: Accra, Rotterdam, and Chongqing. I was a bit embarrassed to take two goes to get Brussels, but my excuse is that the first level wasn’t a particularly distinctive part of the city.

We watched Dept. Q, a Scottish transposition of a Danish crime thriller. It’s captivating, but not always easy viewing, and my heart was going at a perilous rate during the final episode.

I get the impression that it’s going to become increasingly difficult to have a mobile phone that is your own, that isn’t completely locked down, and that isn’t working for someone else. Apple was always that way. Android wasn’t, but now Google is going to force developer verification for all apps, even those installed directly outside of the Play store. That’s quite a lot of what I have on my phone, and you can bet that the developers of NewPipe or ReVanced or anything else that threatens their advertising revenue won’t be suffered for long.

And what if you don’t want Google or Apple? It’s harder and harder to live without a smartphone. You can’t use some banks. You can’t go to some gigs. You can’t get a season ticket for the Thames commuter boat. You can’t get cheaper prices at Lidl. I use a phone running GrapheneOS and I already can’t use some of those apps because it’s not blessed by American Big Tech. I can’t even use the GOV.UK mobile app. Every company wants you to install their app so they can force-feed you ads and track you more effectively. None of them have your best interests at heart.

If the ghouls at the Tony Blair Institute get their way, you’ll be obliged to use your “digital ID” on your phone to do anything in society.

And yet, the more they become required, these horrible little things that steal our attention and spy on us and force adverts onto us, the more I want to throw mine away and return to a time when it was OK to be out of contact for a few hours, to find your way around by using your own sense of direction, to not know exactly what mad shit is going on in US politics at any given moment,
to just not know things,
to be bored.

Links that I have bookmarked:

  • Dig Archive. “An archived collection of digitized media art, text, zines, videos, and other saved works from around the net, and beyond.”
  • I Am An AI Hater. “I became a hater by doing precisely those things AI cannot do: reading and understanding human language; thinking and reasoning about ideas; considering the meaning of my words and their context; loving people, making art, living in my body with its flaws and feelings and life. AI cannot be a hater, because AI does not feel, or know, or care. Only humans can be haters. I celebrate my humanity.”
  • Vibe-coded build system NX gets hacked, steals vibe-coders’ crypto. They keep finding new ways to forget everything we knew about security.
  • Everyone loses in the rage of China’s delivery wars. I think we should ask ourselves whether, perhaps, it is simply not possible to operate food delivery services without exploitation; and if so, whether we should tolerate it.
  • A convex polyhedron without Rupert’s property. Until this week, it seemed possible to cut a hole in any convex polygon through which an identical polygon could fit, and no one could prove otherwise.
  • Burner Phone 101. “Hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library, this Burner Phone 101 workshop introduced participants to phone-related risk modeling, privacy-protective smartphone practices, the full spectrum of burner phone options, and when to leave phones behind entirely.”
  • Inside Windows 3. “Windows 3 is often said to be just an UI on top of DOS. This article presents some of the inner side of Windows 3.x and will show that it is more ambitious than that; especially when running on a 386 computer.”