In my dreams, I met a crow who could talk. I don’t remember what they said, but they were friendly.

After a morning of luthiery putting the final finishing touches on the mandolin I’ve been rebuilding, I cycled to the Royal College of Music on a sunny Tuesday afternoon to visit their musical instrument museum. I saw the world’s oldest string keyboard instrument and the world’s oldest surviving guitar – it’s about the size of a tenor ukulele – but it was a couple of beautifully inlaid viols that really caught my eye.

It’s small, but it’s free, and worth a visit if you’re in the area. It’s just off Exhibition Road, opposite the Albert Hall. There are some beautiful, unique, abnd just weird instruments, and the museum does a good job of addressing the unacceptable side of instrument making: the amount of endangered plants and animals used in traditional manufacture.

AlgoRhythms at the Carpet Shop in Peckham on Wednesday night was a lovely, welcoming, and inspiring evening of live coding. My favourite performance was from PiPiPri; I’m told it was their first time, but I wouldn’t have guessed.

It’s been ages since I did any live coding, but maybe I can refresh my memory and skills in time for the next event.

I won an auction on eBay for a mandolin that would be a significant upgrade from mine. Nothing particularly special, but the top is carved rather than being made from pressed plywood, and it comes in a very good quality hard case that’s worth more than I paid for the whole lot. It was a collection-only auction, which probably helped with getting a bargain, but meant that I had to travel down to Twickenham to pick it up.

The seller was very nice and friendly; her husband died several years ago and she’s selling off some of his hobby kit in preparation to move to a smaller house.

What I didn’t realise until I got home was that the instrument suffers from the same ailment that I fixed last time: a brace has come unglued and as a consequence the top is sinking under the pressure of the strings. Hey, mandolin makers, here’s an idea for you! Use a good quality adhesive!

I’m not worried. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again. As I’ve just finished work on another mandolin, it must be time for me to have another one on the (figurative) bench.

On Sunday evening we went back to the pub in Peckham where we previously won the pub quiz, with the same group, so that we could use up the bar tab we won last time. By half time, we were doing reasonably well, but were in joint second place with three teams above us. We didn’t think we’d win, and were rather relaxed about not having to make the somewhat inconvenient trek back to this particular pub again.

And then we won! But it turns out that this pub is part of a group of half a dozen pubs in south London, so there may be a more convenient alternative for next time.

A handful of links this week (although perhaps it’s an “AI”-generated hand with too many fingers):

  • Grayskull is “a minimalist, dependency-free computer vision library designed for microcontrollers and other resource-constrained devices. It focuses on grayscale images and provides modern, practical algorithms that fit in a few kilobytes of code.”
  • Myna is a monospace typeface designed so that the sequences of punctuation used in programming look good.
  • In Praise of dhh. “[A]fter a long struggle, [dhh] eventually lost his fight against the parasitic fungus that was taking over his brain, and died […] he exists only as a macabre meat puppet, his sinews pulled taught, controlled entirely by the brain parasite he contracted from a WhatsApp group chat.”
  • End of The Line: how Saudi Arabia’s Neom dream unravelled. Reality finally catches up with what was long obvious to anyone who can think critically and do a few basic sums: The Line, as conceived, can never be built, and if you have a reputation for bonesawing your opponents you may not benefit from robust critical feedback on your wild ideas.
  • squawk is a linter for Postgres migrations and SQL.
  • DOGSPINNER is a bit of silly fun. Turn the crank to make the dog chase its tail.