Befell that, in that season on a day,
In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay,
Ready to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Canterbury with devout coráge,
At night was come into that hostelry
Well nine and twenty in a company
Of sundry folk, by áventure y-fall
In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all,
That toward Canterbury wouldë ride.

Can you walk from London to Canterbury in less than 48 hours? Maybe. Should you? Probably not. But I did.

Five of us set out on Friday evening from Southwark Cathedral with an optimistic plan.

• Friday evening: 12 miles (19 km) to Bexleyheath
• Saturday: 28 miles (45 km) to Sittingbourne
• Sunday: 19 miles (31 km) to Canterbury

The downside to doing it in such a short time is that you’re forced to take a direct route that includes some quite unpleasant sections, like the part where you have to walk along a footpath separated only by a crash barrier from an eight-lane dual carriageway that is a motorway in every sense except the strict legal definition. I was glad that I had packed earplugs. And for some reason, almost every footpath alongside a busy road is on the north side, so you never get any shade from the trees.

There were good bits, though, when we walked along quiet shaded roads, along fields, and even through woods where I snacked on blackberries, plums, and cornelian cherries.

We rented a house for each night. On Friday, I ended up in the attic room which was initially hot, but tolerable after I opened the window for some air. In return I had a whole floor and an en-suite bathroom to myself.

On Saturday, however, the house that was advertised as having three beds and two sofa beds had only three beds and two sofas. I took some sofa cushions to the dining room, fashioned a comfortable bed for myself, and slept very well with a keffiyeh for a blanket. I slept so well, in fact, that I woke up at 03:30 feeling very refreshed before looking at my watch and going back to sleep for a bonus round. All the same, a proper bed would have been nice.

Walking boots were also a mistake. So much of the route was on tarmac – and what wasn’t was baked hard anyway – that running shoes would have been a better bet. Nonetheless, my feet survived with only one insignificant blister that didn’t even cause me discomfort.

The same couldn’t be said of my walking mates, all of whom suffered various difficulties with feet, legs, and exhaustion from the hubristic pace we had set ourselves. By Sunday morning, I was clearly in a much better condition than anyone else. Even before we walked from the house to the main road, the differences were becoming obvious between two of us at the front, and the three behind. They elected to find a train from Sittingbourne, while we pressed on.

However, they subsequently managed to walk a bit further and made it as far as Faversham, and the shrine of St Jude – who is, appropriately, the patron saint of lost causes – before taking a bus the last 10 miles. I don’t think that’s a failure: every depiction of historical pilgrims along the route shows them on horses or donkeys, and Chaucer’s pilgrims are described as riding. Doing it most of the way on foot in such short time was still a huge achievement.

Meanwhile, my remaining companion and I continued, he suffering with leg pains, I doing my best not to rush off ahead at my natural pace, and we made it to Canterbury together just after 16:00, in plenty of time for Evensong.

My feet were a little tender from being bashed against the hard ground for so long, but I arrived with no particular ill effects other than slightly stiff legs. By Monday evening, after a night of proper sleep, and an idle day with an afternoon nap, I felt almost completely back to normal. Is it from eating a plant-based diet? Is it from being fitter? (The fact that I cycled nearly 500 km a couple of weeks ago can’t have hurt.) Is it just that I weigh a lot less than anyone else and so it takes me less energy to move around? It is a strange feeling to have succeeded relatively easily at something that was such a challenge to others.

Nonetheless, I still feel that I achieved something significant, and unlike William of Perth I didn’t get murdered just past Rochester, so that’s nice.

We’ve also raised a significant amount for young people’s swimming in online and offline donations. The irony is that I don’t do that kind of swimming at all. I’ve never been able to master the technique of breathing while doing front crawl, because I lack the buoyancy and/or skill to keep my head above the water so that I can breathe.

We finally have fibre-optic internet at home again, five years after we last had it before we moved to these infrastructure-starved wild lands in inner London, less than 4 miles from Charing Cross. The engineer came and fitted the cable from the recently-installed box in the pavement to the front wall. It’s both faster and a bit cheaper than VDSL. I’ve gone with the cheapest tier (115 Mbps down) for now, because I wasn’t particularly dissatisfied with 58 Mbps before. It’s enough to download over a terabyte per day, and with the current AI-bubble-inflated cost of storage, who needs that much data?!

I’ve been hoarding links lately. Here they are:

• The git history command deserves more attention. git history fixup is new to me, but potentially very useful.
• E73 is a “rendering of the ECMA-42 standard bitmap printer font from 1973.”
• justif implements Knuth-Plass in JavaScript.
• We write code by hand: “We use Natural Intelligence to build software libraries and applications in production today. Some of them you may be using right now.”
• Copilot worm can spread through Microsoft Word docs. “It’s hard not to chuckle a bit with this one […] Thirty years later, we’ve built an entire category of software that can’t tell the difference [between data and instructions] at all.”
• BitBang: “Run BitBang, get a URL, and open it in any browser – you’re connected to the machine, peer-to-peer and end-to-end encrypted. There’s no account, no port forwarding, and nothing to install on the connecting side.”
• Develop Cross-Platform CLI and GUI Tools With Tcl/Tk. Powerful, Event-Driven, Open-Source And Future-Proof Toolkit… From the Past?!
• Data centres could pay hundreds of millions in deposits for power demands. “[Ofcom] said the amount of electricity capacity being requested by projects seeking to connect to the grid had risen from 41 GW to 125 GW in the past year, reflecting a sharp increase in demand. This is significantly more than double 2025’s peak electricity demand in Britain of around 46 GW.” Ridiculous amounts of power that we don’t have, and which we need for the transition away from fossil fuels.
• AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking. “I’ve had a front-row view to our collective institutions across both the private and public sector undergoing breath-taking mass psychosis. This essay is an attempt to describe the bizarre dynamics that are currently at play, as I am in the rare position where my wellbeing is not contingent on paying lip service to madness, and to reassure the people trying to survive amidst all of this that they are not crazy.”
• The Hare programming language: “Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. Hare uses a static type system, manual memory management, and a minimal runtime.” Fits on a floppy disk, and is opposed to the use of LLMs or GenAI.
• Extinct Media Museum Tokyo is “a private museum that collects and exhibits media and media equipment that have died out or are dying out in the process of evolution based on the belief that all media other than paper and stone will become extinct.”
• Fast Synthesis of Basic Oscillators.
• Why Aren’t There More IMAX 70mm Screens for ‘The Odyssey’? “Sources at Imax confirmed to Variety that many of the parts needed to build these specialized film projectors ‘simply no longer exist.’ The original design files were created roughly half a century ago, but as Gelfond alludes to, they were never properly maintained. As a result, Imax no longer has a complete manufacturing blueprint — and much like the lost tribal knowledge of the Apollo-era spacecraft, very few engineers working today fully understand the systems.”
• slash pages is a “guide to common pages you can add to your website”
• Unicode Variation Selector-15 and some of my tears. How to render ↩ instead of ↩️.
• The AI Resist List: “Actions against the empire of AI.”
• polyUAnalog is a “Polyphonic Analogic and Open Source Synth”.
• GitLost: How We Tricked GitHub’s AI Agent into Leaking Private Repos. The fact that LLMs have no separation between data and instructions strikes again.
• Interview: Drew DeVault on an AI-free version of Vim . An interesting and deep interview that goes far beyond just programming.
• The devout Muslim making a living from Islamophobic AI slop.
• DHH Calls for Death to Cows as He Writes the Word Remigration. Whatever shreds of mask remained on the face of the Rails guy, they’re off now.
• Reviewing AI Code Is Not A Viable Argument. Reviewing is the bottleneck, and reviewing LLM-generated code is harder than reviewing human-authored code.
• Worse on Purpose. “Why your stuff stopped lasting, who profited, and what’s still built right.”
• Grumpystack. “Computers. The Internet. Are too complicated. But they don’t have to be.”

Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka Matz, is the creator and chief designer of the Ruby programming language. He isn’t outspoken, he doesn’t make many pronouncements outside the strictly technical arena, and he conducts most of his online life in Japanese. That provides a space onto which to project anything, and that gave us a motto of the Ruby programming community: MINASWAN (“Matz is nice and so we are nice”).

I’m not saying that Matz isn’t nice, but the “Matz is nice” trope was only ever projection, and in the end it doesn’t matter, because if we’re honest, we must conclude that the Ruby community is not “nice”.

Two of the most obvious “not nice” but powerful people in Ruby are David Heinemeier Hansson, aka DHH, and Tobias Lütke, and Matz shares a stage with both of them.

Let’s take DHH first. He is the creator of and prime mover behind the Ruby on Rails framework. Rails is Ruby’s success story, and represents the vast majority of Ruby development and deployment. It has given me much of my paid work for the past couple of decades.

DHH owns the Ruby on Rails trademark and is, in effect, the dictator for life of the project. He was a controversial figure in the early days of his Ruby fame.

He’s noisy, he’s reactionary, he’s anti-intellectual, he’s very sure that he is right, and he enjoys being rude.

But who among us has not been an idiot in their youth? He seemed to grow up, calm down, chill out, and for a time even espoused inclusive policies and ideas.

More recently, however, he has pivoted his entire online personality to being obdurately “anti-woke”, and started to publish pieces that are increasingly, unarguably, white nationalist and far right in tone and content, lauding Stephen Yaxley-Lennon dba Tommy Robinson, attacking immigrants and other minorities, and generally revelling in reactionary bigotry.

“As I remember London” should be a wake-up call for everyone in the Ruby and Rails communities. This is not a man who wants to keep going. This is a man who romanticizes a past that was predominantly good for white men. This is a man who has spent years railing against diversity, equity and inclusion and who spreads anti-trans rhetoric. This is a man who is deeply afraid of immigration changing countries’ cultures and “national identities”, despite this kind of change being a constant for the whole of human history. This is a man who is a white nationalist. And he is in sole control of Rails, this framework we all love.

Unfortunately it isn’t just migrants and non-white people that have come under fire in DHH’s recent writing and social media posts. There have been multiple examples of anti-trans rhetoric. There was the post where he described an ad featuring a plus-sized Black women as “grotesque” and celebrated the ads being replaced with ones featuring “blond babies” (what is it about the baby’s blondness that is relevant I wonder?). There have been the posts veering into puritanical Pronatalism, another favourite subject of the nationalist right. Whether it’s his direct intention or not, there has been a consistent theme of othering and stigmatising in his recent writing.

In the past few weeks, DHH has gone much further, calling for “remigration”, the euphemism for mass deportation of citizens used by the far right.

Because the sacred cow here is not just that mass migration must stop going forward. It’s also that millions who are already in Europe must go. Remigration has gone from a fringe concept to the mainstream discourse in record time on account of that realization.

He has also, most recently, compared Roma people to wolves that need to be shot, and then got very upset when an LLM refused to translate it because it was “dehumanizing towards an ethnic group”. You don’t gotta hand it to the LLMs, but on this occasion, fair play.

When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn’t hard, it isn’t cruel. It’s the basic logic of self-preservation.

As Emily Gorcenski pithily observed:

just figured out what the HH in DHH stands for

Hansson is also a board member of Shopify, a company that provides hosted online shops, and who you may know from 10,000 annoying podcast ads.

Shopify employs five of the ten foremost current human (we’ll get to that) contributors to the Ruby language. It is the largest sponsor of the Ruby Central organisation, and exercises a great deal of de facto control over the Ruby ecosystem as a result. When Sidekiq withdrew their sponsorship after Ruby Central announced DHH as a speaker at the final RailsConf – the final RailsConf because Hansson, piqued at not being invited to a previous year, had set up his own rival Rails World conference – Shopify pushed Ruby Central to take over full control of RubyGems in a very murky series of events.

Shopify’s technical and labour contribution to Ruby has been significant and valuable; however, along with its financial contribution, this has given it a great deal of power and control over the language.

Billionaire Tobias Lütke is the co-founder and CEO of Shopify. In 2022, against the wishes of 46% of shareholders, he was granted a “founder’s share” giving him 40% voting power.

This week, he’s in the news for endorsing the idea that rich people should get more electoral power.

Shopify has long been infamous for hosting the online store of far-right publication Breitbart (along with other right wing publications and vendors of Nazi memorabilia). They have defended this as supporting free speech, but there has always been a suspicion that there might be more alignment than that. Shopify’s COO until 2025, Kaz Nejatian, was behind a Canadian right-wing anti-immigrant website.

In January 2025, shortly after Donald Trump’s second election win, Shopify terminated their support programme for Indigenous entrepreneurs and their One Million Black Businesses initiative, and then in February closed the Slack channel that had allowed participants to stay in touch. The members of the equitable commerce team left the company without explanation. Despite being a Canadian (by naturalisation) running a Canadian company, Lütke seems to be increasingly aligned with Trump.

you are right that there was stuff spreading everywhere so I guess the initial assertion is true that there was a lot of woke stuff at Shopify, but it was never sanctioned.

Lütke doesn’t say anything nearly as incendiary as DHH, but the actions of the company he controls tell their own story, and his posts on X, the Everything App, document his turn to the right, along with all the crypto and AI stuff you’d expect to go along with it.

He gave Hansson a seat on Shopify’s board long after the latter had started on his anti-“DEI”, anti-immigrant theme. Lütke also recently reposted DHH writing about “not caving to the woke mob”. That’s more than just tacit acceptance.

I hope the move to fork Rails succeeds, but while it’s necessary, I’m not sure it’s sufficient while Ruby as a whole is substantially controlled by the same people.

Meanwhile, what of Ruby? The second most prolific contributor to the Ruby codebase in the last six months is Claude. Is this even worth salvaging?

When I performed at a festival in Athens earlier in the year, I could just have taken a plane to get there – everyone else did – but I try to avoid unnecessary flying. Instead, we made a holiday of it, and spent a fortnight on trains, buses, and ferries, travelling through four different countries. In the process, I had the chance to visit Rome for the first time, as well as Turin, Bologna, and Basel. I saw the whole length of the Italian countryside from train windows. I came back relaxed and refreshed, and I never had to worry about whether my instrument would be allowed as carry-on baggage.

When I walk into a restaurant, I could just order anything off the menu. My life would be a lot simpler. Going vegan has profoundly changed my relationship with food. In exchange, I cook and eat much more interesting and varied food, and I feel much happier with the consequences of doing so.

I’ve been running Linux on a variety of computers, mostly second-hand laptops, for decades. My life would undoubtedly have been simpler if I had just thrown money at the problem and bought a lot of proprietary hardware and software. In work situations, I have long been the only person not using a MacBook. “Just buy a Mac!” they exhort me from the keyboards of their £3,000 machines. I’d be afraid to carry something so expensive and fragile around every day, and the inflexibility of Mac OS bugs the hell out of me. Meanwhile, I’m using a corporate surplus ThinkPad that cost me £170. I saved a computer from landfill instead of buying a new one. I don’t have to give my personal details to US Big Tech just to sign in or install some software. If I don’t like the way something works I can change it, and that makes me happy.

So when people tell me that so-called “AI” is here to stay, and there’s no point resisting, and I’ll be left behind if I don’t embrace it, I don’t care. I don’t just have to do anything. I don’t want to argue in English with a graven image of a human mind, to cajole a gaslighting automaton into writing some software for me, when I already have an unambiguous means of instructing the computer to do exactly what I want. Besides, my human brain is right here, it costs me nothing to use it, it doesn’t create any additional environmental damage to do so, and continuing to exercise it keeps it working.

You only have to spend time in a country with high income inequality to see the negative moral and intellectual consequences of “having staff”. “AI” chatbots and agents bring the same decerebrating idleness to many more people who, like plutocrats of old, think they’re somehow doing actual work while they really become less capable.

I don’t just have to give in, and you don’t either.

After a reasonably early bed and an adequate night of sleep on Sunday night, I woke, ate breakfast in my tent, packed everything onto my bike, and left the festival site a little after seven o’clock. My first day’s route was 86 km with 860 m of climbing.

I saw wrens, corncrakes, peacocks (and peahens), a dunnock, some birds of prey I couldn’t identify (buzzards, perhaps), some I could (red kites), and some unexpectedly excellent cycling infrastructure in Gloucestershire outside Cheltenham.

I had to attack one particularly steep hill in 10 m bursts, but I loved coasting down the other side at over 50 km/h.

I imported my maps from cycle.travel into Organic Maps, but made the mistake of allowing it to suggest a slight variation that looked better on the map. This turned out to be impassable to anything less than a lightweight mountain bike, and I had to take a significant detour.

For lunch, I ate a carb-on-carb feast of hash browns in a bun in a café in an old prison.

My campsite for the night was basic but comfortable. My tent attracted hundreds of flying ants. I managed to keep most of them outside. The site was close enough to RAF Fairford to see and hear a few fighter jets, but they didn’t keep me up at night. In fact, it was my first night camped on a level pitch for a while, and I slept better for not sliding down towards my feet.

My second day of cycling was long: 150 km with about 660 m of climbing. I reasoned that, as a shorter distance would have taken me to the outskirts of London anyway, I might as well push on all the way home to a real bed. In the worst case, it would be possible to catch a train into the centre.

On my way back along the Oxford–Witney bypass cycle track, I stopped off again at Greggs for a morning coffee and vegan sausage roll, and sat on the ground enjoying it. Greggs’ coffee is cheap and, in my opinion, a lot better than many actual coffee chains. Even I, a notorious coffee snob, find it drinkable, which is not something I could say of Costa or Caffè Nero.

I encountered a 15% incline after Princes Risborough that I couldn’t ride up. I had to push my loaded bike to the top, taking frequent breaks, dripping with sweat. But I made it, and from there it was mostly flat as far as the pub I’d targeted for lunch.

The pub kitchen was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, unfortunately, but I bought a drink and sat in the garden eating my own food with their blessing. As I chatted with the regulars, I learned that Kop Hill, the hill I’d just conquered, was the venue for a motor vehicle hill climb challenge. I assume that “Kop Hill” is another one of those tautological place names that just means “hill hill”. It’s definitely a hill.

There was another impossible hill immediately after Great Missenden, on a dirt track which reaches a vertiginous 19% gradient. I struggled not to slide back down the hill as I pushed my bike. This particular track (along with Kop Hill) is on Sustrans the Walk Wheel Cycle Trust’s National Cycle Route 57, which goes to reinforce my negative opinion of that organisation: they proclaim all these cycle routes that they have “created”, but it most cases their work seems to be limited to the addition of hard-to-see signs on routes that aren’t always practical or even safe for cycling.

Mindful of the effort of the gravel section on my first day outbound, I chose a “tarmac” route for my return into London. This took me along a safe but unpleasant track alongside the A40 for what felt like a long time, until I was able to duck through some small streets and get onto the Grand Union Canal all the way back to Notting Hill. From there, I rode through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park by the light of the evening sun, then the familiar streets of south London, then home.

A new fresh hell is upon us: “vibe gardening”. When the garden company came round for an initial visit and chat, they showed me an example of a garden design: to scale, drawn by hand on squared paper. They quoted an initial price to make the plan.

What they delivered was a series of fancy looking renderings, each of which was accompanied by a top-down view that didn’t match the rendering, and neither matched the actual size and shape or the positions of doors and gates of either our front or back garden.

We began to suspect the malign claw of “generative AI”, and our suspicions were confirmed when they sent us a link to an image with impossible geometry and chatgpt.com in the URL. We have asked for our money back.

The thing that saddens me is that, a few months ago, these people were probably competent at their jobs. But a short period of exposure to the obsequious confabulating device has left them unable either to make a simple plan, or to recognise that what they are producing is completely unfit for purpose. It’s a deskilling of disturbing rapidity.

My advice is, never talk to the machine. When billionaires, politicians, and bosses want you to outsource your thinking to the machine, the best resistance is to keep thinking for yourself.

I answered a call from an unrecognised number on Thursday. A robotic voice just said, “Goodbye”, and hung up. The machines are onto us.

Khan’s Bargains is open again. The most useful shop in south London has been closed since the store room fire a few weeks ago, and I’ve missed it.

I’m one of those people who discovered a few years ago that most of the population can literally visualise things, and that the mind’s eye isn’t just a metaphor. I was astounded to learn that “counting sheep” involved enumerating perceived sheep, and not just counting up from one like you’re playing hide and seek.

However, as I lay in bed on Friday morning, awake but only just, I found myself imagining an apple; as I concentrated I was able to see it in colours of red and green, and even to feel the texture and smell against my face. I was awake, but perhaps I was still close enough to dreaming, or perhaps aphantasia is a thing that can be overcome.

I got a letter from the government the other day; I opened it and read it, it said they were … going to send me a load of money. The work I did for the Department for Education was paid through a complicated arrangement involving multiple intermediary companies. Because I finished in the middle of a tax year, they didn’t supply me with a P60 end-of-year calculation, and I had to reverse engineer it from my pay slips. Evidently, I made a mistake, because they did send the calculation to HMRC, and I had paid more tax than I thought. Someone at HMRC corrected my tax return, told me I was owed a refund, and £5,800 appeared in my bank account the next day.

We both volunteered to work as stewards at London Trans+ Pride again this year, after a year in which trans people have been subject to more attacks from society, the state, and one particularly rancid billionaire.

Last year, the turnout was estimated at 100,000; this year, it was about 150,000 trans people, their families, friends, and other allies.

Trans people are a small minority of the population, but you’re not alone. A lot of us will stand with you.

A video recording is available.

I have exported the slides as a PDF.

I’ll add a transcript in due course.

Further reading

• Matrículas de coche de todos los países del mundo
• License Plates of the World
• Olav’s License Plate Pictures
• License Plate Fonts of the Western World: History, Samples, and Download Info
• Vehicle registration plate on Wikipedia
• Jeff’ Plates

References

• Walter Long, House of Commons, 4 August 1903
• Convention with Respect to the International Circulation of Motor Vehicles 1909 (Paris)
• International Convention relative to Motor Traffic (1926)
• Geneva Convention on Road Traffic (1949)
• Vienna Convention on Road Traffic
• UK ratification of Vienna Convention
• Explanatory Memorandum on the Convention on Road Traffic
• States close seat belt law loophole
• Car-driving Tips from Beijing Government
• Who was Charles Wright?
• The German EU numberplates: a typographic road accident?
• Kosovo-Serbia Licence Plate Dispute Proves Hard to Resolve
• Kosovo-Serbia License Plates ‘Sticker Regime’ Comes Into Force
• The dangers of driving under Israeli apartheid
• Luxury car sales hit by new lime green plate scheme
• From stigma to status symbol: Lime-green plates lose bite after a year on the road
• Japan License Plate Generator

Credits

• “Volvo S60 2” by dani31-at, CC BY 2.0
• “DSC_1298” by Chris Blackhead, CC BY-SA 2.0
• “Classic Cars and Trucks” by Martin Pettitt, CC BY 2.0
• “Standard Vanguard Vignale Estate” by Eddy CJ, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
• “HJV815E 1967 MG 1100” by Steve Knight, CC BY 2.0
• “Russian car 03” by Mike W., CC BY-SA 2.0
• “Belgian rear 1953-62” by David Howard, CC BY 2.0
• “Summer memory” by LuK MoG, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
• “IMG_4275a” by Ian Fuller, CC BY-NC 2.0
• “British three wheeled car” by Zach A, CC BY 2.0
• “Next Generation.” by Reece Garside, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
• “Dieppe, Seine-Maritime - France” by Mic, CC BY 2.0
• “Decani Kosovo [a]” by Dave Proffer, CC BY 2.0
• “KLRKS7543_S” by Konrad Lembcke, CC BY-NC 2.0
• Israel’s System of Segregated Roads in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (c) Visualizing Palestine 2012 BY-NC-ND
• What does this green plate mean by Wild_Strawberry7986
• “Tacla Taid Anglesey’s Transport Museum - Motorcycles room - Ariel and BSA” by Elliott Brown, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

That’s 94 km or 58 miles, in under 48 hours, from Southwark Cathedral to Canterbury Cathedral. It’s not exactly the original pilgrimage route – we’re avoiding the A2 as much as possible, for one thing – and there will be more Tescos Express en route than a mediaeval monarch could have imagined, but it’s similar.

We’re hoping to raise money for the local swimming club, which has suffered from increasing costs and from the temporary closure of the local pool earlier in the year.

Blatant appeal for money follows: please visit our sponsorship page if you’d like to donate.

Things that also got a cheer: when I said that I’d cycled all the way from London; and when I faintly praised the Tories for opting out of article 20(6)(b) of the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic to preserve the right of pedestrians to cross the road wherever they wish.

The most typically EMF question after my talk: where did you take that photo of your bike by the weir? (Near Eton.)

Lots of people (who go to EMF) really like number plates. My talk was very well attended, especially considering it was 10:30 on a Sunday morning. Admittedly, it wasn’t quite as busy as the full house for Breaking into buildings with boobs (a hugely informative and entertaining talk!) but I didn’t put “boobs” in the title and, as someone pointed out, to be on Stage A means that plenty of people must have starred it in the talk list.

Composting toilets are great for authentic feedback. While using one, I overheard a couple of people outside discussing talks they’d seen that day. One said, “I went to the number plates talk and it was really good.” That’s honest feedback, and I was happy to hear it.

Even in July, in a heatwave, it can still get cold at night in the countryside. Last EMF, I was too cold at night. But that was in June, and this was mid-July in a near-constant heatwave. Surely my ultralight sleeping bag that’s comfortable down to 15 C would be fine. Well … it got down to 11 C on a couple of nights, and even clad in socks, trousers, fleece, and scarf, I still felt the chill in my bones.

I’m going to buy a warmer sleeping bag before my next camp, even if it’s in the so-called summer.

Solar power is amazing. With a 21 W “hiking” solar panel from Decathlon and a USB C power bank with Power Delivery capabilities, I kept my phone and laptop charged the whole time I was away. Of course, EMF being the kind of event it is, you can bring a long extension lead and get power to your tent; however, as I was staying in campsites on the way that either didn’t offer power to tents or charged significantly for it, the weight of a 10 m spool seemed excessive. I fully expected to have to fill up my charger from a mains socket at some point, but I never actually needed to.

Robins (the birds) can live up to 19 years, and 26 g is heavy for a robin.

Hedgehogs can swim across rivers, tracking them at feeding stations while keeping most of the cats out is hard, and Prickly Pigs hedgehog rescue have one permanent resident hedgehog called Rhubarb who is neurodivergent and thinks they’re a cat.

Side note: I was very sad to see a dead hedgehog at the side of the road on my way back to London.

If you put it on the schedule, they will come. In 2024, the session was spontaneous; this time, it had a time and a place (two times, in fact). On Friday night, a huge number of people turned up at various points, and I ended up playing for 3¾ hours until it was dark and I was still stuck wearing my prescription sunglasses because I’d left my normal glasses in my tent.

Nobody has seen a baglamas before, but it fits in very well with other session instruments. By halfway through the first jam, I was feeling comfortable playing chordal accompaniment as well. It’s really only two shapes and a lot of moving around, but there’s a difference between theoretical and practical knowledge that can only really be overcome in the course of real-life playing.

You can develop black and white film with coffee, as I discovered from Alexander Baxevanis’s talk and live film development demonstration.

A good performer is still a good performer when everything else goes wrong. John Robertson’s “live-action videogame” The Dark Room relies on a remote-controlled laptop presentation. When his Bluetooth controller stopped working, he turned the debugging and fixing into part of the show, with audience participation, and it was just as entertaining as the planned show.

Have a spare pair of cycle shorts. I didn’t, and was content to just wash them by hand each evening. On Friday morning, however, I noticed that the gel padding had broken down, leaving me with a problem for getting home again. This pair of shorts was old, and rubber doesn’t last forever, but they were comfortable up until they broke. I ordered a new pair to be delivered to the Co-op in Ledbury, and cycled there and back on Saturday afternoon (about 20 minutes each way) to collect them. I noticed the difference between regular padding and gel on my ride back to London, however.

Flora Buttery is vegan again! It wasn’t, and then in 2019 it was, and then in 2020 they added dairy back after a “backlash” from people outraged that their sunflower spread – that is literally named after a Latin word for plants – now contained not even a trace of animal products, but I’d missed that the makers had removed the dairy again in 2023 until someone at the South London Makerspace breakfast confidently informed me that it was vegan and pointed to the packet. I mean, if you will keep messing around with the recipe, you can’t expect me to keep up.

Blink and you’ll miss the chance to volunteer. I was out on the Sunday before EMF when they opened volunteering slots; by the time I got home they were all taken. Volunteering is the only way to guarantee a ticket for the next Electromagnetic Field. But I’ll find a way to come back next time!

As well as my tent, clothes, laptop, and a prudent amount of food and water, I was also carrying my baglamas, in its case in a pannier, protected by a section of 150 mm ducting. Last time, the folk jam was spontaneous, but we kept in touch and planned more for this year.

I planned the route with cycle.travel and broke it up over three days: a long first day of 105 km, a shorter second day of 86 km, and a half-day of 47 km on Thursday, to arrive at Electromagnetic Field around the time the gates opened so that I could sort myself out and have a nap before everything started properly. By starting early each day, I hoped to be able to do most of the cycling before the sun reached its death ray zenith.

As I was looking along the route for rest stops, I realised that the first day route took me directly past my aunt’s pub in Cuxham around lunchtime, near my campsite for that evening. That gave me a goal to aim for on Tuesday.

My journey started with a jaunt through London, very quiet at that hour, followed by a long stretch along the Grand Union Canal. It’s flat (apart from some absurd humps where there are bridges) and pleasant, and the discourteous ebike riders aren’t too numerous, but I wish they realised that just because you can achieve a constant 25 km without much physical effort doesn’t mean you should.

The middle section passed Hampton Court and Eton. It was quiet, traffic-free, but more gravelly than I’d realised, and I spent a lot more time there than I’d anticipated.

After that, the route for the rest of Tuesday consisted of quiet country lanes, occasional B roads, and of course the hills of the Chilterns. I did not at any point in my trip enjoy cycling up gradients of 14% or more with a fully-loaded bicycle. I resorted to pushing on a few occasions; some were so steep that even that was a challenge. There were as many downhill stretches as uphill, though, and those were a joy.

I made it to Cuxham around 14:00, and after a good break, a mushroom and artichoke pizza, and a chat, covered the last 10 km to my idyllic campsite next to the river Thame (not a typo, it’s a tributary of the Thames). I swam in a secluded bend in the river, washed my clothes, read a book in a shaded hammock, and had an early night in my tent.

As it was my first day breaking camp, I needed some time to get everything packed up and loaded onto my bike, and I wasn’t on the road until about 07:00. My route was 80 km through Oxford, along a cycle track next to the Oxford to Witney bypass (safe, boring, noisy). Witney, lately the parliamentary seat of the overconfidently mediocre David Cameron, is a beautiful market town full of stone buildings, and was near the halfway point of my day’s ride.

The rest of the ride featured a lot of hills, but ended in a glorious downhill stretch that had me worrying if I was going to wear out my brakes. After 1600 m of climbing and 1600 m of descent, I made it to the campsite at a fruit farm.

I pitched my tent in the shade of a tree, set out my solar panel, and hung my laundry from an improvised washing line tied to a bough, accompanied by the occasional whistle from steam engines on the nearby Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway heritage line. Angled towards the sun at 18:00, the panel was still generating a respectable 9 W.

After weeks of unbearably hot nights, it was a shock to be woken by the cold in the small hours. The temperature had dropped to 12 C; I fumbled in my bag for a fleece to layer and went back to sleep.

The last leg of the journey was short but hilly. I saw a hill that looked like a pimple on the landscape – and a deer running on it – and climbed another called, ridiculously, Eggs Tump. The ride ended in 4 km of climbing that I didn’t enjoy. Nonetheless, having set off at 06:45, I made it to the gates of the festival by about 10:20.

I scouted about for a reasonably flat and quiet spot, pitched my tent, took a shower, and found myself a bowl of chickpea masala, rice, and a samosa.

Then I took a long nap until I awoke to the sound of enka drifting from a nearby gazebo.

Electromagnetic Field itself was fantastic, but I’ll write about that in my next post.

Much of the week has been taken up with polishing my talk for the festival. I find writing a talk to be one of those things where I’m always nearly done, like Zeno’s paradox approaching but never reaching 100%.

As I was walking back from Tesco with a bag loaded with several kg of flour, etc., the baguette I had put at the top of the bag for my lunch slipped free of its polythene sheath, fell onto the pavement, and rolled under an idling van.

I abandoned it.

There were also things that I had to get from Lidl – perhaps not so much “have to” buy there, but they cost significantly less – so I cycled there and picked up what turned out to be a much nicer baguette. I just had to wait longer for lunch than I’d intended.

I should have cycled to Tesco in the first place, and saved myself a laden down trudge home, and a lost baguette.

I renewed our house insurance. The same insurer that we were already using offered us a deal that was cheaper than last year, and cheaper than I was quoted elsewhere. That’s the opposite of the predatory behaviour I usually expect from insurance companies.

There were a few things I needed for my bikepacking trip. As you can infer from the opening paragraph, I sorted them out. I fitted a frame bag. That’s useful, but it blocks the cage mounts and leaves me with nowhere to carry water. I fitted bottle cages to the front forks, using SKS universal cage mounts, hose clamps (because the supplied rubbery velcro isn’t secure enough for fork mounting), and sections of inner tube to protect the forks and prevent slipping.

I also bought a 21W solar panel “for hiking” that is even now, at 19:15 in the evening, oriented to face the sun, generating 11W of electricity to charge my power bank.

If I could figure out a secure way to lash it onto my rear rack it would be even more useful.

We saw Malagasy singer Hanitra perform on Friday night at a concert organised by Tuned In London. It was an intimate audience, and it’s a shame it wasn’t more, because she is extremely talented as a singer and as a performer.

We spent Sunday in Margate, visited the Turner Contemporary and the Crab Museum (recommended to us by someone in a shop, and worth seeing), drank beer in micropubs, and it was a pleasant temperature significantly cooler than London.

I still hate sandy beaches though.

I ran a test on the VDSL line, which identified a real fault: “impairment in copper joint”. I contacted my ISP; they weren’t seeing any packets loss on the connection, but they would contact OpenReach to fix the hardware.

This implied that there was a problem inside the house. I unplugged all the wired devices, and the wireless devices instantly enjoyed perfect internet access. I plugged wires back in until I found the culprit: my desktop.

I thought that it might be the network hardware or its driver (it’s a Realtek, so it seemed a likely culprit), but connecting via a USB ethernet adapter resulted in the same problem: within a few minutes of being plugged in, every other device in the house experienced degraded service.

Someone more knowledgeable said that it sounded like a bridge loop. One thing that creates a lot of bridges is Docker. I stopped that, and the problem went away. I don’t know exactly what Docker was doing, because I deleted all the containers and networks that I no longer needed, which was all of them, because they were all for work, and …

With the end of the quarter, my contract came to an end. They’ve been lovely people to work with, but I’m very glad to have a summer holiday and enjoy a bit of time off.

Every time I finish a contract, I wonder if it will be my last software job. I might think AI is a waste of everyone’s time and the planet’s resources, but if a bunch of know-nothing managers are convinced it’s the future, there are fewer jobs to go around, and the ones remaining require an obeisance to the machine god that I will not make. It might all go pop, but the market can remain irrational for a famously long time. At least I made some decent pension contributions and ISA savings while I could, so I might just about find myself thrown free of the wreckage – unless, of course, the bursting of the bubble wrecks all that as well.

The engineer from OpenReach turned up a couple of days after I contacted the ISP. He fixed a dodgy termination at the cabinet and the reported impairment disappeared. I don’t think it’s made any discernible change to the service, however. The noticeable problems were already fixed by terminating Docker.

I spent the rest of the week doing domestic chores and working on my EMF talk.

The United States of America is 250 years old, which doesn’t seem like a thing worth celebrating. I hope for all our sakes they don’t make it to 300 without serious constitutional and attitudinal adjustment.

It’s been hot, but bearably so, and not nearly as hot as the week before.

Just a few links for this week:

• ‘You can’t make billions without hurting people’: Cory Doctorow on Elon Musk, the AI bubble and bosses’ cruel fantasies “Bosses are haunted by the knowledge that even though they fancy that they’re driving the car, if they don’t show up, everything continues to work. Whereas if the workers don’t show up, everything shuts down. And so perhaps they’re in the back seat with a toy steering wheel. AI is the promise of wiring that toy steering wheel directly into the drivetrain of the car.”
• The Cruel Rebranding of the Vagrancy Act “Scrapping an old piece of paper means absolutely nothing when it’s immediately replaced by fast-tracked dispersal orders, civil Respect Orders, and the ongoing, daily theft of tents and sleeping bags by council enforcement teams.”
• What We Lost When We Quit Using Crappy Old Web Forums They’re still out there, serving niches, and some of them are thriving and pleasant communities.
• .gitignore Isn’t the Only Way To Ignore Files in Git Indeed not; I use .git/info/exclude regularly but still have to remind myself of the path every time.
• How to talk about “AI” without adding to the anthropomorphization. These systems don’t think, they don’t reason, they don’t have intelligence or agency, and perhaps we shouldn’t let ourselves be lured into talking about them as if they do.