Recently, I ended up typing my password into a Slack window while trying to unlock my computer. By the time I’d realised that it wasn’t locked but had merely blanked the screen, my muscle memory was far ahead of my brain. As I went through the hassle of updating my password and brain, I couldn’t help wondering whether there was a better way.

The solution I’ve found lets me unlock my computer with a short PIN and my U2F key, and to use just the key for sudo.

These instructions are for Debian with Gnome; they will probably work on Ubuntu, and for other distributions and desktop environments you might have to make some changes.

Setting up the SoloKey

First, you need to set the PIN on your U2F key. I have an original SoloKey (two of them, in fact), so I need to use the solo1 command. This is afflicted by bitrot, but if you have Python installed you can work around the problem:

pip install pipx
pipx install --preinstall "fido2==0.9.3" solo1

This installs solo1 in its own Python virtual environment. You can now use this to set the PIN:

~/.local/share/pipx/venvs/solo1/bin/solo1 key set-pin

Obviously, choose a PIN you won’t forget, and/or make a note somewhere.

If you have a different type of U2F key, you’ll have to use their tools for setting the PIN; the rest of the process is the same.

Configuring PAM

Now, install the relevant PAM library and tools:

sudo apt install libpam-u2f pamu2fcfg

Next, you need to enroll your key. Plug it in and run:

pamu2fcfg | sudo tee -a /etc/u2f_mappings

You’ll be asked to enter your PIN, then press the button. You can repeat this for any additional keys you wish to enroll.

It’s a good idea to restrict permissions on the mappings file:

sudo chmod 600 /etc/u2f_mappings

Authenticating sudo

To authenticate sudo by clicking on the key, enter the following line into /etc/pam.d/sudo above @include common-auth:

auth sufficient pam_u2f.so authfile=/etc/u2f_mappings cue

Putting this before common-auth means that you won’t be asked for a password if U2F authentication succeeds. Using sufficient (rather than required) allows it to fall back to password authentication if you don’t have your key to hand.

Save the file but don’t close the editor yet. Open a new terminal, and test that it’s working:

sudo echo OK

You should see something like Please touch the FIDO authenticator followed by OK once you have done so.

Unlocking the computer

The procedure for unlocking is similar. This time, the relevant file is /etc/pam.d/gdm-password, and once again we add a line above @include common-auth:

auth sufficient pam_u2f.so authfile=/etc/u2f_mappings cue pinverification=1

The addition of pinverification=1 tells the system to prompt for the PIN in addition to asking you to press the button. This prevents someone who gains physical access to the key from authenticating unless they also know the PIN. You can add the same constraint to sudo if you wish, depending on your threat model.

Thanks to Jookia, Karubits and Yubico for helping me fill in some of the blanks.

I’ve been busy with the local elections recently, and especially on election day itself on Thursday. I woke just after 6 and spent a few hours delivering election day leaflets to identified Green supporters to encourage them to get out and vote.

After work, L— and I spent an hour telling outside a polling station – that’s the thankless task of standing outside in the cold asking people if you can check off their poll number so that they don’t end up getting disturbed later on. After that, we went to knock on the doors of people to encourage them to vote before polls closed at 10.

All that is a lot of work, and walking, and doing things that I really don’t particularly enjoy, but the past few months paid off: in the target ward (Rotherhithe) we got two out of three Green candidates elected.

Because the effort was focused on wards identified as winnable, in our own ward of Surrey Docks there was no activity and only paper candidates. In the final count, however, the Green candidate who came fourth was only 27 votes away from third place. It’s a shame, but it bodes well for the general election.

For Greens in Southwark it was a good result: Labour no longer have control (down from 52 out of 63 councillors at the last vote) and the council is now split: 29 Labour; 22 Green; 12 Liberal Democrat.

I completely wrecked my voice shouting over the din at the celebrations on Friday night; I was still a bit croaky on Sunday.

We dropped into the Surrey Docks Farm Spring Fair on Saturday, where a friend was singing with the London Sea Shanty Collective. That was a lot of fun to listen to.

I left after their first performance with the intention of cycling to Sanshinkai practice, but a busy week, not enough sleep, and a late night on Friday caught up with me and I took a 1½-hour nap instead.

I’m going to Electromagnetic Field (aka EMF Camp) 2026 in July. I went for the first time in 2024, and loved it. This year, however, the tickets sold out within seconds, before I could even open the drop-down menu and click “buy”, and I resigned myself to missing it unless I managed to snag a last-minute ticket again. But I also submitted a couple of talk proposals. One was accepted, so I was able to buy a ticket without needing gamer reflexes, at a bit of a discount.

It’s a talk proposal that I first sketched out a few years ago, and it’s been percolating in my mind for a long time. I’m looking forward to making it real at last.

I’ve heard far too much of that excessively auto-tuned new song by the Strokes on the radio this week. I hope it drops out of 6 Music’s playlist soon.

Links:

• PicoHDMI “leverages the RP2350’s dedicated HSTX (High-Speed Transmit) peripheral with hardware TMDS encoding. No bit-banging, no overclocking required: just near-zero CPU overhead for video output.”
• FastCGI: 30 Years Old and Still the Better Protocol for Reverse Proxies.
• Influential study touting ChatGPT in education retracted over red flags. But after a year and 504 citations, much damage is already done. “It really seemed like a paper that should not have been published in the first place.”
• AMY is a high-performance fixed-point synth library, written in C, that runs on almost anything and implements Juno-style analogue, DX7-style FM, and wavetable synthesis as well as sample playback.
• Palantir Workers Are Finally Noticing The Skulls On Their Caps.
• Your hex editor should color-code bytes. Makes a convincing case.
• AI as a Fascist Artifact.
• Beans is How: “A campaign to double global bean consumption by 2028”.
• Mythos: Backlash builds over NHS plan to hide source code from AI hacking risk. “NHS England is pulling its open-source software from the internet because of fears around computer-hacking AI models like Mythos. Opposition is growing among those who say the move is bad for transparency and efficiency, and will also do nothing to improve security”.
• Keep things open: it makes things better. An open letter asking NHS England to keep its code open.
• That “Pending PayPal Charge” Email Is a Scam — Even Though It Really Came From PayPal. “PayPal lets anyone send small amounts of money to anyone else, and that PayPal will dutifully email the recipient a notification. […] PayPal’s system then automatically generates and sends you a real, legitimate, fully-authenticated email confirming the transaction. Here’s the catch: the email’s subject line is whatever the scammer typed when they set up the payout. PayPal doesn’t sanitize it.” Eek.

I bumped into a few people I knew, and chatted as I followed the troupe for the first hour.

If you’re wondering about the huge (mock) cleavers, that’s the Deptford Gut Girls, who celebrate the women who worked in the Foreign Meat Market in Deptford in the late 19th century:

One of the most unpleasant jobs was cleaning cattle and sheep intestines, which were used for making sausage skins (and, according to a later source, condoms). Originally men’s work, in about 1891 they went on strike for more pay: management responded by assigning the work to women. The wages were still much higher than most working class women and ten times higher than ‘going into service, which is what they were eventually forced to do.

As well as drummers, there were pipers of various kinds, and people playing guitar, banjo, concertinas, accordions, and even a hurdy gurdy. Somehow, they all managed to play together, and it sounded much more cohesive than you might expect from such a motley assortment.

I peeled off at St Nicholas’ church (where Christopher Marlowe is buried) and walked down the high street for lunch at the Waiting Room.

When I set up my new phone a few weeks ago, I configured Syncthing to upload new photos, but without downloading the old ones to my new phone. At least, that was my intention, but at some point it had synchronised the other way and deleted the old photos everywhere.

I had set it to keep backups for a week, but more than a week had elapsed by the time I realised.

This still wouldn’t be a problem except that I hadn’t got round to sorting and importing pictures into my photo management program for a few months.

After a bit of panic, I realised that the photos were still on my old phone, which was switched off, so I just walked down the street until I was out of range of our home network, switched the phone on, and set it to aeroplane mode. Back at home, I plugged it in and pulled all the photos off via USB.

And then I remembered that I had taken a backup of that phone just before I bought the new one, so it was never going to be as catastrophic as it seemed in the moment.

Nonetheless, it’s a reminder: synchronisation alone is not a backup strategy.

Unfortunately, thanks to “AI” companies having bought up all disks (as well as memory and graphics cards) and made them unaffordable, backups are no longer quite so easy. Yet another thing ruined by LLMs!

I spent a quarter of an hour running around the house on Friday night trying to work out where I’d put my music stand. I searched high and low, and even in the loft, but it was nowhere to be seen.

It was in the middle of the living room with a score open on it. You’d think that would be obvious, but I was oblivious: I was looking for a small black folded package, not the deployed stand. L— saw the stand, but assumed I was looking for a different one, because surely I couldn’t fail to see something so conspicuous. No, really, I could.

The Sanshinkai performance at Yokimono Market on Saturday went well. We ended up playing both sets an hour later than scheduled because, although we had sent detailed instructions to the organisers, no one had communicated the staging requirements to the people responsible on the ground.

Whether in Dalston or Stratford, Yokimono always seems to be the most chaotic of all the events we play, but it’s popular. Both sets went well, and we finished before the rain started; we were covered, but the audience wasn’t, and it would be a downer if everyone ran for shelter in the middle of a performance.

Although it rained in the early evening, the weather was lovely for most of the day. Between sets, I took advantage of the proximity of Westfield to escape the captive pricing and massive queues, picked up a marinara pizza from Franco Manca – still good value, even if the price has now broken above £7 – and ate it on the river bank under a weeping willow. It would have been even better if I’d chosen a spot without ants.

I had a bit of success in speeding up a slow connection negotiation process at $CLIENT. This is a tool that attempts to connect to a router via a UDP protocol. The previous algorithm tried each network device in turn, and ran through three attempts with a generous timeout before trying the next one. If the relevant device was low down the list, it could take several minutes.

Instead, I rewrote it try each device once with a short timeout, then repeat with a slightly longer timeout, then finally a longer one still. This typically finds the connection in a few seconds.

My new toothbrush arrived, although as you’ll find out, that was really last week’s news. I didn’t necessarily want to buy a new electric toothbrush, but my old one stopped working. I replaced the battery last year and had hoped that it would manage another decade, but it seems that opening it up compromised the seal and it corroded on the inside.

I don’t mind using an old-fashioned manual toothbrush, but the dentist seems insistent that I should use an electric toothbrush (with a pressure sensor).

After reading around a bit, I ordered a Suri 2.0. It’s well reviewed, it looks stylish, it’s less covered in gunk-harbouring greebling than most of the other ones, and it promises less plastic waste. And as it uses vibration rather than an oscillating head it doesn’t have any moving parts to nip my tongue.

The toothbrush is great. The online purchasing experience, not so great.

16 April:

We’re busy putting the finishing touches to your SURI order and we’ll keep you updated on its journey and tracking details as we get ready to ship it soon.

22 April, after I enquired whether it would be shipped soon, given that it was supposed to be 48 hour delivery:

Your order is still being prepared and hasn’t been dispatched yet. You’ll receive a shipping confirmation and tracking details as soon as your order leaves our warehouse.

25 April, after I sent an email cancelling the order, because I realised I could just buy one in Boots instead:

We’ve finished packing your SURI order #XXXXXXX, and it’s now ready to leave our warehouse with our delivery partner.

If your delivery service includes tracking, we’ll send you an update once your parcel is on the way.

27 April, after they read the email asking to cancel:

I’ve checked your order, and it’s currently marked as delivered.

And there, in the screenshot, was a Royal Mail tracking number and the detail that it was delivered two days before they told me it was still being prepared, and five days before they told me they had finished packing it:

Your item was delivered on 20-04-2026

Maybe I should have checked the post room every day just in case they had sent it when they said they hadn’t, but it’s a big building and the post room is enough of a mess that I don’t generally go hunting for parcels I’ve been led to believe aren’t there.

Again, I’m very happy with the toothbrush, but it seems you’d be better off buying one from a retailer with more business-to-consumer experience.

I started trying to tidy up my office at home, which has been a disaster since I dumped everything in there after our house was renovated. There’s a long way to go, but it’s a start.

Everybody loves the London Marathon except for those of us for whom it’s an annual inconvenience. We don’t live near the marathon; no, we’re surrounded on three sides by it. You can’t cross the road; you can’t take the tube without queueing for hours to get into the station; there are crowds hooting and hollering everywhere. And, even worse, apparently they want to make it a two-day event next year.

At least we have a few underpasses and bridges that cross the route near here, so we were able to escape to the riverward side of the route and cycle along the Thames to the South Bank.

At the Hayward Gallery, we met a friend and visited a combined double exhibition.

Yin Xiuzhen’s installation was charming, and varied in scale from tiny and whimsical cities stitched from old cloths to a vast heart in which a dozen people can sit.

Pictures can’t capture the sheer amount of thread in Chiharu Shiota’s installation. It’s like several cat’s cradles, each the size of a room, and had me puzzled just trying to work out how you’d even construct such a thing.

If you time your visit well, I hear that you can even see performers get in and out of the beds through some invisible gaps in the webs. (We didn’t.)

I’ll be playing sanshin and guitar and singing with London Okinawa Sanshinkai at Yokimono Market in Stratford this coming Saturday. We’re doing two half-hour sets, one at 12:00 and the other at 15:30.

Fun fact: the Japanese word for set in the context of a musical performance is ステージ (sutēji), from English stage. And stage shouldn’t be mixed up with スタジオ (sutajio) which means studio. It can get confusing in a multilingual setting.

I slightly regret missing Haggis Ruby. It would have been an excellent excuse for a trip to Glasgow, and I was tempted.

However, I’m avoiding conferences this year because I can’t face the prospect of being trapped in a room having AI explained at me. I would be very keen to attend a 100% Generative AI Free conference somewhere reachable by train, if anyone wants to promise such a thing.

Slow Horses is good, isn’t it? We’re very late to the party, but that means we won’t run out for a while. I have a lot or respect for Gary Oldman for making himself quite so repulsive in it: I fully believe that that shirt wasn’t washed at any point during the making of the first two seasons.

I have a prediction: some time between now and the local elections on 7 May, BBC News will run another set of migrant-bashing headlines like their recent “undercover investigation” into immigration lawyers.

Links:

• The people do not yearn for automation. “But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! The entire human experience cannot be captured in a database. That’s the limit of software brain. That’s why people hate AI. It flattens them.”
• Do I belong in tech anymore? “Ironically, what I’ve gained from AI is a deeper appreciation for human communication, in all its messy imperfection.” This rings true to me too.
• parli_protect for Drupal. “The Parliament Protect module will protect your website from UK Parliament. There are two options for protection: A silly form asking for far too much personal information or a simple message to be displayed.” There’s a convenient list of IP addresses in the source if you too want to inconvenience the MPs responsible for the Online Safety Act.
• Tunera Type Foundry offers attractive and usable free SIL-licensed fonts.
• Nebula Sans is Nebula’s new brand typeface, based on Source Sans, free under the SIL Open Font License.
• How To Create A Responsive Navigation Menu Using Only CSS.
• FontCrafter: Create Your Handwriting Font for Free. Print page, write letters, scan, get font.
• On the acceptance of GenAI. “If any of these facts are new to you, you haven’t been doing your due diligence.”
• Debunking zswap and zram myths. “If in doubt, prefer to use zswap. Only use zram if you have a highly specific reason to.”
• Piper is a “fast and local neural text-to-speech engine that embeds espeak-ng for phonemization.”
• The Necessary Pain Involved in Blogging (if you want your work to be preserved beyond your lifespan).
• File Wizard is a “self-hosted, browser-based utility for file conversion, OCR and audio transcription.” Can be run via a Docker image.
• Document Converter Pro is “A powerful, Docker-based document and image conversion application with a modern web interface built using Streamlit. Convert between multiple document and image formats with ease, including batch processing capabilities.”
• Modern Frontend Complexity: essential or accidental? Presents an alternative: “We can utilize HTMX, HTML Web Components and a templating language to build websites and apps in a way much more aligned with how the browser works - without sacrificing user experience, complex features or developer experience.”
• DSPi “transforms a Raspberry Pi Pico or other RP2040-based board into a very competent and inexpensive little digital audio processor.”
• whosthere is a LAN discovery tool with an interactive TUI.
• Ultramaster KR-106 is an open source Roland Juno 106 emulator.
• On the abdication of Chief Prophet Tim Cook. John Ternus has been appointed as Steve’s representative on Earth.

An endangered Mexican axolotl, a species of aquatic salamander, has been found living under a bridge near Bridgend in south Wales by a ten-year-old girl. The amphibian is the size of a small cat, and it’s the first documented discovery of the species in the wild in the UK.

Evie Hill was on holiday with her family when they stopped at the dipping bridge over the river Ogmore.

I went down to the bank and there was this thing with gills on its head and I’m like, that’s an axolotl, and I went, Mum, there’s an axolotl in the river, and she said, no there’s not, you’re not going back in the water, though I went back in the water anyway because I could see it and then I caught it and brought it back and my cousin’s going mum, Evie’s caught the axolotl, she’s caught it!

So of course the first thing I did was to open a browser and search for a picture of this small-cat-sized critter. I found a slightly longer standalone version of the story with a small picture of the axolotl’s face, but nothing more.

I did, however, find something similar from September last year in an “Axolotls Lovers” [sic] group on Facebook.

Hi. My son recently rescued a axolotl from a river near us. Being the uk waters and fast flowing waters she must have had a really bad time and lucky my son found her. I managed to quickly get a tank together for her and shes setting well i think lol. I have done alot of research and hope im doing things right for her. Any tips on helping her gain weight as she was very skinny and help her grow her fluffy gills again?also finding it straige she has no black dots in her eyes they are see through. She obviously had a very stressful time being dumped in a river. Any information il need to know would be a massive help.

A few seconds of searching for the author’s name led to their Instagram account with a video of the axolotl.

So … is it really “the first documented discovery of the species in the wild in the UK”? (And do BBC journalists actually go beyond merely repeating what they’re told?)

An interesting detail is that this other person also appears to live in or near Cardiff: they are pictured wearing University of South Wales/Prifysgol De Cymru scrubs and talk about visiting Clearwell Farm. This raises the possibility that there are more axolotls living wild in south Wales, and perhaps even that they can survive over the winter!

And as if just getting used to work again wasn’t enough, Tuesday ended up being longer than anticipated. I hadn’t had a chance to check over my bike and pump up the tyres over the weekend, so I took the Overground to Peckham on Monday and Tuesday. That was fine until Tuesday afternoon, when I checked the time of the next train and saw that they had all been cancelled.

Something had caught fire at Clapham Junction, at the end of the line, and as a result trains on the entire Surrey Quays to Clapham Junction branch were cancelled all afternoon and evening. One might naïvely ask why they couldn’t just run the trains most of the way and back again, but I think all the platforms along that branch serve multiple routes, and using one as a temporary terminus would block other services.

I checked the options to get home: 56 minutes on the slow, winding 381 bus, or 58 minutes on foot. I chose to walk, as it costs nothing and it’s a bit more pleasant – on a mild light evening, that is; it would have been different in the rain. I used to walk home from Holborn fairly regularly when I worked there; that was a little further but more picturesque, especially along the river. However, I prefer to walk out of choice than out of necessity.

On Wednesday evening we went to a Green Party fundraiser comedy gig, conveniently located just upstairs from my desk. You never really know what you’re going to get at that kind of event, but the overall standard was good, and it was an entertaining evening.

I saw an unhappy-looking vole in the garden on Friday afternoon. It was just sitting there, looking unwell. It scampered away when I got close, but I put some water out in case that was the problem. I haven’t seen a dead vole, so perhaps it helped, but that’s all I know.

We met a friend for brunch at the recently-opened Simplicity Bakery in old Rotherhithe, in the premises that used to be the otherwise unconnected Simplicity restaurant. The coffee was good, and the leek and potato pastry was delicious. I hope it succeeds; that it was busy is a promising sign.

It’s been a while since I posted any links, so here’s a few:

• A Japanese Glossary of Chopsticks Faux Pas.
• Advanced Mac Substitute “is an API-level reimplementation of 1980s-era Mac OS. It runs 68K Mac applications in an emulator without an Apple ROM or system software.”
• The Media Let Mandelson Get Away With It for Decades.
• AI’s sinister takeover of British politics. “British laws are already being written by AI.” But of course! Of course those dunderheads would outsource their thinking to a machine.
• picoZ80 is a RP2350-based pin-compatible Z80 emulator plus RAM. It can also emulate a disk controller and other peripherals.
• Kindling is a fast, open source Kindle publishing toolkit that can also compile dictionaries and comics.
• Porting Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii.
• Self-updating screenshots. A simple great idea: capture your documentation screenshots in your build system so that you don’t have to faff around updating them every time you make a change.
• Bring Back Idiomatic Design. Modern web applications are idiosyncratic and lack the consistency, predictability, and consequent usability of older desktop environments.
• AI data centres can warm surrounding areas by up to 9.1°C. Is that good?
• On the foolishness of “natural language programming”. Edgar Dijkstra: “The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.”
• Let’s talk about LLMs. “Very few organizations have the strong fundamentals needed to absorb even a relatively moderate, incremental increase in the amount of code they generate, which I suspect is why so many studies and reports find mixed results and lots of broken CI pipelines. Not only is there no silver bullet, there especially is no quick or magical gain to be had from rushing to adopt LLM coding without first working on those fundamentals.”

In Bari, the weather was nicer than it had been last time. We walked a different route past the castle and through the old town, stopped to pick up lunch for the journey, and caught our train to Bologna.

The train made good progress as far as Foggia, where it paused. A landslip further up the Adriatic line half an hour earlier had blocked traffic (and would do so for a couple of days). This was the first misfortune. We were to be rerouted via Rome, skipping Pescara and Ancona but stopping at Bologna and Milan as intended. No problem; we were going to Bologna.

But we didn’t leave Foggia, and although the display on the train and the automated announcement kept repeating the same information, nothing was happening. I went in search of information. I don’t really speak Italian, but it’s basically just another Romance language with fairly reasonable pronunciation (unlike, say, Portuguese, which is only comprehensible to me when written) so I was able to grasp most of what was going on by listening to other passengers talking to the staff, and occasionally asking for some clarification.

Our train had broken down while waiting in the station. This was the second misfortune.

Unfortunately, as they don’t let you take a train without a seat reservation, we couldn’t just take the next train, and because it was Easter week all the trains were already full. The Trenitalia staff said that we’d be taken to our destination either on buses or on a replacement train, but they didn’t know which.

Foggia is a backwater of a station to be stuck in. Much as I sometimes despair at the shopping mall-ification of stations, at least you can get stuff there. Foggia has not received these capitalist blessings. It has one bar and some vending machines.

After a few more hours, there was more news, although I had to find it out by asking, because if there’s one thing Trenitalia is absolutely dreadful at, it’s telling passengers what’s going on. A replacement train set was being sent from Rome, a few hours away.

Then a third misfortune befell us. A car had crashed on a level crossing, and the train from Rome couldn’t reach us until that blockage was cleared.

The replacement train eventually rolled into the station a little after half past ten, ten hours after we should originally have left. It was greeted with clapping and cheering from the exhausted passengers.

Even then it wasn’t entirely smooth: between Rome and Florence we took the old, slow, winding route instead of the high speed track.

We finally made it to Bologna at 06:00, nearly twelve hours later than planned. At least it was still before dawn, and our hotel was only a couple of streets away. We checked in and slept for a few hours before getting up in time for the tail end of breakfast (until 10:00).

Between some low quality sleep on the train and some better quality sleep in the hotel bed, we both felt rested enough to wander around Bologna. The sun helped.

We walked around the city, saw the Piazza Maggiore and the Moline Canal, ate lunch at Miss Fagiola, visited the international museum and library of music, and had some al fresco beer at a bar near our hotel.

The last stop on our way home was Basel. The next morning, after a short journey from Bologna to Milan, we boarded a Swiss train for the rest of the journey. This was the most spacious and comfortable train of the trip.

We were only in Basel for one night, but we arrived at 15:26, our hotel was right next to the station, and we still had plenty of time to explore. We walked around the old town, looked inside the Münster, took a rope ferry across the river, and stopped at a bar on the river for a drink in the sun.

We walked along the Rhine, where people were relaxing in the evening sun and they even have a little artificial beach, until we reached the restaurant we’d booked for dinner: Cantina Don Camillo in the old Warteck brewery.

It’s a slightly odd concept for a restaurant: vegan starters, vegan mains, vegan desserts, vegan wines, but they also serve meat main courses (but only main courses). Is it so that you can take your non-vegan friends for a meal and they won’t die from having to go through an entire meal without eating meat?

In any case, the vegan food was delicious, I had a glass of one of the best red wines I’ve ever tasted, and it came to an amount that reminds you that the median salary in Switzerland is nearly twice that of the UK. It was a good way to end our trip.

The next morning, we walked the two minutes to the station and caught our French TGV Lyria service to Paris. The travel agent hadn’t been able to book us onto the earlier Eurostar that would have been a more reasonable connection, so we ended up with a couple of hours to kill before we needed to check in. There’s not a lot to recommend a visit around Gare du Nord, but one exception is Café Tranquille a block south. We drank coffee and did a cryptic crossword before heading to the Eurostar terminal.

The previous train – the one we would have taken if we could – was running late, and left about an hour late. Our train left about five minutes later than scheduled. If we’d been able to take the earlier train, we’d just have spent an extra hour in the unlovely environment of Gare du Nord departures.

And then we were back in London, walking through Saint Pancras, and it almost seemed as if we’d only been there the day before, even though it was eleven days earlier.

When I looked at our itinerary before we left, I was a bit worried that it would feel as if we were spending the whole time on trains. In fact, it wasn’t like that at all. Even in the places that we were in only for one night, it seemed as if we saw a representative sample of what the city had to offer. Furthermore, when you’re on the train, you see so much of the country between the cities. We saw snow in the Alps, and abandoned houses – so many abandoned houses – in the Italian countryside, and mountains and lakes everywhere. We saw ancient ruins and mediaeval cities and four different countries and heard multiple languages.

I’d definitely do it again. Even with the horrible delay on the way to Bologna, I enjoyed the trip.

Our outbound itinerary was one night in Turin, two nights in Rome, and one overnight ferry before arriving in Athens on Friday.

We left London on Monday morning. We started with the long queue for the Eurostar at St Pancras (just behind the first example of Mar-a-Lago face I’ve seen in the flesh, and very disturbing it was). From Paris Gare du Nord, we took the RER to Gare de Lyon and, from there, a Ouigo TGV to Turin.

Paris remains an annoying hold-out as the only place we visited where you can’t just use a contactless bank card to travel, but instead need a special card (Navigo) that you have to reload. Everywhere else, even on the diminutive Turin Metro, you can tap a card you already have.

The TGV gets as far as Lyon rapidly, but then spends hours crawling across the Alps on slow lines. We left London in the sunshine, but up in the prematurely crepuscular shadow of the mountains it was snowing.

We broke through back into daylight on the Italian side and arrived in Turin in time for dinner at Gørilla, a characterful bar with plenty of vegan tapas options of which we ate our fill.

Although we were only in Turin for the night, after an early breakfast in our hotel next to the station we had time to wander around the city for a couple of hours before our 09:55 train to Rome.

The Frecciarossa to Rome to was fast (295 km/h), it was reasonably comfortable, and it arrived on time in the mid afternoon.

Rome underwhelmed me, however. Whatever illusions of la dolce vita you might harbour, dispel them. There is plenty of historic architecture in various states of ruin, but the overwhelming theme of Rome is cars. Perhaps it’s connected to the fact that the metro network is so desultory, but every space that isn’t filled with as many lanes of traffic as they could squeeze between the buildings is given over to static cars parked double or even triple. We walked the Appian Way from the Parco della Caffarella to the Colosseum; for most of the route the cobbled street is two lanes of speeding vehicles, with only a narrow painted-on strip for pedestrians on each side.

The city is also crowded. By the raw numbers, there aren’t as many tourists in Rome as in London – fewer than half as many visitors, in fact – but because they seem to be squeezed into a smaller number of places it feels much worse.

We decided not to squander our limited time in Rome in any of the queueing opportunities, so we enjoyed the Colosseum and Palatine Hill from the outside. I would, however, recommend the placid, tourist-ignored, and free Museo delle Mura in the Porta San Sebastiano, in which you can learn about the old city walls and walk along a section of them.

The churches are worth looking inside; for example, amongst all the scaffolding and repairs in Santa Maria in Portico di Campitella is a stunning 17th century altar:

Our hotel was in the south of the city, in the Garbatella area, where we found Le Bistrot, an amazing vegan restaurant, run by a friendly family, serving adapted versions of traditional Roman and Italian cuisine.

To get to Greece we first took another Frecciarossa to Bari on Thursday morning. After a stop for a coffee, We walked through the old town in the rain to the port, followed the long and perfunctory pedestrian route to the terminal, and checked in for our ferry to Patras.

The ferry (Superfast II) was fairly new and well appointed, and our room was comfortable enough for a good night’s sleep disturbed only by the alarming reverbrations of an intermediate stop in the wee small hours at Igoumenitsa.

For most of the journey the ferry is within a short distance of the coast, so to avoid the exhorbitant roaming charges of the marine base station on the ferry itself, I turned off automatic network selection and fixed my phone to an Italian network (and to a Greek one the following morning), and had a working connection most of the time using my regular free roaming allowance.

The journey from Patras to Athens was more of a hassle. First, we had to get from the ferry terminal to Patras itself. There are some intermittent buses, but the easier way was a taxi for €10. There’s a railway station at Patras, but you can’t get a train to Athens from there. Instead, you take a bus operated by the railway company as far as Kiato, from where the train to Athens departs. We’d been told to take the bus from the bus station across the road, but when we reached the bus station we discovered that it was abandoned, replaced by a newer bus station a few minutes further on. But there was no sign of our bus on the departure board, and when I asked at the information desk I was rudely informed that it was another company and they didn’t know anything about it.

We walked back to the railway station, and found our bus parked in front. It took us to Kiato, we changed to the Athens train (operated by Hellenic Train, Ferro dello Stato Italiane Group, like it’s still the early Roman Empire), and then caught the metro a couple of stops to our hotel, where we arrived about 18:15 on Friday evening.

And then I immediately left again to go to the venue for a soundcheck, while L— took our dirty clothes to a serviced laundry to be washed and dried for €10. It’s much easier than carrying around a fortnight’s worth of clothes.

Athens is a lively place in the evening. We strolled to Exarcheia to COOKooMÈLA for delicious vegan souvlaki and generous cups of wine (⅓ of a bottle for €3!) at a table on the pavement in front.

The Sanshinkai performance wasn’t scheduled until late on Saturday, which left us plenty of time to wander around Athens, visit the Museum of Ancient Greek Technology (fun and interesting), see some of the sights like the National Garden, the Zappeion, the Temple of Olympian Zeus (we didn’t go in as it’s half covered in scaffolding and you can see it pretty well from the fence without paying €20 a head) and the Arch of Hadrian, wind our way through Plaka and Monastiraki, and still have a few hours for a nap before heading to the venue.

I found a music shop selling traditional instruments and tried several baglamades of various prices before choosing a mid-range one that was easy to play and sounded good to my ears. It’s one more thing to cart with us on our journey back, but at least it’s small and light: it’s specifically designed to be that way.

Our performance went well. Everyone knew what they were doing, nothing broke, and the audience seemed to enjoy it. The taiko players didn’t bring the bulky drums from London, but instead borrowed a couple from a Japanese percussion group in Athens. Unfortunately, Japanese taiko drums are designed for static use, rather than being carried by dancers, and these were about twice as heavy as they were used to! They managed, but I don’t think it was fun for them.

Early on Sunday morning L—, I, and most of the Sanshinkai performers climbed up to the Acropolis in time for the 8am opening. The Ministry of Culture had given us free tickets in exchange for our participation in the cultural life of Greece, but the gate staff at the Acropolis, in full jobsworth mode, were having none of it. “Why do you have free tickets?” Because your government gave them to us. After our Greek member went to talk to the ticket office staff, who didn’t have any problem with it, we eventually made it inside.

Compared to Rome, even the most important sites in Athens are fairly quiet, especially first thing on a Sunday morning. We took a relaxed wander around the Parthenon and its environs before walking back down the hill to the Acropolis Museum for brunch and a look at the exhibits.

The museum’s presentation of the Parthenon sculptures is excellent, and further reinforces the inescapable truth that the ones that Elgin appropriated would be better returned to their proper context, rather than continuing to sit in a gloomy room in the British Museum.

I liked Athens a lot, although I’ve never been anywhere quite so noisy. We gave up on the idea of eating at one restaurant because the techno emanating from a bar a street away was so unpleasantly loud – more appropriate to a warehouse in an industrial estate than a residential street – that it would have been like dining next to a pneumatic drill. The bar next to our hotel was similarly loud, but luckily our room faced an internal courtyard and was insulated from it.

Sunday was our last full day in Athens; the journey continues in the next installment.

Monday was the worst. I took the day off because there was no chance of getting any work done. I managed three days of work; they might not have been my most productive ever, but I did at least finish off the thing I was doing.

In Surrey Quays shopping centre, I saw teenagers queueing up to scan their eyeballs with one of weirdo Sam Altman’s weird World (formerly Worldcoin) iris-scanning orbs. I wonder if we’ll ever hear the outcome of the ICO’s enquiries (that post has since been scrubbed off their website), and I wonder whether scanning the irises of minors into your massive database is actually legal. I would have assumed not, but perhaps it counts as “innovation” and thus benefits from some kind of impunity.

I hope the approximately £5 worth (at current prices) of oddball cryptocurrency is worth giving their iris scans to Sam Altman forever.

It doesn’t feel like the kind of thing that happens in a society where things are going well.

L— and I went out delivering leaflets for the Green Party in advance of the local elections. We tried on Friday night, but after about ten minutes it started raining hard and we had to call it off. It was sunny on Saturday morning, so we finished off the rest of it. The hardest part was getting to letterboxes in blocks of flats where the developers have blocked off the post boxes inside the locked entrance. Must be hard to get anything delivered when you live there. The second hardest thing was deciphering the unreasonable house numbering scheme perpetrated by developers when building housing during the London Docklands Development Corporation era.

On the way, we saw a fox brazenly eating off the road in the middle of the day, only moving reluctantly to allow the occasional traffic to pass. On closer inspection, its irresistible meal turned out to by a grey squirrel, squashed flat into a pancake of flesh and fur by passing cars. The fox eventually pried the sheet off the ground and carried it away to be finished off in peace somewhere else.

It’s a bit gross, but hey, that’s the circle of life in the city.

My week didn’t start auspiciously, either. I had to re-prove my identity to one of my bank accounts by uploading a photo of my driving licence – in case I had ceased to be myself in the past few years, I suppose – as a result of which left my wallet on my desk at home before cycling down to Peckham for the day.

I didn’t realise until I tried to get it out of my pocket to open the door. I just turned straight around and cycled home. At least it was a mild and sunny morning for it, although there was enough pollen to leave me sneezing.

On the way, I spotted a sticker on a lamppost advertising another “Unite the Kingdom” jamboree of littering and racism in May. That will be a weekend to avoid central London.

Traid on Rye Lane were doing one of their periodic sales; this time, everything was £2, so I thought it was worth a look. I found a nice hooded cotton/linen lightweight jacket from Uniqlo that’s perfect for the warmer weather. It’s not brand new, but it doesn’t look like it was worn more than once or twice. I’ll take that for £2!

I narrowly escaped falling victim to a similar fate as L— the week before, in the same place, when someone on a rental e-bike (Forest, this time) raced down from the Millwall path onto Senegal Way in front of me without slowing or looking.

Rental e-bikes are useful and clearly popular, but they do seem to attract some especially insouciant riders who put everyone in danger. They’re full of instrumentation and comms hardware in order to track their location and operate the service, so I wonder whether the companies could be made to take more responsibility for their riders. Perhaps accelerometer data could identify hazardous riders, or location data could be used to reduce the maximum speed near junctions. I don’t think they’ll do anything without legislation or the threat of losing licences, though.

I had a much-needed haircut. My hairdresser, whom I’ve been visiting for over a decade, had been away visiting her family in Malaysia for over a month. That’s long enough for me to really need a haircut, but not long enough to go to the hassle of finding someone new. She’s back now, and I look better for it.

We went to the Tate Britain to see the Turner and Constable exhibition before it closes next month. I came away with a distinct preference for Constable’s work: in comparison, his paintings seem livelier, and more human, whereas Turner doesn’t even really seem to like people. Given the choice, I prefer realism over classical scenes. On the other hand, my absolute favourite picture was Norham Castle, Sunrise by Turner, painted late in his life, a canvas of pure light.

On the way back, we passed a Chinese-registered car, just parked on Millbank. How did a car from Harbin, a landlocked city in Heilongjiang province in Northern China, come to be parked in London? How would you even drive here? And why? It’s one thing to transport a supercar halfway across the planet, but a Chinese-made Toyota?

Links for good or ill:

• The major-minor mode dichotomy in music perception. A systematic review of literature on how we feel about major and minor keys. Even in Western music, the association of major with happy and minor with sad is relatively recent.
• Children’s associations between space and pitch are differentially shaped by language. The idea that musical pitch is “high” or “low” is not universal, and not necessarily even particularly intuitive; in this study, they found that the Turkish concept of “thin”/”thick” is internalised at a younger age than “high”/”low”.
• Hister is a search engine that indexes websites you’ve visited.
• Reverse Drafting Club: “Reverse drafting is the process of unraveling fabric swatches and diagramming their construction using weave draft notation. It’s really fun! So fun that we started a Reverse Drafting Club to work remotely on this practice with friends near and far.”
• Tiled Words is a sort of crossword/Scrabble mash-up daily word game.
• March, 19-21: God is a comedian. “Friday’s press gaggle. Barely exaggerated: at 12:03 PM, President Trump told reporters he wanted a ceasefire with Iran. At 12:05 he declared victory. At 12:07 he announced he was sending Marines. At 12:08 he said no boots on the ground. At 12:11 he said he did not want a ceasefire. At 12:16 he declared victory again. At 12:17 he asked for a ceasefire. At 12:23 he told NATO they were cowards. At 12:29 he said Iran was begging for a ceasefire. At 12:31 he said everything was perfect. At 12:36 he said $500 oil was a good thing. At 12:37 he demanded Iran open Hormuz. At 12:39 he said Hormuz was never closed. At 12:41 he said the US was not at war with Iran. At 12:42 he declared victory in Iran.”
• The 49MB Web Page. “I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones. […] To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49 MB web page, let’s quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks). The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page load.”
• The pet I’ll never forget: Penny, the pigeon who never left my side. “[Pigeons] are so misjudged: they’re incredibly intelligent, loyal and affectionate. Just like Penny was. I was never lonely while she was in my life.”