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.

Starmer quit as prime minister – or, more accurately, announced his intention to do so – having apparently realised several months later than the rest of the country that he wasn’t going to make it anywhere near the next election. I know there’s no great talent pool in the parliamentary Labour party to draw from, but I still I don’t feel great about the fact that the next PM-designate is just being shooed in based on a kind of media blitz, or that he’s now beholden to an electorate in a reactionary constituency.

In the early hours of Wednesday we were woken by a biblical thunderstorm, and both sat bolt upright when a deafening thunderclap hit close by, setting off car alarms.

I later found out exactly how close it hit: a house about 400 m away, where it destroyed their TV and burnt a toilet roll. Despite this, both building and occupants were unharmed.

It was horribly hot all week. On Tuesday, I closed the curtains and shutters all day and arrived home to a house that was only 27 C and felt cool compared to 34 C outside. Closing off the heat from the outside does work to an extent. If we had some of those external shutters you find on old French houses, it would be even better.

We watched Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the cinema via National Theatre Live. It’s the first time I’ve watched one. It’s much cheaper than the theatre, and whilst it lacks a certain feeling that you get when something is happening in front of you, you’re closer to the action and the view is better.

Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner were great in the lead roles; Turner was especially menacing and venal, I thought. I loved the dance interludes at scene changes and the opulent costumes.

We watched it at Peckhamplex on a hot evening, and that cinema doesn’t have air conditioning. However, the cavelike proporties of the car park structure kept the temperature pleasantly cool inside.

As we emerged into the heat of the evening we were greeted by a row of fire engines on Rye Lane. A stockroom on the first floor behind Khan’s Bargains caught fire – refrigerators overheated in the weather, I heard – but it was contained and the damage was minimal.

I’d already planned to spend Friday in Brighton and go to a concert in the evening, and it was an ideal day to escape the city. Brighton was much cooler and overcast, at least until the early evening, and I felt a bit chilly in my shorts at times. I sat on a foggy beach and had never been happier for such weather.

I walked to Kemptown to sit and read in a pub (The Well on St George’s Road, a lovely little bar that feels like a sitting room) before the gig, then strolled up the street to join a massive queue to get into the church that was the venue for the evening.

The reason I’d gone to Brighton was that after the Mandalakia gig the previous week, talking to the singer, who also sings with Idrîsî Ensemble, I mentioned that I’d missed out on tickets to see the latter. “We’ve just announced a gig on the 26th,” she told me. At home, I checked, but that gig was already almost sold out, with the only remaining seats having a restricted view but still being quite expensive. However, I saw that they were playing Brighton the previous evening. L— already had plans, and I had the day free, so I decided to take a day trip to Brighton and bought a ticket.

Idrîsî Ensemble played in a small group of singers, variously accompanied by vielle, a small portative organ, and hurdy-gurdy. The programme, Trinity & Quadrivium, was inspired by Hildegard von Bingen, the Sibyl of the Rhine, the first Renaissance Woman before there were any Renaissance Men, and comprised Latin, Corsican, Occitan, and French pieces from the 12th to 14th centuries.

It was excellent, and I highly recommend them to anyone who enjoys early music.

After a quick dinner at the new outpost of Tofu Vegan in the Lanes – fish-fragrant aubergine and rice, if you’re interested – I caught the air-conditioned Thameslink back to London. The Jubilee Line was two stops of actual sauna temperatures, and it was followed by another night of sleeping on top of the bed, but at least I experienced a bit of cool during the day.

L— ate something dodgy on Friday while I was in Brighton – we suspect B. cereus from rice in a sushi roll – and ended up with food poisoning that left her lying abed feeling sorry for herself for the whole weekend. She’s mostly recovered now.

Have you ever wondered what happens if you heat up a skillet that is sitting on a cork mat on top of an induction hob?

It works almost as usual, but the mat does get a bit scorched on the pan side.

It wasn’t an intentional experiment, but at least nothing bad happened. I only heated it up to warm some flatbreads, so it wasn’t running particularly hot or particularly long.

We were woken in the middle of Monday night by cheering. I assume it was the football, probably the Iran–New Zealand match that kicked off at 02:00 UK time. Some of the games are at very unsociable hours from a western European perspective. I don’t know which neighbours it was, or which team they support.

I know I have Turkish neighbours, and there’s a 03:00 game coming up, so I’ll find out soon enough if they’re football fans.

I potted the pothos cuttings I’d been cultivating on my desk. Technically it’s Epipremnum aureum, which is no longer classified in the Pothos genus, but that’s not my problem, is it? They seem to be doing well so far.

HMRC owe me a decent (four figure) amount of overpaid tax from last year. That’s nice. The process of getting paid the money is pretty onerous these days, however. It used to be simpler, but now you have to download an official government app and scan your driving licence. Or passport, I guess, but I don’t have a valid UK passport. I tried the alternative method of answering a few questions, but after a lot of weirdly specific questions about my precise credit card transactions it told me no. At least I was able to install the app on GrapheneOS, even though there’s no way to do so without getting it from US Big Tech.

I don’t know what you do if you’re a non-driving foreign national. Or if you don’t own an appropriately powerful and modern phone. HMRC get to keep your money, I suppose.

Even though I haven’t got the money yet, the prospect was a bright spot after a rather dispiriting day of unproductive JavaScript wrangling.

The replacement fridge door shelf arrived from France. It fits perfectly, I saved £41, and I’m happy.

I nearly ran over a pigeon. I was rolling rather slowly around the corner of the docks, not even pedalling at the time, when a pair of birds walked straight in front of my bicycle wheel. I was sure I’d crushed one, but when I looked round they had both flown away. I stayed around for a little while, but didn’t see any obviously injured pigeons. I hope they were OK. I was a little traumatised by the event.

I went to see Mandalakia play Greek rebetiko music at Sands Films, from a front row seat. People seem so reluctant to take front row seats; perhaps they still think they’re at school. I’m happy to get a good view.

It was a very tight performance, and the singer is absolutely stellar.

While purchasing a CD from the merch stand afterwards, I learned that, while μανταλάκια (mandalakia) does mean “clothes pegs” in Greek, it also refers to the microtonal adjustment fixtures on the kanun, known as mandallar in Turkish (itself originally a loan from the same root in Ancient Greek).

Of four job postings to the LRUG mailing list in the past week, one is actually in Cambridge (daily, in person), one is for a mid-level role, and the other two both require that the candidate fully embrace the synthetic text extruders:

• “Successful candidates will … be using AI to responsibly write all their code”
• “Day to day you will … Champion AI-assisted development”

It’s safe to say I won’t be doing either of those things, and if that means I never get another software development job in my life, it wouldn’t be the worst outcome in the world.

Okinawa Day went well. I played four sets: two of music and singing, and two accompanying the eisa dancers. I didn’t mess up the piece I was most worried about, one which leaves the player absolutely nowhere to hide. Many friends came to watch and support – even an old university friend visiting from Singapore for a few days!

I’ve been hoarding links lately:

• Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health. “Our results suggest that remote work substantially increases isolation and worsens mental health, particularly for those living alone. Although a large body of research finds that workers want to work remotely, our findings suggest that workers may not realize the costs of remote work for their well-being, which may take time to accumulate.”
• Gritcore by Norfolk Trotter is “[t]wo textured walls sourced from playing sandpaper discs on a modified turntable at 8 RPM, track 1 is coarser grit whilst track 2 is a slightly finer grit.”
• Watch our short film on the cosmic sound of Cabo Verde. In 1968, a cargo of modern synthesisers washed ashore in Cabo Verde; hidden from colonial authorities, they ended up influencing the sound of the resistance against Portuguese rule.
• Rising Emissions, Depleting Water and Vanishing Land—UN Scientists: AI Is Threatening Natural Resources for Billions. “By 2030, AI’s water use will match the needs of 1.3 billion people while its power use triples that of 650 million”.
• No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious, says Ted Chiang. “Generative AI is harmful enough when we understand it as a conventional technology, but if we confuse fluency at generating text with consciousness or moral agency, we’re at risk of assigning responsibility to entirely the wrong parties whenever anyone uses a chatbot.”
• Bubbles: “Somewhere out there, someone wrote a really good blog post today. You’ll probably never find it. Google won’t show it to you. Social media buried it under engagement bait. Bubbles tries to surface it.”
• Early Web Links: “Before the internet went corporate, it was weird, wonderful, and deeply personal. People built websites just because they had something to share. This directory is full of sites that bring back that feeling.”
• HYPERBLAM “lets you make music with HTML. It’s a declarative implementation of the Web Audio API and is completely dependency free. Create pedal boards, drum machines, sampled instruments. And don’t write a single line of JavaScript in the process. Unless you really want to.”
• Sigma 45mm f/2.8 Lens Repair & Analysis: A write-up of a successful repair of the microelectronics on a modern camera lens.
• Big Tech, big cons: Scammers are hiding in the apps that make your life easy. Google et al are no longer a reliable source of information about anything: not even your neighbourhood wine shop. This story comes from India, but it’s happening everywhere.
• An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt. “To understand why every machine since Gutenberg has wrestled this script and mostly lost, you need one structural fact: Arabic is cursive always. There is no print-versus-handwriting distinction, no block letters. The letters connect in stone inscriptions, in manuscripts, in metal, on screens. Each letter therefore changes shape depending on its neighbours (an isolated form, an initial, a medial, a final), and six letters refuse to connect forward at all, which breaks words into joined clusters and gives the script its rhythm. The shapes are not costumes over some underlying “real” letter. The positional variation is the letter.”
• There should have been an op-ed here but you filed AI slop. “In this slot there should have been an op-ed. A punchy one from a high-flying lawyer on the ever raging debate around inheritance tax, perfectly attuned to the interests of City AM readers. However, as is now happening at an alarming regularity, what said lawyer filed was not an insightful piece drawing on their many years of experience and expertise, but 600 words of AI-generated slop.”
• Jira IS Turing-Complete.

When we had the house renovated a couple of years ago, we went for engineered wood – it’s about 6 mm of wood on top of a plywood base – rather than some kind of synthetic flooring because it looks nicer, and because our house is so small that even expensive flooring doesn’t cost all that much. But there was another reason: you can repair wood, and when the wood starts off with a slightly rustic look (knots and filled-in cracks) it’s even easier to camouflage further repairs.

I used a clothes iron and a damp cloth to raise the dents, then drop-filled with superglue where the varnish was damaged. When the glue had hardened I scraped it level using a razor and polished it with some very fine sandpaper.

It was only about half an hour of labour in total, but it worked well. The damage is now invisible to all but the most careful of examination, and I don’t have to engage in self-criticism over my own stupidity every time I walk upstairs.

A horse came to Peckham Levels to take part in a musical performance (a reprise of Oliver Leith’s Garland, I believe) but I only saw the back end of the equine disappearing round a corner. I could still smell it all the way through the building for some time afterwards.

I cycled to IKEA on Friday to buy some more rechargeable batteries. They sell cheap, good quality, LSD NiMH batteries that are widely believed to be rebranded Eneloop, and these ones are made in Japan which makes it almost certain that they’re from the same factory.

I had a lunch of plant balls, naturally.

While I was there I also picked up a couple of Knagglig pine crates to organise the two compartments of chaos in our pantry cupboard. Apart from being a bit tall, they’re just the right size. But they’re just pine; with a razor saw and a couple of minutes I was able to modify the flat-packed sections and reduce them from three-slats-high to two before assembly.

I have two weeks of work left on my current contract. I’m looking forward to a couple of months off after that; my plans include Electromagnetic Field in July, and a walk with a friend to Canterbury over several days (mostly following the pilgrimage route, but avoiding the bits that are now the A2) in August. I’d also like to sleep a bit more than I have recently. Even with a three-day weekend, there isn’t nearly enough time to do the things I want.

Before all that, there’s Okinawa Day on Saturday, for which I have to finalise a guitar arrangement for a piece we only decided to add guitar to last Friday. On the day, rather than juggle two instruments myself between pieces, we’ve decided to assign someone as a roadie so I can just hand off my sanshin and get a guitar back, and vice versa. That will be good if it works.

However, I did find the same part for sale from France, with free delivery, taxes paid, for half the price, so I’ve ordered it from there. It takes a little longer, but I’ll put up with a few days’ delay to get it for half the price.

I found a mechanical keyboard for £5.50 in a charity shop, and, after a quick search to see whether it’s possible to flash new firmware (yes), bought it. It didn’t work as a keyboard when I plugged it in, but I could see it was recognised as a USB device. I compiled QMK and flashed it, and it worked! I think it was just set up as a Bluetooth keyboard before; flashing it made it work as a USB keyboard by default. It’s also supposed to have some LED backlighting, but they’re off. I’m happy with that: I don’t need flashing coloured lights on a keyboard.

It’s fun to be able to tweak my own keyboard layout; I’ve set it up so that Tab works as a layer key when held down, and Tab-u gives me an underscore, the key that I least enjoy having to stretch to reach on a normal keyboard (and which I have to type a lot while programming).

Friday was overcast, so the sun didn’t get a chance to heat up the loft, and I finally had the opportunity to spend the day up there sorting it out. I found a couple of things I had been looking for, cleared out a lot of old cardboard boxes, and brought down some things to donate to the charity shop.

Now there’s more space up there, I was able to move some things from my office that I don’t need so frequently.

In the loft, I came across my old point-and-shoot camera, a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX01 with a 6 megapixel CCD sensor from 2006. I looked through the pictures on it and was impressed with how good a job it did. The photos really look like photos somehow. Here are a couple from 2013, taken in San Francisco in the now-defunct United States of America:

Also on the 2 GB SD card: a photo of someone I used to work with, who is now worth $3.9 billion (I checked). It’s a reminder of a very different time in my life, that could have gone in another direction entirely. But I’m glad my life turned out how it has, even if I do have to pay a mortgage.

The rubberised coating on the camera had gone the way of all such rubberised coatings, but with a bit of effort and some methylated spirits I was able to remove it to leave a slightly shinier but no-longer-sticky device. I bought a new battery (the old one no longer held a charge) and I’m going to take the camera out for a photo walk some time soon.

The programme was some of his older work followed by a UK première of his Dark Lights album for electronics and chamber orchestra. I sat right in front of the stage and felt completely immersed.

The hinge on L—’s laptop broke, though through wear and tear rather than an accident (like when I dropped mine on the floor). I looked on eBay for viable used ThinkPads and found one that was very cheap (about £80) and in excellent condition apart from some keys that didn’t work. It was a T470s, exactly the same as the one I fixed, which meant that I had a spare keyboard of exactly that model.

In fact, not only did I have a keyboard, the half-a-ThinkPad in the loft had a better processor, too, and I had spare RAM and an SSD that were an improvement on what was in there, so I transplanted the motherboard across, repasting the heatsink in the process, and installed the SSD and RAM.

The Frankensteined laptop needed an operating system, and for her needs that has to be Windows. Windows 10 is nearly at its end of life, so I went for Windows 11. That wasn’t straightforward, because the processor is slightly too old to be officially supported. It works – in fact, the original SSD had Windows 11 running on it – the installer just won’t let you install it without a bit of a workaround.

However, that workaround requires a computer running Windows, and I don’t have one of those. I first needed to run a Windows virtual machine on my computer, so that I could run [Rufus] and build an install image with the CPU check patched out (and, as a bonus, some of the bloat not installed by default). [Rufus]: https://rufus.ie/en/

But that wasn’t easy, either, because of AI. Let me explain. I used quickget and quickemu to download and set up a virtual machine. In the past, this worked very smoothly, and lived up to its promise that

quickget automatically downloads the upstream OS and creates the configuration

Nowadays, however, every second website has some kind of bot challenge, because badly-behaved LLM agents are DDoS-ing the web, and quickemu can’t fetch the virtio-win.iso CD image it needs at boot to give the installer the drivers it needs to see the virtual hard disk. Unfortunately, it doesn’t realise that it failed; all that happens is that the fragment of HTML that it saves in an unusable .iso file doesn’t load properly.

Jobs, a habitable planet, politics, culture, the very epistemic basis of knowledge itself, and now downloading a .iso file. Truly, there is nothing that the AI boom can’t make worse.

I eventually sorted it out, wrote the patched installer to a USB drive, and installed Windows 11.

I went about cleaning up the default installation and adding programs she wanted. The stock experience of Windows 10 and 11 is awful, full of annoyances and distractions and unnecessary software and services, but under all that there’s actually a perfectly usable and, actually, pretty snappy operating system. It wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’s not bad! If only Microsoft had any respect for their users, they could ship a good operating system.

Windows 11 comes with PowerShell and WinGet, so you can install software – including third-party software – via a command-line tool, rather than having to search for an installer and avoid getting scammed. You can also uninstall Windows components and programs, and it turns out that if you remove all the Bing components, and the widgets, and CoPilot, it runs very well, and no longer needs all that processing power and RAM just to stand still. Thus, another computer is saved from planned obsolescence.

The Pope released his encyclical, Magnifica humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. I wouldn’t normally find myself in the position of eagerly awaiting a papal encyclical, and I don’t think that you’ve entirely gotta hand it to the Catholic Church, and even though I’m sick of hearing about AI and even sicker of being obliged to engage with its output when other people employ the infernal machines to produce software, I am interested in what people who actually read, and write, and think deeply about these things have to say.

Unfortunately, he did not call for a Butlerian jihad crusade against the thinking machines. Alas.

It’s very long, and I’ve only given it a quick first reading so far, but there’s a lot of thought on the relationship of humanity to technology, and the inability of machines to make moral or artistic choices, and the antagonism of capitalism and war to human dignity and the planet. I would characterise it, more than anything else, as a very humanistic document. It’s very quotable:

If a system is designed or used in a way that treats some lives as less worthy, or excludes them without the possibility of appeal, then it is not merely a tool “to be used well,” since it has already introduced criteria that contradict the inalienable dignity of the human person. For this reason, ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes; it must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it.

Whether those of his flock in positions of power and influence (JD Vance or Tony Blair, for example) will read and act on it, I don’t know. I suspect not.

We now have a Green Party-led coalition running Southwark Council as a result of the local elections. There was an extraordinary general meeting of Southwark Green Party earlier in the week to vote on the proposed coalition, which we both attended remotely. There are dangers to any coalition, but they’re pretty normal in countries with less absurd voting systems, and I think if you have the opportunity to effect political change you should take it. And this means I personally know some of the people running the council after knocking doors and delivering leaflets with them.

Our Labour MP is taking it extremely normally:

This was, of course, in your former role before you jumped ship with other Marxists no longer welcome in Labour. I suspect your impact will be just as grim in your new role, but wanted to flag up some concerns at the outset.

Despite this atrocity in the community I serve, you shamefully ignored the police advice on counter-terrorism measures on Borough High Street — prioritising a cycle lane instead.

(I have no idea how a cycle lane is supposed to hamper counter-terrorism.) But there’s a backstory to his antipathy, and Coyle has form for behaving badly.

James McAsh’s reply was perfect:

I will not attempt to respond to the many factual inaccuracies in your letter, in which even my name is misspelled. Instead, I will liaise with the Chief Executive to find a time for the three of us to meet and discuss any issues affecting your constituents.

I’m glad it’s a bit cooler. I can’t really cope with the heat. On Saturday, I made it about halfway through preparing my bike to cycle to Sanshinkai practice before I realised that I was already so overheated and agitated that there was no chance of achieving anything. On such a hot day, there’s no good way to get there. Cycling involves hills. (I could hire an electric bike, but without a luggage rack I can’t take my sanshin.) Buses aren’t air-conditioned, and the Tube is whatever the opposite of air-conditioned is. The Overground and Elizabeth line are cool, but there’s too much walking at the other end for that kind of weather.

Some links:

• ESP-Osito. This is the kind of software development that inspires and excites me. “You can buy a ‘Cheap Yellow Display’ for $10. That is a dual core CPU, gigabytes of storage, a full color touchscreen and more. If we treat it like a real computer, that is a $10 computer. In our modern world, this is hundreds of times slower than your phone. But … it is hundreds of times faster than a Palm Pilot. And on palm pilot apps started instantly. And the device turned on/off in under a second. Have you seen how long your good pocket computer takes to TURN OFF? So, let’s take something cheap and make it good.”
• Harper: The Private Grammar Checker: Works locally and doesn’t use an LLM.
• Unintended Consequences. “As you read this, please think about the echoing thought of ‘this is what we are burning the planet for.’”
• Unlawful by design: Exposing the human rights costs of generative AI. From Amnesty International: “This briefing examines how standalone generative AI systems, based on unlawful web scraping, are in conflict with international human rights law (IHRL) and standards through their design, development and deployment. While these technologies promise sophisticated automation and efficiency, they rely on data collection and model training practices that abuse privacy rights, enable discrimination, and threaten freedom of expression and thought.”
• Package Manager Threat Models.
• The UK has 90 taxes. Here they all are. An interactive visualisation.
• Pinsent Masons: LA AI, MVB and NVB. A law firm gets in trouble. “Readers of AI hallucination cases have been to this rodeo before: rely on hallucinations, get found out, create minimal viable bullshit (MVB) to try and dig oneself out of the first hole, find the second hole is much bigger and deeper because minimally viable BS is in fact non-viable (NVB).”
• End of an Era: Iconic Shibuya Hands to Close After 48 Years I think I’ve visited this shop every time I’ve been in Tokyo. It’s a warren of three seven- and eight-storey buildings with different floor heights, linked by a staircase, full of all kinds of hobby paraphernalia.
• Under the Hood: Building a Real-Time Chord Recognizer. “Piano players often leave out notes that a dictionary entry might expect. Extended chords add notes that no fixed dictionary entry anticipates. […] What you actually need is a scoring model.”
• The Grove Remembers. The now-infamous AI-written Granta prize-winning short story, analysed. “Every overlapping n-gram in the story, drawn against a web-scale corpus — so you can see which phrases the writer invented, and which ones the world had already said.”
• AI-slop, GrantaGate and Bad Writing. It writes like that because it’s regurgitating sequences from bad fan fiction.

Friday was also hot, and I decided to spend it walking in the countryside. I followed Saturday Walkers Club’s Harlington to Flitwick route, cutting off a couple of kilometres between Priestly Farm and Flitwick at the end to get back home at a reasonable time. I don’t know the exact distance, but it was at least 20 km.

I saw plenty of wildlife: a deer (possibly a muntjac); a cock pheasant; a couple of red kites; some kind of large raptor being harried by a crow until it flew away.

It was hot and tiring, but a good way to spend a day off.

We did half of our Sanshinkai practice in the park on Saturday. I appreciated the cool breeze, but I think the dancers appreciated it more. A few curious passers by came to watch and ask questions.

I restored an old film camera. It’s an Olympus Pen S, a beautiful tiny manual half-frame camera (i.e. it takes portrait photos that are half the width of a normal 35mm frame) designed by Yoshihisa Maitani in the late 1950s. I have the version with a 30 mm f/2.8 lens. I picked it up cheap, and as far as I can tell there’s nothing wrong with it beyond some degraded light seals.

I measured and cut new seals and installed them. As to how well it worked, I’ll have to wait until I’ve finished off the roll of film and had it developed, and even the 72-frame roll of film (two frames per normal frame) and had it developed. If they’re good, I’ll post the SVG templates for the benefit of others.

Someone from Openreach came to carry out the initial stages of fibre installation. They couldn’t get the cable to the front of our house, though, because the duct is buried under two layers of paving slabs. It seems that whichever cowboys installed the ugly paving in front of our house just laid them directly on a set of very similar ugly paving.

The suction device he used to lift the paving – like a reverse hovercraft that stuck itself onto the slab and provided a grab handle – was impressive, though.

They’re going to come back and install a box in the pavement in front of our house, but we still have to figure out how to get the cable across. Ideally, we’d get rid of the slabs entirely, but I don’t think that will happen in time, and if we don’t we’ll end up with an exposed cable run across the top that makes it harder to sort out the front garden in the future.

That’s all for now: it’s too hot!

Sometimes I’m working on some code that is incomplete, or is speculative, or there’s another reason that I don’t want to push it to the remote branch yet, but I need to swap from my desktop to my laptop or vice versa.

Git is a distributed version control system, but I think people often forget what that implies. A git repository can be as simple as a directory available via ssh, which means that your other computer is already a git repository as long as you can ssh to it.

Furthermore, you don’t have to go through the ceremony of setting your other computer up as a named git remote; if you can ssh to it, you can access it directly using a properly-constructed URL:

git push ssh://mylaptop.local/~/path/to/repo

You can do this for pull, push, fetch, and any other command where you’d normally use a named remote.

There are some caveats:

1. The remote directory has to have a git repository already; if not, you’ll have to ssh in and create one with git init path/to/repo (it will even create the intervening directories for you).
2. You can’t (by default) push to the currently active branch on the remote; create or use a different branch instead.

But most of the time, I’ve already been working on the same codebase on the other machine. I have something that isn’t quite ready yet, so I make a work-in-progress commit on a new branch, send it across, and pick up where I left off.

I knew that some Kindles were going to be no longer supported, but I didn’t know mine was one of them, because their generation-based naming scheme is hard to keep up with, especially when it isn’t marked on the device itself.

It’s not just that you can’t download new books, it’s a complete cessation of service. If you reset the device, it will never work again.

You can continue to read books already downloaded on these devices, but you will not be able to purchase, borrow, or download additional books on them after that date.

That’s bearable.

If you deregister or factory reset these devices, you will not be able to re- register or use these devices in any way.

What the hell, man?

I have decrypted and backed up every Kindle book L— and I ever bought, and I don’t think I’ll be inclined to pay them for any more ebooks, even though I also have a newer model that is still supported, and I don’t think I’d buy another Kindle reader after this, not least because you can borrow books from the library and read them on a Kobo, but not on a Kindle.

I prefer reading paper books, but an ereader is useful on holiday when I want to minimise weight. For that, there’s the catalogue of Standard Ebooks to work through.

I’ve had enough of typing passwords and I was finally irritated enough to find the solution. I can now unlock my computers with a PIN and a hardware token and every day is slightly less inconvenient.

I stayed away from central London on Saturday out of caution after seeing the aggression around last year’s racist jamboree, but it seems like it was much smaller than last time. A rare example of a positive change in the current political climate.

Quite a few links this week:

• French researcher cracks 4,000-year-old Elamite script from Iran. The key that unlocked it was a repeated name.
• The Irish language is having a moment — and running out of time.
• Train Your Own LLM From Scratch: “A hands-on workshop where you write every piece of a GPT training pipeline yourself, understanding what each component does and why.”
• Height hunt is “a quest to find and visit every possible height restriction sign in the UK.” They’re more complicated than you might think. This kind of proper nerdy stuff is the internet at its best.
• Welsh names and places deserve basic respect. Dw i’n cytuno’n llwyr.
• [Unofficial] UK Government Mirror: “An unofficial mirror of every UK Government Github repository, to preserve repositories that are removed or made private. Updated at least weekly.”
• The Virtual OS Museum. “This is a virtual museum of [over 570] operating systems (and standalone applications) running under emulation, implemented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM.”
• Paterson Listings: “Tim Paterson’s DOS listings, containing source code of 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, various PC-DOS 1.00 pre-release kernels and utilities, and the Microsoft BASIC-86 Compiler runtime library.”
• Snack giant Calbee switches to black and white packaging as Iran war hits ink supplies. And gets a lot of free publicity, which might be the real goal.
• Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments.
• Ontario auditors find doctors’ AI note takers routinely blow basic facts. “Nine out of 20 AI systems reportedly ‘fabricated information and made suggestions to patients’ treatment plans” that weren’t discussed in the recordings.’”
• Who will maintain the web when PHP’s veterans retire? PHP is the asbestos of web development.

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/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 /etc/u2f_mappings

You’ll be asked to enter your PIN, then press the button. You can enroll additional keys, but note the additional parameters:

pamu2fcfg -n | sudo tee -a /etc/u2f_mappings

For a multi-user system with multiple key holders you’ll have to do something a bit more complicated so that you end up with one line per user.

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.