Microposts on Tales from the Bitface

Sat, 16 May 2026 22:29:13 +0100

What’s with this ‘You can vote ten times’ nonsense? Is it even a vote, then?

Sat, 16 May 2026 21:42:59 +0100

This isn’t going to work, I’ve got three tens already (Finland joining the UK and France).

Sat, 16 May 2026 21:28:10 +0100

And then France go and better it!

Sat, 16 May 2026 21:25:13 +0100

Best song we’ve sent from the UK in decades! My fave of the night so far.

Sat, 16 May 2026 21:16:04 +0100

I mean, it’s the Eurovision Song Contest, not the Eurovision Dance and Dramatic Staging Contest.

Maybe I should listen to it on the Radio.

Sat, 16 May 2026 20:48:23 +0100

I sometimes think, with Eurovision, they should have to perform standing on a plain stage, with no fancy stuff. I mean Greece, tonight!

📚Books 2026, 12: Just One Damned Thing After Another, by Jodi Taylor

Thu, 14 May 2026 16:26:01 +0100

I’m not sure where I heard of this. It’s on a list of possible books to read I’ve had knocking around for a few years. I thought it originally came from one of those lists in The Guardian, ‘Books to Read This Summer’, or similar. But I can’t find any reference to it on the site now.

And it would be kind of strange to read about this in The Guardian, because it’s not very professional.

The problem is, it feels like it needs a major editing pass. It’s kind of disjointed. There are inconsistencies of tone, and confusion (in the reader) about how much time has passed. After what feels like quite a short time in the main character’s experiences, we learn five years have passed, for example.

The idea is good, and it does succeed in being a page turner. It wound the tension very high, especially at one point. It’s about time-travelling historians. An academic institute where they do historical research by time travel.

Which is a fine idea, but surely the first question anyone asks when they discover time travel is possible is, ‘To the future?’ So if you’re not going to travel forward you need some mechanism or rule as to why that’s not possible. Our characters here don’t even think about the future. Except (spoiler ahead) when one character reveals he’s from the future.

Later on there’s a mission to Mars planned, but that has nothing to do with our characters, except when one threatens to leave and join the space programme. Other than that we hear nothing of the world outside St Mary’s, the research institute that gives this series (because of course) its title.

It turns out it began as a self-published novel, and was successful enough that the series was picked up by a mainstream publishing house, which is the dream. From reviews and comments on GoodReads and elsewhere I hear the writing gets better in the later books. I suspect that is at least partly because of professional editors. Still, we learn our craft and hopefully improve oner time, whatever we do.

Overall I enjoyed this book, though I’m not sure I would recommend it, and I don’t think I’ll bother with the sequels. Interesting, though.

Thu, 14 May 2026 16:21:07 +0100

How did I not know till today that the vocals on Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’ are by Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins?

Sun, 10 May 2026 12:37:03 +0100

The security at this rally says something about the state of Britain today: metal detectors, bag searches… the police are being lovely, though.

Sun, 10 May 2026 11:14:34 +0100

Off into Central London for the rally against antisemitism.

Sat, 09 May 2026 23:13:05 +0100

Watched Funeral in Berlin 🎥 last weekend.

After enjoying The Ipcress File a year ago (where does the time go?) it was good to see more of what Harry Palmer was up to back in the Cold War.

In this he’s sent on a slightly confusing mission to West Berlin — and, inevitably, into the East — to get out a high-ranking Russion officer who wants to defect.

Or at least, that’s what he’s told. Betrayals and double-crossings ensue. It’s not as good — and somehow, strangely, not as sixties — as the first one, but Michael Caine is great, and it’s fun enough.

Sat, 09 May 2026 23:04:21 +0100

There is a petition to parliament asking for UK civil service software to be made open source by default. This comes after (and at least partly in response to) a move by the NHS to make the opposite move: to make all their existing open-source repositories closed-source.

Please sign it here if you can. Publicly funded software should be available for the public to see and use. And open-source software is more secure and helps free us from US tech giants.

Sat, 09 May 2026 12:27:29 +0100

📚 You are reading Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney. You are finding it hilarious. This book was published when you were 20: why have you not read it till now?

Thu, 07 May 2026 17:30:28 +0100

I used to wonder if the Greens had any policies other than the environment. Now I see they have no policies at all. Not even the environment. (Based on literature I’ve seen for the local elections, and the fact they’re still opposed to nuclear power.)

And some of them are showing distinctly worrying tendencies. OK, antisemitism, I mean antisemitism.

Not a policy, sure. But it feels like they’ve been taken over.

Thu, 07 May 2026 17:20:56 +0100

Voting day today, for most of us in the UK. All those local councils and mayors aren’t going to elect themselves (luckily).

Vote for the ones who are going to make sure the bins get collected, the schools are good, social housing gets built… OK, Labour, I mean vote Labour.

📚 Books 2026, 10: The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle

Mon, 04 May 2026 23:21:31 +0100

I had read a lot of Sherlock Holmes, but none of Doyle’s other work; including none of the Professor Challenger stories. There aren’t nearly as many as there are Holmes stories, so it’s less of a challenge (ha) to do so. I was in a second-hand bookshop a few weeks back, in an unfamiliar town — let’s not be coy, it was Taunton — and I was there so long, going, ‘So many books, so little time,’ that I felt I had to buy something: it would be impolite not to.

And just as I was preparing to leave, I saw a collected Professor Challenger volume, and here we are. I’m treating the individual novels in it as separate novels, since they are, and will write about them here individually.

So to The Lost World . A tale of adventurers finding a fabled land where dinosaurs still live, even in the 20th century. In this case it’s on an inaccessible plateau in South America, not underground, for example.

In fact, this is the motherlode for all those kind of stories, predating Edgar Rice Burroughs and everyone else.

It’s presented as a work by a journalist, Edward Malone, a young man seeking both to please his editors, and (seemingly more importantly at first) to charm his beloved, one Gladys, who says she’s attracted to the adventurous type of man.

Challenger claims to have seen evidence of the prehistoric creatures' existence; his brother scientists don’t believe him; the Zoological Institute commissions an expedition to confirm or deny. Young Malone volunteers/is volunteered to go along and report back.

Stuff happens. Dinosaurs are found. Ape-men fought. An impossible fecundity of life exists on a twenty-by-thirty mile plateau, isolated from the rainforest and Amazon below it. (A question comes to mind: why wouldn’t the pterodactyls fly down from the plateau to the jungle? At least sometimes?)

It’s lots of fun, if very full of the idea that the white European (or really, British) man is the most highly evolved entity on the planet. It is, of course, of its time.

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 22:30:19 +0100

Must be time to link to Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files again. The latest episode had me laughing aloud many times, both from Nick’s answers and his questioners' questions.

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 19:30:44 +0100

I suspect this StoryGraph review of the book I just posted my own thoughts on captures what’s going on:

… a character who has agency but really doesn’t, which subverts the western idea of conflict that pivots around a main character always having to make the choice, do the thing, that runs the story. Here, no matter what Matt Kim does, the world affects him, does whatever it wants to him. Disappear him even. The ‘looseness’ of the story, as in, ‘I don’t get this book’, is imo holding up eastern cultural expectations of writing …

📚 Books 2026, 9: Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, by Matthew Salesses

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 18:37:11 +0100

I first heard of Matthew Salesses when I was doing my MA. One of the tutors said his forthcoming book on the craft of creative writing was eagerly awaited by everyone in the business of teaching it. This was in early 2021. I got hold of an ebook copy of Craft in the Real World at some point, and haven’t got very far with it. The main thesis, as I recall, was about the typical method of critiquing creative works didn’t work well for all people.

Which is fair enough, if perhaps a bit slight to hang a whole book on (I’m sure there’s more). But when I was looking into it, I read the announcement of this novel (which came out earlier, in 2020), and thought it sounded amazing.

What’s actually amazing to me, having read it, is that it’s the second novel in a row I’ve read that makes almost no sense at all.

I expect it’s me. I suppose it must be, because again, the cover and inner pages here are festooned with glowing platitudes, while I was left cold by much of the action, and confused by what Salesses was trying to say.

A young Korean-American writer¹feels he’s disappearing. A near-duplicate of his girlfriend turns up. She used to have a boyfriend who looked just like the narrator, and who disappeared.

She has never heard of Boston, where the novel is set. Until it switches to the alternative universe where the doppelgänger woman came from, and a city whose name is given as XXXXXX. Why not make up an actual, believable, name, I wondered.

All of which is fine, and could explore some interesting ideas about identity, and indeed tries to. But the narrator is such an annoying character who keeps doing stupid things for no very good reason, that it’s hard to get with him. That in itself could be seen as good characterisation, of course.

But whatever is going on between the two alternatives doesn’t make much sense to me, and things don’t get resolved in any meaningful way, and I just didn’t enjoy it much. Cultural differences, maybe? That is, I believe, part of what Salesses’s Craft book was about: different cultures have different ways of telling stories. Maybe my understanding and expectations are just too western to appreciate this.

Which is my loss, I guess.

Just because they say ‘Write what you know’ doesn’t mean you have to write about writers, by the way. ↩︎

📚 Books 2026, 7: Raven Black, by Ann Cleeves

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 21:20:22 +0100

I heard Ann Cleeves on the Radio — probably Radio 3’s Private Passions — a couple of years ago. I must have seen her books in shops before that, but hadn’t really paid attention. And I vaguely was aware there was a BBC detective show called Shetland.

Turns out that show is based on this novel and its sequels.

Anyway, she sounded interesting on the radio and I seem to read almost as much crime fiction as SF these days, so when I was exploring a bookshop on our recent trip to Devon, and saw this, I thought I’d give it a try. I devoured it in a couple of days. Really good page-turner, engaging characters, unexpected ending, Just what you want.

📚 Books 2026, 6: The Twenty Days of Turin, by Giorgio De Maria, Translated by Ramon Glazov

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:25:33 +0100

I don’t recall where I first heard about this . It was probably Warren Ellis, but I seem to recall there being a second source. Anyway, I lived in Turin, or between Turin and my then-home in Walthamstow, for the best part of a year, 1989–90. My employers had a big contract with an Italian bank, and most of the work was done on site. Which seems amazingly old-fashioned for software development today, when we mostly don’t even visit our employers' premises very often.

All of which has nothing to do with the novel. It was written in the 70s and is set then. The unnamed first-person narrator is researching the titular event, which happened ten years earlier. It’s not entirely clear to what extent he experienced the ‘Twenty Days’ himself, but many people still living in the city did, and they don’t talk about it. It started with mass insomnia. Sleepless people took to the streets, some in their nightclothes. Then the violence started. Mysterious, brutal murders of the insomniacs.

But before all that, there was the Library. It seemed to be a project by well-meaning young people, possibly religious, who set up a kind of pre-computer social network. People were encouraged to share diaries or other writing — original manuscripts only, no published work. For a small fee, anyone could visit the archive thus formed, and read any of the pieces. For slightly higher fee, they could find the name and address of a chosen contributor.

The idea being ostensibly to help lonely people find like-minded folks. With a strange inevitability, that isn’t necessarily how it was used.

The implication is the Library somehow led to the sleeplessness, if not the violence. Perhaps not the violence, as our narrator’s explorations appear to find a more supernatural, if not downright bizarre, explanation for that.

And it all seems to be starting up again. The Library didn’t go away, it just went underground. And the narrator and at least one of his interviewees may be in danger.

It’s an odd one this. Reviews of the recent English-language publication speak of its prescience, comparing the combination of the Library and the insomnia with people up all night doomscrolling on their phones. Which is interesting, but takes no account of the violent attacks, and the supernatural element.

I think this will bear repeated readings.

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 23:27:10 +0100

I’ve posted here every day so far this year. That’s unusual for me — unprecedented, in fact. I might take a break now , though. Except… hello.

Full of Grace

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:19:00 +0100

So, what did I think of Project Hail Mary 🎥, after my scientific concerns?

I enjoyed it immensely. I had a great time. I was in a electrically-reclinable chair that vibrated during the loud parts (though that’s about the Leicester Square Odeon, not the film, of course).

I have things to say about the title, the expression used in it, but I’ll keep that for a separate post. The main flaws in the film — which, to be fair, is a blockbuster big-screen bonanza, and beautifully made — are scientific.

Starting with physics. It’s a long time since I knew enough special relativity to work out the time-dilation involved in a six light-year trip, and to be fair we’re not told how long it lasted for the induced-coma-experiencing Grace; but we do know it would be a lot longer on Earth, assuming the ship actually reached a significant percentage of lightspeed.

That point is perhaps implied at the end, but it should have been mentioned in the film — not least since they specifically say the Eridans don’t know about relativity.

Turning to the biology. Look, it’s just annoying that it’s so stupid, when there’s at least a couple of ways they could have told the same story, without requiring biological life to exist in an environment where, not only is it impossible for atoms to join together into molecules, even atoms don’t stay together. Stars are plasma, which means a big soup where the energy is so high electrons are stripped off the nuclei of atoms. You don’t get biology. You don’t even get chemistry.

Just make the ‘astrophages’ exist at some distance from the star, occluding it. Or have them be dark matter, instead of algae. It doesn’t matter. The story would be just as good, just as compelling, without being annoying.

Because it’s not about the science. It’s a love story. Love between human and — let’s not say ‘alien’, because everyone is alien out there. Between Earthling and Eridan.

Or friendship, if you don’t think it reaches love. I don’t mind.

It’s also about the limits of humanity and what we might be able to do even if we refuse, if we’re forced into an impossible situation. And language and communication and all sorts of stuff.

It’s really good. You should see it.

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:12:59 +0100

Off to see Project Hail Mary in Leicester Square. Time to find out what these astrophages are made of.

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:00:45 +0100

Watched Top Secret! 🎥 a couple of nights ago. A 1984 film by the makers of Airplane, I have to wonder why on Earth I haven’t seen it till now. It’s pretty funny. A rock star visits a weird East Germany, which is just as oppressed as the real one, but the authorities are still the Nazis. Wehrmacht and SS uniforms abound.

Our hero gets caught up in a plot to rescue an imprisoned scientist — the resistance are all french, of course — and falls for the scientist’s daughter.

It’s about as silly as it sounds. An early part for Val Kilmer, and he does a pretty decent job as the singer, which can’t have hurt when he was cast as Jim Morrison in The Doors.

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 17:09:46 +0100

How can it be that I only realised today, with the clocks going forward for summer, that we don’t have a six-month summer/standard time split. We have seven months of British Summer Time.

All the more evidence that BST should be the standard, if not the permanent state.

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 23:27:55 +0000

I’m currently reading The Twenty Days of Turin A Novel by Giorgio de Maria. 📚

It’s a very odd work, which in part slightly prefigures (because it’s set in the 1970s) some of the negative effects of social networks. But it’s about a lot more than that.

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 22:31:55 +0000

Putting this interview with Andy Weir here for future reference. We’re going to see Project Hail Mary next week, and it claims the book and film are ‘built on solid science’.

But it’s described as:

a story about humanity’s last-ditch attempt to save Earth from “astrophage,” a fictional, star-eating algae that has infected our sun.

I also watched the trailer last night, and it seemed incoherent (though trailers often do).

But algae? Biology in a star, in plasma at impossible temperatures? I can feel my inner physicist cringing already, so I hope they manage to make it make sense somehow.

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:39:12 +0000

The music app on iOS: what does this icon on the top right do? Or what is it supposed to do, because nothing audible or visible happens when I tap it?

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 19:48:45 +0000

Ben Werdmuller tells us ‘AI is changing the style and substance of human writing, study finds’:

the software really does change the substance of your writing in what I would call objectively bad ways: it makes it less personal and less emotional, and it actively changes its underlying meaning in the process.

This takes us back to my recent thoughts on people possibly not even understanding their ‘own’ LLM-generated writing.

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 19:26:13 +0000

Tonight, at London’s historic Roundhouse!

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 21:58:45 +0000

To the Hackney Empire tonight, to see Bridget Christie’s Jacket Potato Pizza tour which was excellent.

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 07:16:30 +0000

We watched The Man in the Hat 🎥 a few nights ago. An odd, gentle little British/French road movie from 2020. It’s almost silent, at least as far as the main character goes. Others have dialogue, but not a lot. A man goes on the run across France, after seeing what appears to be gangsters disposing of a body. He meets lots of strangers — mostly strange in more than one sense — along the way.

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:20:14 +0000

Of course a quick digital lookup answers the question in my previous post: the new meaning of ‘nonplussed’ is its exact opposite.

Literally.

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:02:08 +0000

Kottke shares the teaser trailer for Dune: Part Three, and says he is nonplussed by it, ‘both in the traditional and modern senses.’ I was just annoyed by the whispery voiceover.

But: what is this ‘modern’ sense of ‘nonplussed’?

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:19:15 +0000

Hari Seldon as an undercover Sigmund Freud?

It’s a long time since I read any of the Foundation trilogy, but this article, describing it as a ‘Jewish Masterpiece’ suggests Freud as partly a model for Seldon:

The Foundation trilogy doesn’t really focus on whether or not the galaxy will be saved. What it does, like Freudian psychoanalysis and Jewish textual practice did before it, is focus on how the past can best be mined to solve the problems that spring up in the present. Both methods prize talk and debate … Asimov’s priests are men of intellect who talk and puzzle and debate over questions and explanations and theories and counter theories and false leads and red herrings much the same way students in a yeshiva talk and puzzle and debate.

It’s an interesting piece, well worth your time, especially in these disturbingly anti-Semitic times. And it makes me want to read the books again.

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 23:52:16 +0000

Good piece by Jonathan Freedland about the disastrous state of the war in Iran. I know I said I felt supportive at the start, and I still want to see the Islamic Republic’s regime fall, and Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis with it. But sadly it isn’t likely this can make that happen.

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 22:57:06 +0000

🎥 Small Prophets is Mackenzie Crook’s new comedy-drama. We watched the first episode tonight. Looks like it’s going to be really good. Interesting similarities to Ricky Gervais’s After Life, in that you’ve got a sad man living alone because he’s lost his partner, and visits his elderly dad in a care home.

I think it’s going to be very different, though, both from that and from Crook’s earlier Detectorists. We watched both of those in the last year or two. I was surprised how much I enjoyed Detectorists when I finally came round to trying it.

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:24:13 +0000

In more ‘AI’ nonsense, Grammarly is giving bad advice and tagging writers' names to it, without paying the writers or even getting their permission.

I tried Grammarly a few years ago and hated it, but that was long before the LLM boom. This is beyond unethical.

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:01:00 +0000

I find it deeply weird and surprising to read of authors claiming as ‘mine’ images they requested, or copied and manipulated using ‘AI’. The kind of claim quoted in the linked piece, that ‘it’s all mine.’ When it plainly isn’t.

Writers, you’d think, ought to understand that words have meanings.

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 23:23:18 +0000

Glasgow Central: Building collapses at station as fire causes major disruption - BBC News

Oh no! Glasgow Central! Also my brother and sister-in-law are here and heading back there tomorrow.

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 23:07:42 +0000

To the Arcola theatre in Dalston this afternoon, for Ukraine Unbroken, a set of five short plays about Ukraine since Russia invaded in 2014.

Powerful, moving, a reminder of a time we lived through and that the people of Ukraine are still living through it.

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:52:59 +0000

In a world of lies, we need the BBC more than ever, the headline to Polly Toynbee’s article says. It continues: ‘This week could be our last chance to save it,’ which makes for a very long headline, if a very good point.

My favourite quote is this:

The right’s peculiar patriotism seeks to demolish British achievements the country is most proud of: our public broadcasting and our NHS.

The truth is, those kind of people are loyal only to the country of commerce, of corporations, of capital.

The government’s questionnaire on the BBC’s future is here. We should all respond.

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:41:17 +0000

Started watching The Miniaturist Season 1 🎥. Very strange household they’ve got there. Big on atmosphere, costumes, and interiors. Not sure where the story’s going to go yet.

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 22:41:07 +0000

Currently reading: Red Menace by Joe Thomas 📚

This is the sequel to White Riot, which I read a surprising two-and-a-half years ago. Ongoing Hackney cop, criminal, and political shenanigans, starting on the day of Live Aid.

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 23:04:05 +0000

Netflix’s Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials 🎥, written by Chris Chibnall, was excellent. Really compelling story that kept us mostly guessing till almost the end.

I don’t know what Agatha did with it, or intended to do with it, but I see what Netflix and Chibnall are doing. They’ve set it up beautifully for an ongoing series. And I for one look forward to it.

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 20:52:47 +0000

We’re in the middle of watching Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials 🎥. Two episodes down, and the last one to watch tonight.

That Bundle is a great character. And Superintendent Battle seems a bit useless and annoying so far. I haven’t read any of the books about him.

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 23:26:01 +0000

Oh, damn, I just read in Ansible: Dan Simmons has died. The Hyperion Cantos are some of the best SF of the late 20th century.

Here’s his Encyclopedia of Science Fiction entry.

Sad. So it Goes.

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:27:25 +0000

Sometimes even the best software lets you down. This morning I dropped a quick note in Obsidian about something I wanted to blog about. This evening it’s gone. Not on my phone, not on my Mac.

Can I remember what the idea was? I cannot.

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:18:20 +0000

I know we’re not supposed to celebrate the death of another human being. But what else can you do when it’s Khamenei?

I mean, do you think anyone one didn’t celebrate Hitler’s death in 1945?

I just hope the Iranian people will be able to rise up and free themselves after this. Sadly, history does not hold many examples of this kind of thing working out.

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 18:36:07 +0000

It feels very strange to be supportive of the USA attacking a middle-eastern country (or any country). Even more so when it’s Trump in charge. But the chance this could bring down the Islamic Republic — that evil, terrorism-exporting, citizen-murdering regime — is much to be hoped for.

Of course, it won’t be as simple as that. Things never are. The desire to find simple answers to huge, complex questions, is at least partially the cause of many of our problems today.

But still. The idea that the Iranian people might have the chance to overthrow that monstrous regime: that is huge.

📚 Books 2026, 4: Caledonian Road, by Andrew O'Hagan

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 21:24:49 +0000

I really enjoyed this. It’s set in London (mostly), in a later year of the pandemic (2022, probably), and across just over a whole year. The characters are people from the upper-middle to upper classes, and some of the lowest classes in society, including criminals and illegally-trafficked people who have to work for them.

Some of the blurbiness on the cover describes it as a ‘state of the nation’ novel. It doesn’t quite seem like that for me (though I don’t know if I could give you an example of one that is), not least because the main characters exist at a fairly rarified level of society. They are things like academics, authors, journalists, MPs and lords. Or else they’re would-be drill rappers in street gangs. There’s nobody who’s just normal; whatever that means.

There are so many characters that O’Hagan provides a list of them, a dramatis personae, which I approve of.

Anyway, it’s very good, and I read it much faster than I expected to, which is usually a good sign.

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:10:07 +0000

Ed Zitron’s latest, On NVIDIA and Analyslop, is very good on the current state of some financial stuff related to ‘AI’. It’s also good on how much more complex software development is than the ‘vibe coding’ believers would tell you:

Software is a tremendous pain in the ass. You write code, then you have to make sure the code actually runs, and that code needs to run in some cases on specific hardware, and that hardware needs to be set up right, and some things are written in different languages, and those languages sometimes use more memory or less memory and if you give them the wrong amounts or forget to close the door in your code on something everything breaks, sometimes costing you money or introducing security vulnerabilities.

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:14:23 +0000

Fuckin hell, Apple Music! This is just what I was talking about a few weeks ago. ‘Camera’ and ‘(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville’ just aren’t going to play, for no reason.

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 23:40:28 +0000

A quick note just to keep up my streak of having posted every day this year. Is that stupid? Maybe. Will mentioning it jinx it? Time will tell.

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 23:39:25 +0000

Watched: The Eagle Has Landed 🎥

if you’d have asked me I’d have said I thought I’d seen this back in the day. But no. Very much not. It’s a very odd film.

I thought it was going to be about some allied mission into or over Germany during WW2. It was actually the opposite: a secret German mission to kidnap Churchill from Norfolk. Including an IRA member helping them, and a traitorous English villager providing them with information.

it’s so totally not what I expected, but it’s pretty good.

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 11:08:21 +0000

Fun Minute Cryptic clue today.

Minute Cryptic - 20 February, 2026 “Dropped Jacksonville’s latest quarterback after non-pass?” (4) 🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣 🏆 0 hints – 2 under the community par (71,660 solvers so far). www.minutecryptic.com

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 23:05:34 +0000

Watched: Ludwig Season 1 🎥

This was unexpected, and surprisingly good. David Mitchell playing a semi-serious (but still fairly comic) part, as a puzzle-setter whose twin-brother police officer goes missing. Anna Maxwell Martin as his sister-in-law. Good stuff.

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:20:11 +0000

Question being asked on BlueSky (saw it from @kottke.org: ‘Not big movies, more culty ones’) about what movies you saw on first-run at the cinema. Mine, actually premieres at the Edinburgh Film Festival back in the day:

The Company of Wolves
Repo Man
Brazil

The latter two being two of my all-time faves.

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:25:56 +0000

Watching the Women’s Freeski Big Air final. They’re such incredible athletes. And Kirsty Muir, from Aberdeen, is currently in the silver medal position! (Briefly was gold, but changed as I was typing.)

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:49:13 +0000

Francisca Sinn: “@jamie I am an IP lawyer and…” - Mastodon

This Mastodon post reminds me that what I quoted Cory on the other day, regarding copyright in ‘AI’ training, may not be the whole story. Of course.

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 23:18:43 +0000

📚 Currently reading: Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan.

Looks like the Micro.blog book search is working again.

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 21:17:00 +0000

I’ve been trying to post that I’m currently reading Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan. But the Micro.blog bookshelves tool is not finding it in its database for me. Or finding any other books. Something’s wrong.

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:48:18 +0000

Minute Cryptic - 10 February, 2026 “For example, an elephant over 50 reproduced three times” (10) ⚪️🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣 🏆 1 hints – 4 under the community par (95,093 solvers so far). www.minutecryptic.com

Minute cryptic’s a scunner today. But good maths.

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 23:43:07 +0000

I’m listening to the current Accidental Tech Podcast to see what they actually say about ’AI’ after much recent Mastodonage about it and them.

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 17:37:25 +0000

Lunch in Richmond today. Quick look at the Ted Lasso location by the Green, and the shop. Didn’t bother taking photos, but nice to see it.

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:55:42 +0000

Why are certain tracks on certain albums unplayable for me in both Apple Music and (just as a test) Spotify? For example, ‘Eat Y’Self Fitter’, the opening track on The Fall’s Perverted by Language? Greyed out, no length shown, and it just won’t play.

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:50:14 +0000

📚 Currently reading: How to Seal Your Own Fate by Kristen Perrin

The sequel to one I read last year. I got that for my birthday, this for Christmas.

I’m enjoying it, though so far I’ve got to say it’s not quite as good as the first.

And the third one is coming out this spring.

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:42:34 +0000

Yesterday there were people marching through London, ostensibly in support of Palestine, flying the Flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and pictures of Khamenei. They might as well have had swastikas and pictures of Hitler. I mean what the actual fuck is going on in these people’s heads?

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 23:47:08 +0000

The Skids at the Electric Ballroom last night.

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 17:00:38 +0000

Watched early in the new year: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 🎥

This is fine, a perfectly acceptable addition to the Spider-Man films. Though I have to say, a few weeks later, I remember little of it. And I blame that partly on its incompleteness: the fact it’s part one of two. Frustrating.

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:36:53 +0000

You know what’s a great album? The Absolute Game by The Skids. Who I’m going to see tonight.

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 20:02:57 +0000

Watched just before Christmas: The Shop Around the Corner 🎥

James Stewart, a Christmas movie, and not that one? Not specifically a Christmas movie, but part of it happens then, so why not?

Two shop workers hate each other, but fall in love with their mysterious pen pals. Guess what?

Not bad.

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 19:46:39 +0000

Watched: Hamnet 🎥

This is a fabulous film. It’s about motherhood and magic, and grief and how a genius can turn it toward one of the world’s great works of literature. And also about the special bond between twins.

But mostly it’s about grief. It is heartbreaking, yet also deeply life-affirming.

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 09:52:18 +0000

Minute Cryptic - 27 January, 2026 “Wolf pack roved with uncertainty, initially turning back” (6) 🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣 🏆 0 hints – 2 under the community par (55,613 solvers so far). www.minutecryptic.com

In answer to my earlier question: like this! I’m not sure it all quite hangs together, though. I’ll have to watch Angas’s video.

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 09:02:46 +0000

Every word in today’s Minute Cryptic could be an indicator. Every. Single. Word. How am I meant to solve that?

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 22:57:33 +0000

Watched: Now You See Me 🎥

I believe the third of these recently came out, but we hadn’t seen any of them at the start of the month and year when we watched this. A group of stage magicians — so good they seem that they might have real powers — do heists. Or do they?

A decent romp.

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 15:42:13 +0000

Watched: Office Space 🎥

Some of my work colleagues recommended this to me. I was vaguely aware of its existence before that, since it’s been around since 1999.

It’s a comedy about office workers — amusingly enough, they’re specifically software developers working to prevent the year-2000 two-digit date problem, or ‘Y2K Bug’, as it was usually called. Amusing, because I did some of that myself. Or at least tested the system I worked on at the time to make sure it didn’t have the problem (it didn’t).

As to the amusement value of the film itself: it was fine. Not that great, but not a total waste of time. Probably two and a half stars, if M.b had stars like Letterboxd.

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 16:37:43 +0000

Watched: Mrs. Dalloway 🎥

I still haven’t caught up with posting about the movies we watched over Christmas & New Year, but never mind. Watched this yesterday. I read the book about seven years ago, and would have thought it close to impossible to film. Far from it. This actually worked pretty well. It’s not as rich as the book, of course, but it hits many of the points the book makes. The shellshocked veteran of the First World War, Septimus, I though was particularly well played, by Rupert Graves. Who, I learn, played LeStrade in Sherlock.

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:28:57 +0000

In the unlikely event that anyone reading this uses the London bus routes 19 or 38, you have until today to comment on TFL’s terrible proposals to reduce the services.

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 10:35:32 +0000

I was wondering why my iPhone was refusing to download my full Obsidian vault.

Had a look at its storage:

Whoops! I’m gonna need a bigger phone.

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:32:35 +0000

Existential question: in Springsteen’s ‘Open All Night’, if it ‘takes [him] two hours to get back to where [his] baby lives’, why does he later call her on the phone to say he’s ‘got three more hours but [he’s] covering ground’? Where has he been in the extra hours???

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 22:54:07 +0000

📚 Emily Tesh wrote the best SF book of the last couple of years (not just my opinion, it won the Hugo). Now The Incandescent is an incredible fantasy book, a magic-school story for adults.

She’s so good she almost scares me. Yet she just seemed to appear out of nowhere.

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 14:26:27 +0000

There seem to be more cops at this relatively tiny Free-Iran demo than at any of the Brexit ones.

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 14:27:56 +0000

March in London romorrow in support of the protests in Iran. I’ll be there. Not much reporting of it in the mainstream news, from what I can see.

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 23:37:46 +0000

Watched: Towards Zero Season 1 🎥

Or season ‘only’, as it is. An adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel, and quite a fun one. Where ‘fun’ includes murder, as it tends to with the Queen of Crime, of course.

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 06:56:16 +0000

I note in passing on this early-morning start day, that The Monkees (or songwriter John Stewart) had to get up earlier than The Clash, pre-fame. ‘Ring, ring, it’s seven am’ vs ‘The six o’clock alarm would never ring.’

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:47:47 +0000

🎥 Forgot to mention we watched Holiday Inn over the Christmas period. A singer gives up show-business because it’s hard work, to become a farmer! After a year he realises the obvious, and turns his house into a supper club that’s only open on the fifteen holidays in the US year. Great songs.

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 08:03:40 +0000

Trying out mb-cli, a command-line Micro.blog client from @timapple.

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 22:36:00 +0000

I fail to understand anyone who considers themself to be even vaguely ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ or ‘on the right side of history’ can not stand with the people of Iran. Sure, the US taking action might not be the best result, but as long as the Islamic Republic falls, the world will be better.

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 08:46:42 +0000

Five under par in today’s Minute Cryptic!

Minute Cryptic - 12 January, 2026 “7-Eleven uniform among ugliest uniforms” (5,4) 🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣 🏆 0 hints – 5 under the community par (47,960 solvers so far). www.minutecryptic.com

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 15:49:29 +0000

Going to see The Book of Mormon tonight. I’ve no real idea what it’s about, which may be the best way to approach it, I don’t know.

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:25:55 +0000

Very weird. I’m trying to sign in to YouTube on my Mac. The signin page gets intercepted by Microsoft’s SSO page, which wants me to log on with my City Lit account. I did a course there last term. They used Google Classroom, so that was the last way I signed in to anything Google. But I want to sign in with my Google account.

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 20:17:35 +0000

Watched: Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl 🎥

Another one we watched over Christmas. Rewatched, actually, as we saw it when it came out last year.

Tons of fun, of course. Four stars.

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 23:26:49 +0000

Watched: A Few Good Men 🎥

I’m trying the Micro.blog films feature, for more control than the Letterboxd RSS feed.

We introduced our daughter to The West Wing over the last few months, and needed more Sorkin. Also RIP Rob Reiner. It’s a great film. I’d give it four stars if this had them.

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 17:22:29 +0000

The world turns, and just like that, it’s a new year. Happy New Year, everybody!

I didn’t know creating a list on Letterboxd would add an entry to my feed, and thereby create a post on my blog. It was only meant to be a place to record the films we watched recently, prior to me writing about them. Oh well.

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 20:02:17 +0000

Incredibly, and contrary to my previous post, I remain unwhammed after shopping in the West End on the Saturday before Christmas. Wow.

It was busy, you won’t be surprised to hear.

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 15:22:04 +0000

It is the 20th of December, and incredibly, I have not yet been Whammed! Which probably just shows how little I go out.

I’m shopping in the West End today, though, so Whamaggedon seems inevitable.

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 19:22:35 +0000

Every time I try to share a link to GoodLinks on my Mac, the sharing app crashes. This applies to both Safari and NetNewsWire. Haven’t tried from anything else yet. I may reboot.

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 20:05:30 +0000

There’s something way wrong with this list from Variety of the 100 all-time best comedy films. There are hundreds of those lists, of course.

But this one has Airplane at only 62. 62! And then compounds the error by making number 1 be… The Naked Gun. A fine and funny film, to be sure; but not as good as Airplane. Certainly not 61 places better than it!

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 14:33:11 +0000

‘[W]e might have to wait two years for the conclusion’ I wrote almost six years ago.

The conclusion of The Book of Dust arrived the other day. I haven’t started it yet, and now I’m thinking I might go back and reread the previous one first.

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 09:04:15 +0000

Spent yesterday at the Battle of Ideas festival, from the Academy of Ideas. Lots of panels on various subjects around politics, society, literature, and more. I mostly went to literature-related ones. why has fantasy fiction become so popular? How fantastic is Jane Austen?

Going back for day two today.

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 17:25:43 +0000

Watched: Mission: Impossible 🎥

Went back and took a half-star off after posting, because of the betrayal. Honestly. It’s hard to get over that. I don’t really know why I went on and watched the second one last night.

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 06:46:19 +0000

Watched: Sliding Doors 🎥

I already posted about this, but I’m trying out Micro.blog’s new movies feature here.

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 18:11:04 +0000

What the hell was that ridiculous picture Letterboxd sent for The Italian Job? Nothing to do with anything that happens in the film. Guy in a chair with a machine-gun and a half-naked woman with a street plan drawn on her back?

Deleted from my post, but the Letterboxd link above has it.

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 11:04:59 +0000

180 pages in, and it’s only publication day. My local bookshop got my preorder in early and let me collect it.

Took the dustjacket off because it’s fiddly to hold.

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 22:39:17 +0000

August, so my daughter tells me, slipped away like a bottle of wine.

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:18:45 +0000

Minute Cryptic - 25 August, 2025

“Forger’s initial on map - it shows treasure spot! Buried gold is fake…” (4)

🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣

I scored: 2 under par

www.minutecryptic.com

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 17:58:38 +0000

I find this kind of horrifying: Denmark’s state-run postal service will no longer deliver letters. And I can see Britain’s Royal Mail going to same way.

It feels like we’d be cut off, in kind of a way. I mean I don’t know when I last sent a letter, but still.

I mean, Christmas cards!

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 17:46:40 +0000

I read Doc Searls’s piece, How about ASO, for Attention Surfeit Order?. I was sure I had used that expression, or one like it, on my blog. A quick search led me to a 2006 post about attention in various senses, which has ‘Attention surfeit disorder?’ as a subheading. The amusing part was that in that subsection, I referenced Doc Searls.

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 14:38:57 +0000

Continually making decisions is cognitively taxing. That’s why we gravitate to morality systems like religion, the Free Software Foundation, and CAMRA.

That line amused me in The Vegan Morality Policy by Terence Eden.

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 14:04:24 +0000

Obviously my last books post should have had ‘Cracked’ not ‘Carcked’ in the title. Fixed now, but visible forever in the URL.

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 13:52:49 +0000

The New York Times Connections is getting harder. Or I’m getting worse at it. That’s two Saturdays in a row I haven’t got any rows. I only do it at weekends, and not always then, but still.

What the hell is a ‘brad’? And ‘spike’? Come on. (I’d say more, but spoilers, you know.)

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 17:44:55 +0000

Wimbledon without line judges: do not appprove. Makes the court look weirdly empty; drains some of the drama; and puts people out of a job. Presumably not their actual occupation, their career, but still.

Bring back the line judges!

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 22:05:23 +0000

I see, the stand with multiple microphones has both a harmonica attached, and different quality mikes, like a lo-fi one to get that loudhailer effect. Even though there’s an actual loadhailer on the keyboards to one side.

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 21:34:20 +0000

Wait, Neil just has an ordinary stand with a single mike now. Was I hallucinating the great cluster of them a few minutes ago?

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 21:32:46 +0000

Well they may not be Crazy Horse, but they’re still pretty damn hot. And Neil himself is in incredible voice.

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 21:26:53 +0000

Just switched to the Glastonbury live feed. Why have Neil Young’s non-Crazy Horse band got such weird mike stands? And why has Neil himself got like fifteen mikes? Very strange.

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 17:48:30 +0000

This must be the latest I’ve set the hammock up since I got it in… oh, 2020?

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 19:36:58 +0000

Yes! The Book of Dust volume 3 is out in October!

The Rose Field: The Book of Dust Volume Three a book by Philip Pullman and Christopher Wormell.

Finally!

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 18:41:54 +0000

Ah, my Letterboxd post finally made it. Just a lag in the feed handling, I suppose.

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 16:22:21 +0000

My Latest Letterboxd post hasn’t synced to Micro.blog (and hence my blog), and I can’t get iCloud photos to sync to my Mac. Or not all of them yet, at least.

Everything’s not quite working. Maybe it’s the heat. 31°C here in London at the moment.

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 22:41:57 +0000

A fortnight in Canada, a long weekend camping in Somerset, and a couple of days back at work. Couple of film notes and now a Crucial Track. Off we go, then, with a Summer of Blogging.

(Or not, let’s wait and see.)

Sat, 24 May 2025 21:56:25 +0000

Out of the park, RTD. Out of the fuckin park.

I just hope he can bring it home next week.

Sat, 17 May 2025 21:40:22 +0000

What is this archaic nonsense? Seems the only way we can vote for Eurovision in the UK is by making a phone call! What century is this?

Well, I’m not doing it. Iceland will have to do without my vote.

Thu, 08 May 2025 06:38:28 +0000

I wonder what they call VE Day in Germany?

Fri, 02 May 2025 13:50:25 +0000

Kind of hard to believe, now, the one on the left would go on to lead Britain’s worst (or maybe best) spies. Still with fag in hand, mind you. I wonder if Gary Oldman smokes.

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 19:52:40 +0000

I still don’t understand why AI gives me such a visceral negative reaction.

The intellectual reasons for concern are well known.

But right now, I just wish apps would stop adding AI and trying to tell me it’s great. I’m looking at you Raycast, but you’re just the most recent culprit.

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 11:44:22 +0000

Wordle 1,407 2/6*

🟨🟨🟩🟨⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I must say, I’d’ve been very disappointed if I hadn’t got this one, but I haven’t often got it in two.

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 20:55:29 +0000

I’ll allow I might have been overstating the case in last night’s slightly excited post about Doctor Who. After all, Russell’s current ‘incarnation’ includes ‘73 Yards’.

Still, ‘Lux’ was tons of fun.

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 23:15:55 +0000

I just watched the latest Doctor Who episode, ‘Lux’. It was gloriously meta. Who needs fourth walls? And with a love note to the fandom in the middle.

The best episode RTD has done, certainly in this incarnation. IMHO, obviously.

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 06:40:19 +0000

I should note it’s Petroc Trelawny’s last day on the BBC Radio 3 Breakfast show today. I’ll miss his dulcet tones, and especially his weird pronunciation of ‘Bach’.

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 06:37:45 +0000

Radio saying SpaceX’s latest launch will be the first to orbit over the north and south poles. That’s wrong, of course: there have been plenty of circumpolar satellites. I wonder if it’s the first human-occupied one to enter that orbit; or just the first commercial one to do so.

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 08:54:47 +0000

Carrot Weather catching the vibe of the day as usual.

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 08:52:33 +0000

I tried the ‘Hey Siri, what month is it?’ question, since people have being saying it can’t answer that.

It gave me to today’s date. Which seems fine. It’s more than I asked for, and includes the information I wanted, so…

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 07:57:15 +0000

When did the 20th of March become the first day of spring? I saw lots of mentions of it yesterday, and they’re even saying it on Radio 3 this morning.

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 18:52:19 +0000

Currently reading: Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose 📚

And on page 40, this quote:

Finally—and there is no way to convey this unless you read the sentence aloud or at least, as your first grade teacher cautioned you not to do, say it silently, word by word, in your mind

What are they teaching kids in American first grade? What does she mean, you were taught not to say it word by word in your mind? How do you read without doing that? Or at least learn to read?

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 18:45:06 +0000

This isn’t a story so much as a floating mass of jellyfish tendrils with which the viewer intermittently comes into contact. And the show’s premise is a joke that neither a Hollywood millionaire or a Silicon Valley behemoth have any right to make. It’s a long, long exercise in seeing how long your customers will tolerate being laughed at.

Will Dunn, Severance is Laughing at You

I don’t agree with the early part of this New Statesman article, but there are some good points in it, not unrelated to my post the other day.

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 17:18:35 +0000

Just heard the first ice-cream van of the year. Whaaaat???

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 08:32:09 +0000

I wish people wouldn’t post links to videos without warnings. You tap or click through to read something, and suddenly a video blares out. Most annoying.

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 17:23:00 +0000

I got lucky(?) in a prize draw at work, so tonight I’m going to the Brit Awards finals. Taking my daughter. I suspect she’ll get more out of it than me.

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 15:38:14 +0000

It was 30 years ago today, PJ Harvey tells us, that To Bring You My Love was released. Sounds as good as ever.

Give it a listen.

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 08:14:41 +0000

Looks like Amazon’s deal with Iain Banks’s estate to make a series out of Consider Phlebas is back on.

Pity it’s Amazon, but at least Adele is involved as an executive producer.

I remember Banksie saying all he wanted to see was the fight under the hovercraft, so let’s hope they leave that in.

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 23:03:45 +0000

Fascinating piece about how George Eliot seemingly wrote about AI. I disagree with this assertion, though:

Put simply: intelligence is not the same as consciousness.

…

But, for the avoidance of doubt, they are not the same thing. My own (simplified) view is that intelligence is the ability to achieve goals and consciousness is the phenomenon through which we experience qualia …

learningfromexamples.com https://www.learningfromexamples.com/p/reflections-on-superintelligence

To my mind and understanding of the terms, there’s no intelligence without consciousness.

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 11:40:26 +0000

Having the first Creme Egg of the year with my coffee. Actually probably the first I’ve had in several years.

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 22:23:53 +0000

Artificial Intelligence is facing a crisis: humans are consuming far too many precious resources that AI needs to thrive. Every sip of water you take and every light you turn on could be sustaining the AI systems that uphold your digital conveniences.

Just Sustainability Design Lab https://savethe.ai

Maybe not the thing that bothers me most about AI, but something that does bother me.

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 14:06:53 +0000

Have switched my blog to the Bayou Theme by Matt Langford, @Mtt. Liking the look. I’ll probably give it a few tweaks, but looking good so far.

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 02:08:00 +0000

Happy New Year, everyone. 2025 starts with London’s fireworks, and then, surprisingly, The Boomtown Rats on Hootenany.

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 19:40:07 +0000

Currently reading (and relatively close to finishing): Death’s End by Cixin Liu 📚

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 17:00:29 +0000

Oh, and Andy Murray’s going to be coaching Novak Djokovic.

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 16:58:52 +0000

‘Call a General Election’ is trending, with a parliamentary petition. ‘The country can’t stand another four years of this!’ I saw.

But… what is the ‘this’ they’re unhappy about? Labour have been in power for about five minutes, they haven’t had a chance to do anything yet. I don’t understand.

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 14:57:26 +0000

It’s the middle of November, why is this rose flowering and budding?

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 19:40:27 +0000

Watching Channel 4’s Unreported World segment on cocaine smuggling into Spain by mini submarines from South America. And I can’t help thinking, just fucking legalise it. Regulate it, tax it. Take control out of the hands of gangsters. Everyone would be safer.

And not just cocaine, obviously.

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 10:00:03 +0000

Oh, America, what have you done? How has this happened?

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 22:41:07 +0000

Watched the Channel 4 documentary about Hope Not Hate’s undercover investigation: Undercover: Exposing the Far Right. Very good, compelling viewing, and important.

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 22:38:10 +0000

Just booked to see Fucked Up on Saturday. I saw them back in 2011. I haven’t paid that much attention since. But since they’re playing at Oslo, Hackney, just down the road, it would be rude not to go.

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 17:23:34 +0000

The local parakeets basically live in our garden now.

📚 Books 2024, 20: Julia by Sandra Newman

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 22:43:02 +0000

As I said about Nineteen Eighty-Four itself, a bigger post is coming.

📚 Books 2024, 19: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 22:41:08 +0000

I’m going to write a bigger post about all the Nineteen Eighty-Four -related things I’ve read, listened to, or attended recently, and I’ll link to it here when I do.

And here it is.

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 13:27:22 +0000

I love that today’s Xkcd (probably strictly yesterday’s) celebrates the closure of the UK’s last coal-fired powerstation in such a British way: do all the sums in metric, then convert at the last to inches.

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 06:33:54 +0000

Let my phone update to iOS 18 overnight, and this morning… it’s hard to see the difference.

There wasn’t even a message saying, ‘Your phone was updated…’

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 09:01:30 +0000

Currently reading: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell 📚

So many editions, and none of them with quite the cover I have: a self-portrait by Francis Bacon.

It must be 40, 45 years since I last read this and there are currently a lot of sequels and connected works I want to read, so I thought I’d go back to the source.

📚 Books 2024, 18: Nova Scotia Vol 2: New Speculative Fiction from Scotland, Edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J Wilson

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 17:57:50 +0000

If there’s a record for the longest gap between volumes of a series of collections, I think we all know that there’s only one real contender. Though to win it, JMS’s The Last Dangerous Visions will have to actually be released (which, at the time of writing, is scheduled to happen next month, amazingly).

Second on the list, though, might be Nova Scotia. The first volume was published in 2005, to more-or-less coincide with the second Glasgow Worldcon. Nineteen years later all is well, as Volume 2 is published to more-or-less coincide with this year’s Glasgow Worldcon.

And it is again, very good, and very varied. I’m not going to go through the stories, but it struck me that three of them concern someone being resurrected — woken from cryogenic stasis, or reconstructed from DNA and memories — in a future that might not be quite what they had expected or hoped for. A couple of others include bringing back extinct species, or sentient life coming to entities that are not (to the best of our knowledge) sentient at present.

I doubt the stories were chosen deliberately to have those connections. Rather, perhaps this is how our current end-of-the-world fears are playing out: in fantasies of technological afterlives. Not that such stories are particularly new, but maybe they’re particularly now.

Notable contributors: Ken McLeod, of course, Scotland’s premier living SF author. James Kelman, surprisingly: as one of Scotland’s best-known literary authors, it’s pleasing that he’d lower himself into our genre murk. Grant Morrison, Scotland’s best known comics writer, I imagine. And plenty others.

📚 Books 2024, 17: The Library of the Dead by TL Huchu

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 17:58:29 +0000

I saw Tendai (as is his name) interviewed at Worldcon last month. Went along without knowing anything about him or his writing, and the interview was interesting enough that I went and bought this in the dealers' room immediately afterwards. Or maybe the next day, but you get the idea.

It’s the first of the Edinburgh Nights series, which I think is currently at three books with a fourth on the way and a fifth planned. Which means it kind of violates one of my personal guidelines to have bought it, but what the hell, you know?

Anyway, it’s set in an alternative Edinburgh where there’s magic. The time is approximately the present day, because there’s things like smartphones. But our heroine, Ropa, can talk to ghosts, which tend to hang about when they’ve got unfinished business back on the plane of the living.

And a whole lot more happens besides. It’s a pretty bleak environment that she lives in, essentially a shanty town of caravans on the edge of the city, very much hand to mouth. It feels kind of post-apocalypse, but I don’t think there’s been anything quite as disastrous as that, just a slow decline. Not sure, though, there are hints at things. It’ll be interesting to see where he takes it.

As far as the ‘Don’t start a series that the author hasn’t finished writing’ guideline goes, it’s pretty standalone, thought with plenty of setup for more.

📚 Books 2024, 16: Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 17:55:52 +0000

I mentioned in the last books post that I’ve seen the Jackson Brodie TV series. Well, maybe not all of them. I enjoyed the latest book in the series so much that I thought I’d go back and read the earlier ones. This is the first, and the story was completely unfamiliar to me.

It was also surprisingly horrific. It starts by setting up three ‘case histories’, with three stories of crimes at different times in the past: a young girl disappears; a young woman is murdered; another young woman murders her husband.

Then we’re introduced to Jackson Brodie: divorced and trying to co-parent a young daughter and carry on his life, while also trying to run a private detective agency in Cambridge, a city he hates.

Somehow, all these cases are going to come together and get solved. As I said about the latest book, though, it’s clear that Atkinson’s writing about the minutiae of the human heart, far more than the minutiae of detective work. And that’s OK.

It’s an enjoyable, easy read — well, apart from the gruesomeness and tension of the first three chapters — and intriguingly it ends as if Brodie’s career is over. I don’t know if she planned to write sequels, but clearly something must change.

📚 Books 2024, 15: Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 06:21:29 +0000

I’ve read several of Kate Atkinson’s books, but never one of her Jackson Brodie detective series. This despite having seen the TV adaptations. So getting this as a birthday present was great.

We’re promised a murder mystery set against the background of a country house hosting a murder-mystery party, and that’s what we get, eventually. I really enjoyed it, but if anything I’d like her to spend more time with the titular detective.¹ But we get various viewpoint characters, and really very little from Brodie’s viewpoint. Very little actual detecting, too.

Indeed, I got the impression that Atkinson doesn’t really want to be writing a detective story. Or she does, of course, but she’s so keen on multiple viewpoints and character creation — and so good at them — that those are the things she’s doing, more than writing a conventional story of a detective solving a mystery.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, you can tell any story you want, any way you want, and why be bound by conventions?

Not really titular: Brodie’s name doesn’t appear in the title, after all. ↩︎

📚 Books 2024, 14: The Last Dark: The Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book 4 by Stephen Donaldson

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 06:03:23 +0000

When the final chronicles were first announced, and indeed on the first two books, it was referred to as a trilogy. I assume that the third volume just became so long that the publishers, and probably Donaldson himself, decided it needed to be split in two. Each of the third and fourth volumes is about the same length, anyway.

And they bring everything to a satisfying conclusion, that’s the main thing. Of course Linden hesitates, and Covenant resists using wild magic (but not to the extent he once did). Of course Donaldson uses fifty words where fifteen would do. Of course his writerly tics come through.

But the pages keep turning, and old friends and enemies turn up, and Wild Magic, Law, and Earthpower do their things, and we all leave satisfied.

📚 Books 2024, 13: The Legend of Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 12:24:20 +0000

I didn’t even realise there was a third (and final?) volume in Talbot’s Luther Arkwright chronicles. Until friends mentioned it at worldcon.

I ordered it immediately. It’s really good, right up there with the earlier ones. In this there turns out to be an even more highly-evolved, more powerful human than Arkwright and co. And they do not have the best interest of anyone but themself at heart.

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 16:35:20 +0000

Well, I guess that was the last working day of my fifties.

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 21:35:49 +0000

Big Thief were good, if tending toward the prog at times.

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 17:26:09 +0000

At Gunnersbury Park for the PJ Harvey gig.

Took an age to get here, from East London to a long way West. Bar has the worst selection of beers I’ve seen at a festival-like event for years. Red Stripe or Jubel lager with fruit flavours. Trying the peach one atm. It’s not good. I suspect they’ve had to cut it with fruit because it’s piss.

Oh well, Big Thief should be on soon.

📚 Books 2024, 12: Against All Things Ending: The Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book 3 by Stephen Donaldson

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 10:40:04 +0000

Not going to say much about this here, as I’m already well into the next (and final) volume, and they’re very much a single story.

📚 Books 2024, 11: The Crow Road by Iain Banks

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 07:03:14 +0000

You will, I think, be far from surprised to learn that this is a reread. At least the third read, in fact. I suggested it as a possibility for my book club, and when it wasn’t chosen I decided it was time anyway.

There are still books that should be in The Great Banksie Reread that I’ve only read once: Stonemouth and The Quarry. But I’ll get to those eventually.

One oddity about The Crow Road is that I’ve never blogged about it before. Yet I’ve loved it since I first read the opening line, at a convention in Glasgow in 1992, if memory serves.

‘Just read the opening line and you’ll buy it,’ my friend Steve said, when I was hesitant about shelling out the huge £10 price for the hardback. I had already read all of Banks’s earlier books, so I was definitely planning on getting it, but waiting for the paperback was the norm.

‘It was the day my grandmother exploded.’ Steve was right. I bought it, and all he subsequent books, in hardback.

Memory does serve, but not all that well: I’ve written all that before, it turns out, after Banksie died. Though it remains slightly unclear which convention it was that year.

A book is more than its opening line, though. The Crow Road is a family drama, set mostly in a fictional Scottish town not far from where I grew up. Also in Glasgow, a non-fictional city where the titular road exists. The metaphorical one is everywhere, of course: it means death, in the vernacular of that exploding grandmother.

I read it with more of a writerly eye this time, I think, and I wondered whether the structural games really add anything to the whole. I don’t mean the parts that are effectively speculative: the main character, Prentice McHoan, trying to work out what might have happened to his missing uncle. Nor the flashbacks in third-person, when the main narrative is in first. That makes sense, as they’re showing us Prentice’s childhood, or things that happened to other family members when Prentice wasn’t there.

I’m more thinking about a couple of flashes forward, that hint about where the main narrative is going to go. They aren’t enough to really make the reader speculate, and they happen when we’re already well into the story, so they aren’t needed to make us keep going.

They do no harm, though, and maybe Banksie needed to use them to keep his own interest up. And there’s nothing wrong with them, or that.

I do find it hard to explain why this book is so compelling. I think it’s probably his best non-SF book. It’s probably not quite my favourite, though it’s up there. I’ve long thought it was partly cultural for me, in that the characters and locations feel like people and places I knew growing up. But that can’t explain its broader appeal.

I guess Banksie was just a great writer.

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 13:10:40 +0000

Great sense of relief this morning. Starmer’s speech makes me feel like it’s the early days of a better nation.

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 21:21:46 +0000

Well, let’s hope this exit poll is something close to accurate. Labour landslide, as the whole country was hoping for. (What do you mean, not the whole country?) Me, I’m not counting any chickens. At all. I have no chickens.

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 18:06:08 +0000

Andy and Jamie walking out to Centre Court, and the BBC are treating like a final. Quite rightly.

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 17:02:49 +0000

As we settle in for the long night ahead, John O’Farrell’s piece from last weekend is worth a read: Are you suffering from symptoms of hope? Here’s how to cope with the prospect of a Labour victory.

📚 Books 2024, 10: Beyond the Light Horizon by Ken MacLeod

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 06:49:50 +0000

Ken finishes his wonderful Lightspeed Trilogy with a flourish. Not all the problems are solved or mysteries explained, but that’s life. All the main characters get good conclusions. And a yellow submarine in space is still an astonishingly cool idea.

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 17:37:17 +0000

I keep thinking I should write about the current state of what we are calling AI. Trouble is, I still can’t quite decide what I think about it. Or why it makes me feel the way it does. Or even what, exactly, that way is.

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 17:47:12 +0000

Currently reading: Beyond the Light Horizon by Ken MacLeod 📚

Not so much currently reading as nearly finished. The final volume in Ken’s excellent trilogy, and looking forward to seeing him at Worldcon in Glasgow in August.

📚 Books 2024, 9: Trust by Hernan Diaz

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 15:22:18 +0000

Forget I hadn’t posted about this. I finished it almost two weeks ago. The latest book-club book, and not the sort of thing I’d choose normally. It’s the story of a financier around the time of the Wall Street Crash in the 1920s, told from four different points of view. Which one do we trust? (See what he did with the title?)

It’s pretty good, but nowhere near as good as the praise heaped upon it by reviewers, as quoted all over the cover, would suggest.

Mon, 20 May 2024 19:05:16 +0000

Doctor Who discussions are going to get confusing. Seems Disney are calling the Christmas special episode 1, ‘Space Babies’ episode 2, and so on; while the BBC call ‘Space Babies’ episode 1.

1 & 2 have their moments, but it doesn’t really get going till 3, ‘Boom!’, when Moffat takes over.

📚 Books 2024, 8: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

Wed, 15 May 2024 17:56:54 +0000

Actually finished this a few weeks ago, and forgot to write about it. I don’t know why, because it’s absolutely fantastic. Space opera of the biggest scope, yet a tightly-focused character-driven story, and a bildungsroman.

The Earth has already been destroyed when we start reading. Our heroine, Valkyr, or Kyr for short, lives on humanity’s last outpost (or is it?), where they train for revenge.

But there’s so much more to it than that.

Wed, 08 May 2024 19:44:50 +0000

One of those times when someone is trending on Twitter and it is what you fear. Sad to hear about the death of Steve Albini.

📚 Books 2024, 7: My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 22:08:07 +0000

The latest bookclub book. Kincaid’s brother died in 1996 of AIDS. Kincaid herself was estranged from her family for 20 years, so she saw her brother when he was three, and then again when he was 33, and dying.

Unsurprisingly this is more about her than about him. She looks at feelings towards her birth family: does she love her brother? Does she love her mother? ‘No’ is her conclusion for both. But she examines different kinds of love, different ways of loving.

Parts of it are kind of like cubist art in a way: examining the same place, person, or event, at different times, in the way the cubists would try to show a subject from different angles at the same time.

The writing flows very smoothly despite some impressively- if not excessively-long sentences.

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 07:27:33 +0000

Peter Higgs, physicist who proposed Higgs boson, dies aged 94

It’s a good age, as far as that goes. He was already professor emeritus at Edinburgh back when I was at uni. Still sad, though.

📚 Books 2024, 6: A River Called Time by Courttia Newland

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 12:16:32 +0000

I got this as a Christmas present from my beloved. I had no idea who Courttia Newland is. I assumed it was a woman, at first. It’s not, and it turns out I had experienced some of his work already, as he wrote some of the scripts for Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series of films; specifically Lover’s Rock, Red, White and Blue , and Education . (I wouldn’t bother clicking those links, it looks like I didn’t write anything about them.)

I started the novel without reading any reviews or anything about it other than the blurb and quotes on the cover. The key one of those is this, from the Observer:

A vast and wildly ambitious piece of speculative fiction that asks what the world would look like if slavery and colonialism never existed.

Which set me up with some expectations. Sensibly, Newland doesn’t make this imagined world a utopia. Far from it, in fact. The world in which the protagonist, Markriss, finds himself, is pretty grim.

And to my mind, at least at first, the only thing in-universe that tells us about the absence of colonialism, etc, is skin colour is never mentioned. Yes, the world is different from our own, and it turns out (reading around the novel) a major reason is, instead of the weird monotheism of Judaeo-Christianity-Islam having the major religious impact on world history, African religions have the biggest influence.

What this means for our hero is he can have an out-of-body experience and it not exactly be unexpected.

Which takes us into the whole out-of-this-world part of this novel. All those blurbs talk about it as a novel of decolonisation and so on, which is fine. But that’s because Newland has a mainstream, literary reputation — he has published several previous novels. This, though is a genre work. Science fiction, you might say, or fantasy, looked at from another direction.

And what nothing prepares you for (well, the reviews do, but I didn’t want to read them first) is that this is a multiverse story. Because Markriss’s ability to leave his body in his astral form develops to the point where he can do so permanently; and then drop back down into a different tributary of the titular river.

This puts him in an alternative version of himself: another timeline. Some have very similar events and experiences; some are very different, such as one that doesn’t look at all removed from our own. He always has some of the people closest to him, though their relationships vary.

It’s effective and accomplished, but it can be unsatisfying. Because, when he leaves a timeline, he leaves its story incomplete. We don’t know what happened to the first version of Markriss, or the second, or…

Sometimes the language, the linguistic style, can be confusing. But it feels like a positive sort of confusion, the kind that stretches your mind.

On the whole, I enjoyed it.

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 15:04:01 +0000

Somewhere out there, I’m fairly sure, a crime is happening. But Saga will work it out.

📚 Books 2024, 5: Monument Maker by David Keenan

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 22:45:34 +0000

This is a monster, behemoth of a book. At over 800 pages it’s not the longest I’ve read in recent years, but it’s up there. And it is… very strange.

I’ve read several of Keenan’s books before, and enjoyed them, but found them strange. This one is composed of three or four different narratives. They’re interlinked, or at least interconnected, but they’re very different.

A love story in France of a few years ago about someone who is studying cathedrals (sort of); a historical story about the Siege of Khartoum; a far-future science-fiction story supposedly written by two of the characters in one of the other sections.

And so on. It will bear rereading, I imagine, but I’m not sure I’ll dedicate the time. I started it just before Christmas and finished it this morning. With a few other books in between, but still.

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 19:24:13 +0000

BBC 6 Music is playing a live set from their festival, and I turned it on and thought, ‘How can there be a Joy Division live set?’ Till I realised it’s a live DJ set. Mary Anne Hobbes is playing ‘Transmission’. Whew! I thought things had got really weird there!

📚 Books 2024, 4: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 11:17:18 +0000

The latest book club book for me, and I read it in a day. Short, easy, and supposedly the most popular crime novel ever, or something.

It was OK, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as Murder on the Orient Express, which I read at Christmas.

Ten people are invited to a house on an island. Ten people die. But there’s no one else on the island! How can this be?

📚 Books 2024, 3: The House at the End of the Sea by Victoria M. Adams

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 20:00:31 +0000

First, a disclaimer: the author of this book was on the same Creative Writing MA as me, and I read a prerelease PDF that she sent me.

That said, it’s a really good young-adult fantasy story set in the real world, present day.

Or I think ‘middle grade’ is the sort of level it’s marketed towards. The main character, Saffi, is about 12. Her younger brother is maybe eight or ten. Their mum has died tragically young and their dad takes them from London to live with their grandparents in a B&B by the sea in Yorkshire.

The titular house has been in the family for generations, and it has A History. The kids hate it at first, but Saffi tries to adjust and to keep her brother’s spirits up. She is helped by a slightly mysterious local boy they meet.

And then a group of guests arrive at the B&B. In the middle of the night. Without coming through the door.

Things get stranger after that. Will Saffi and Milo save the family’s legacy, themselves, and their new friend’s home, from the plans of these powerful figures out of myth and fairytale? Only by reading will you find out.

It’s great. Get it for your kids.

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 18:54:57 +0000

Well this is an exciting turnup: remember early in the pandemic, when there was an article in ~~The New Yorker~~ New York magazine about the inability to get a particular pasta shape? The pasta shape was equally mysterious over here. I wrote about it: Bucatini.

Well, at last, here it is.

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 08:10:48 +0000

Great, we’ve been paying billions for a nuclear ‘deterrent’ that nobody wants and that doesn’t even work.

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 23:09:47 +0000

🔗 Introducing Pkl, a programming language for configuration :: Pkl Docs

… delighted to announce the open source first release of Pkl (pronounced Pickle), a programming language for producing configuration.

If Apple needed a general-purpose language for configuration, why did they invent their own, rather than using Terraform, say?

But then, this Pkl (‘Pickle’) seems a lot more expressive than Terraform, and a lot more down-to-Earth and less cloudy.

Could be interesting. (H/T @danielpunkass.)

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 11:06:40 +0000

More evidence of comically early spring: daffodils dancing in the sun.

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 13:10:41 +0000

Pending the deal’s publication on Wednesday, it appears that Sunak has offered to keep Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland) aligned with European standards if the DUP returned to Stormont.

Best news since Brexit, if true.

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 14:41:40 +0000

It’s still January. It’s the northern hemisphere. So why is this rose flowering? I’ll be wanting to prune it in about a month.

‘Oh rose thou art sick’… But the climate, not the rose.

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 19:16:14 +0000

Currently reading: Monument Maker by David Keenan 📚

I’ve read a few of his before, and they’re all strange. This one may be the strangest yet, but I’m only about 40 pages into a huge book.

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 18:17:40 +0000

I didn’t have China Miéville co-writing a novel with Keanu Reeves on my 2024 bingo card, but here we are.

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 22:55:07 +0000

Currently reading: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka 📚

My current book-club book. Shouldn’t be any trouble to finish it by the 18th.

This year I’m going to do my book posts Micro.blog-style, using its Bookshelves feature. We’ll see how they go.

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 13:47:26 +0000

I read 27 books in 2023; just over one a fortnight, which seems faster than it felt at the time. And I posted 111 times, with the following monthly breakdown:

Month	Posts
Jan	16
Feb	11
Mar	5
Apr	10
May	6
Jun	1
Jul	7
Aug	13
Sep	12
Oct	9
Nov	9
Dec	12

With my yearly theme of ‘Getting Out and Connection’, I’ll try to put a few more posts out into the world in 2024.

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 01:06:00 +0000

Happy New Year everyone!

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 11:47:25 +0000

Hackney Christmas lights

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 23:33:46 +0000

What the hell is this shit? Tried to open a link at CNN and I get this response, in Safari, Firefox and Chrome. Brave? I don’t even have it installed!

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 20:04:20 +0000

I’m watching Shane MacGowan’s funeral on YouTube, and loving how it seems totally chaotic. Like a Pogues gig. ‘Nick’s going to lead us in “A Rainy Night in Soho”,’ says the priest. ‘Oh, no, this is live, and Nick’s been delayed.’

Nick Cave, that is.

Pity the sound is complete mince.

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 19:38:22 +0000

To a first approximation it takes me all day to bake the Christmas cake. To be fair, I had to go out and get unsalted butter, and 4½ hours of that was just letting it be in the oven. But here it is now, cooling on the rack.

Speaking of letting it be, it must be about time to watch Get Back again.

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 10:22:16 +0000

Wordle 890 2/6*

⬛🟨⬛⬛🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Extreme rarity of Wordle in 2!

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 19:52:00 +0000

BBC 6 Music DJ: ‘We’ve set up a deck in the studio so we can play you some vinyl directly, instead of having to digitise it.’ Then he has to run across the room to where the turntable is.

The sound you hear is not the turntable spinning, but John Peel doing so in his grave.

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 11:03:11 +0000

🔗 BLACK DOG, Gazelle Twin – WARREN ELLIS LTD

Hell of a record. It’s like immersing yourself in a haunting. Depression, anxiety and ghosts – which, to me, are probably all the same thing anyway. The Halloween release was clever, but I suspect that if you played this loud at midnight you’d clear a room pretty fast.

Experimental post using the “Publish Quote” Shortcut from @jarrod. As to the music, it’s OK, but I’ll need to give it another listen.

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 16:37:07 +0000

Think I might refer this recruitment company to London Zoo, given their requirements.

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 17:28:04 +0000

Ceremonial Doom Bar with the new Strike & Ellacott novel. 📚

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 21:26:16 +0000

Hazel O’Connor trending on Twitter. Mainly because of people saying ‘I saw Hazel O’Connor was trending and feared the worst, but it’s fine.’

Looks like someone asked for ’80s songs with the best sax', and ‘Will You’ fits. Thought Gerry Rafferty should be there, but ‘Baker Street’ was 1978.

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 20:44:40 +0000

Tried Siri’s new slightly more conversational mode in iOS 17. Said ‘Siri, pause’ while a podcast was playing out loud, and it did. Said ‘Thank you,’ and it said, ‘You’re welcome,’ which is nice.

Still no Scottish voice, though.

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 21:03:52 +0000

This is a good piece about the different ways we communicate:

Are you a writer or a talker?

That is, when you need to think about something, do you generally reach for something to write with, or look for someone to talk to?

https://everythingchanges.us/blog/writers-and-talkers-and-leaders/

I’m definitely a writer, and I know how it feels to explain something in careful detail, in a document, an email, or just an instant message, and have someone reply with, ‘Maybe a quick call to talk about it?’

This helps me to realise that I shouldn’t get infuriated at them. They just have a different communication style.

H/T to Colin Devroe.

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 13:50:44 +0000

Speaking of ChatGPT, I like Cory Doctorow’s explanation of it and its cousins from his latest piece:

AI chatbots are mirrors of experts, only instead of giving you informed opinions, they plagiarize sentence-fragments into statistically plausible paragraphs.

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 13:35:16 +0000

Dave Winer (I think he’s still @dave on Micro.blog) talks about using ChatGPT to

make calls about a user’s WordPress account. I want to know what sites the user is following in their reader app.

ChatGPT notwithstanding, I’m mildly horrified that a) WordPress makes that info publicly available, and b) Dave wants to use it.

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 16:46:04 +0000

Well, it’s obvious that no one reads this, or they’d have drawn my attention to the ridiculous typo in the title of the last but one post. And of the book it was naming. My apologies to Becky Chambers.

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 09:30:37 +0000

I’m not sure who the New York Times folks are trolling with today’s Connections, but it’s a good one.

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 14:01:30 +0000

I think I’ve seen more rain this summer than in all the years I’ve lived in London.

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 17:26:41 +0000

Oh no, we’ve lost touch with Voyager 2. I feel weirdly sad about this. It’s the furthest-away thing humans have ever made.

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 17:14:06 +0000

This Scottish MP who’s been ousted by the people for breaking Covid rules: I think this is the first time we’ve had a recall in the UK.

Now, what we need is to have the policy extended to the whole of parliament. Could we get 10% of the electorate to vote to recall the current parliament? Yes. Yes, we could.

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 19:36:48 +0000

Started reading The City & the City by China Miéville 📚

This is one of only very few of China’s books that I haven’t read, and I’ve joined a kind of online book club at work, so I have to finish it by the 10th of August. Which should be doable.

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 12:38:44 +0000

How do people cope with being full-time sport fans? Watching Murray/Tsitsipas last night was so stressful. It felt like a final. I can’t imagine going through that every week.

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 14:25:24 +0000

The Guardian is reporting that people who didn’t get the alert are mostly on the Three network. As I am.

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 14:21:32 +0000

Hey, what happened to my government warning? It’s twenty past three and I haven’t received it yet!

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 23:02:19 +0000

Conventions conventionally drink the real-ale bar dry too early.

Here at Eastercon, apparently we’ve drunk the bar dry…

… of low-alcohol beers.

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 10:49:07 +0000

On my way to Birmingham for Eastercon. Been a few years since I’ve been to a con. It’ll be good to see folk.

Thu, 06 Apr 2023 06:38:28 +0000

Just after midnight last night I finished my novel, Casino Soul. The first draft, anyway, or maybe only the zeroth draft. There’s a lot to do to make it anywhere close to good.

But that can wait for later. For now I’m feeling a combination of elation and deflation.

92,000 words and two years elapsed. Writing takes time.

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 07:21:13 +0000

Extremely rare software update this morning: Scrivener for Mac updated to version 3.3. A huge number of changes from 3.2.3, and I can’t help but wonder if they’d be better off doing more frequent, smaller updates, just so we know they’re still there.

The best writing app.

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 19:54:16 +0000

The first band I ever saw live, back in (fuck!) 1980, was Stiff Little Fingers.

I’ve seen them a few times over the years. Tonight I’m at The Roundhouse to see them once again.

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 12:08:04 +0000

Look at the new Interzone: it’s a paperback book! I like it.

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 23:12:45 +0000

I’ve written here before about Nick Cave’s newsletter, The Red Hand files, and lately I’ve taken — slightly hyperbolically, perhaps — to saying that I think it might be his greatest creation. Today’s issue knocks it right out of the park.

He writes about worrying about singing flat, because he’s going to duet with Johnny Cash. Even Nick Cave worries about not coming up to the mark. And then — well, just read it.

And in the last paragraph, after the signoff, he introduces another hero of mine, just in passing.

Wonderful.

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 08:16:18 +0000

I just crossed the 80,000 word mark on Casino Soul, the novel that I started as part of my creative writing masters in January 2021. Nearly finished (I keep thinking).

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 18:27:25 +0000

When you end the week with a massive merge to master, and then go downstairs to drink wine and listen to Ziggy Stardust. Hello.

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 08:25:57 +0000

A rare trip into the office today. We have the Christmas do for London-based developers and testers tonight. A little late. But that’s the way these things go sometimes.

London commuters have largely forgotten Covid ever happened, it seems.

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 21:54:02 +0000

Currently reading: Poems by Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod 📚

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 17:31:27 +0000

Us old types are told that youngsters don’t like punctuation. Full stops in texts sound angry, etc. But I find an unpunctuated message incomplete. You’re left hanging, waiting for the rest. I just got a message at work that said:

Great

Great what? Balls of fire?

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 15:58:23 +0000

It’s the 31st of January, and daffodils are out.

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 11:08:27 +0000

The first snowdrops are out in London.

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 13:26:59 +0000

Went for the first swim of the year this morning. And if the app for the pool is to be believed, I haven’t been since March last year (not counting holidays). That whole ‘work getting in the way of things’ I was talking about yesterday. Or being a good excuse, at least.

They had a sign up warning that the pool temperature was only 23.7°C. It was fine once I got going, though.

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:18:06 +0000

Happy New Year!!!

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 12:13:26 +0000

🅦🅞🅡🅓🄸🄿🄻🅈 #6
🌟 Length Score: 78%
🚀 Letter Score: 68
🔗 Play Wordiply: www.wordiply.com
🎬 Today’s starter: 🄲🄰🅃

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 09:33:14 +0000

The Guardian has a new word game, Wordiply:

🅦🅞🅡🅓🄸🄿🄻🅈 #4
🌟 Length Score: 73%
🚀 Letter Score: 46
🔗 Play Wordiply: www.wordiply.com
🎬 Today’s starter: 🄸🄲🄴

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 01:09:22 +0000

Happy Christmas, everyone!

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 08:02:25 +0000

I was listening to The Specials yesterday because of the sad death of Terry Hall, of course.

I was mildly distracted by this text early in that Guardian report:

The pioneering 2 Tone band rose thanks to the support of Joe Strummer,¹ who invited them to support the Clash live,² and of BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel.

While not wrong, it ignores the fact that The Specials were bloody brilliant! The piece does make that clear later, to be fair, but it seems slightly the wrong way to weight it.

I also listened to some Fun Boy Three, and they were far better than I remembered, too, both with and without Bananarama.

For whom there’s a big anniversary tomorrow. ↩︎
I wish I’d seen The Clash on that tour, though. ↩︎

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 17:35:28 +0000

This is really weird. ‘Do the Dog’ by The Specials, but Apple Music brings up the lyrics of ‘The Last Day of Our Acquaintance’, by Sinead O’Connor.

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 09:37:07 +0000

At the start of this year, I promised myself I’d finish this novel by the end of the year.

I just passed the 70,000-word mark, and I’m on course to do it.

As long as Christmas doesn’t get in the way too much.

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 08:19:52 +0000

I opened a file where I had made some notes for a possible post. It had a link to something I might comment on. I clicked the link. Not only was the post gone, but the whole site; the whole Substack.

I created the file in March.

Own your stuff. Use your own site.

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 18:58:11 +0000

Right. Friday night is upon us. The week’s work is done. Hello.

@meandering

Fri, 25 Nov 2022 22:20:56 +0000

Why do Netflix, when nothing’s playing, still include The OA in the shows they tout, when the bastards cancelled that wonderful series three years ago?

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 20:06:44 +0000

This is a micropost, sent using the MarsEdit 5 beta’s new ‘Micropost’ feature.

It’s good. Would be even better if it had a character count.

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 16:25:23 +0000

This is disappointing: Apple have removed the delightful page-turn animation from the Books app: Apple’s taken the joy out of its Books app with iOS 16 - The Verge.

Bring it back! Joy! Whimsy!

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 11:01:48 +0000

November sky. Days like this are the real reason we have Christmas.

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 17:43:11 +0000

Saddened to read of the death of Marcus Sedgwick. I don’t know much about him, but I read and enjoyed one of his books two years ago, and subscribed to his mailing list after that. He seemed like a decent guy.

So it goes, I guess.

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 20:42:30 +0000

If you use Stage Manager on Mac, it seems that Command-backtick (⌘+`) behaves differently.

Normally it switches between windows of the active app. With Stage Manager it appears to switch between windows that are active in the current Stage (if that’s the term). Even between apps.

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 18:05:54 +0000

My site is fully switched over to Micro.blog. Everything has changed. Not just the look — I plan to work on that and try to make it more the way I want — but the URL scheme.

There will be breakages. I’ll fix things over time, but let me know about any you see.

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 23:08:34 +0000

I plan to move my site to Micro.blog. I’ve had enough of running servers and juggling components to make Indieweb things work together. I’d also relish the simplicity of making short posts easily.

I have a feast of fiddling about ahead of me to get all my old posts imported.

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 19:00:54 +0000

Tax rises expected from the latest Tory PM. What I can’t figure out is why they have to ‘make up for a £50bn fiscal hole’ caused by Truss, when she was only in for 5 minutes. Her disastrous mini-budget hadn’t been enacted yet.

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 08:26:13 +0000

Well, damn. As the only one in my immediate family never to have had it, I really thought I was going to get away with it.

Positive

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 21:42:30 +0000

Also I don’t really like the #NotMyKing hashtag that some republican campaigners have been using. It implies either that someone else should be king, or that there is or could be someone who is ‘my king’. Republicans believe no one should be king. Or queen.

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 21:32:09 +0000

Did anyone else get heavy Cybermen vibes from the royal funeral parade? All the slow marching with a drumbeat on every step? Everyone in time, rocking from side to side…

Sat, 02 Apr 2022 08:49:48 +0000

I no longer follow anyone on Twitter that I haven’t met, but I’m thinking of making an exception for this glorious translator between modern slang and business-speak:

<twitter.com/MeanestTA…>

Sat, 26 Mar 2022 14:27:07 +0000

It’s not yet the end of March. I’ve just put the cushions on the outdoor chairs, and put the umbrella up to shade me from the sun as I sit in the garden drinking coffee. I’m about to cut the grass. And I can hear seagulls.

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 22:00:01 +0000

Mildly amusing that no one noticed the obvious mistake in my last post/tweet. Or they were too polite to say. It’s still visible on Twitter, fixed on my site.

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 19:33:44 +0000

Wordle on my phone is still at the original site. But my partner’s goes to the NYT. There’s no obvious reason for the difference, and there has been no practical difference.

Today we got different words. Mine, both obscure and not even an allowed word on the NYT. What?!

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 18:19:54 +0000

On this date of many ‘2’s (but just wait till the 22nd), here’s a nice sunset for you.

Sunset over Hackney

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 15:22:13 +0000

So if I run brew install python-tk, which should let me build basic GUI apps on Mac with Python, it says:

Error: python@3.9: the bottle needs the Apple Command Line Tools to be installed.
  You can install them, if desired, with:
    xcode-select --install

And running xcode-select --installgives me the following dialogue:

Ludicrous installation time

80 hours! To install some command-line tools!

(In fact it soon dropped to a more sensible 8 minutes, via 13, but still.)

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 09:47:04 +0000

This is what Hackney Marshes looks like on a Monday morning in October

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 13:00:45 +0000

My phone just reminded me that my dissertation is due right now. Which wouldn’t have been a very useful reminder if I had been planning to submit today, but had somehow – incredibly! – forgotten.

Luckily I’ve got a two-week extension. I plan to actually submit in the next two or three days, though.

Thu, 09 Sep 2021 15:41:59 +0000

Book me a front-row seat:

The Matrix Resurrections in theaters and on HBO Max December 22 #TheMatrixMovie pic.twitter.com/USY3CKSgXq
— The Matrix Resurrections (@TheMatrixMovie) September 9, 2021

… because the new The Matrix movie looks incredible.

(I know the front row isn’t the best place to sit.)

Tue, 07 Sep 2021 14:19:35 +0000

Just found a typo in my diss: ‘Jeff the sandman,’ instead of soundman. Should probably be two words, ‘sound man,’ but anyway, an unexpected @NeilHimself-esque touch.

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 15:48:13 +0000

Today is Irony Day: Wetherspoon’s short on some beers as Brexit affects deliveries.

They blame ‘lack of lorry drivers and strike action.’ Hadn’t heard about a strike; does it exist? And more importantly, what on Earth could have caused a lack of drivers???

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 14:32:54 +0000

I sent my CV to a recruiter today, for the first time in a long time. Dissertation due in less than a fortnight, so I have to start thinking about what’s next.

In an ideal world I’d be able to make a living from writing. This was a programming-type recruiter, though.

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 15:44:51 +0000

#WeStandWithRNLI

My parents taught me to always give to the RNLI when they’re collecting, because of how important and dangerous the sea is. Lifeboat crews deserve all our support.

Some idiots don’t think so. Instead they want our seaborne heroes to let people drown if they don’t have the right papers.

Fuck that shit, and fuck those people.

HOPE Not Hate’s We Stand With RNLI image

Sat, 10 Jul 2021 18:46:56 +0000

Have sunk into a tennis stupor. It’s likely to stay until tomorrow.

Thu, 08 Jul 2021 10:23:20 +0000

There was a remarkable sporting event yesterday.

We learned that Roger Federer is human, and ageing.

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 11:07:15 +0000

Turns out The Killing is a pretty good TV show. Who knew? We’re five episodes in, and I’m wondering how they can make this first season last for 20.

It’s all on BBC iPlayer at the moment, which is nice.

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 17:35:15 +0000

Just heard the first ice-cream van of the summer. Well, spring.

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 07:15:10 +0000

‘New single by Belly': not what you expect to see on your phone in 2021. Thanks, MusicHarbor.

However, as I wrote in ‘Colliding Names,’ back in October, this is a different performer with the same name. The Wikipedia article tells us that ‘our’ Belly are active again, though.

Mon, 05 Apr 2021 23:02:11 +0000

We started watching Line of Duty two or three weeks ago, and now we’ve caught up. So we’ll have to watch the rest of series 6 week by week. Like it’s the past.

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 13:42:57 +0000

Lunch and writing in the garden today, and unlike back in February, it’s not just not cold, it’s almost too hot.

Sat, 27 Mar 2021 16:39:00 +0000

Saw a guy in a shop just now and his ‘face covering’ was a bandana. That was me a year ago! Get up to date, jimmy!

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 11:47:05 +0000

Today’s weather report

Good morning (just).

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 17:25:10 +0000

We had our first lunch in the garden of the year, today. I even spent half an hour out there writing, afterwards. In February.

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 19:04:12 +0000

I got a reply to the Twitter version of my last post which pointed me to something called the Badger Seal. It’s a DIY attachment you can make that’s meant to hold masks on better. Not just at the top for the glasses issue, but all around, for overall better filtration.

Because let’s face it, when we breathe out with a mask on, a lot of that breath is not going through the mask, but round the sides.

It looks like it might be pretty effective, but making it looks like a hassle – or at least, getting the components. It needs something called ‘foam wire,’ which I’ve never heard of, and I don’t know if you can even get it in this country (a quick search at B&Q’s site suggests not). But if you can, it’s likely to be in a big roll, when all you want is 30cm or so per mask.

Not to put a downer on good ideas, I mean. That site sells them too, but they’re heavily back ordered, and who knows how long they’ll take to get here from the US.

There are other, similar, things out there, but I can’t so far find anything sourced in the UK.

I’ll stick with micropore for now.

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 16:23:00 +0000

These days I double-mask -- as well as using tape

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 17:38:52 +0000

It’s reading week again already! Or it will be from Monday. Halfway through the second term already. Time flies when you’re writing a lot.

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 17:31:45 +0000

Deeply saddened to learn that Mira Furlan, who played Delenn in Babylon 5, has died. Only 65.

Over to JMS:

It is a night of great sadness, for our friend and comrade had gone down the road where we cannot reach her. But as with all things, we will catch up with her in time, and I believe she will have many stories to tell us, and many new roles to share with the universe. pic.twitter.com/HyQlqyC19v
— J. Michael Straczynski (@straczynski) January 22, 2021

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 19:07:52 +0000

Dave Winer asks:

What’s “neo” about neo-Nazis? Why not just call them Nazis? I’ve asked this question a bunch of times, over many years, never heard a satisfactory answer.

– Dave Winer, Scripting News

I’ve always thought it was just to distinguish from the original Nazis, the ones in Germany in the 30s and 40s.

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 16:55:43 +0000

And of course, congratulations Kamala. Her swearing-in was historic.

Biden’s speech talks of unity, and states that white supremacists will be defeated. I think we can all get behind that.

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 16:49:15 +0000

A new dawn for America. Congratulations, Joe.

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 16:36:31 +0000

Watching the US presidential inauguration. Somebody sanitises the podium between speakers. Covid times.

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 16:40:26 +0000

We finished Schitt’s Creek last night. Late to the party, but it was worth the wait.

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 20:52:22 +0000

We also finished the Christmas cake today. The true end of the season.

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 17:42:22 +0000

Submitted the first assessed pieces for my two modules today.

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 16:18:44 +0000

I could use such short, tweet-like posts as, effectively, paragraphs on a ‘Today Page,’ as Dave Winer and some other bloggers do.

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 15:57:26 +0000

I have a sort of mental goal of increasing my post-count this year. Ideally I’d like to hit 365. That doesn’t mean posting every day, necessarily (I didn’t post yesterday); but would need me to post several times per day. Even inconsequential fripperies like this.

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 01:42:52 +0000

And a Happy New Year to all.

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 16:48:48 +0000

Honestly, it’s great: I love the fact that I can stream all the albums in the world for one flat monthly fee.

I just wish that so many of them didn’t end their titles with ‘(Expanded Edition)’.

Or at least that the ‘Original Edition’ was there too.

Fri, 25 Dec 2020 12:53:18 +0000

Happy Christmas everyone.

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 12:01:05 +0000

The soundtrack for today starts with Earthquake Weather. How can Joe Strummer have been dead for eighteen years already?

I know, that’s just the way time works. The music lives on.

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 15:41:00 +0000

Yesterday I tried removing my taped-on mask slowly, and it was actually much better. So I rescind my advice from the day before about removing it quickly.

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 11:16:26 +0000

Trump may never concede, but this video shows us he’s at least said all the right words, if not necessarily in the right order.

He’s FINALLY presidential. It’s never too late.

pic.twitter.com/TFIx3pS0cw
— Jamie Schler (@lifesafeast) November 17, 2020

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 22:50:24 +0000

Christmas cake cooling on a rack

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 17:47:14 +0000

The Christmas cake is in the oven. ‘Tis the (start of the) season.

Sat, 07 Nov 2020 16:10:35 +0000

Lot of fireworks going off in Hackney at the moment. It’s probably just random November parties, but I like to think they’re celebrating the great news from the USA.

Congratulations, over there!

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 17:59:59 +0000

The sky over Hackney, this morning

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 08:49:43 +0000

These videos of Americans chanting ‘Stop the count!’ What… why… how…?

Trump’s reality distortion field is powerful indeed.

(For example: <twitter.com/SJPeace…>)

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 09:40:55 +0000

In Trump’s fake-news world, ‘counting all the votes’ equals ‘stealing the election.’ Out here in the real world ‘counting all the votes’ equals ‘democracy.’

Tue, 03 Nov 2020 22:16:45 +0000

Why do the polls close so early in the US? Seems to be 6pm. On the other hand, with all the early voting, I suppose they’ve been open for weeks.

Tue, 03 Nov 2020 14:33:06 +0000

Good luck today, America. Here’s hoping for a landslide against the guy in office.

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 12:50:17 +0000

It’s extremely disappointing that yesterday’s UK government announcement of the new lockdown made no mention whatsoever of masks or ventilation – and barely any of testing and tracing.

We still need those things, even as we lock down again. The virus doesn’t know the rules.

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 21:02:20 +0000

Lava lamp, processed with Prisma

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 17:53:08 +0000

OK, I’m just watching S3E1 of Star Trek: Discovery, and a character has just said his name is Book.

Are we in the Firefly ‘verse?

Mon, 05 Oct 2020 22:41:32 +0000

Term started today, technically. Coincidentally, 38 years to the day after my first term at Edinburgh started. I don’t have any classes till Wednesday, though.

Off we go, then, into this new adventure.

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 20:18:51 +0000

Ten days between posts? Good lord. What have I been up to?

I hope to tell you soon. Watch this space.

Sat, 29 Aug 2020 14:16:04 +0000

Last night’s pizza: the wee tables in the box were triangular! I’ve never seen the like.

Takeaway pizza with triangular support 'tables'

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 11:46:31 +0000

This is the least rustic-looking bread I’ve ever baked.

Some surprisingly-professional-looking homemade bread

Sun, 23 Aug 2020 16:44:09 +0000

Robin Rendle’s ‘An Astronomical Clunk’ is a great celebration of what the web is, and can be.

It’s these moments when the web holds up to its original promise; the web standards, the infrastructure, the open web. With eyes wide open I watch as this beige suite of specifications link together until they’re like constellations out of stars in the sky. It all begin to makes sense. But it’s not just the technologies that fit together in these moments, it’s the skills, too. When I’m excited about design, and writing, and coding all at the same time, and when each of them can be seen as the same thing, just from different angles.
Robin Rendle https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/an-astronomical-clunk.html

Sun, 23 Aug 2020 16:38:42 +0000

I played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time last night, with the family. My grown-up son plays, and he was our DM. It was more fun than I expected, but it takes a lot of work to set up. Mostly by my son, of course.

Sun, 09 Aug 2020 19:43:04 +0000

This street sign in Hackney today represents the times we live in.

Electronic street sign showing question marks

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 16:59:33 +0000

Another great quote from that piece about libraries:

[L]ibraries are a sweet little drop of socialism in our late-stage crapitalist coffee.
Chris Brecheen http://www.chrisbrecheen.com/2020/08/libraries-vs-pay-authors-wait-what.html

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 16:40:50 +0000

Nice:

Twitter is where nuance goes to die.
http://www.chrisbrecheen.com/2020/08/libraries-vs-pay-authors-wait-what.html

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 14:03:50 +0000

The Bridge season 4 picked up after the first episode’s shock ending. It led to a good conclusion, though not without some questions, which is fine. But what to watch next? That is the question.

Wed, 05 Aug 2020 10:16:05 +0000

Phil Schiller is now an Apple Fellow. Given the shape of their headquarters, is he part of the Fellowship of the Ring?

Wed, 05 Aug 2020 10:10:16 +0000

Watched season 4, episode 1 of The Bridge last night. I’m not sure I like it any more…

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 13:24:58 +0000

Do people not know breath comes out through the nose as well as the mouth?

And then there’s these folk who only breathe through their chins. Impressive.

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 17:16:34 +0000

How I prepare to go out on days like these.

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 10:57:53 +0000

Still, seems like we’re getting the solar panels up just in time for the hottest day. Or actually, not: watch when the rest of the summer is cloudy.

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 10:44:10 +0000

Damned noisy round here today. At the front we’re getting scaffolding put up, for our solar panels to get installed tomorrow. Out the back it’s all strimmers, drills, other people’s scaffolding, and I don’t know what all. It used to be quiet!

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 09:10:36 +0000

Why are so many Johnny Cash compilations being released at the moment? Seems like I’ve seen about six different ones in the last month or two.

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 18:01:44 +0000

I hope I didn’t fool you with that last title. It had nothing to do with the B-word. That ship has sailed, and the icebergs won’t really loom till the end of the year. It was about email. Go and check it out.

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 23:19:40 +0000

The growth of email newsletters over the last few years has been interesting. But they have a major problem, compared to blogs.

That is, once they’ve been sent out, the author can’t fix typos. Other errors can be corrected in later issues, but typos are out there forever.

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 17:29:33 +0000

God, what is this wintry July we’re having?

Tue, 07 Jul 2020 21:33:10 +0000

On a not-unrelated note to my last, Colin Devroe wrote this last month:

All pop-ups on page visit should be blocked. I don’t care if you’re giving me 100% off, I don’t want to see the pop-up. No, wait, how about only if you’re giving me 100% off is it OK to show me a pop-up. Thanks.

Colin Devroe, Untitled

I agree 100%.

Tue, 07 Jul 2020 21:27:45 +0000

More Options… 👇 Reject All 👇 Save and Exit 👇

That’s how I roll on websites these days. Anyone else?

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 21:13:42 +0000

We’re currently watching Borgen, or the Danish West Wing, as I like to think of it. It’s really good. Just about to start season 3, and slightly sad that this is the last one.

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 22:20:00 +0000

It’s funny when you hear the DJ on BBC 6Music saying, ‘I borrowed some records from the John Peel Archive’; and then you realise it’s Tom Ravenscroft. ‘I got some records from my dad’s collection’ doesn’t sound quite so… distinguished.

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 15:55:21 +0000

Listening to the Bikini Kill Peel Session, and it does have Peel’s intros. So good to hear his voice again.

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 14:07:49 +0000

My son is doing university exams in the kitchen.

Such is the world we live in now.

Wed, 27 May 2020 22:42:52 +0000

Strange seeing this tweet from the London Cycling Campaign:

When it's safe to cycle, people cycle. #LockdownCycleFreedom https://t.co/pTrXoBkNjk
— London_cycling (@London_Cycling) May 27, 2020

Cycling is up all over, apparently. Yet I stopped cycling for fear of putting extra strain on the NHS.

Wed, 13 May 2020 21:03:37 +0000

This guy gets it. The start of a 16-tweet thread, and following on from my thoughts the other day.

I had to go to the store yesterday.

I wear a mask, like responsible people do. Mine's a professionally made cloth mask with a replaceable N-95 insert.

And I'm not too proud to wear it.

1/
— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) May 13, 2020

Sun, 10 May 2020 10:13:22 +0000

To judge by all the the likes I got on Facebook for the last post, as well as the positive comments there and on Twitter, it seems that a lot of people share my mild distaste for the “Post your 10 top breakfasts. No explanations, no comments!” type of post.

Tell us about your favourite breakfast. I’ve just had a croissant with Victoria plum jam.

Fri, 08 May 2020 18:26:17 +0000

Why is it that all these “challenges” on Facebook say that you should post the things – movie posters, album covers, artworks – “without comment”? I’d like to know what my friends have to say about the thing in question.

Thu, 07 May 2020 13:39:49 +0000

App updates that amuse. Booking.com: “Now you can book taxis…”

Thanks, mates. Get back to me when that’s useful again.

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 23:16:39 +0000

Of course (following on from my previous post), I neglected to mention that Little Britain was never very funny.

In my humble opinion, of course.

Matt Lucas was much better in Doctor Who, and David Walliams was beter in… well, Attachments, if anyone remembers that.

Sat, 18 Apr 2020 17:52:51 +0000

It strikes me that Richard of York’s battle wasn’t in vain, when I see all these rainbow paintings with the colours in the right order.

(Personally, though, I learned the order without learning about Richard.)

Sat, 11 Apr 2020 11:48:05 +0000

Out to the supermarket today, because we were running low on a few things and our next delivery isn’t arriving till Monday. It’s the first time I’ve been out – except to the back garden – since the bike incident. Admittedly that was only four days ago, but like everything now, it feels a lot longer.

And I felt some trepidation about it. The world’s a dangerous place: the very air is dangerous, depending on who you get close to. And some you can’t avoid, because pavements have a finite width, and some people still walk blithely two-abreast, or on their own but down the middle… honestly, people, keep your distance.

In keeping with my recent exhortation, I wore a mask. Just a bandana, but as I said there, anything is better than nothing. And hey, it reminded me of The Clash in the “Bankrobber” video.

Sainsbury’s was fine. A spaced-out queue of about ten people outside, one-in-one-out, and maybe only five people in the shop at once (it’s one of the small Sainsbury branches, I should note). All very well handled

People with and without masks – some kind of face covering, at least – I’d estimate at around 30/70. Some with were also wearing gloves and looking very overheated.

But there’s a feeling of society – there already, and that I think might grow – when you’re masked: you see someone who isn’t, you shy away; while when you see another mask wearer you make eye contact. A small nod passes between you: we’re different. We’re connected. We’re doing something they’re not. Or maybe just, we have the same fears.

On the way back I passed a bus stop, where the only person waiting was an NHS worker on her way to a shift at Homerton Hospital (I assume, because that’s where the bus goes). A month ago I’d have wondered why people wear their staff passes outside of their work. Today it’s a badge of honour.

Thu, 09 Apr 2020 17:35:39 +0000

The only thing about having put my site into a repo in GitHub, which has to be deployed to my server, is that I need to be able to get to the server to deploy it (until I automate that, at least). Still, I’ve just posted this entirely from my iPad.

Thu, 09 Apr 2020 15:23:49 +0000

If you’re seeing this, then the new static version of my site is successfully running on its new server. Details here.

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 12:07:15 +0000

Just been for a bike ride. I think I’ve forgotten how my legs work.

Lots of people out, mostly keeping their distance.

Down to the Olympic Park. Nice view of the Orbit.

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 17:18:33 +0000

Good piece by Margaret Atwood about… what everything’s about, these days.

Any child growing up in Canada in the 1940s, at a time before there were vaccines for a horde of deadly diseases, was familiar with quarantine signs. They were yellow and they appeared on the front doors of houses. They said things such as DIPHTHERIA and SCARLET FEVER and WHOOPING COUGH. Milkmen – there were still milkmen in those years, sometimes with horse-drawn wagons – and bread men, ditto, and even icemen, and certainly postmen (and yes, they were all men), had to leave things on the front doorsteps. We kids would stand outside in the snow – for me, it was always winter in cities, as the rest of the time my family was up in the woods – gazing at the mysterious signs and wondering what gruesome things were going on inside the houses. Children were especially susceptible to these diseases, especially diptheria – I had four little cousins who died of it – so once in a while a classmate would disappear, sometimes to return, sometimes not.

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 17:37:50 +0000

I wish I hadn’t shared that video earlier. Seems like much of the advice is not so good. Thirty-three tweets from a food microbiologist starting here, or unrolled by the ThreadReader app here.

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 12:55:50 +0000

This video on how to deal with your food shopping is good. I’m alarmed to hear that some coronaviruses can live frozen for — two years, I think he said? So buying open bread from the bakers and freezing it is probably not as safe as I had thought.

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 23:33:23 +0000

Oh, here’s The Guardian talking about the government’s mass text:

UK mobile firms asked to alert Britons to heed coronavirus lockdown

As I imagined, it’s not like there’s a massive database with everyone’s numbers. They just asked the operators to send it to all their customers.

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 14:05:00 +0000

I just got a text from the government about the new regime. I assume everyone did. I didn’t know they could do that. It just has this link.

Fri, 06 Mar 2020 10:04:46 +0000

Some thoughts on using Instapaper, from Dan J: Doubling Down on Instapaper – Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters.

Quite similar to my own experience (though with more note-taking).

Fri, 28 Feb 2020 20:06:40 +0000

It’s filling up a bit. And the DJ’s playing the 101ers, so that’s good.

Fri, 28 Feb 2020 19:54:11 +0000

At the Red Lion in Leytonstone, where Glen Matlock is playing tonight. It’s… not busy.

Thu, 06 Feb 2020 00:49:44 +0000

In General Election 2019: the news media failed profoundly — but not in the way you think, Adam Tinworth buries the “lede.” Probably deliberately, as the whole piece is worth reading.

The key point is that the Reuters research showed that people spent only 16 minutes a week on average reading news during the election.

That’s a ludicrously low figure.

Also odd is that the Shortcut that I used to create this post pulled this text out as the title: “The Media & the 2019 General Election: trusted, but little consumed.” Which would be better in terms of not burying anything, but I can’t see where it came from. The <title> tag, I’d have to guess, but you don’t really see those on a phone. And not that much on a computer, once you’ve got more than a couple of browser tabs open.

Sat, 01 Feb 2020 08:57:52 +0000

FotoFebruary, as some on Micro.blog are calling the February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 1 theme: Open.

Why not join Micro.blog and take part?

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 12:35:18 +0000

Deviate. Hesitate. Repeat. 😟

Sat, 18 Jan 2020 10:20:18 +0000

I joined the Fabian Society recently, mainly so I’d get a vote in the Labour leadership election (I’m not rejoining Labour, at least for a while). So today I’m at the FEPS-Fabian New Year Conference 2020. Or #FEPSFAB20, as they’d like us to tweet.

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 23:21:41 +0000

I ate the last piece of our Christmas cake today. Christmas is now definitively over. If there was ever any doubt of that.

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 00:27:10 +0000

Enjoying Moffat and Gatiss’s Dracula. The end of episode 2 takes a surprising turn.

Sat, 04 Jan 2020 17:24:12 +0000

I don’t know if online petitions do much good, really, but with Trump trying to drag America into yet another war in the Middle East, the very least we can do is try to stop the UK from getting involved.

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 15:54:39 +0000

Hi-Five.

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:14:53 +0000

Live rickrolling on the Hootenany! Happy New Year, everyone.

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 18:18:39 +0000

Jolyon Maugham QC and the Good Law Project are petitioning Johnson to ask the EU to allow us to have associate EU citizenship, as part of the exit negotiations. I can’t imagine it’ll do much good, but there’s no harm in signing.

On one level I think they’re trolling Johnson: suggesting that he might want to — or suggesting that there’s any chance he would — appear statesmanlike.

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 20:49:21 +0000

At the cinema. The Rise of Skywalker will start any minute.

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 09:02:28 +0000

From The Guardian‘s piece on what we learned in the election about the media:

One Labour MP who nearly lost their Brexit-backing seat told the Guardian that on doorstep after doorstep, people brought up Corbyn’s connections with the IRA after seeing memes and images on Facebook: “It was never used by the Tories in the campaign but there was a separate election going on, which was a Facebook-orientated campaign.”

Maybe this explains the hatred for Corbyn which so mystified me.

The next paragraph is astonishing:

The MP suggested constituents are increasingly overwhelmed by information and unsure what is real and what is not, assuming there is some sort of editing of what goes on Facebook. “People have a sense that some of this stuff is probably wrong but they have no compass. They would say: ‘But it’s on Facebook – how can there be something that isn’t true?’ They think there are gatekeepers but there aren’t.”

Emphases mine. Oh my god. How can anyone think that after all that’s happened? I realise that not everyone is as deeply into tech and politics as I am, but still.

We never had a chance, did we?

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 04:09:05 +0000

It’s 4 in the morning and Gove is telling lies on the telly. This has become masochism — actually it did several hours ago — I’ll just listen to wee Nicola, and then go to bed.

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 03:48:05 +0000

Jeez, Jo Swinson loses by 149, in my old stomping grounds. Actually I think the constituency was West Dunbartonshire wherein I grew up, but close enough.

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 03:25:34 +0000

I think Corbyn’s stepping down (as he should) — or maybe it’s only at the next General Election? Strange phrasing.

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 03:11:56 +0000

Ed Miliband’s still around? And he just scraped back into his seat.

Thu, 12 Dec 2019 21:26:04 +0000

It’s not too late to vote, folks. Half an hour to get down to your polling station, get the Tories out, and stop Brexit.

Sat, 07 Dec 2019 16:05:36 +0000

Have reached Watchmen episode 6. Getting strong Babylon 5 vibes.

Thu, 28 Nov 2019 11:21:17 +0000

Why is it two different temperatures at the same time in London?

Tue, 05 Nov 2019 08:07:55 +0000

Corbyn is saying that Johnson is trying to “hijack” Brexit and turn it into a right-wing project — “Thatcherism on steroids”. That’s not hijacking; that’s what it always was.

Wed, 02 Oct 2019 12:56:54 +0000

Where, and in what direction, am I meant to slide? Because I can’t get past this screen in the iPhone camera app “Manual.”

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 23:00:53 +0000

Tempted to register one of the many available domains using “chuntering from a sedentary position.” It would be a John Bercow fan site, of course.

Thu, 12 Sep 2019 21:44:21 +0000

Do you ever listen to the start of Blonde On Blonde and want to know more about the Rainy Day Women numbers 0 to 11, 13 to 34, and maybe even 36 and beyond?

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 21:46:12 +0000

Dan Baird & Crimes Against Typography.

Wed, 04 Sep 2019 18:14:01 +0000

I’ve been in Parliament Square more times in the last few months than previously in my life. Back again tonight.

Tue, 03 Sep 2019 20:05:51 +0000

Iain Blackford speaking well as usual, but he could bring it to a close now. Leave them wanting more, and all that.

Tue, 03 Sep 2019 20:00:05 +0000

The BBC Parliament channel’s sound is disturbingly out of sync at the moment. And at such a critical time.

Sun, 01 Sep 2019 19:01:30 +0000

Autumn approaching in South London.

Sat, 24 Aug 2019 15:11:40 +0000

Sat, 17 Aug 2019 20:15:24 +0000

Darn, last post slightly too long for Twitter, and I forgot to tag it. #RevokeA50, as if it needed to be said. Petition here: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/241584.

Sat, 17 Aug 2019 20:05:00 +0000

I see our old friend the Revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU petition now has over 6.1 million signatures. Parliament has already debated it in a cursory way, but it’s worth getting its numbers up before it expires on the 20th. So give it a sign if you haven’t already.

Fri, 19 Jul 2019 16:52:28 +0000

I’m musing on whether or not to keep the holiday beard. Two weeks in Greece almost over. Home tomorrow.

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 20:51:21 +0000

Sometimes you just put on Combat Rock, and you are reminded of how awesome it is.

Sat, 15 Jun 2019 18:28:01 +0000

You should be watching Russel T Davies’s Years and Years. This thread nails it:

It’s scary because life is scary sometimes. People are brilliant, maddening, contradictory, and full of love.

and:

I’m dying to find out what happened, but scared to watch at the same time.

Sun, 09 Jun 2019 16:53:51 +0000

I don’t know when I last sat down to watch a Scotland-England football match. Indeed, I don’t know when there last was a Scotland-England match. It used to be every year with the Home Internationals, but that was long ago. Quite looking forward to this, though.

Mon, 27 May 2019 00:43:18 +0000

So it’s quite clear: UKIP/Brexit Party on much the same as five years ago. Many switching from Tories and Labour to Lib Dems and Greens. Change UK have, at best, split the remain vote.

Not the big swing some are making out. #EuropeElects

Mon, 27 May 2019 00:08:11 +0000

Based on the stats they just put up on the BBC, the pro- and anti-Brexit groupings have 35% of the vote each. That’s not counting Labour or the Tories, of course, because their votes don’t give a clear picture. #EuropeElects

Sun, 26 May 2019 23:31:39 +0000

If the Brexit Party are “up 3″ seats, and UKIP down 3 seats: that’s no change, in reality. #EuropeElects

Sun, 26 May 2019 23:07:58 +0000

Hey broadcasters: add up the remain totals and compare that with the Brexit party’s numbers. #EuropeElects

Sun, 19 May 2019 17:54:50 +0000

Five years ago I tweeted this:

Five fucking years. Back when the F-word national disgrace was just a bad joke.

Note that I’m deliberately avoiding using his name.

Tue, 30 Apr 2019 20:35:37 +0000

People in the UK should watch out for dodgy emails pretending to be from “TV Licensing”. I got one from an email of support@servereurcom.com, telling me to “update your account” at tv-license.tk/redirect.php.

Mark as spam, delete. On no circumstances click the link or reply.

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 15:03:12 +0000

Not to make a political point from today’s black-hole news — I would never do a thing like that — but isn’t it great what humans can accomplish when we collaborate between nations?

Far better than, say, building walls between nations, or breaking international treaties.

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 14:37:06 +0000

Congratulations to the Event Horizon Telescope team. The first ever picture of a black hole. In this case, the supermassive one at the centre of the M87 galaxy.

Fri, 05 Apr 2019 15:01:16 +0000

I hope everyone’s not petitioned out, because we need this: To establish a Public Inquiry into the conduct of the 2016 EU Referendum.

There will be a public enquiry about Brexit and how it was mishandled, eventually. But it could be years from now. Sooner is better.

Wed, 27 Mar 2019 07:52:16 +0000

Aw man. Ranking Roger has died. Only 56: too young.

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 21:56:19 +0000

New passport arrived. The proper, dignified burgundy colour.

That’s me set as an EU citizen till 2029.

That’s how it works, right?

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 12:48:13 +0000

The European Parliament’s outreach team (or “institutional, non-partisan communication action”) is encouraging us to sign up at This Time I’m Voting. I will be, as I always do — assuming, of course, that we in the UK are able to.

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 09:10:38 +0000

Ah, Carrot. You make checking the weather a joy.

Sat, 23 Mar 2019 09:55:26 +0000

I’m approximating the colours of the flag today. And my tiny banner is ready to go. Off into town for the #PeopleVoteMarch.

(Error loading gallery)

Fri, 22 Mar 2019 12:24:14 +0000

The petition has crossed the three million mark.

Rafael Behr has a great piece in The Guardian about May being finished.

It even has a Hamilton reference.

Thu, 21 Mar 2019 16:25:41 +0000

About to head out to the school for our last ever parents’ evening.

Thu, 21 Mar 2019 14:59:49 +0000

And it’s over a million.

Thu, 21 Mar 2019 12:41:16 +0000

Parliamentary petitions, including “Revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU,” have a “Show on a map” feature. I note without comment that the second-most signatures of any London constituency are currently in Islington North. Its MP is one J Corbyn.

Thu, 21 Mar 2019 09:48:03 +0000

As the big “Revoke Article 50″ petition approaches 600,000 signatures:

Petitions is down for maintenance

We know about it and we’re working on it.

Please try again later.

I think we broke parliament.uk. Which feels like some kind of metaphor.

Wed, 20 Mar 2019 17:16:49 +0000

Good thread from Mitch Benn (@MitchBenn) here, setting out how the conversation around Europe could improve if Brexit is stopped. Just six tweets. Go read.

Sun, 17 Mar 2019 17:32:07 +0000

Off to the cinema and apparently back to the nineties tonight.

Sat, 16 Mar 2019 23:31:09 +0000

I love Star Trek: Discovery, but the latest episode, ‘Project Daedalus,’ was infuriating, because they didn’t use an obvious and well-established feature of the programme to get out of a fatal situation.

Tue, 12 Mar 2019 16:25:29 +0000

Finally, some good might come of the Brexit fiasco:

From a senior Tory: “Feels like the last rites of the Tory party”. Slightly overstating perhaps. But captures the mood

— Robert Peston (@Peston) 12 March 2019

Realistically, of course, they’ll cling on at all costs. But “the last rites of the Tory party” is such a pleasant thought.

Fri, 08 Mar 2019 10:07:38 +0000

Carrot Weather on the zeitgeist again.

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 16:13:29 +0000

I hadn’t even seen this story about Morrissey and his politics and collaborators when I made my last post. But I’m baffled by this quote:

Representatives for Lydia Night of California band the Regrettes offered no comment, but the 18-year-old told punk magazine Kerrang!: “I’ve grown up loving the Smiths – my cat’s name is Morrissey!”

Emphasis mine. When I were a lad — and, indeed, when it was launched — Kerrang! was a heavy metal magazine. A flagship of one of the enemy camps in the Punk Wars. Has it really changed, or is The Guardian just misinformed?

Or maybe the lines are more blurred than ever before, so it doesn’t really matter.

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 11:32:34 +0000

“’80s Indie Essentials,” from Apple Music. Really good, and has several things I didn’t know, as well as much I did. Perhaps too much Smiths, especially with Morrissey’s fall from grace, but they did make some good records.

Wed, 13 Feb 2019 10:29:02 +0000

“Tables in Numbers can’t support more than 65,535 rows.” What nonsense is this, Apple?

Fri, 08 Feb 2019 10:28:13 +0000

Brexiters think the BBC is anti-brexit. Remainers think the BBC is pro-Brexit. Does that mean it’s really getting it right and keeping balanced? Inspired by this tweet:

Hilarious that anyone could think #r4today was anti-Brexit https://t.co/uWRv9nnu2J

— Jane #CheckBrexit #MakeItStop (@localnotail) February 7, 2019

which indirectly links to this report about Radio 4 losing listeners. Speaking from personal experience I’d say its listeners are not going to “commercial rivals” so much as to podcasts. But I’m only one data point.

Fri, 25 Jan 2019 17:40:16 +0000

Off to see Sir Billiam of Bragg at Islington Assembly Hall. Hoping for A Great Leap Forwards.

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 19:47:37 +0000

Motion of no confidence! Yay!

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 09:23:37 +0000

We’ve taken down the decorations, but we can’t put the Santas way until the cake is finished.

Sat, 05 Jan 2019 14:00:03 +0000

Look at the picture at the bottom of this article. Trump seems to have started creating an army of cloned bald-headed men to build the wall for him!

Luckily The Fall wrote a song about it years ago.

Fri, 04 Jan 2019 23:23:53 +0000

When I was writing that last post I was confused because I couldn’t copy text from the article I was linking to.

Clicking and moving my mouse across the text did nothing: there was no indication that I had selected anything. Similarly, double-clicking on a single word didn’t select it.

Eventually I saved the article to Instapaper, and copied from there

After initially posting it, I noticed that the URL contained the string “amphtml”. I removed the amphtml/, and the page worked normally.

AMP is Google’s “accelerated mobile pages,” a way for them to control URLs instead of the owners controlling them. At least, that’s how it appeared at first. Clearly that can’t be the case for a page like this that’s purely at the Washington Post’s own site.

But it’s a bloody annoying state of affairs, and makes for a very bad web citizen.

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 12:29:51 +0000

“I’ll try for something closer to daily in 2019,” he says, and then misses day 2. Oh well.

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 11:30:16 +0000

Happy New Year, everyone. It could be a rough one, so look out for each other.

Sat, 22 Dec 2018 13:28:40 +0000

I knew going In to the West End on the Saturday before Christmas was crazy. But first I couldn’t get on to the Piccadilly Line platform. And then, they’re queueing outside the Lego shop!

(Actually things aren’t too crowded so far.)

Thu, 20 Dec 2018 13:54:38 +0000

Today I learned that Nick Cave has a newsletter. I insta-subscribed, obviously, as you can do, and read the archive.

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 13:12:12 +0000

When did Windows get a case-sensitive filesystem?

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 17:31:48 +0000

This is more contempt of parliament.

It’s bullshit. Delaying the vote is just a ploy to leave less time to organise a second referendum. May is finished anyway, and her reputation as worst PM ever is assured. She should just finish it.

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 20:06:00 +0000

All the congratulations to NASA for another successful landing on Mars. Good to know humanity can still do great things.

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 19:25:41 +0000

Did I hear right on https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive? The principal scientist for Mars Insight is Bruce Banner? Hope he stays clear of gamma rays. And doesn’t get angry.

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 17:20:07 +0000

Installing Ubuntu on Windows 10 on a VM on a Mac. Because why not?

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 22:42:54 +0000

I just read the phrase “staying under the rule of Brussels” in a foolish article. Instead it should read, “Continuing to contribute to the rule of Europe,” if you want it in terms of ruling. “Continuing to share in Europe’s future development,” to be more about cooperation.

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 00:06:12 +0000

Leaves. (Despite that word, nothing to do with Brexit, for a change.)

Thu, 15 Nov 2018 23:19:42 +0000

My resignation from Labour has had a bigger impact than I expected:

In an email to Labour Party members this evening, Jeremy Corbyn confirmed that Labour will support the campaign for another public vote on Brexit if a general election is not possible

Thu, 15 Nov 2018 11:48:28 +0000

Our Prime Minister is either lying or deranged. From The Guardian’s live updates:

Labour’s Phil Wilson asks May if she can say, “hand on heart”, that this deal is better than what the UK has now.

May says she firmly believes the UK’s best days are ahead.

Or avoiding the issue: “best days ahead” could be looking ten, twenty years ahead. You know, when we rejoin the EU.

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 19:33:30 +0000

Stan Lee: Marvel Comics co-creator dies aged 95 – BBC News

He had a good run, I guess, and created some amazing things. I hope they’ve filmed his cameo for the next Avengers film.

Sat, 10 Nov 2018 18:11:58 +0000

Some Labour MPs are thinking along similar lines to me.

Wes Streeting:

“Labour cannot sit by and allow the choice to be between the economic ruin of a hard Brexit or the loss of sovereignty under Theresa May’s deal, with Britain subjected to EU rules but with no say over them,” he said. “As with any fork in the road, there is always the option of turning back home.

“We know this is a mess made by the Tories, but the Labour party can’t just sit back and watch. It’s time for all of us in the Labour party to make the full-throated case for a people’s vote with the option of remaining in the European Union.

“That leadership must now come from the top, or our party may never be forgiven for the consequences that follow.”

Chris Leslie:

“With even Tory ministers recognising Brexit threatens the poorest in society, our public services and Britain’s place in the world, to have a Labour leader just shrug about it, then go awol, is nothing short of a dereliction of duty.”

OK, they’re maybe not planning to leave the party, but still.

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 22:41:43 +0000

It’s nearly time…

After my success last year, I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year.

I’ve been planning for the last few weeks, and as midnight approaches I’m ready to start on Delta Blues: Beat Poet of the Spaceways.

Make of that title what you like. I know I will.

Sun, 07 Oct 2018 23:10:57 +0000

Oh, yes, that will most certainly do. A very strong start for both Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker. And, indeed the whole team.

And a cliffhanger ending! What!?

Sun, 07 Oct 2018 18:39:26 +0000

The nation hods its breath: five minutes till the new series of Doctor Who starts.

Fri, 05 Oct 2018 23:23:50 +0000

Preparing for Sunday.

Fri, 05 Oct 2018 21:43:06 +0000

I just almost died laughing watching a horse puke cotton candy.

Fri, 05 Oct 2018 16:27:55 +0000

Got an email that told me Clearwater Creedence Revival are playing in London in January. I thought, “What?!!?”

Then I noticed that the first two words are inverted.

I mean, “tribute” bands, fine, if you must. But at least pick a name that doesn’t look like passing off.

Wed, 19 Sep 2018 08:23:15 +0000

Well that’s me told. Arrr.

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 14:11:26 +0000

Hamilton was every bit as amazing and wonderful as I had hoped. A fantastic piece of work.

I didn’t listen to the soundtrack first, in the end, and that was fine.

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 18:13:13 +0000

Tonight! Hamilton! Just waiting for the family and friends to arrive.

Tue, 11 Sep 2018 07:57:28 +0000

A week till we see Hamilton. Should I listen to the soundtrack first, or not? I don’t want to spoil the show, but often gigs are better if you know the material.

So far I’ve only heard the opening song, and odd other bits. Also: I grew up hearing my parents’ records of musicals long before I saw the films.

Mon, 10 Sep 2018 14:52:05 +0000

The Indieweb, the open web, and now: the “decentralised web, or DWeb.”

We used to just call it the web.

Little has changed except for the fact that people are now rightly suspicious of the centralised services.

And I’m willing to bet that the term “DWeb” does not catch on.

Wed, 05 Sep 2018 11:16:51 +0000

Serial‘s Season 3 trailer just dropped. Jumped to the top of my podcast queue… dated 1st July? Today, for the record, is the 5th of September.

Probably just a mistake, but it’s odd behaviour.

Sun, 02 Sep 2018 19:54:35 +0000

“iCloud photo sharing limit reached”? What is this madness?

Sun, 02 Sep 2018 19:07:47 +0000

I’m not at all sure about this new “Gutenberg” editor they’re adding to WordPress. I’ve installed the plugin version to try it out. Gutenberg is a change to the web-based editor in the WordPress dashboard, not a separate app. I typed up my previous post in MarsEdit, as is my wont, and uploaded it. The Gutenberg plugin imported it nicely and displayed everything as you’d expect. But it turned all my Markdown into HTML.

That’s not what I want, and it’s not how most Markdown-processing plugins — notably WordPress’s own Jetpack — handle Markdown. Instead they keep the source document as Markdown and only convert it to HTML when the page is requested. That’s what using a dynamic CMS means, after all.

It appears that you can get Gutenberg to keep the Markdown as it is, if you type it into what they call a Code Block. So I’ll have to hope that [@danielpunkass](https://micro.blog/danielpunkass) updates MarsEdit to send posts to that kind of block once Gutenberg is the default. Assuming the WordPress API lets you do that, of course.

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:41:41 +0000

Three weeks on holiday puts you super far behind on podcast listening, doesn’t it?

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 23:53:03 +0000

Piano steps, Calle Beethoven, Valparaíso.

Fri, 27 Jul 2018 18:05:32 +0000

This storm feels like it’s been building for weeks. Finally to break just as I’m trying to get to the theatre.

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 21:01:13 +0000

Dreams Before the Start of Time by Anne Charnock wins the 2018 Arthur C Clarke Award.

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 15:40:07 +0000

Expecting leadership challenge, vote of no confidence… we could have a general election within weeks. Hope it’s not while I’m away on holiday.

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 15:33:21 +0000

Feels like the major influence on British politics this century — if not in my whole lifetime — has been the Tory party feuding over the EU. If the fuckers had just split in two twenty years ago we wouldn’t be in this mess now.

Sat, 07 Jul 2018 11:30:18 +0000

I feel strangely drawn to the idea of watching the World Cup today. It’s particularly odd, since there’s tennis on.

I visited Sweden once, so that makes me more-or-less Swedish, right?

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 07:51:09 +0000

On @atpfm episode 280 @marcoarment says that playing music from your own library on Sonos is buggy. In my experience it’s flawless. And it’s what Sonos has done since before there was Apple Music or even Spotify, so it should work.

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 10:16:45 +0000

Orwell would have had something to say about their use of “unanimous”:

The judges praised her “whole set of amazing stories” and said they believed that “if George Orwell had been here he would have been unanimous in choosing our winner”.

(Emphasis mine.) From the Guardian.

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 19:35:45 +0000

When you manage your dependencies with Maven, the transitive dependencies mean you can find you’re using a library that you never explicitly said you depended on (because some library that you do depend on included it). This can lead to confusion, as I learned today.

Sat, 23 Jun 2018 10:51:08 +0000

In Clapham for the BSFA/SFF minicon and AGMs. Signal v poor. Are there no cell towers south of the river?

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 10:31:09 +0000

I can think of only one reason to take refugee children away from their parents at a border, other than sheer cruelty. That is to scare other families, so they won’t try to reach your country.

There’s word we use for causing fear for political ends: that word is terrorism.

Sat, 16 Jun 2018 20:38:45 +0000

You know those pocket computers we all carry? Will we ever stop calling them “phones,” do you think? When did you last make a phone call on yours? And even if the answer is “today,” is that the main thing you use it for?

Tue, 05 Jun 2018 23:22:52 +0000

Well, London’s Micro.blog meetup was… let’s say, lightly attended. [@johnphilpin](https://micro.blog/johnphilpin) has the photo. Good time, though, if not WWDC-level.

Sun, 03 Jun 2018 18:23:20 +0000

Brix & The Extricated at All Points East.

Sun, 03 Jun 2018 09:31:15 +0000

Looking forward to Nick Cave, Patti Smith, etc at All Points East in Victoria Park today. They’re not keen on publishing the full lineup, but I finally found the clashfinder.

No major clashes except for Patti & St Vincent. But a bit of zigzagging between stages needed.

Wed, 30 May 2018 20:12:51 +0000

Oh no! Alarming email from “Apple Service”:

We have detect some problem with your account Apple,because was sign in from other IP.For the further informations please find the attachment file (PDF) and follow the intructions.

Not problem with my account Apple!

Sun, 27 May 2018 22:43:45 +0000

So, Micro.blog folk: we’re planning a meetup in London. It’s scheduled to kind of coincide with one that [@manton](https://micro.blog/manton) and others are having during WWDC in San José, but that’s not important, really.

What is Important is the date, time, and place: Tuesday the 5th of June, from around 6:30pm, at The Grenadier – 18 Wilton Row, Belgrave, SW1X 7NR. More details here.

So far attendance is looking a little light, so your presence is not just desired — it’s required

If you’re within striking distance of Central London, your Micro.blog community needs you.

Sat, 26 May 2018 23:41:20 +0000

We’re having a crazy silent, dry thunderstorm in London tonight.

Fri, 25 May 2018 11:35:59 +0000

I naively thought that, now that GDPR Day is here, we might see a reduction in annoying cookie popups. (I don’t know why I thought that; I was probably just being hopeful.) But it’s got worse Much worse. Giant, screen-covering popups; “Accept” buttons that don’t work. Oh dear.

Thu, 24 May 2018 15:31:21 +0000

This is a form of GDPR email I haven’t seen before (and I’ve seen a lot):

With new data protection rules known as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) effective 25th May 2018, we are reaching out to existing customers to notify them that RCP Parking Ltd will be unsubscribing all existing customers from our promotional communications.
…
RCP Parking Ltd has determined that previously subscribed customers were not subscribed in a manner compliant with the new GDPR regulation.

Refreshingly honest.

Sat, 12 May 2018 21:33:14 +0000

Regarding Eurovision: I sort of understand why you can’t vote for your own country. Though if you could, would the most populous country automatically win? Or the country with the biggest LGBTQ community? I don’t think so. People would still vote for a song they liked. But it would be interesting to try it one year.

But more importantly: why can people in the UK not vote by text? Seems weirdly old-fashioned.

Sat, 12 May 2018 21:29:20 +0000

It’s been a 24-hour rollercoaster for my daughter (and all of us) as Brooklyn Nine-Nine has now been picked up by NBC. Phew.

Fri, 11 May 2018 11:55:43 +0000

Until his morning I couldn’t have told you the name of Frightened Rabbit’s lead singer, though I like some of their music. Now Twitter tells me of Scott Hutchison’s tragic death.

All I can say is: if you find yourself in a dark place, please, talk to someone. Help is there.

Fri, 11 May 2018 07:14:11 +0000

My daughter has just told me that Brooklyn Nine-Nine has been cancelled. God damn it. In this golden age of television that we’re living through, it’s consistently the funniest thing out there. Never an episode goes by that we don’t have to pause and jump back because one or more of us (to be fair, usually me) were laughing so hard we missed the next line.

I hope they don’t leave on another end-of-season cliffhanger.

Mon, 07 May 2018 12:02:04 +0000

My Dock came back without me having to do anything. Very strange.

Mon, 07 May 2018 07:42:48 +0000

I’ve never seen this before: my iPhone’s dock is missing this morning. Everything else is working fine, though.

Sun, 06 May 2018 11:36:26 +0000

Back to the Minnow theme. One of these days I’ll stop experimenting and settle on a theme.

Fri, 04 May 2018 08:20:01 +0000

Oh, and I suppose I should say something about “may the fourth of May be with you,” right?

Fri, 04 May 2018 08:18:13 +0000

I sometimes forget how easy it is to post to my blog. Then I go into Micro.blog…

Thu, 03 May 2018 18:45:51 +0000

When you’ve got a child who’s on the electoral register, but they’re not yet old enough to vote; and they have the same initials as you? That can cause problems.

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 17:24:33 +0000

Good day today: spent most of it struggling to get Java — running in Tomcat on the Mac — to call functions in R. Successfully in the end, thanks to Stack Overflow and others. Tonight: Infinity War!

Fri, 20 Apr 2018 21:03:30 +0000

What?!? Commando comics are still a thing? I used to love them when I was a kid. And look at those issue numbers: up in the five thousands!

Fri, 20 Apr 2018 18:37:05 +0000

Today was the first day wearing shorts this year. And also the first time ever wearing shorts to work. Another reason to love this new job.

Fri, 20 Apr 2018 08:24:10 +0000

Merlin Mann just said what I thought was “Trump loyal” on the Reconcilable Differences podcast. Intriguing.

Then I realised he said “trompe l’oeil”. Which made more sense in context, but was less interesting.

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 07:07:45 +0000

Why do Americans (or at least American podcasters) say “soddering” for “soldering”? Is it just a weird pronunciation (and if so, why?) or is it a slightly different spelling, like aluminium?

Sun, 15 Apr 2018 19:56:27 +0000

My wee boy turned 21 today.

Thu, 05 Apr 2018 13:27:58 +0000

Ev Williams on the future of reading and writing on the net:

Now we can’t stand to sit through ads…

Where I come from we never could; because we grew up on the BBC. Whose funding, when you think about it in modern terms, is essentially a subscription model, though paying the subscription — the TV Licence fee — is mandatory if you have a TV.

In the early days that made sense, because the BBC was all there was on the TV. Now it seems harder to justify, but I’ve yet to see a solution that would be both as successful and as egalitarian. Because the licence is very, very cheap compared to the alternatives.

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 18:44:14 +0000

Stiff Little Fingers were the first band I every saw, back in 1980, at the Glasgow Apollo. Tonight I’m off to see them again (for maybe the sixth, seventh, eighth time), at the Forum in Kentish Town.

Thu, 22 Mar 2018 14:21:55 +0000

There’s a Blues Brothers quote that seems appropriate here. And it’s not the one about sunglasses.

BREAKING: American Nazi wins Republican primary in Illinois’ Third Congressional District.

And I see that downstream people have posted the requisite clip.

Wed, 14 Mar 2018 21:16:23 +0000

Professor Hawking told us to loook up at the stars… he probably didn’t live in London.

Wed, 14 Mar 2018 07:12:13 +0000

Aw, Stephen Hawking, man. It’s not exactly sad, because he had a good life, especially compared to the two-year prognosis he was given. But still.

His name will forever be written in evaporating black holes.

Mon, 12 Mar 2018 20:39:35 +0000

OK, so I’m watching Stranger Things, and in season 2, episode 8, it gets really weird. You need to know BASIC to reboot the security system?

But then I remembered: it’s set in the eighties. So it almost makes sense.

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 20:00:20 +0000

I should just mention that Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is brilliant. Best film I’ve seen this year. And I’ve seen Black Panther. (Which, don’t get me wrong, is also great.)

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 10:59:20 +0000

Once again Carrot Weather shows how it’s tuned in to the Zeitgeist.

Mon, 19 Feb 2018 14:05:24 +0000

It’s amusing to see that this article, called ‘Why Decentralization Matters,’ is on Medium.

Where’s Alanis Morissette? (Sorry, ‘Ironic’ cliché.)

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 09:30:22 +0000

Oh, well done, Orbit. I salute not just the publication, but the use of ~~weapons~~ language:

We’re thrilled that the Estate has given us permission to publish the collection, and that owing to special circumstances Ken MacLeod has agreed to join the team working on it.

Mon, 12 Feb 2018 13:05:20 +0000

You can’t leave it there, Star Trek! I mean, you totally can; it’s a great place to leave it. But when’s season 2? 🖖

Mon, 12 Feb 2018 12:02:55 +0000

I’m on an Edinburgh-London train that seemingly has no power sockets (here in coach H, next to the café, at least). What?!? What decade are we in?

Luckily, phone, iPad, headphones, and Kindle all have enough charge for the journey. And I have the season finale of Star Trek: Discovery downloaded. Off we go, then. 🖖

Sat, 10 Feb 2018 11:47:51 +0000

A year ago today I was on a train to Edinburgh. It was snowing at Peterborough.

Today I am also on a train to Edinburgh. No snow, but it’s so crowded that I can’t get to the buffet car. Well, I could, but I’d have to push my way past so many people that I can’t face it. This is why you should buy your sandwiches before you get aboard.

Why is it so crowded, though? Is there something going on that I don’t know about? Or is it something to do with the fact that Virgin run the franchise now?

Fri, 09 Feb 2018 09:18:01 +0000

Marina Hyde has been on fire at the Guardian lately, but this headline is just something else: A-hole in a K-hole: Katie Hopkins’ ketamine adventures

Newspaper journalists don’t usually write their own headlines, but whoever came up with that one deserves an award.

Wed, 07 Feb 2018 07:44:50 +0000

I’m reminded by last year’s post (though really by Facebook: that’s one thing it’s good at) that Feb 7 is recognised by some as International Clash Day. Doesn’t feel like a year, etc. 🎵 #internationalclashday

Thu, 01 Feb 2018 23:20:53 +0000

I have job news. Or I will, soon, I hope. Just waiting for some paperwork…

(OK, Mr Mysterious, that’s enough.)

Tue, 30 Jan 2018 20:53:53 +0000

Why does using psychic powers always cause nosebleeds?

(Still watching Stranger Things.) 📺

Mon, 29 Jan 2018 12:26:00 +0000

12:00:00: Hamilton tickets go on sale. 12:00:01: Ticketmaster site grinds to a halt.

(12:10-ish: I book six tickets!)

Fri, 26 Jan 2018 18:59:39 +0000

I don’t suppose the government will listen, but this Brexit poll is interesting.

Fri, 26 Jan 2018 16:18:27 +0000

I just heard the harmonica on ‘Garageland’ for the first time. I’ve heard that song thousands of times over… err, nearly forty years.

These Beats X headphones are really quite good. 🎵

Thu, 25 Jan 2018 23:14:16 +0000

I’m wildly behind the TV curve, in that I’m just watching Stranger Things now. But I’ve got to say they’re killing it with the music choices.

Thu, 25 Jan 2018 15:11:27 +0000

They were never quite my favourite band, but were always there or thereabouts

In Legend of the Fall: Mark E Smith kept swinging to the end, Dave Simpson sums things up well. 🎵

Wed, 24 Jan 2018 00:21:27 +0000

The science-fiction community is dispossessed tonight. Ursula K Le Guin RIP.

Fri, 19 Jan 2018 00:15:49 +0000

Croydon looking colourful and futuristic, yesterday

Fri, 12 Jan 2018 14:28:15 +0000

Maybe this change to Facebook’s feed will take it back towards just showing what family and friends post, as I was asking for back in October.

My guess is it still won’t give us what we want: all the things our Friends post, in reverse-chronological order.

If only there were a special word that described posts presented in that way… or a special protocol, or feed format, that made it easy to share the posts…

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 16:17:40 +0000

I love that, on Touch Bar MacBooks, you can set things up so that you use your fingerprint to authorise sudo in the Terminal.

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:08:27 +0000

Happy New Year from firework-drenched London Town.

Wed, 20 Dec 2017 01:08:22 +0000

Liked: In “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” Luke Skywalker Finally Becomes Cool | The New Yorker

Luke’s diminished circumstances make for a far richer character, one whom Hamill portrays with mournful energy and depth. For the first time, Hamill’s performance is one of the best parts of a “Star Wars” movie.

I can’t really agree with this article more. Except maybe the bit about the wink.

Thu, 14 Dec 2017 21:05:32 +0000

At the cinema. What for, you say? Oh, nothing special: just Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Fri, 08 Dec 2017 08:08:35 +0000

You’ll be pleased to know that we got the battery cover off the Fire TV Stick remote. Got Netflix and iPlayer installed, watched Person of Interest.

In the end we just had to be persistent. And firm.

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 12:45:49 +0000

It would be weird if Tony Blair turned out to be the hero of the Brexit hour. But we need all the support we can get.

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 11:32:49 +0000

Just saw this winter’s first flurry of snow. Well, hardly flurry: just a few flakes drifting past the window. And it’s stopped now.

Wed, 29 Nov 2017 19:09:12 +0000

I’m glad Scrivener 3 is out, but could they have picked a worse month for it? The end of November, when a crazy percentage of users are crazily last-minute-typing into the app.

Not a good time to upgrade.

On the other hand, when November is over we can reward ourselves.

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 22:05:26 +0000

Look at that, I’ve crossed the line. I’m now above the NaNoWriMo average daily word count.

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 12:56:26 +0000

The trees are afire in Clapton Square. (OK, with a little bit of help from Photos.)

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 20:26:09 +0000

Just realising that when the Star Trek: Discovery theme music starts, I now want someone to say “Space: the final frontier…”

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 08:42:03 +0000

Just saw a guy cycling along, no hands, hands in pockets. Geez, get some gloves, mon, you’re making us all terrified.

Wed, 15 Nov 2017 23:27:46 +0000

23,600 words in 15 days. I’m on course to make the 50,000. And to finish my novel. If I do that, I may not go to the full 50,000.

I also finished reading, a year and eleven days after I bought it, Alan Moore’s Jerusalem. Which was almost as much of a challenge.

Mon, 13 Nov 2017 23:47:46 +0000

Turned out the missing dates was a setting of the theme. Dates are back.

I wouldn’t mind if it showed the time, too, but dates are a bare minimum.

Fri, 10 Nov 2017 18:15:43 +0000

The Ramones were the first band I saw when I came to London, and I’ve seen them several other times. I’ve just been listening to a couple of early albums, and they’re still so good. Now sad that I’ll never see them live again.

Go and see bands live when you can.

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 23:35:14 +0000

12,120 words so far. And a sure sign that I’m getting close to finishing this novel: today I started thinking about what I’ll write next. The total word count is 85,700. I didn’t start a new one this month.

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 09:28:35 +0000

If FaceID comes to the Mac, with its attention detection, will we ever get what I’ve always wanted: “Focus Follows View”? Keystrokes should affect the window I’m looking at, not the one I last clicked in. Would be great.

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 20:55:09 +0000

Start at the top: Billy opens with ‘Sexuality’.

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 18:41:07 +0000

1200 words today. I’m slipping back a bit. At this rate I’ll finish on 3rd December, it tells me. Still, I’m ahead of anywhere I’ve been before at this time in the month.

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 17:18:58 +0000

Off to see Billy Bragg tonight in Islington.

Fri, 03 Nov 2017 13:50:23 +0000

This Joe Ricketts seems like a right bampot: shutting down publications just because the workers join a union.

Fri, 03 Nov 2017 09:04:55 +0000

The trouble with NaNoWriMo is obsessing over your word count. As I write, I’m constantly checking that figure.

It’s not a big trouble.

Fri, 03 Nov 2017 07:57:47 +0000

Carrot Weather is hooked into the news today.

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 12:16:32 +0000

In NanoLand. 462 words before getting out of bed this morning.

Sun, 29 Oct 2017 10:33:53 +0000

I love it when bloggers surprise me. I read Brett Terpstra for Apple-related tech and software development, and such. But here’s a great piece on his experience with yoga.

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 21:57:29 +0000

Star Trek is really getting back to its sixties roots. Magic mycelium, “A hit of speed…” Groovy stuff.

Sun, 22 Oct 2017 22:26:16 +0000

Walthamstow Wetlands: London’s newest Park. Just opened.

Fri, 20 Oct 2017 18:36:49 +0000

Reread the originals first, or dive straight in…?

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 18:42:05 +0000

Mixed feelings: somebody dies; the reaction makes you check out their work; you find you’ve been missing something great. You’ve got a great new band to explore. But it’s like coming in at the end of a movie.

And the guy is dead. (He was my age.)

The Tragically Hip. Very good.

Thu, 12 Oct 2017 20:54:56 +0000

You ever watch a scene and it shocks you, even though you know what’s going to happen? My Buffy rewatch just reached ‘Seeing Red.’

Tue, 10 Oct 2017 19:02:48 +0000

Watched The Last Jedi trailer. Didn’t do a lot for me. Don’t worry, though: I’ve booked my ticket for opening night.

Sun, 08 Oct 2017 22:53:03 +0000

I’m not going to say much about Blade Runner 2049 yet, except: I felt disappointment more than enjoyment. All the critics are praising it unreservedly, and I didn’t enjoy it that much. I have a whole lot more written, but I’m going to wait a while before posting it.

Thu, 05 Oct 2017 11:30:02 +0000

So why has no-one told me about Milk Kan before? God With an iPod, for example, is brilliant. From 2008.

Thu, 05 Oct 2017 06:41:30 +0000

Brett Terpstra is offering the chance to win a copy of the new 60 Mac Tips book and the (updated) old one. All you have to do is register. Sounds great.

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 06:43:11 +0000

Citymapper has AR now. Not sure it’s as useful as the rest of the app, but fun.

Mon, 02 Oct 2017 22:40:01 +0000

Star Trek: Discovery, episode 3, ‘Context is for Kings,’ keeps up the good work, in case you were expecting otherwise. And I forgot to say the other day that, although the IMDB people were negative, there is a very positive review on Tor.com. Much positivity in the comments there. too.

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 23:00:48 +0000

I received one of the stranger pieces of spam or phishing I’ve ever seen. Not because of what it’s trying to do — obviously it wants me to click on a dodgy link — but because of the weird, almost surreal ineptness of the content. Take a look:

Isn’t that its own special thing? Almost poetry, in a disturbed, fractured way.

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 20:21:13 +0000

Gabi Garbutt & The Illuminations at the Monarch in Camden.

Tue, 26 Sep 2017 22:26:26 +0000

Twitter going to 280 characters. Clearly emulating Micro.blog. Congratulations [@manton](https://micro.blog/manton).

Fri, 22 Sep 2017 19:40:08 +0000

I hate how Amazon Prime Video puts adverts in between episodes. And it always seems to be for The Tick.

Fri, 22 Sep 2017 19:27:57 +0000

Watching early Seinfeld. If I’m not very much mistaken he just made instant coffee! Yuck. The past was another world.

Fri, 22 Sep 2017 18:47:07 +0000

This tree looked amazing as the sun caught it. This morning in Croydon.

Thu, 21 Sep 2017 07:39:00 +0000

Put on BBC 6 Music this morning. They played ‘The Sound of the Suburbs.’ Excellent. Still stands up well.

Wed, 20 Sep 2017 00:06:20 +0000

Also that ‘easy moving’ trick only works on the iPad, not the iPhone. In fact the strangest thing about iOS 11 so far is the differences between iPhone and iPad. Like when I swipe up from the bottom on the iPhone, I want to see the Dock.

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 23:07:02 +0000

Ah, wait: they do shake if you hold them long enough. But you can now move them before they start to shake. Nice. Obviously they have to go into shake mode, otherwise how could you delete them?

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 23:01:57 +0000

iOS 11: icons don’t go shaky when you move them any more. I think I’ll miss that.

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 07:55:57 +0000

This post, in which I said:

I just checked, and my current total is 700. I’ll have to go some to catch you up. 🙂

will no doubt have confused everyone. I was involved in a conversation on Micro.blog, and I may have pressed the wrong button and created a new post instead of a reply. I thought it was a bug, but it’s entirely possible it was my fault.

Manton, the creator of Micro.blog, is going to make some UI changes to make that error less likely. And he has also told me how to check where a post is going to go. Which is that, if it shows devilgate.org at the bottom while I’m typing, then it will be posted here. So I’ll watch out for that in the future.

Mon, 18 Sep 2017 17:12:56 +0000

Listening to Joe Strummer’s ‘Willesden to Cricklewood’ for the first time in a while, and realising that’s not very far. When that album came out we didn’t have digital maps in our pockets.

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 17:43:59 +0000

Rainbow over Dalston tonight. Just visible to the left of the Hackney Peace Mural there.

Tue, 12 Sep 2017 23:23:53 +0000

Well, so much for my hoping. I don’t think ‘iPhone X’ is a great name, especially when they’re pronouncing it ‘ten.’ I can only say ‘ex’ in my head when I read it, and the 10/8 dichotomy is just going to confuse people and make the 8s feel old. But if it wasn’t for my recent forced purchase I’d certainly be wanting one.

Tue, 12 Sep 2017 15:45:38 +0000

I hope the rumours are false and Apple don’t call the new iPhone the ‘iPhone X.’ That’s a terrible name, I think. Whichever way you pronounce ‘X’.

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 10:07:23 +0000

A playlist on Apple Music on the Sonos: “Alternative Hits: 1978.” And man is it good. But as they say, the golden age of music is 14…

Wed, 30 Aug 2017 23:30:48 +0000

Went for a drink & meal with an old uni friend. Talked of family, health, politics, jobs, and Doctor Who. And really, what else is there?

Sun, 27 Aug 2017 11:58:47 +0000

On a long weekend in Cornwall. Drive down on Friday was longest ever, so not looking forward to drive back tomorrow, but it’s been good.

Wed, 23 Aug 2017 20:53:20 +0000

Yesterday’s mysterious post was not meant to be a post at all. Instead it was a reply to a comment on Micro.blog. But something went wrong and I posted it without the reply’s @-name at the start so it appeared as a full-fledged post, and got crossposted to Twitter and Facebook as usual.

I’m going to leave it in place as a learning experience.

Tue, 22 Aug 2017 06:53:22 +0000

Nice. That makes sense.

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 22:46:20 +0000

My site was down for a couple of days. You probably didn’t notice. These things happen when you’re on holiday, it seems. The nice people at Linode were very helpful, though, and it’s all back up now.

Tue, 15 Aug 2017 11:02:26 +0000

The Rolling Donut, Dublin. Highly recommended. Good to remember how good donuts can be if you don’t get misspelled American ones.

Mon, 14 Aug 2017 11:20:09 +0000

A pint of ice-cold Guinness in a pub in Dublin

Ice-cold Guinness. I’m reminded of the late Bob Shaw…

Sun, 13 Aug 2017 05:37:07 +0000

At Holyhead, on the ferry for Dublin. It’s taking a while to get going, though.

Fri, 11 Aug 2017 12:22:47 +0000

Test posting to my site from Quill. I’ve no idea whether this will work.

Mon, 07 Aug 2017 16:54:23 +0000

Further to this morning’s post, it looks like I’ll be in the City for a while, and only going to the client’s site later, or occasionally. Which is good news for my commute.

Mon, 07 Aug 2017 08:03:32 +0000

On my way to first day at the new job. This is at the consultancy’s offices in the City, though, for induction, not at the client’s site.

Sat, 05 Aug 2017 19:58:35 +0000

Just realised that ‘Blue Monday’ gets its drum pattern from ‘Get Off of My Cloud.’

Fri, 04 Aug 2017 22:39:47 +0000

I’m pretty sure that all of these are meant to be autumnal. Yet here it’s early August — high summer — and there they are, growing madly.

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 16:14:12 +0000

First time anyone has asked me for a more detailed CV. But hey, I can write about myself till the cows come home.

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 11:46:14 +0000

Weird. I go to Ted Leo’s Soundcloud page. A track by someone called Lil Purpp starts playing. Nothing to do with Leo or the page I’m on, as far as I can see.

Thu, 27 Jul 2017 10:29:07 +0000

This is what Virgin Trains calls a window seat now.

Fri, 21 Jul 2017 17:58:43 +0000

Monster sky out my window. And time I tried some photos with this new phone.

Thu, 20 Jul 2017 19:44:30 +0000

Wait, Now ATP has gone back to the old outro theme. Was last week’s just a one-off? I’m so confused.

Thu, 20 Jul 2017 17:28:06 +0000

[@colinwalker](https://micro.blog/colinwalker) Did you know that your blog’s search page for the term is the second hit on DuckDuckGo for #indieweb? Quite impressive.

Thu, 20 Jul 2017 17:19:26 +0000

The Microformats 2 WordPress plugin was causing spurious HTML tags to be visible around my name next to these posts. I’ve disabled it for now. But looking at the page to get that link, I’m realising that maybe I don’t actually need it:

For all themes that do not declare support for Microformats 2, this plugin attempts to add Microformats to areas that are accessible through filters and actions.

I think the theme I’m using, Minnow, probably supports microformats already. Though I confess to having only slight understanding of what microformats are for. I added that plugin while moving the site the other day, along with all the #Indieweb plugins.

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 07:45:52 +0000

Testing Micro.blog with the new server setup.

Sun, 16 Jul 2017 16:43:56 +0000

Jodie Whittaker was amazing in Broadchurch. I’m extremely happy to see her as the new Doctor.

Sun, 16 Jul 2017 13:08:44 +0000

“Arguably the greatest player ever to pick up a racket.” There’s no argument, Sue.

Sat, 15 Jul 2017 15:18:19 +0000

I’m shocked, saddened and sickened that Wimbledon can’t spell Garbiñe Muguruza’s name correctly on their scoreboard. It’s not an emoji.

Fri, 14 Jul 2017 11:50:18 +0000

Wow! ATP has a killer new version of its outro theme on episode 230. No mention of it in-show, though, even in the aftershow.

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 11:27:08 +0000

Forgot yesterday: worst thing about Apple earbuds is that the control is on the right-hand wire. Every other pair has it on the left.

Mon, 10 Jul 2017 16:28:01 +0000

Wondering why people recruiting for senior development positions often ask low-level JVM type questions. Doesn’t hurt to know that stuff, but who keeps it at their fingertips?

Mon, 10 Jul 2017 10:14:11 +0000

Subtitles Café on the Balls Pond Road has a sign saying “Best Covfefe in London.”

Wed, 05 Jul 2017 11:00:00 +0000

Trying to use Maven properly to build and release an open-source project. Was it invented just to make things more complex?

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 19:41:46 +0000

In Naples airport waiting to fly back to London. Have charging point, but iPad won’t talk to iPhone for tethering.

Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:05:09 +0000

OM god! Radiohead are doing ‘Creep’. Somehow I thought they didn’t do that anymore. And no bowdlerisation, either. I approve.

Fri, 23 Jun 2017 17:27:42 +0000

I don’t understand: Glastonbury is on this weekend, but Wimbledon hasn’t started yet? Glastonbury’s always in the middle of Wimbledon. The world is turned upside down.

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 09:19:49 +0000

Interesting that this article about Scotland’s Neolithic rock carvings should appear in The Guardian on the Monday after Rona Munro’s great “The Eaters of Light ” episode of Doctor Who.

Sat, 17 Jun 2017 00:26:33 +0000

The Skids in full flow, earlier tonight.

Fri, 16 Jun 2017 21:15:28 +0000

Jesus, but The Skids are good live.

Fri, 16 Jun 2017 20:41:06 +0000

Preparing the stage for The Skids.

Fri, 09 Jun 2017 15:15:55 +0000

DUP leader: “Our United Kingdom — and indeed our very way of life — are under threat from extremists.” Yes, mainly the extreme-Brexit loonies whose government you are going to prop up.

Thu, 08 Jun 2017 09:56:29 +0000

Based on my two-minute walk to the polling station and thirty seconds there, I predict a very high turnout. #ge2017

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 16:36:57 +0000

Pleased to see that Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning, which I’ve spoken of before here appears to have a British publisher at last. Amazon is showing it available from 1st July. I’ve preordered.

Sat, 03 Jun 2017 20:18:56 +0000

Amusing to see that covfefe.com redirects to Teespring.

Sat, 03 Jun 2017 13:18:35 +0000

In Chinatown tonight.

Wed, 31 May 2017 09:08:11 +0000

Disturbing to see a Chinook hovering over the City as I approach Liverpool Street.

Tue, 30 May 2017 19:38:47 +0000

I like the Spark iOS email client, and the new drag & drop between it and the Documents app is great. But it can never be my full-time client until it lets me order the mail properly (oldest to newest, that is).

Sat, 27 May 2017 14:24:05 +0000

I’ve never installed Google Maps on my iPhone before. So how, on first launching it just now (after reading this excellent article) can it be logged in as me?

Sun, 21 May 2017 19:56:15 +0000

At Glasgow Airport, heading home after an excellent weekend seeing family and friends.

Sun, 21 May 2017 11:48:14 +0000

You’re probably wondering what has happened to my daily posts. Good question. I’m in Glasgow this weekend, so that has slowed things down. And also I’m working on a big piece. So big that I may have to split it in two, just to make it digestible.

Thu, 18 May 2017 07:48:31 +0000

Both the BBC and Twitter updating their privacy policies within a couple of days? What can it all mean?

Sun, 14 May 2017 11:11:19 +0000

The USPTO is ridiculous. And the whole idea of software patents is especially ridiculous. So maybe the whole idea of patents is ridiculous and outdated.

Sat, 13 May 2017 10:46:53 +0000

What’s worse: putting ransonware on NHS computers, or underfunding the NHS so it can’t afford to upgrade IT infrastructure?

Fri, 12 May 2017 18:51:54 +0000

Just changed Micro.blog to use Wordpress “Status” posts instead of “Asides”. This has meant close to (but not quite) a reinstallation.

Fri, 12 May 2017 00:21:02 +0000

Brooklyn Nine-Nine was on fire tonight. Still managed to be hilarious while treating a very serious subject with respect.

Wed, 10 May 2017 22:44:25 +0000

No prosecutions to be brought in Tory election misspending case. Coverup by the CPS? Seems unlikely, but these are unlikely times.

Wed, 10 May 2017 14:28:09 +0000

New theme on my site. Independent Publisher wasn’t behaving quite how I wanted, especially with microblog posts. So I’m trying Minnow, with thanks to [@colinwalker](https://micro.blog/colinwalker) for the suggestion.

Tue, 09 May 2017 19:22:17 +0000

Further to my thought the other day about the Clips iPhone app and portrait video: it doesn’t let you shoot in landscape. Or it does, but it doesn’t rotate. So you end up with sideways videos.

Tue, 09 May 2017 07:45:05 +0000

Raspberry jam for breakfast leads to both Prince’s and the Hindu Love Gods’ versions of “Raspberry Beret,” and I marvel again at how cool the Sonos & Apple Music combination is.

Sun, 07 May 2017 21:35:39 +0000

Congratulations to France. Nice to get some good electoral news for a change.

Sat, 06 May 2017 13:21:18 +0000

Of course @bbcanyquestions has the traitor Farage on again. Of course. (Someone who has spent his adult life working against the national interest can rightly be described as a traitor.)

Sat, 06 May 2017 09:37:15 +0000

The Clips app actually records full-frame video, even through it only shows squares. So I now have some portrait videos. Ewww.

Fri, 05 May 2017 09:16:53 +0000

If Squarespace, Casper, & Linode stopped advertising on podcasts, the whole podcast industry would collapse. Parts I listen to, at least.

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 10:38:23 +0000

At the dentist, she & the nurse were talking about marathons. I said maybe they shouldn’t cos of Marathon Man. They had never heard of it.

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 01:06:57 +0000

Perhaps the most annoying feature of Eclipse is that a new workspace always defaults to tabs instead of spaces. Who uses tabs?

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 14:41:56 +0000

This is posted using the new Micro.blog app and service from Manton Reece. The app is in beta, I should note.

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 00:08:42 +0000

Broadchurch, man. Still kicking it out of the park.

Sun, 02 Apr 2017 04:27:21 +0000

The blossoms are out.

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 14:41:26 +0000

I painted a picture of the City. (OK, it’s #Prisma again).

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 23:44:40 +0000

This is what rhe trees in Hackney are looking like this spring.
#prisma with the “Thota Vaikuntam” effect. #thotavaikuntam

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 13:36:35 +0000

No snow after Peterborough. In fact we’ve had some sun since then.

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 11:36:40 +0000

On a train to Edinburgh. Snowing at Peterborough. What will happen next?

Sat, 04 Feb 2017 05:40:26 +0000

New Year lanterns in Chinatown, London.

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 14:30:43 +0000

So good. So fuckin good. #Rezillos

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 13:55:08 +0000

Finally, the Rezillos. “Can’t Stand My Baby” is the opener.

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 12:53:15 +0000

Still not the Rezillos. Everyone’s sharing kit tonight, which is very 77. Spizz Energi onstage.

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 12:08:16 +0000

Not actually the Rezillos, but the Tuts, my new favourite band.

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 12:58:51 +0000

Starry Comandante

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 12:22:35 +0000

Cubana. Service slow but food v nice.

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 14:45:00 +0000

The Captain sings.

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 13:15:29 +0000

The Damned on stage.

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 12:25:47 +0000

More Penetration.

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 12:24:09 +0000

That’s Penetration on stage at Brixton Academy, supporting the Damned.

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 03:56:52 +0000

Harry Potter play today! (Also mixing up the fandoms.)

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 01:50:50 +0000

From the fierce heat of the autumnal South of Spain, back to properly-autumnal London.

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 12:48:38 +0000

A Manhattan in Seville (no 2 in an unplanned series).

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 06:52:28 +0000

Rough time to be Samsung.

Sat, 01 Oct 2016 02:57:48 +0000

They don’t like appearing in photos.

Tue, 19 Jul 2016 15:54:22 +0000

The hottest day of the year, and I end up having an interview. Glad to have it, but gladder to be home and into cooler clothes.

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 12:07:50 +0000

I'm having trouble with WordPress not wanting make a "Link" format post if I have too much other stuff in it.

Thu, 14 Jul 2016 22:15:41 +0000

Blinding Larks in the back room of Biddle Bros last night.

Wed, 29 Jun 2016 01:13:34 +0000

Last day at work. My computer seems to know. It’s turned back to Windows 95.

Sun, 12 Jun 2016 14:18:22 +0000

PJ Harvey at Field Day was SO good. Straight into my top three ever gigs? Oh yes. Most definitely.

Sun, 12 Jun 2016 12:23:11 +0000

Polly Harvey speaks onstage!!! Dedicates song to Seamus Murphy.

Sun, 12 Jun 2016 11:31:51 +0000

Field Day. The stage awaits PJ Harvey.

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 11:45:07 +0000

At the Hammersmith Apollo for Billy Connolly. Been a long time coming.

Fri, 06 Nov 2015 11:02:37 +0000

This is weird. Package from Amazon correctly arrived… with no address on it.

Mon, 24 Aug 2015 09:50:05 +0000

Old picture found of strange creature over London… #stackablesapp

Sat, 25 Jul 2015 12:03:05 +0000

Brooklyn is so hip.

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 16:24:39 +0000

A Manhattan in Manhattan.

Sun, 12 Jul 2015 10:37:55 +0000

Ad-screen BSOD, Westfield.

Fri, 10 Apr 2015 06:56:27 +0000

The main reason I won’t be getting an Apple Watch.

Wed, 11 Mar 2015 16:56:36 +0000

OK, if we’re guessing… What song does this picture represent?

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 09:33:00 +0000

Name the famous book. #VSCOcam

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 13:45:01 +0000

Sons of Bill, Hoxton.

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 11:49:11 +0000

Never really expected to get another new Iain Banks book. But here we are.

Sat, 21 Feb 2015 07:34:04 +0000

At Hackney Downs station. #stackablesapp

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 06:03:14 +0000

Some weirdly faded viaduct. #stackablesapp

Thu, 25 Dec 2014 11:57:13 +0000

Christmas has a slightly musical theme this year.

Sun, 14 Dec 2014 09:58:45 +0000

What’s the collective noun for Santas? #VSCOcam

Sat, 06 Dec 2014 03:53:46 +0000

Queuing out the door at the parcel depot.

Wed, 03 Dec 2014 11:57:52 +0000

#stackablesapp with the “Frozen Souls” formula. It’s amazing what you can do to a photo.

Tue, 02 Dec 2014 16:33:26 +0000

The Millennium Bridge with the Shard in the background. #stackablesapp with the “Fill the Sky” formula.

Fri, 28 Nov 2014 00:50:00 +0000

Clapton Square, again. #stackablesapp with the “Nirvana” formula.

Mon, 17 Nov 2014 10:39:57 +0000

Tree near Strathblane, messed around in #stackablesapp.

Thu, 06 Nov 2014 01:35:29 +0000

More autumn light in Clapton Square of a morning. Looking towards the old Police Station, and messed around in #vscocam.

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 12:20:50 +0000

Autumn green. #vscocam

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 05:04:12 +0000

Just got into a train. There’s a log lying on the floor. No sign of the Lady. The owls are not what they seem.

Tue, 21 Oct 2014 07:25:48 +0000

It’s here…

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 23:35:47 +0000

Autumn flare. Straight out of #vscocam

Fri, 12 Sep 2014 09:50:32 +0000

The Blue Mask.

Wed, 10 Sep 2014 23:33:46 +0000

Autumn already? How did that happen, September? #vscocam

Tue, 09 Sep 2014 01:24:41 +0000

Lights…

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 06:31:26 +0000

Clear view all day then these bampots come along and stand in front of us.

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 06:31:26 +0000

Clear view all day then these bampots come along and stand in front of us.

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 04:13:17 +0000

Waiting for Lé Tour. Doesn’t look like it’s going to be too crowded here.

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 04:13:17 +0000

Waiting for Lé Tour. Doesn’t look like it’s going to be too crowded here.

Fri, 09 May 2014 14:16:04 +0000

Spring blossoms in Clapton Square. #vscocam

Fri, 07 Mar 2014 15:38:04 +0000

Spring morning, low sun & shadows. #vscocam

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 13:10:17 +0000

This beer goes down too fast.

Fri, 28 Feb 2014 09:55:13 +0000

Pipes and gas meters, Hackney. #vscocam

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 01:58:31 +0000

A bit early in the year for these. #vscocam

Sun, 19 Jan 2014 02:41:15 +0000

Me, by @fiona_fudge. :-)

Fri, 10 Jan 2014 13:18:39 +0000

The Christmas cake nears its end…

Thu, 26 Dec 2013 08:22:30 +0000

Eurostar departures at St Pancras.

Tue, 24 Dec 2013 00:26:53 +0000

Gatwick Lines.

Mon, 23 Dec 2013 15:41:13 +0000

Sunset. West Sussex.

Thu, 28 Nov 2013 09:02:17 +0000

Once again I won’t be reaching NaNoWriMo’s 50,000-word mark this year, but I have written over 30,000, which is the most ever. And I finished a novella at the start. So I’m pretty happy.

Fri, 15 Nov 2013 16:14:59 +0000

That’s a lot of leaves. You’d think it was autumn.

Fri, 15 Nov 2013 10:29:19 +0000

Another one from my train journey last weekend, with the iOS7 “Noir” filter applied.

Sun, 10 Nov 2013 09:25:08 +0000

Cooling towers at sunset.

Sat, 09 Nov 2013 12:24:36 +0000

3,446 words today for a NaNoWriMo total so far of 15,724. That also completes a 20,000 word novella called “All Tomorrow’s Troubles”. Going well. Now I can get back to my novel.

Tue, 05 Nov 2013 23:32:03 +0000

This “short story” that I was going to knock out before getting back to my novel is growing into a behemoth. At 12000 words it’s thoroughly a novelette, and heading squarely for novella-land.

Thu, 24 Oct 2013 01:28:43 +0000

Shadows. New carpet on the landing at work, and the morning sun streaming in.

Sun, 30 Jun 2013 15:30:02 +0000

Hard Rock Calling. Bruce in 30.

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 04:49:02 +0000

First time I’ve ever been sad on getting the latest Iain Banks novel.

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 08:50:02 +0000

Twenty years of Meltdown and I’ve never been before. But tonight, Yoko Ono POB.

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 10:47:03 +0000

This one’s in memory of Banksie.

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 12:26:23 +0000

Sunsetting.

Sat, 25 May 2013 06:53:46 +0000

Onions & garlic sizzling.

Thu, 23 May 2013 07:57:40 +0000

Can you tell what it is?

Wed, 22 May 2013 23:45:25 +0000

The trees are looking lush now.

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:20:23 +0000

London in May. Looks like the church is on fire.

Wed, 22 May 2013 02:36:34 +0000

Waiting to give blood. Is this a healthy option?

Mon, 13 May 2013 22:53:41 +0000

Tulips outside my office in Paddington, yesterday.

Sun, 12 May 2013 06:19:13 +0000

Stoke Newington buggy jam. This is how the pubs are these days.

Sat, 11 May 2013 03:13:30 +0000

Hooray! @Savagesband album and EP.

Sat, 11 May 2013 02:54:37 +0000

This should be the Savages album.

Fri, 10 May 2013 01:12:14 +0000

Well-fired pain au chocolat. Still, they charged me less than usual.

Sun, 05 May 2013 10:46:25 +0000

The long hard winter made everything dormant, but now the bluebells are out in our garden.

Sun, 05 May 2013 08:57:06 +0000

Tidying.

Sat, 04 May 2013 09:28:13 +0000

What in all the bells is “Banana Ketchup”???

Fri, 03 May 2013 00:24:13 +0000

Spring springing in Hackney. This seems to happen every year. Eventually. #spring #hackney

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 13:08:55 +0000

Cud at The Garage

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 13:02:47 +0000

Surely Cud approaching…

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 12:17:22 +0000

Echotape supporting Cud at The Garage.

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 12:13:57 +0000

The stage awaits Echotape. At The Garage.

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 11:31:18 +0000

Sheen supporting Cud at The Garage

Fri, 25 May 2012 05:51:40 +0000

Moving desks today

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 23:40:55 +0000

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 15:08:21 +0000

I don’t think they’re being ironic about the Jesus bit either.

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 14:17:10 +0000

The Felice Brothers

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:57:35 +0000

The Felice Brothers at the O2 ABC, Glasgow

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:10:25 +0000

Craig Finn at the O2 ABC in Glasgow. I don’t think this Jesus song is ironic.

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 05:31:00 +0000

Desperate sun-seekers

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 11:06:45 +0000

Eyelash car

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 05:41:13 +0000

In an astounding example of metaness, this Instagram pic should generate a blog post, using ifttt.com

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:54:19 +0000

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:32:38 +0000

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 05:31:52 +0000

Flying Kids

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 03:37:50 +0000

Tree & Sky

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 12:50:13 +0000

Tortilla Mask

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 00:24:39 +0000

Spring springing in Clapton Square

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:25:32 +0000

Veela in the Bey Blade arena

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:02:02 +0000

Autumn sky

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 01:21:56 +0000

Autumn in Clapton Square

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:39:50 +0000

It is _immensely_ annoying that you can't just download and install Firefox 3 on Linux (at least the Xandros distro that comes with the Eee PC) without having to install something called Gtk+ 2.10. Not least because you can't just `apt-get install` the latter: you _have_ to build it from source, and handle countless dependencies. Really, I thought we were supposed to have got past all that shit.

This page details the steps.

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 13:57:00 +0000

What a great feeling it was to hear the Defence Procurement Minister come on to the Today program to answer for buying a bunch of Chinook helicopters without the software that will allow them to fly in anything but fine weather; and when asked how such a contract could have been signed, answer: “It was signed in 1995, before we came to power.”

God, I love politics. Alas, we won’t get to see a Tory minister squirm over this.

True, perhaps they should have realised it when they did come to power, but a government must be party to a lot of contracts; presumably a new minister can’t go over every single one. In fact, whoever is in power, isn’t it the relevant Civil Service people who are at fault in case like this? Including, no doubt, somebody actually in the RAF.

I wonder, though, why no-one seems to be having a go at the manufacturers, Boeing, for the madnness of ever making them (or at least, selling them) in that condition.