I’ve been suffering from my shoelaces coming undone recently – there’s a particular pair of shoes with particularly slippery laces. In a recent podcast episode, John Robins mentioned the Ian Knot, which has been on my radar since 2005 and I’ve been using since 2012, but it made me think I should check that my knotting technique hadn’t gotten sloppy. It hadn’t, but I’d been missing out on the extra security of the Double Ian Knot (which is actually what JR mentioned) – it’s just like the single Ian Knot but with an extra step at the end – and since adding the extra step at the end I haven’t had my laces come untied once.

Bought a showerhead from Lidl just over a year ago – incredibly, I didn’t write about it here at the time. (I have some complaints about the Lidl Plus app – ambushing me with an updated privacy policy when I’m in a checkout queue, no thank you – but I’m jolly impressed by the receipt history search feature, which I used just now to check when I bought the showerhead.) This week, I noticed that showerheads are back in season, and also the button on the year-old showerhead – you know, for toggling between the three spray modes – has stopped working. Coincidence?

I could return the showerhead for replacement under the three year warranty – of course I’ve kept the warranty information – but what am I supposed to do while waiting for my claim to be processed, have baths?

Sunday. Had lunch and a small seaside walk with some cherished loved ones, taking in various liquids – cider, soup, Earl Grey (the three main liquids) – and then it was time to go home. I could have caught a train and enjoyed several opportunities for peeing – while waiting for the train, on the train, etc. – but my espousal of the bustimes.org brand values is so strong that I chose to spend 90 minutes on a bus, in growing discomfort, cursing every time an inconsiderate passenger delayed progress by getting on or off the bus. But the great relief I felt at eventually relieving myself, in better facilities than a train toilet, almost made the suffering worthwhile.

Woke up silently humming a tune, but before I could put words to it it was forgotten like all the fantastic ideas I’ve had while on the threshold of falling asleep.

🎦 Nosferatu (2024). I’ll level with you, I did some microsleeps, which is not to say the film was soothing and viscera-free, it had more to do with the beer and fish I’d enjoyed earlier – the problem with the Belgians is they don’t have a word for “keep it session”. Also I was distracted by trying to remember Willem Dafoe’s name.

Took in Celya AB’s show at the regional arts centre. She mentioned each joke costing 17p, assuming a ticket price of ~£17, but somehow I’d only paid £14 which is even better value.

Rewatching the first serie of Severance before I catch up with the second, and I’m glad I decided to because it’s remarkable how much I don’t remember, it’s like it was a different version of me watching it.

(Yes, I keep trying to make the singular “serie” happen, because “season” feels like a beneath-me Americanism. Likewise, it feels wrong for an Englishman to describe anything as “[the] OG”, like someone from Tacolneston saying “y’all”.)

Shaved my face for the first time this year, and I’m not sure about the slug-like expanse that it’s uncovered, hmm.

At the start of the year, I enquired about renting a bit of an office, you know the co-working hot-desking they have these days. It wasn’t at all obvious from the poster I’d seen outside a grand building that a company is renovating, nor from the website I gave my contact details to, but it quickly turned out to be a front for the scumbags Regus, which soured me on the idea. (I’m sure they’re no worse than any other commercial landlord, and their staff are upstanding fellows – some of you contrarian fucks might even argue that their destroying a podcast production company was actually a net positive – but I’ll hold a grudge if I want to.)

Still, I meekly agreed to look around (a different building to the one I was really interested in), but due to agonies I didn’t attend, then they phoned some sixty times (each time from a different number) over several weeks until I deigned to answer, what’s wrong with me.

My railcard auto-renewed and I didn’t want it to. It’s my own silly fault for not carefully reading the emails that were sent to warn me, but I’d counter that it’s their fault for entitling them “Your railcard is about to expire” and not “Your railcard is about to auto-renew”. I drafted a reply to that effect, but haven’t sent it for fear of coming across a bit Karen, you know, insufficiently grateful that at least I’ve been spared the unpleasant surprise of finding it’s expired.

Since seeing an ex-prisoner on TikTok demonstrate how to fold an opened bag of crisps (potato chips) to keep them fresh without an elastic band or clip, I’ve bought bags of crisps for the sole purpose of practising the technique (and eating them, of course). It’s satisfying, and has made me less apprehensive about being imprisoned for a crime I didn’t commit.

🎦 The Brutalist.

With renewed enthusiasm I set about making the place less of a hovel and jettisoning rubbish that no longer sparks joy. That included a sock cull – I’ve yet to find the perfect sock; even the ones with the most going for them, like they’re wonderfully soft and the right size and have a jazzy design, have a flaw like they wear out quickly. I have to remind myself that there are people (like Steve Allen) who famously wear a new pair of socks every day, and I’ll never be as wasteful as they so I shouldn’t feel so guilty about saying goodbye to a sock.

Also I dismantled a broken hard drive, curious to see what lay within, and now to decide whether to repurpose the two shiny “platters” as too-small coasters, tree decorations or handsome jewellery.

Some work, obv. Since reading all of Alex Russell’s posts about how React is bad I’ve been trying to use Preact in its stead – shame-driven development – but ended up going round in circles in technical cul-de-sacs, as if it really is unnecessarily complex. And I was perversely reluctant to use my tried-and-trusted method of working on some different stuff for a bit, of enjoying solving some easier problems, but at last I did and I’ve made some progress in understanding some of the errors that were sending me around the cul-de-sac. So that’s good.

I tried using much less dishwasher powder, and altered the how-much-salt-to-use setting to match the local water hardness (very hard … as in the water here is very minerally, according to the water company’s interactive map, and altering the setting was difficult) and the results were promising.

🎦 A Complete Unknown. Timmy’s Bobbles is extraordinary.

(A few weeks ago) I saw two separate instances, in different cities, of men, in too much of a hurry to wait at a pedestrian crossing, shouting “fuck you” at the cars/vans that came along as they walked across the road. A large part of me thinks “dudes rock”, and my heart swells with patriotic pride that “jaywalking” isn’t a crime here … but also, it’s not great to be so angry.

More days of no work (at least, no git commits), but then I rode my bicycle and felt like doing some work afterwards, like it was a Pavlovian response from when I had a trad job I cycle-commuted to. (But if that was the case, wouldn’t I feel a bit of dread and boredom too!?)

My early experiments with dishwasher powder, although I’ve not run out of tablets yet, have been disappointing: some kind of dusty residue left on the dishes etc. Clearly I need to experiment with settings and adjusting the amount of salt and/or rinse aid dispensed, but is experimenting with settings really how I saw myself spending 2025?

📺 You know in the This Is My round of Would I Lie to You?, wouldn’t it be good if, just once, all three panellists’ funny anecdotes connecting them to the mystery guest were true. (I’d settle for two.)

🎦 Better Man. I’d heard that it sees Robbie Williams portrayed by a computer-animated monkey, but it’s actually a chimpanzee. I enjoyed despite not being an enjoyer of musicals.

AirPods bleep follow-up: Apple has acknowledged the “quiet chime”. I briefly wondered whether disabling some nannying hearing protection feature or other would stop them making that sound, but a) it’s not a thing, b) I want my hearing protected thank you, and c) if the sound went away now I’d feel a sense of loss, like an egg without salt.

It still hasn’t snowed here, but the frost does just as good a job of making the landscape look pretty and the ground so satisfyingly crunchy.

The temperature. In theory, I can programme a heating schedule for each heating zone (room), for each half-hour of each day of the week. In practice, that feature of the 4 zone wall mounted pilot wire controller doesn’t work – I think I damaged the delicate electronics last year – and even when it did work I was too thick to programme it, so I manually micromanage the heaters instead. I’m just grateful to be warm, and the display of the controller still serves as a handy digital clock.

And so we say goodbye to 2024. It wasn’t everything I hoped it would be, but I have much to be thankful for, so.

In 2025, I resolve to use dishwasher powder instead of tablets (after I’ve finished this bag of tablets). The advantages of powder are that you can control the dose, and you can even put a bit in the special pre-wash compartment according to needs; the disadvantages are that powder is harder to find in shops (but apparently the Essential Waitrose range has some). (Yes I’ve seen the Technology Connections video.)

Had a charming time in windy Edinburgh, in a draughty flat with black almost-everything, black cutlery, black light-switches, gold taps. Among other things we played Catan (sometimes known as Settlers thereof) which was in fact fun for all of the family.

Back by train in first class due to factors. The extra space and table were useful for doing work and stuff but, woe unto me, being plied with free food and drink started to get almost tiresome. I made the schoolboy error of brimming my heavy bottomed glass with locally sourced ale, which predictably spilt everywhere. (This is dangerously close to a particular cringey Musk tweet, but it is nice having proper cutlery and glassware at 125 mph.)

There are children’s books called both Who’s in the Loo? (witty rhymes, charming illustrations, award winning) and Who’s on the Loo? (flaps), and I’m not saying one is a cynical rip-off of the other, they can coexist peacefully.

Merry whatnot and all that. I’m proud to say I’ve done no work all week, at least written no code (apart from on a train, which doesn’t count). So I hope that puts to bed any suggestion that I “have a workahol problem” or “am like a chocaholic but for work”.

I didn’t bring some cheese on a train because I was worried about it getting warm and/or smelling. In fact the train was refreshingly cold, but never mind, there was enough cheese that I didn’t need to bring any.

To Liverpool, where we did much celebrating and walking and I got some Scouse pub-floor-dirt on my coat, and then to Edinburgh where there’s a good chance of some rain to wash the dirt off.

Mince pies: this year I under-filled them, which solved the problem of the mincemeat overflowing and making a sticky mess, but at what cost? They’d have been tastier with more filling. And foolishly I left the pastry out of the fridge for a bit, in an unseasonably warm kitchen, supposedly to make it easier to manipulate, but which of course adversely affected its quality.

Needless to say, Wallace and Gromit’s latest adventure was a shimmering delight. Got some M3GAN vibes from it.

Been playing a bit of internet Scrabble. It turns out (and shouldn’t be a surprise) that the strangers one plays against tend to be annoyingly good at playing Scrabble. Sometimes I paranoidly half-think they’re trying to tell me something with their word choices – FOOL, DITHERS – but not really. The games (on playscrabble.com) are limited to 15 minutes per player, so one (slightly unsatisfying) way of winning is to use as few tiles as possible until one’s opponent runs out of time.

Christmas approaches. I made two long-winded three-legged bus journeys to inspect some knitwear and buy some posh biscuits – it could’ve been one journey if only I hadn’t misread a timetable and thought I didn’t have enough time to buy biscuits the first time.

It’s the worst time of the year for the accuracy of bus timetable open data, and I don’t like it. (Although, statistically, I reckon a high proportion of the services running on Christmas Day will have correct data.) Every year I think I ought to make some tools for applying corrections, but then it gets forgotten among all the figgy pudding.

(Do you think Google fellows lie awake at night worring about the accuracy of Google Maps?) I recieved an email with the subject “critical errors”, and actually couldn’t bear to look at it for a bit … what a relief it was then to find that it was just some spam from an SEO scammer and not actually something I’d done wrong.

This week has felt unusually long – great, good value! – and I don’t write these notes over the course of the week like some kind of swot, so, more than ever, I can’t remember much from the start of the week.

Today: did some laundry and I think I forgot to put any detergent in the washing machine – I think, I don’t remember, but then it’s not the sort of thing one remembers. Here’s a funny story: a while ago I thought “these new dishwasher tablets aren’t very good”, then the penny dropped and I went from thinking that to being impressed by how well everything had been cleaned with just water. What a funny story.

Apparently clothes retain a bit of residual residue from previous washes, so forgetting to add detergent may actually be OK once in a while; that doesn’t apply to plates and forks etc.

Work: I’m stuck, blocked, haven’t achieved almost anything. And that’s OK for now – I’m glad to have some more healthy blank squares in my contributions graph – but also dispiriting and unsustainable.

Walked a long way, to a small nature reserve and then a bit further, while listening to a playlist of everything I’ve Shazamed in the past year or so. Of course the most notable nature I saw was just a stone’s throw from the front door (a cormorant).

🎦 Heretic (2024). Hugh Grant plays a sort of more-of-a-comment-than-a-question bore. Nobody says the name of the film at any point.