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.

🎦 Obviously I thought Conclave (2024) was going to be about something being the opposite of convex. (And, if you think about it, it is.) It was cool to see so many of those fish-faced Sitcar Voyager mini coaches (the cardinals’ shuttle buses).

Twice back and forth to glittering London for the last time this year, surely.

• Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf. The werewolf costume is quite special. Sat adjacent to none other than Chris Morris, who arrived wearing a yellow bicycling jacket similar to the one I use, which we could have bonded over and become friends.

• Remi Wolf, a fine young woman making really exciting pop music.

That’s an anomalous number of things with wolf/wulf in their name. The contrast between Lee’s uncomfortably tight jeans (a man who’s mocked the Top Gear audience’s “supermarket denim” before) and the baggy pants of Wolf and her band was, somehow, notable.

The second train home was delayed by signalling problems, and then further delayed by waiting for some police to arrive (to discipline a naughty passenger, or perhaps arrest a flange or bogey or other bit of the train). So £2.24 of sweet Delay Repay money is mine, should I choose to claim it.

It’s the worst time of the year, but less crummy than this time last year maybe, I can’t really remember.

I keep doing my walking, cycling, errands, etc. in the dark evenings, which is daft – what’s stopping me doing what I want in the daylight, and doing all of my important work after sunset? But I suppose doing it this way round saves a bit of the cost of electric lighting.

Every year I think of doing a socially medium advent calendar of photos of fly-tipped festive disposable coffee cups, but I never do.

Those Japanese nail clippers are good. Maybe it’s just the dazzle of their sharp newness, who knows how quickly they’ll grow blunt and horrible … but let’s be positive!

Hard to believe that, in all my years of coming across things, I’d not come across the principle of least astonishment before.

This week I was mostly cold and doing front-end web development, swimming in a knot of complexity of my own making.

The National Express coach slogan “if you know, you go” is sound advice: go (to the loo) beforehand so you don’t have to use the centre sunken toilet cubicle on the coach. The Stagecoach bus slogan “we’ve got you” has sinister undertones and/or overtones: I’m sure it’s supposed to connote cosy “we’ve got your back” vibes, I think there’s even an advert with the Sonny & Cher song in it, but it reads a bit “gotcha”, you know, no one likes “getting got”.

On my occasional visits to the Merseyside region, I’ve had trouble with the Stagecoach ticket machines declining various payment cards – it’s frustrating, why won’t they take my money? On the first occasion the driver mumbled something something “get off”, not sure if it was “you’ll have to” or “try again when you” but I did neither; subsequently I used a different card until that stopped working. But it’s good to know I’m not alone – see this Railforums thread which bizarrely quickly descends into someone accusing someone of deliberate fraud. I feel like there might be a bug that’s causing false positives, wonder if they’re using a Bloom filter or something.

To leafy London again. What a lot of people ganning about with umbrellas there were, they’ll have someone’s eye out if they’re not careful. Fell asleep on the train home and said “crikey” upon being politely awoken.

Sometimes, when one goes to some bustling place on one’s own, there’s a mishearing and before one knows it one’s accidentally bought two pints of refreshing local cider, and one wouldn’t want to make a fuss and back out of the transaction. And although one is not enough, two is one too many.

Confidence Man … their star has risen and they’re playing bigger rooms than before. A nice time but I wish I’d arrived earlier and avoided the cider misunderstanding and stuff.

Robert Popper’s promotion of his new book led me to have a nice listen to The Timewaster Diaries (since the earlier Letters wasn’t in the catalogue of my chosen audiobook provider). The diaries are sweet and Paul Whitehouse does a good job of reading them aloud. It’s an unrelated coincidence that, this week more than ever, the only things I can think of to write about here feel particularly boring and pointless.

Started paying for a bank account, because of the “free” “perks” – a monthly cinema ticket, a Railcard, an interest rate, and go on then a weekly Greggs item from a limited selection. The other thing is they send you a subtly fancier-looking new debit card with a new number, a mild inconvenience I’d’ve preferred not to endure, but I could have simply not activated the new card and kept using the old one.

Perhaps I will walk to a different Greggs each week, yes, that would be a nice little project to add some meaning to my humdrum life.

Previously:

Had tofu two nights on the trot. Not quite explicably this led me to seek out the Brass Eye–esque title sequence of the Piers Morgan programme, as I recall phrases like “woke insanity” appear in large geometric sans serif lit up by lasers, but pfft/I couldn’t find it.

Reader, I found the title sequence, with its giant brain spinning around a globe among laser beams, and can recommend Gifski as a most excellent app for making animated short GIFs from longer videos. Yes I know that GIF is an imperfect format. Here are “the world’s gone nuts”, “woke insanity” (perhaps that could do with being shorter), etc., to use as one sees fit. But it’s hard to be unserious/ironic on the internet without being mistaken for being serious/unironic.

For weeks/months, I’ve been being haunted/plagued by a sound. A muffled bleep, but not a swearing-on-TV kind of bleep or a voicemail “speak after the beep” beep, more like a bleep test one. (You know bleep tests, in which you run increasing-in-speed lengths of a sports hall, in time with a series of bleeps, to test your cardiovascular fitness?) Actually not really a bleep at all, maybe a cross between a chime and chirrup?

Clearly, the sound was coming from an electronic device, but which one, and where? I began to think it was coming from next door, until I heard the sound in a hotel room miles from home, which narrowed it down to the devices I had with me, and eventually to the AirPods (Pro).

There are YouTube videos with titles like “every AirPods sound effect”, but they’re lying. But eventually I found a Reddit post by someone in the same situation, with a video of their AirPods case making, yes, the same sound. It’s so heartening to read all the comments there, and this MacRumors forum thread, to know I’m not alone, but it’s troubling that no one’s sure what the sound means apart from some people who reckon it’s for calibrating some microphone or other.

:( (It’s not the main thing, but I lost £9.86 – proof, if proof be need be, that gambling is for mugs. No one ever went bankrupt running a casino!)

Ew, twice to London’s glittering West End. The second time to take in the Dr. Strangelove play in which Steve Coogan plays four of Peter Sellers’s three roles from the film … I didn’t mind it.