Oops, it was a fake spring wasn’t it.

I’m no chicken – I do the SPF and the DKIM, and now the DMARC – but it seems that some of the emails I send get marked as spam or “junk”, particularly by Microsoft products. This could explain some things, and maybe I haven’t unintentionally offended various people into ignoring me after all. But the possibility that (because they don’t check their spam folders for false positives) they think I’ve rudely broken off contact with them feels actually worse.

In the course of investigating, I logged into my extant Hotmail/Outlook account and caught up with all the misdirected emails intended for other people who have the same surname and initial as me – John, Jason, Jennifer, Jeanette. They seem like cool people with more interesting lives than mine. What if they’ve been getting emails intended for me?

Snagged a buttock on the sharp corner of a drawer, days after I’d similarly injured a big toe. As an increasingly fleshy population living in cramped conditions, more of our furniture ought to have rounded corners.

A man repaired the leak (see last week) by tightening two bolts, which I could have done. Ah, but the man knew which two bolts to tighten. But so would have I. (But the man also serviced the hot water tank, to be fair.)

Spring! The heating’s off and the crocuses are out.

Whatever mistakes were in last week’s dispatch were a final straw that reminded me I’d read something about getting the computer to help with proofreading – “my PhD advisor rewrote himself in bash”. Then I set up pre-commit with proselint, after consulting Boost Your Django DX for help with remembering how to use pre-commit (even though there’s no Django involved here).

Noticed some little puddles of water indoors, and was strangely unconcerned – passed it off as ghosts or a miracle or something. Then it became clear that the hot water cylinder was leaking when it heated up. This clarity came as a relief, because my other theory was that waste water from the shower – sometimes including pee – was somehow defying gravity and coming up through the tiled floor, which is a bit like the olden-times scientists who theorised that maggots etc. could “spontaneously generate” inside rotting carcasses etc.

Landlord suggested using a tray to catch drips, which I found patronising and stupid cos the actual base of the tank seemed to be leaking and there’s no space between it and the floor.¹ But I could Wim Hof it and keep the immersion heater switched off, enjoying progressively colder showers as the hot water ran out, or I could use newspapers (the Daily Star and the New York Times International Edition) to absorb the leak. I recall that someone wise recommended keeping sanitary products around for just such an eventuality, but the relative advantage of newspapers is they’re exempt from VAT these days they’re exempt from VAT just like newspapers.

Had to phone HMRC. Why did no one tell me the hold music was such a bop? If I’d known, I wouldn’t have been so reluctant to call before; and now that I do, I’m almost looking forward to the next time. (It’s still admin and annoying, but it’s right that this stuff is complex and secure because otherwise a criminal might hack in and pay my taxes for me.)

To London town to take in a live RHLSTP.

To the larger local venue to see the Selecter and Steel Pulse; I was more excited about a but b turned out to be marvellous.

What a lot of important work I did this week. Realigned the navigation on this website – I sometimes forget that flexbox is so damn nifty and is a thing you can just use these days – I liked having the “archive” and “search” links deliberately hard-to-find, due to embarrassment at what lay beyond, but then sometimes I wanted to find something from my past and it was annoying.

Looking at the App Store screenshots for Hyperspace reminded me that one can set a custom icon for a Macintosh’s internal storage device, and indeed any file or folder. So I whimsically applied a picture of Lee Mack – you know, because it’s a Mac – then immediately regretted it and couldn’t undo. (Eventually managed to replace the grinning funnyman with the floppy disk icon, phew.)

My most contentious opinion is that plastic recycling isn’t real and is a displacement activity for tackling climate change. Yes I’m fastidious about recycling metal and glass, and even plastic bottles etc., but not plastic that’s dirty or the “recycle with bags at larger supermarket” soft kind – better stashing it safely in landfill, surely, than it mouldering in a flammable warehouse or falling off a boat into the sea. But something’s changed, for some reason I’ve become more optimistic, I’ve gathered some bags and film lids and by Jingo I’m going to recycle them at larger supermarket.

A while ago, they stopped having proper lids on the 450–500g pots of yoghurt. You could send off for a reusable lid in the post, but I missed the deadline. This week, I found that the lid from a small tub of trout pâté fits perfectly on a 450g yoghurt tub, what a game-changer. Does it make the yoghurt taste of trout? No of course not.

Cooking highlights: leeks vinaigrette (leeks were a bit gritty), two big sandwiches.

I heard a beep. A while later, another, then one every five minutes, and it drove me restless. Beeps aren’t distinctive, especially when a lot of devices probably all use the same off-the-shelf piezoelectric beepers – this beep reminded me of the robot vacuum cleaner, but unplugging that didn’t stop the beeping. I accused all sorts of things – the smoke alarm, my houseguests’ Bluetooth headphones, etc.

Eventually, after a lot of beeps, I realised that it was the carbon dioxide sensor – I can’t find the blog post that convinced me to buy one back in 2022. Incredibly, I’m such a sad little hermit that I’ve never before had enough people exhaling in my home to raise the CO₂ level above 1400ppm. (By the by, I wonder if any/how many orgies have been ruined by carbon dioxide sensors.)

In my defence, the app refers to a “buzzer”, which is misleading – a buzz is different to a beep. And hermitude isn’t the full story – in warmer weather I keep the place better-ventilated. And perhaps I didn’t always have the “beep every 5 minutes” setting switched on.

Some things I’ve done on the computer recently:

• Applied this desktop wallpaper, with the Reduce Transparency setting to stop the menu bar being all yellow.

• Started using Ghostty for my terminal needs. The only snag has been finding myself instinctively ⌘ + F-ing, which doesn’t work.

• Tidied my RSS feed subscriptions, which is how I learnt why one of the blogs I subscribed to had posted nothing new recently (prison for strangling his wife).

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.