I’ve become someone who brushes his teeth before breakfast, not after. Doesn’t it make the coffee taste minty? No it doesn’t, grow up.

In the Sainsbury’s loos, a man dressed like a police officer was using the hand dryer, standing in the way of a washbasin, so I had to use the other, lower washbasin whose lowness contributed to me splashing water on my (fairly light-coloured) trousers.

The Apple event, the coverage thereof and especially people’s toots about it, are a bit like when Alan Sugar tweets the Tottenham score. Anyway after all that I bought some Envy apples; I wanted to try some RedPop but I could find none.

John Gruber, who I increasingly worry has been kicked in the head by a horse, has been making some disparaging noises about the European Union, to which I counter: here in Europe we can still get an Apple Watch with a functioning blood oxygen sensor, and an iPhone with a physical SIM slot. (And I was going to say gambling apps in the App Store but not sure how good and/or special that is.)

Due to an oversight, and the visual similarity between the numbers 3 and 8, the URL slugs for weeks 284–286 here were numbered 234–236, and it’s too late now. But in several weeks’ time they’ll have dropped off the RSS feed and maybe I can fix them then.

On the train back from my holiday I overheard some Americans telling an anecdote. The setting was some kind of university canteen/dining hall, and 40 people went to queue at the soup station, so they decided to start with dessert and work backwards, what a funny story.

In the clearance section of John Lewis they’re selling those phallic Alessi beechwood salt/pepper/spice grinders for a lot less than they’re advertised anywhere else, so maybe there’s an arbitrage opportunity there for someone.

As a result of the Transport for London cyberattack their buses have vanished from the map, which was my leading source of emails this week. It’s not a big deal because the bus arrivals feed still works, and I’m surprised anyone uses bustimes.org in London instead of the several better London-focused apps, but each to their own.

Also I noticed that the Travel Norfolk website has the cheek to scrape bustimes.org for its “find my bus”/“show live buses on map” feature. That’s … interesting, and I guess I’m more flattered than I am irked.

Thought I should finally find out what “Hawk Tuah”, the “Hawk Tuah Girl”, is all about, because remaining ignorant would make me no better than Andrew Neil not knowing what the Global South is. And well, is that it?

Finally I deleted the Twitter app off of my phone, but I still look at it on other devices and it’s actually not a cesspit if you’re following the right people, and my experience of the newer, worthier microblogging platforms is still one of witless bores and shit puns (because I’m not following the right people, I know).

This week I have been mostly on my holidays. I’ve got sand in my socks.

The website got knocked for six by some sudden changes to upstream data things – not great timing on the face of it, but actually my relaxed holiday demeanour helped. (Reading between the lines, they’ve replaced a component of a thing, which to their credit has made the big map of live bus locations update quicker and has fixed at least one long-standing little bug – it’s just a shame about the new problems.)

The Oasis pre-sale ballot form rejected my usual email address, accused it of being invalid, because the local part (before the @) is one character long. Never mind, that someone hasn’t read RFC 5322 isn’t my only reason for not pursuing it any further, and such is the folly of having a show-offy unusual email address.

(It’s not really a problem, because I can make up a longer email address because I have catch-all wildcards set up. That’s cool apart from the problem of misremembering which email address I’ve told whom, and on balance the extra spam and mis-addressed emails are more trouble than than they are interesting. I remember Mr cardigan.com getting messages intended for, I guess, the Cardigan Mountain School for arrogant young men that owns cardigan.org … now I’ve wasted some time on the Wayback Machine failing to find the blog post about that, but I enjoyed this on the way.) (I regret the .in domain too, having no connection to India and it’s tricky to say out loud.)

I can still proudly say I’ve never used Airbnb, due to rigid dogma, as long as we don’t count the times I’ve let someone else book and BACS’d them my share of the cost, like Richard Stallman having an assistant use nonfree software on his behalf. (That may be a misremembering of how Stallman operates, but I’m making fun of me not him.)

🎮 Had a nice time playing Thank Goodness You’re Here. It’s lewd, and at one point it’s a bit gross and nightmarish, but I had no actual nightmares.

Defrosted the freezer, and it’s left a thin, smooth layer of ice so the drawers slide in and out wonderfully like a toboggan on the Cresta Run.

Some work. I have a dark mode again – I sort of soft-launched it a while ago, and took some time to improve it, before finally foisting it on the prefers-color-scheme: dark crowd this week, and there was less opprobrium than last time, in fact there was no opprobrium.

Went to grin and wave at the east coast truckers’ convoy, which was more fun than staying indoors wondering what all the noise’s about – actually I couldn’t be arsed to wave very much, which suggests I’d be bad at being royal or a pope. Inevitably, seeing all the shiny trucks, looking a bit undignified as they do without a trailer attached, left me yearning to play Euro Truck Simulator 2 again.

📺 The third serie of Industry (will probably be on the BBC in a month or so, but until then the pirates have it in HEVC format). There’s a character named Muck which I thought was yet more inaccurate subtitling (closed captioning), but no, it (Sir Henry Muck)’s his actual name and if you think about it is the sort of name a chap might have.

In a 2002 episode of Top Gear, J Clarkson says of the Renault Vel Satis, “it’s like driving along in Arthur Negus.” (That must have been a dated reference at the time, but nowadays it’s easier than ever to educate oneself and learn that Negus was an antiques expert on television between the late 60s and early 80s.)

Late on Friday afternoon, hopped on a bus to Southwold, where you couldn’t move for badly parked Volvos, billowy stripy trousers and pastel colours. Took in the fresh sea air, had an unevenly filled vegetable samosa, stopped in Lowestoft on the way back for some horrible ale. Years ago, I remember hearing a fellow on about Southwold, it’s so refined he said … I don’t know why that’s so memorable.

I’m not familiar with the character, it’s not part of my culture, but the Snoopy Apple Watch face is a masterpiece, the best thing Apple has done in recent memory. Learning that the cartoon dog flies the same kind of aeroplane as the fictional pilot Biggles dredged up a memory of hearing an outlandish drama on Radio 4 Extra in which Biggles possibly went to Mars or the Moon and/or battled some Martians, but I can find no record of such a thing, strange.

The robot vacuum cleaner’s rechargeable battery was knackered, so I thought about getting a normal old-fashioned hoover or something of that nature, but nah I just got a new battery. I had to watch two YouTube videos, and crucially read a comment recommending the use of pliers, to complete the replacement.

On that side of things, the shouty YouTube product tester “Project Farm” is indeed breathless magic. Of course the videos are of limited usefulness, not just because so many products are specific to America – e.g. assessing coffee machines on the basis of how many gallons of coffee they hold is crazy, but I suppose goes some way to explaining the man’s energetic delivery.

A pile of books toppled over last week, which felt like a wake-up call to sell some personal belongings. Conveniently, a useful Pyrex beaker I bought came swaddled in several metres of bubble wrap – I have some thoughts about online sellers over-packaging things, and wish someone would scientifically investigate exactly how much of various materials is really necessary to protect various goods.

The bubble wrap windfall came after I’d already posted a vintage Nexus 10 tablet (my da’s), clantily scad in a thin wisp of bubble wrap. Still working after 12 years, but the screen had a pissy tinge and the plastic case had deteriorated to become permanently sticky, so I didn’t get any money for it in the end, but it’s saved me a trip to the recycling centre.

Cut my finger, an important typing finger, while slicing bread, so it’s true that a low-carb/gluten-free diet is healthier. Those boxes of plasters (adhesive bandages or “band aids” in some cultures) contain too many big ones and not enough small ones … I could cut some down to size, but that would risk another injury.

Greengages are in season – truly the thinking man’s plum. (Found some in a dark recess of the Tesco fruit aisle but other greengrocers are available.)

Gordon Bennett look at the size of that stick

It feels like the whole of Essex (Joey, David) has been in touch to say they can’t track First Essex buses on my website, only on the First Bus app, and to ask tricky philosophical questions like is there a reason and is it permanent. Of course it’s gratifying that they prefer my thing to the official one, and I’m relieved that I don’t sell an app for which they could demand refunds.

(There’s an indie app that has cheekily reverse-engineered various bus operators’ apps rather than using open data, so what’s preventing me doing the same? The threat of First’s lawyers’ flat-nosed geezers?)

By the way, this is a weird bit of the First Bus website’s terms of use (which also prohibit linking to them):

You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our website.

So you’re telling me I must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action? Like I should ask a dentist before waiting for a bus on the basis of the timetable? What else could it mean? And in fact the terms of use are part of the content on their website, so I must obtain advice before obtaining advice.

This week I mostly watched Veep for the first time, a small delight.

Someone has written “Nigel Farage is a horrible dickhead” on a litter/recycling bin. It’s a noble sentiment, if not as nice a turn of phrase as “Gary Sambrook eats big dinners”. Actually, the other words on the bin make it “plastic Nigel bottles…” and I feel the writer could have tried harder to incorporate them into the message, “litter” is just a few dabs of paint away from “Hitler” etc.

Another week older and I’ve learnt nothing apart from the pronunciations of “Blennerhasset” and “Torpenhow” which have to be some kind of prank.

The global fuckdown last week led me to the Security Now podcast. (I don’t know if that’s a play on “serenity now”.) (It’s a shame that, since I last heard anything from the TWiT.tv empire it’s part of, they’ve stopped trying to call them “netcasts”.) Now I’m hooked – I’m soothed by the sonorous voice of the guy and the Kermit-ish tones of the security expert.

Listening has made me reflect on my own disaster recovery strategies, which it might be unwise to admit don’t exist. (This sort of thing is a reason why I’ve shied away from offering services in exchange from money – a free-at-the-point-of-delivery ad-supported website feels less stressful if it breaks.) And I’ve written down “robot jobsworth”, which is my name for a thing to stop me impatiently deploying changes without testing them first.

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. Also I found myself trying to use Google Lens to look up the comfy chairs some nutjobs were sitting on in a video, until I stopped myself – leave it, it’s not worth it, the internet is teeming with more ideologically sound ways to find design-forward furniture, and I’m not even planning to buy any.

Kid Creole and the Coconuts (a), the London Palladium. “This one goes out to all the illegitimate children…”

Been watching grainy uploads of Only Connect on YouTube. I can’t get on board with the Egyptian hieroglyph names – it’s Sammy Snake, not “the horned viper please”, thank you – but never mind. The one where the balding men think the surnames of the members of One Direction might be playwrights’ or golfers’ is great television.

I guess it’s fine that we call things highbrow and lowbrow even though those words come from phrenology, but it can come in useful to win an argument by accusing someone of being a caliper-wielding racist if, say, they snobbily or reverse-snobbily disparage something you like.

The CrowdStrike incident eh? It knocked adrift a couple of the APIs I use – the Transport for Ireland one and a secret one – for between a bit and a while. Here, the council’s “real time” bus time display screens appear to be affected still, but that feels so common that nobody’s noticed and it could be an unrelated coincidence. Someone should do a freedom of information request about it.

Last week’s “that avenue of timewasting has been exhausted” was quickly disproven – I was only measuring ¼ of the four servers’ traffics – but now it’s been exhausted. (Oh and in case it sounded like I’m so vain I measure this website’s traffic, I’m not/I don’t.)

Maybe the first week all month in which I didn’t get caught in some rain, but let the record show that on the hottest day I went to get the leaves out of my ma’s ma’s gutters and became sweaty which is more or less the same.

A bit :( in spite of the nicer weather so that’s interesting.

Some work. It occurred to me that Google Analytics really is useless – not worth the kilobytes – it’s a small proportion of the total kilobytes, but at least all the adtech kilobytes make money for someone. So I turned to GoAccess, which seems like the best thing for analysing access logs, which satisfies my particular needs. That has the questionable advantage of counting all the non-human website traffic – there’s the the option of ignoring it, but no thanks. I wasted lots of time getting the configuration just right, slowed down by my intransigence towards bothering to read the documentation, and now that avenue of timewasting has been exhausted.

🎦 MaXXXine, I enjoyed with some reservations. Later I was inspired to drive to the “Oasis Hotel” in American Truck Simulator.

Bicycling though an industrial estate, I was obstructed by a fellow manoeuvring a big red lorry back and forth, struggling to turn around. I liked the slogan on the curtainsider enough to consider taking a photo, but that might have looked like I was going to snidely post on the internet a video of someone’s bad day at work … obviously, as a Truck Simulator dabbler I fancied that I could have done a better job. Anyway, turns out there’s already coverage of the slogan on the internet. (Huge thanks to my Google search history for helping me remember the name of the company a week later.) I didn’t hang around to watch, I squeezed past when the driver got out of the cab to pace around, so I’ll never know how it concluded.

Then further down the road, a startling glimpse through an open door of a warehouse full of people in activewear doing possibly Zumba or another dance-based group fitness activity – that’s industry these days, and why not!

Recently resumed being a sourdough ponce, partly because of forgetting to buy bread or even dried yeast, and I think I’ve succeeded in making a normal-ish loaf that doesn’t taste excessively sour and that fits in both the toaster and the air-tight storage container. So, well done me. I’ve still never made a poolish.