Last year I got a Raspberry Pi TV Hat and started using TVHeadend, it’s a way of watching and recording digital terrestrial TV. It’s fiddly, but I don’t want to sound ungrateful for the free software and the signals that are just there vibrating in the air all around us. Surely better than ITV Hub or whatever it’s called this week, etc.

Recently (since having to connect the thing to Wi-Fi, because the FTTP equipment is a long way from the TV socket and maybe the vacuum cleaner would get tangled up in a long Ethernet cable), there’s been a disturbance in the force (?), some spooky glitches, like every few minutes. The visual effect is rather fascinating and quite cool, it’s like in The Castafiore Emerald when Professor Calculus invents colour TV.

Well, I got a new cable, and the reported signal-to-noise ratio is better and the problem has gone. It’s famously usually bullshit when an employee of Dixons Carphone plc tries to upsell you to a more expensive version of an HDMI or similar digital signal–carrying cable, but there are other circumstances where you do need a wire that’s shielded or something or at least not broken.

Part of me misses the old glitches – Saturday Kitchen is really boring without Matt Tebbutt transforming into colourful spaghetti every so often – but maybe they can be recreated by half-unplugging the cable or waiting for a thunderstorm.

I’ve had a few of the mass-produced festive sandwiches by now and ugh, the hegemony of cranberry. And maybe caramelised onions are an even more insidious pervasion – I like an onion, and it was a wise person who suggested doubling the quantity of onion (and garlic) in any recipe you follow, but what do these sickly overpowering flavours have to do with Christmas?

This is a bit late, it’s been almost weeks since John Harris was last angry at people with big trolleyloads not letting him go in front of them in the Lidl checkout queue. I actually enjoy the extra moment of quiet contemplation, standing there, marvelling at how much milk some people buy, but when I am beckoned to nip ahead I begrudgingly accept just because I know it makes them feel good to think they’re doing me a favour, there’s no such thing as a selfless act.

🎦 The Menu (2022) was fine but somehow not viscerally wibbly.

Maybe some you’ve noticed some new CAPTCHAs have “dropped” (landed) in the usual places you encounter them. No more training self-driving cars – I’m optimistic that I’ve identified my last fire hydrant, bus, bloody crosswalk. They’ve taken a whimsical turn: identify the chicken on the beach, hedgehog in a bowl, is it a dolphin in a bathtub?

Had some kind of cold or flu, and I’d’ve preferred not to, a bit disappointed by my immune system really. But I’m through the worst of the mucus and coughing and earache now. Fisherman’s Friends, the tooth-rotting Lancastrian mentholated lozenges, have been a great help. (And the usual paracetamol and water etc.)

That Vicks Sinex nasal spray advert showing a courtroom where a criminal is sentenced to have a blocked nose for some weeks, a bit like being sentenced to be someone’s butler. It’s ridiculous because the judge uses a gavel, but we don’t use any ceremonial mallets in our legal system here do we? They’re the preserve of auctioneers.

Fibre to the premises! I’d been enjoying the 5G router lifestyle, but then there’d been some days of important maintenance, during which the connection was poor, and which are not the sort of thing they deign to warn you about beforehand. And fibre, bowels, poo, ha ha.

The Openreach fellow drilled some holes, and very tactfully pointed out I was trying to plug in an RJ11 cable instead of an RJ45 one. So far I’m pleased with Andrews & Arnold, their plain text emails, their old-fashioned-in-the-best-possible-way web interface, and the detailed graphs they provide. IPv6 didn’t work immediately until I followed some instructions.

🎦 Barbarian is adequately scary and some other things. Inevitably, some say they can’t relate to the characters’ gung-ho-ness in going down dark spooky corridors. I would simply not use Airbnb, having absorbed all the anti-them propaganda when I worked in a smaller cuddlier bit of the self-catering accommodation industry.

In Bruges is a jolly Christmas film.

Leave me alone in a kitchen and there’s a good chance I’ll fix the clock on the oven, you know, if it’s displaying the wrong time. Which is a bit cheeky really – not just because of the risk I’ll accidentally activate the “child lock”, effectively breaking it, but also you’ve probably internalised the difference between the oven time and real time, using the power of your mind to subtract an hour or whatever, because you think mental arithmetic is good for you, so an unexpected correction could send you out of whack and make you late for things.

Anyway, I was unprecedentedly slow to correct the oven clock here after the latest BST–GMT transition, but I’ve done it now.

Other peoples’ dreams are always boring. Dreamt that some electricity/telegraph poles had been painted yellow – I guess by the utility company, not environmental protestors – and a pigeon perched on a pole had gotten painted too, and proudly stretched out its wings as if to say hey look at me I’m like a canary now. Cool story.

It’s nice to get out of the house:

• 🎦 Triangle of Sadness is a terrific hoot . Learnt something about the name Yaya, which I’d read before and heard before but had never connected the two (somehow thought it was pronounced “Yay-a”).

• David O’Doherty, the noted comedian who wears hats and rides bicycles and plays a little Yamaha keyboard (not all at the same time).

• Half Man Half Biscuit. In a room packed full of mostly maybe increasingly weak-bladdered men, it’s a good idea to be out of the way of the jostling of the sort of jetstream of folks going to and from the loo.

Regrettably, started watching IACGMOOH for the first time. It is a bit compelling, entertaining, which must be why millions of people watch it. I think I have the mental strength to resist being brainwashed into feeling any sympathy for the Tory fellow.

Some little work. Now you can toggle between, for example, an X21 timetable and a combined X21 and X22 timetable.

The mutiny about the supposed-but-not-actual removal of the Bounty chocolate bar from the Celebrations tub, an ingenious little publicity stunt. It’s right that when all the real news is as it’s always been – everything, you know, fascism, all the ways in which we’re doomed, etc. – we go wild for a concocted thing about confectionery. But here’s the thing – and this is me at my most out-of-touch – I’m not sure I’ve ever even eaten one of the sweets in question, low-cocoa-percentage shit, so I can’t have an opinion.

🎦 Decision to Leave.

Cycled to Ipswich because of the railway strike and stuff. Stayed at Lenny Henry’s house (the Premier Inn), reputedly the better of the three main hotel chains, and, you know, it might be? The shower was weak but there was a good supply of teabags and a complimentary chocolate orange which I didn’t touch. To my surprise and delight it overlooked the local bus depot with its famously low roof.

To Harry Hill’s Pedigree Fun. Arrived late and missed the start – I’d heard that the image of the radio phone-in legend Nigel from Maidstone, of all people, appears in an introductory video, but I can’t confirm. Never mind, it was a special fun time.

Cycled from Ipswich, quite rain-lashed. Apparently the roads of Suffolk have particularly bad drainage.

To London. Had my nose rubbed in some of the remaining problems with tracking TfL buses on bustimes.org – the destination fields are still various kinds of wrong. Strode up Parliament Hill. Then to see Pavement at the Roundhouse, supported by Los Bitchos who were brilliant. Left just slightly early in order to have enough time to make a couple of wrong turns walking between stations while still making the last train with plenty of time, oh how blessed we are to have relatively good trains.

I don’t like to yuck anyone’s yum, but oh the state of the sicko perverts who tweet at the poet Ian McMillan asking why he’s not having cheese with his Christmas cake. We should celebrate still being a permissive enough society that people who eat digestive biscuits with cheese can do so openly, but I’m afraid I’d rather they kept it within the privacy of their own homes.

Considering expressing some more extreme opinions. Balsamic vinegar is horrible. Anyone who uses the phrase “ad hominem” is a paedo.

📺 The Elton Musk Show (BBC). You know the thing they do in certain kinds of documentary now, where they show an interviewee getting ready for their interview, coughing, telling the sound engineer what they had for breakfast, having their collar straightened, asking “are we recording?”, having a clapperboard clapped in front of them. I was going to call it postmodern but I’m not sure that’s right. You’d think it would be a tired trope by now, but I go wild for it every time. Otherwise, it wasn’t all that, a bit flattering to Mr Must.

Charged £350 for some services I rendered. With the addition of 20% VAT, that becomes £420, which is unfortunately close to the sort of thing ol’ Musky would think was a great laugh, but I swear in my case it was entirely accidental; if I could reclassify myself as cake to avoid the tax, I would do.

🎃 Never feel more like I missed a day at school than on Halloween. Fully grown adults dressing up in fancy dress like it’s the most normal thing in the world, like we’re all friends with Jonathan Ross? When did this come in? Let me be clear: I fully support it, skellingtons and cobwebs and vegetable carvings, things of that nature, but it’ll never not feel weird. 👻

The Wikipedia article It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers is one of my favourite Wikipedia articles.

🎦 So enjoyed Emily (2022), which imagines the mental health of Emily Brontë. All the uphill running through long grass made me wonder do ticks spread tuberculosis? Ah probably not, and they had long socks on anyway.

To Birmingham last weekend, arguably one of the country’s ten or so main cities. There and back on the Megabus, which inspired me to make a few more maps follow the roads, and I’ve a new idea for doing that for even more where currently I draw a dumb as-the-crow-flies straight line between stop points. I think pfaedle might be the best state-of-the-art tool for helping with that.

Watched The Capture (2019–2022) over the last few weeks. It has some great infeasible user interfaces if you like that sort of thing.

Went and saw [the] Sugababes, the Trigger’s broom/ship of Theseus of pop music but their line-up’s stayed a lot more stable than the Conservative front bench (little bit of politics there). That was a nice time. The audience could have shown the support acts some more reverence instead of nonchalantly talking amongst themselves the whole time, a little more chalance please.

🎦 Ticket to Paradise (2022). Not too long, and set in a hot sunny place that’s an antidote to the damp grey autumn. There’s bit of thunderstorm that makes you turn in surprise to the back right-hand speaker. Froth, but there’s nothing wrong with froth, apart from all the extra washing-up when you take a hand blender to hot milk to try to make a poncy coffee.

Some work:

• A lot of fiddly-fart-arsing, trying to make a GitHub Actions workflow better and faster – so far I’ve made it slower and less reliable, but that’s progress. All the different nouns involved are a bit confusing – Actions actions and workflows and steps and jobs – and also I realise I’ve never properly learned YAML, just muddled along forever inferring the syntax from examples, but turns out the rules are written down somewhere.

• The Descriptions in TransXChange files are sometimes bad. Sometimes they’re orthographically weird, sometimes the OutboundDescription and InboundDescription or Origin and Destination are the wrong way round. There’s a case for ignoring them and generating nice consistent ones, but I don’t. So people would helpfully report the wrong-way-round errors – “there’s a St Helens to Liverpool timetable under the heading ‘Liverpool to St Helens’, you idiot, don’t you know they’re different places?” – and I’d be unfairly annoyed, I know they’re just trying to help. Well now I’ve finally fixed it again so the descriptions are automatically swapped to the correct orientation – the things you can make computers do these days! – so that’s good.

Really fancied some soup, not sure why.

Finished watching This England (mentioned previously) last week. (There’d been an advert for it at the cinema, after the trailers, around the point where for a while Nicole Kidman would say “somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”) It would be terribly meltily centrist to conclude, from how some reviews called it a hatchet job and some others said it was oversympathetic nonsense, that it must actually be just right – so don’t. Anyway, there’s a bit where Aylsham doubles as a flooded town in Derbyshire, and I was pleased with how good I was at identifying a Norfolk market town.

🎦 Amsterdam (2022). There’s a lot to it. A bit of wondering is that Taylor Swift? (it was – I’m so good at recognising things) but that’s just the start.

🩼 Flu jabbed. The venue was Carrow Road, next to where besuited football men were arriving for some kind of catered reception before travelling to Watford I suppose. Almost the makings of a Hennimore! sort of farce where slightly clinically vulnerable people have to go in the football team? Darren Huckerby arrived in his motor car as I was leaving, personalised number plate in case he forgets his name, it’s a Jaguar with what looked like naff aftermarket modifications but might just be the factory-fitted options they offer these days, there’s no accounting for taste.

The YouTube channel High Peak Autos. It’s a second-hand car dealer who we see inspecting a used car which is then cleaned and sometimes repaired and sold for a profit – a tale as old as time. I wouldn’t say the presenter is “my Zoella” – he’s a flash git who occasionally says something outrageous (addressing a recessed bit of the Citroën C3 Picasso dashboard assembly, “I always thought that these things here looked like soap dishes, which is ironic with a C3 Picasso because most C3 Picasso owners wouldn’t know what soap is”) but also has a point about the merits of keeping an old gas-guzzler on the road versus manufacturing a whole new electric luxury car. Still, some of the best episodes are where it all goes wrong and he loses money, a bit like in Homes Under The Hammer where a heroic planning enforcement officer foils a would-be slumlord’s plan.

Some work:

• https://bustimes-timetable.com/ is an interesting website I’m deliberately not linking to sorry. It appears to be someone in Turkey copying and pasting from bustimes.org into WordPress to earn some advertising pence, which is cheeky. It’s good to be a bit cheeky, but is this too cheeky? Maybe. “Ironically”, they’ve even deployed some ingenious JavaScript to disable text selection and right-clicking (and therefore copying and pasting) on their website. Cheeky.

• Sure ___ is great but have you ever had an idea and implemented it and then seen the lines go down on the graphs showing CPU usage and cache bandwidth? Turns out caching the rendered HTML of a timetable is much better than just caching the Timetable object – takes up less space in the cache and saves the computer more work. So that’s a bit of electricity and pounds saved.

My fourth helping of novel coronavirus vaccine. The venue was City Hall, where the copper dogs salute you on the way out. Forgot to bring a mask, which was fine – of course they’ve a supply of disposable ones at the entrance – but fell short of the standard of preparedness to which I aspire. Felt slightly rougher than usual afterwards.

Bicycled a bit far and fast the following day, when some relaxing taking-it-easy would have been more sensible. Think I need to raise the saddle a bit. Deyhdrated, had to stop off at an electic vehicle charging station to economically stimulate the bottled water industry. But the day after that felt amazing, can’t remember feeling less achy.

Received a parcel. Inside was a box for a “star shower laser projector”. And a star shower laser projector is the last thing I need or want, entirely at odds with my values. I quite like stars and showers and lasers, but never the three combined.

Realised I’d ordered something else on eBay, and from the reference on number on the address label it looked like this was supposed to be it. I supposed the seller sold a lot of different stuff and had got their labels mixed up, what a wally. Messaged them.

Of course, the item I’d ordered was simply in the star shower laser projector box. What a wally. It’s just that it was bigger and heavier than anticipated, and there’s a tendency among amateur eBay sellers (me included) to over-package, putting boxes within boxes, swaddling parcels in layer upon layer, having so little faith in the careful handing of the postal service.

Pasta shapes. You know I’m not a big fan of the hegemony of fusilli. At the moment I’m on some gigli, and there’s a sealed packet of alphabet pasta in the cupboard. You might say dried pasta is durable enough that it’s fine to have several packets open at once, and you’d be right, but it’s good to have something to look forward to. You might also say “what a sad little life”.

Been annoyed by the illegibility of the date and time in the menu bar in the top right hand corner of the Apple Macintosh computer. Dark text on a dark background. Thinking Steve Jobs would be spinning in his grave if he was still alive; even thinking of turning to desktop Linux, cos at least there you get a choice of different bad user interface designs.

Anyway, turns out the Mac was in “Do Not Disturb” mode, a feature I know from silencing my phone at the theatre and stuff, but that seems a bit strange on a big computer. macOS also has Do Not Disturb While Driving, which is even stranger, cos if you’re driving around while working at your computer you have bigger problems than being disturbed by a bit of bright text.

Made some focaccia to a recipe of the American website “bon appéit”, and I choose to blame the foreign units of measurement for my accidentally making such wet dough it was more of a crumpet batter. I think it would have been fine if only I’d used a bigger shallower tin, and nevertheless the salty crusty top – the upper crust! – was good. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with measuring flour and stuff by volume – I’ve found myself without a scales before, looking up the density of things in order to convert from grams to millilitres – but cups, ugh.

Also this week I done a cassoulet. It was inauthentic in several ways, including the inclusion of a lot of tomatoes, really I might as well have opened a tin of sausage and baked bean, but let the record show that cassoulets are good.

Bicycling thoughts. It’s become autumn and I made the mistake once of forgetting gloves on a cold wet day, but then at some traffic lights I waited behind an Audi A5 instead of filtering through the queue of cars, and I so enjoyed warming my hands on the exhaust emissions, so that’s a benefit of not having good segregated infrastructure.

Attached a pannier rack to the back of the lightweight bicycle making it a bit heavier. There exist things that clamp to the seat post for maximum compatibility with bikes that don’t have threaded holes in the right places, but I had holes and I wanted to damn well use them. As I feared, the rear brake gets in the way of where one of the mounting bracket arms would go, so I simply didn’t attach one of the arms and it still seems sturdy enough as long as I don’t overload it. Immediately I went and carried home too much alcohol-free beer; there was some disconcerting squeaking but I completed the journey OK and with a less sweaty back than if I’d carried a rucksack.

Now none of the residences overlooking my window have the same residents they did when I moved here. Part of me half-wonders if the horror of sometimes seeing me pottering about in my underpants drove anyone to move, which is insane narcissism. The last one to change hands did so without appearing on any listings websites as far as I can see, which is a blow to nosiness, is there a secret backchannel where people swap houses or what?

Cultural highlights of the week:

• 🎦 See How They Run (2022), a likeable bit of fun. It was nice to see the all the actors in it in it.

• East Anglian tribute band Steemy Dan. I was definitely the below the average age of the audience, which is nice, but nicer still there’s always some even younger people for someone to patronise “how on earth do you know of any music from before you were born?” instead of you.

• Public Service Broadcasting put on a good show, a whole audio-visual sensory experience. A new-to-me venue where I learned it pays to turn up earlier (like I normally do but didn’t for a change) and avoid trips to the bar and loos to secure a good position in the room, it sounds obvious now I think of it. But doing multiple wees and having to stand on tippy-toes behind tall fellows isn’t so bad.

Got some Bombas socks some months ago, and they might be the best socks I’ve worn in all my years of wearing socks – slightly ugly, but both comfortable and hard-wearing, and the company give the impression of not being evil bastards. I didn’t use to like a shorter sock, but I’ve come round to the sleekness of ankle and no-show socks, especially when wearing shorts, so the socks I got were that kind. Now winter is coming I thought I’d investigate their longer socks, but turns out they’ve closed their UK shop after less than a year – yes they give it the old soft shoe about “you now have access to our larger assortment of socks & underwear”, but getting socks shipped across the Atlantic Ocean feels a bit much? Weak pound innit.

To London’s glittering West End to see Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee. Lee was looking a million dollars actually. Turned out it was the opening night, and it will be mildly interesting to see how the show has evolved when it comes to a provincial theatre or the TV maybe next year. Pleased that someone’s tackling the Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall issue.

The stone lions in Trafalgar Square were still fenced off – very sensible to stop the carnivorous beasts eating the dead head of state who’d passed-by the day before, lead-lined coffin or not you can’t be too careful, but couldn’t they hurry up and let them back out now? Saw some bagfuls of decomposing flowers too.

Days later, to Ipswich to see Edwin Gamble (supported by Chloe Petts). I think they were funny but the acoustic design of the Corn Exchange maybe isn’t great. I’m supposed to hate Ipswich and everything it stands for, but the waterfront in particular is actually quite nice, it was like being somewhere on holiday. No cathedrals but two bus stations, one of which is called “Tower Ramparts”, and who doesn’t like a rampart?