Week 141

Tuesday 30 November 2021

• There’s been weather. Wandered to the country park and found it was closed due to a wind warning. It was actually not very windy, so I’m sure I could have thrown caution to the wind and ignored the warning sign and walked around the lake anyway, but I didn’t. The wind picked up later.

• To the cinema, a small joy which was just the thing on a cold wet afternoon, for the first time in years. Saw House of Gucci, a slightly surprising choice – I don’t like leather goods – but it was fine and I only looked at my watch once; yes it was a little bit silly, which is obviously one of the best things something can be. Might go to a cinema again.

• I’d heard plans were afoot to add London bus locations to the Bus Open Data Service; I was reminded of it just days ago, when it occurred to me that the consequences of the TfL funding crisis might at least make that easier in one respect (fewer buses, less data). Then I woke from a nap (!) to find it had happened

  It’s a tiny shame that no forewarning had been forthcoming, although in the event the quantity of data (a lot of buses) was no problem. Unrelatedly, some of the following day was spent battling a little technical meltdown which postponed going to the cinema by a whole hour. I’m using Supervisor, and I was repeatedly restarting some processes when I noticed that several times more processes were running than expected … well, this is a marvellously informative article about propagating signals to child processes (the problem was easily solved by using exec, of course, a command I do remember from my time in higher education).

• First Brussels sprouts of the season.

Week 140

Monday 22 November 2021

• Booster jabbed with the Moderna – love the balsamic vinegar, now try the vaccine, right. The venue for this was a “Connaught Hall”, a sort of place where they might have line dancing classes and amateur dramatic productions usually, with the name Connaught all spelled out in grand Helvetica outside. And maybe if I’d asked someone the way there they’d have replied “practice, dear boy, practice”.

  The arm hurt for while where the needle went in, but really scraping my knee on the corner of a bed had more of a painful effect. I was delighted to at last be given an I’ve had my vaccination sticker, although it took me by such surprise that I wasn’t sure where to stick it.

• I’d like to buy a hat because my head gets a bit cold since I cut my hair. It’s slightly complicated by the head being somewhat of a sniper’s dream, and a lot of the hats for sale being one-size-fits-all (as well as having these weird tufts of pretend squirrel on them). Fortunately, Marks & Spencer sell hats in more than one size, and some of them look OK, although the more prettier coloured ones don’t come in the larger sizes. Cool story.

• Sold one old computer. Sticking to my guns and letting the auction bidding proceed beyond the best cash offer received was the right thing to do. Posting the thing cost more than expected, because the buyer wasn’t on the mainland and eBay’s recommended cheap delivery company doesn’t like that. Had a nice half hour standing in the Post Office queue (in the chilled beer section of Budgens), which is the univeral experience of going to the Post Office.

• Something was downloading lots of something in the background on this computer, which is enough to make an adequate 4G/5G connection unacceptably slow. Activity Monitor revealed only nsurlsessiond, an Apple thing used by all sorts of different things. Eventually I worked out, with help from Pi-hole, that the things being downloaded were podcasts, and reasoned that the thing downloading them was Overcast, an iPhone app one can install one one’s M1 Mac. So I stopped Overcast from downloading all of the podcasts in the background, and everything was good again.

Week 139: semi pedestal

Sunday 14 November 2021

It’s always a struggle to remember exactly what’s been occurring when I sit down to write these things. For example, last week I forgot to remember:

• 🪒 I finally extracted the razor handle from the U-bend. Remember I had a go with magnets, and more recently chopsticks, but succeeded only in lodging the handle there more firmly. Finally I decided to try removing the semi pedestal, which is the name of the great lump of porcelain hiding the pipes from view, because how hard can it be. But how? This is the fragment of a forum post that changed my life:

  Numpty tenant when sending me photos didn’t see the two spring hooks at the side of the semi-ped just under the basin. Pulled them with a pliers and the semi ped is off. Good advice as I had help - defo a two person job. Those springs are mighty tough though - it’ll be a pig to get this thing back on.

  Now I wonder if this “numpty tenant” is real or just a literary device to mask the poster’s own numptishness, but it doesn’t matter. The phrase “spring hooks” was all I needed to remove the semi pedestal and reattach it later, and actually with help from no one but a just-the-right-height pile of boxes placed under the pedestal to break its fall in case I dropped it. “Defo a two person job” my arse.

• They painted the grey fence black – it’s nice and glossy, but a shame they painted over the moth picture.

What happened this week?

• The dominant provider of provincial bus ticket machines had an outage, which didn’t affect the sale of tickets but did affect apps, screens and control rooms all over – feels like it would have been a (minor) news story if it had affected London. Naturally I received a small number of emails about it.

  It’s not ideal that one private equity–owned company is in such a dominant position, and charges its smaller customers so much money. I heard that they even charge for investigating bugs in their own software, which isn’t normal is it?

• New computer arrived, possibly the most expensive thing I’ve ever bought. It’s fast enough, but most of all it’s that fast without getting warm or the fans making any noise, which is unlike anything I’ve ever met before.

  Being a computer, it’s a pain in the arse to set up. The biggest problem I encountered is that GEOS doesn’t work perfectly with the Apple M1 chip. Instead of investigating further and reporting that bug in the proper place, I worked around it by finally starting to use Docker. 🐳

  Now I’m selling two older computers and some other accoutrements. Maybe it would be prudent to keep a spare, but I’m not doing that. eBay is the place, and it turns out that people can be annoying – messaging “what condition is this in?” (read the description and look at the pictures), “is this still for sale?” (yes I listed it less than an hour ago) etc. I quickly received two offers of £800 but said no, I’ll let the auction proceed. Currently at £461; it’s thrilling like a teatime television gameshow.

• I’ve been unusually tired, but it’s usually explained by my having walked or bicycled a long way and/or being long past my bedtime. Goodnight.

Week 138

Sunday 7 November 2021

• Again on the bicycle to recycle the ex printer, and was successful. On the way back, picked up some Albert Bartlett Rooster potatoes who’d fallen off of a tractor trailer. Cool story.

  It’s a recently opened dump, and not really accessible to pedestrians, but it’s nice that bicycles are welcome. Apple Maps, Google Maps and OpenStreetMap were variously confused about where it was, which, as well as an unusual number of encounters with delivery workers wandering lost around recently built blocks of flats, kickstarted a flurry of editing OpenStreetMap, which is a satisfying thing to do. And that inspired me to do some stuff with the Ordnance Survey Open Names data, and what a delight it is to see the names of all the woodlands or a map of every heliport in Great Britain.

• Finally used the litter picker upperer (an ostentatiously deluxe one) I bought a while ago. It happened to be the global day of climate crisis action, and I know litter is chutney in comparison to the actual problem of climate change, but please permit me some smugness even though I seem to be mainly concerned about rat obesity.

• Passenged on some buses. One one occasion, a week or so ago, the nationwide driver shortage was palpable as I stood in a queue beside a retail park, squinting at a broken solar powered display board – which gave me some ideas about how to improve bustimes.org, which is sort of the point. Highlights of this week’s journeys include glaring at a van driver who parked (only briefly, to his credit) at the bus stop I was waiting at, and getting precisely wet cos it was raining outside and the window in front of me was open for antiviral reasons.

• Not quite got the hang of this winter – once or twice I’ve overestimated the temperature and gone out without a coat, which wasn’t too bad actually.

Week 137: they saw me coming

Monday 1 November 2021

• There’s an advert (on the sort of television you can watch on the computer) for the Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy computer game, which begins with a guy saying “we’re the guardians of the galaxy!”, a titular line, which tickled me enough to write it down here. But I’ve no urge to investigate further. I know a guardian is a centre-left thing to the left of an observer, and a galaxy is likewise something.

• I appear to be making an (iOS) app, an endeavour I started some time ago (maybe last year) but lost interest until this week, and in a major breakthrough I’ve gone from frustratedly not knowing what I’m doing to understanding some things and thinking it’s really quite easy actually. Of course it’s all downhill from here, by which I mean an uphill struggle, you know, realising that no it’s actually quite difficult after all.

  SwiftUI seems quite nice. Since last year, it has a map component that can display a number of things on a map. But I think I need to break out UIKit to do things like drawing lines on a map, and drawing lots of things without it going all slow.

• Went on the bicycle to take an inkjet printer to the dump/tip/household waste recycling centre, but was confounded by some of the off-road route being closed, so had a circular squelch in a soggy field beside a river, and well those trainers probably needed cleaning anyway. The HWRC will still be open next week.

• Went to the Apple shop to get some fluff removed from a phone’s Lightning port. I’d tried removing fluff myself, and concluded that something deeper and more fundamental must be broken, but it took the bright lights of the shop, and the expertise of a Certified Support Professional to remove it fully.

  Glanced at their new laptop computers, one of which I’d ordered last week. Maybe I chose the wrong size – the smaller would be more portable but, it turns out, not much lighter – and maybe I’m a fool for waiting weeks for the “just right” specification to come from the factory, instead of one of the more/less expensive ones they keep in stock. I’m definitely a fool for, most ashamedly, getting the £19 ($19) polishing cloth (the bit of my order that has arrived) – they saw me coming.

Week 136

Tuesday 26 October 2021

• The construction of the new block of flats next door continues apace. Upsettingly, they’ve erected an oppressive grey fence, enclosing what was a nice line of shrubs along the path leading to the entrance to our building. But let’s not be all nimby. Its redeeming feature is a charming graffito depicting a moth (I thought it was an elephant at first), and there are further moths on other fences around building sites possibly all over the town which I hope to find.

• A new serie of You seemed worth paying for a month of the hated Netflix for to see what murdering the creepy slimy character in it has been up to. Some have described it as “far fetched”, as if that’s not one of the best things a thing can be, because I certainly have no time for things fetched from nearby, thank you, fetch them from afar please.

• Steve Allen, who has the “Up With The Partridge” (“early breakfast”) slot on the hated radio station LBC, was in the news for being unpleasant, which inexplicably prompted me to have a listen to his programme. And actually there’s something compelling about the spectacle of this disagreeable man going on and on, discharging raw sewage from his brain into the airwaves, even though I thought I had a low tolerance for boring arses.

  At one point Allen mentioned seeing an advert for Neutrogena hand cream starring some Norwegian fishermen, and being mystified because he didn’t think a fisherman would use hand cream. This intrigued me, so I did some research, and it turns out to be slightly interesting. Like all the best apocryphal stories possibly concocted by marketeers, there are multiple inconsistent versions, but: well, obviously fishermen’s hands get dry and chapped from being out in the cold wind, so the fishermen sat down and invented Neutrogena Norwegian Formula Concentrated Hand Cream using their knowledge of dermatology. Or maybe the fishermen noticed their skin getting soft and nice when they handled fish guts, and this empirical observation influenced the development of the cream. Either way, of course I’ve now bought some Neutrogena Norwegian Formula Concentrated Hand Cream.

Week 135

Monday 18 October 2021

• Went to Great Yarmouth, partly to buy a Nite Ize Wraptor which is a thing for attaching a mobile phone to bicycle handlebars. Millets sell one for less money than Amazon.

  Well, turns out there’s no longer a Millets in Great Yarmouth. (There’s a Specsavers where I expected it to be.) But there is still a Millets in Lowestoft (where I’d just been) so I went back to Lowestoft where I learned that, of course, a small Millets shop doesn’t necessarily stock all the items advertised on the Millets website. Almost enough to make you want to go mad with a mallet, but instead I just ordered it on Amazon. Never mind, you can’t put a price on the otherwise jolly times I had in Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft.

  Anyway, the Nite Ize Wraptor is good. I had previously used a Quad Lock mount, but I didn’t enjoy keeping the sleek and beautiful phone in the ugly Quad Lock case, and then a bit of the mount snapped off. The Wraptor feels less sturdy, and it’s harder to quickly remove the phone from the handlebars to photograph an escaped pig running past (for example), but that’s OK.

• Another long bus journey around some different coastline. At one point, our route was blocked by some parked cars, and after twenty minutes at a standstill and making some phone calls the driver decided to reverse back up the road, and a passenger in the wheelchair, who fortunately had a yellow reflective gilet with him, leapt up to act as a sort of banksman. (Yes there are some maladies that mean you need the use of a wheelchair for longer periods but can still walk about a bit and direct traffic.) He later regained the use of his legs again to close some windows, which I thought a bit disagreeable because I’d rather zip up my coat than catch a virus, but never mind.

  Most excitingly, for the first time I’m sure I glimpsed a page of bustimes.org on a fellow passenger’s phone screen. Unlike the The Man in Seat Sixty-One or Martin Lewis, I don’t have a picture of me in the masthead so it wasn’t really like being a celebrity seeing someone reading one’s own memoirs or something.

• The toilet cistern, which is a bit leaky as they often are, suddenly went really leaky so I went to fix it. Watched some YouTube videos, which weren’t much help but gave me the confidence to unscrew the push button and remove the cistern lid (damaging the paintwork where some wally had adhered it to the wall with putty) and fiddle about. The floaty thing that’s supposed to float wasn’t floating properly, but now it I’ve fixed it and it’s great, although I’m not yet confident enough to move the screwdriver back out of the bathroom to the place where it’s normally kept.

Week 134

Monday 11 October 2021

• More forgotten things from previous weeks:

  • Some unusual motor cars were parked outside the cinema to promote the new Jimmy Bond film, which I haven’t seen but would probably enjoy. There was a lorry nearby with an Aston Martin branded trailer, by which some of the cars must have been delivered, which beats driving them all individually. Maybe the lorry driver could have been redeployed to deliver more important things, but I suppose it would be somehow bad for the economy if there weren’t cars parked outside the cinema to somehow encourage more people to watch a charismatic philandering alcoholic facing various peril.

• Down by the river I spotted the travel expert Simon Calder standing there with his laptop balanced on a bin. It’s not obvious that you can balance anything on one of those bins, but this was a double-width one with separate chambers for recyclables and general waste and therefore a bigger flatter surface. I think Calder travels around all the time with minimal luggage and working from wherever he lays his computer, which is inspirational, and what’s stopping me doing more of the same kind of thing?

• Finally sought medical attention about my sore ear, after dillying and dallying because each time I thought I must seek medical attention I would then change my mind when the ear stopped being sore for a bit. I sought, and I found, and was prescribed my first prescription since I was was a tiny child, and somehow I knew what to do (take a piece of paper to a pharmacy and exchange it and some money for a tiny bottle) and by jingo the marvellous modern medicine works, which is a great relief and my thanks to everyone involved.

Week 133

Monday 4 October 2021

• To London.

  • Went there on an National Express coach. I have some complaints about the booking process, and the ticket which is a cluttered A4 PDF which led me to discover my little inkjet printer is starting to pine for the fjords, which wasn’t a problem because pinching to zoom and having the driver squint at one’s phone screen is OK, but how much nicer would be a proper “mobile ticket” like you get on trains. (Now I discover there’s an app, which allegedly supports adding a ticket to Apple Wallet. So I’ll use that next time.)

  • Attended a recording of the tolerable Radio 4 parlour game, The Unbelievable Truth. What fun to see how the radio sausage is made, in a theatre full of Radio 4 listeners and/or enthusiasts of free entertainment. Would attend again.

  • Bought a reduced-for-quick-sale packaged sandwich which happened to be gluten-free, and what a horrible sandwich it was, such bread. I’ll never take gluten for granted again.

• I can’t think of much else of interest from this week, so what about things from months ago I forgot to mention on here at the time.

  For example. Watched an old (not that old) documentary about Nigel, owner of the number plate N2 GEL, and his nemesis Nigel, owner of the number plate N1 GEL. What silly men, I thought, and completely different to my thoughts about about whoever owns jo.sh from Saint Helena, and josh.ua from Ukraine, and another domain name earmarked for some project or other that I foolishly let expire this year.

• Flu jabbed.

Week 132

Monday 27 September 2021

• Spent some time callousing my hands improving the condition of the bicycle. I was removing rust from things – a mixture of laying in vinegar and rubbing with damp kitchen foil depending on the mood – when it occurred to me that shinier things are probably more attractive to thieves, so I stopped. Then after much fighting with some dropout screws to stop a tyre rubbing against the frame, took it to the local bike shop for a glow-up – I might have waited until the actual winter, when mechanics should be less busy, but at least it’s no longer the height of summer, and there’s a few days of rain ahead.

• Listened to a recording of Russell Brand’s penultimate Radio 2 programme, ahead of incredibly the thirteenth anniversary of all that. (Thanks Fourble.) It is like listening to two idiots dancing towards a canyon. Some things I found mildly interesting:

  • The reason they telephoned Andrew Sachs was to interview him about The Bill Made Me Famous, a documentary about the police drama which I have never seen, and which Andrew Sachs is not famous for appearing in so that’s a bit strange.

  • At one point in the show it is revealed that Steve Wright, the Radio 2 DJ whose work I’ve never heard, does his own dentistry.

  Anyway, after that of course Brand and Jonathan Ross never worked again which was a shame.

• My foot/ankle started hurting a bit again. Hard to pinpoint exactly where it hurts because everything is connected – I think the ankle hurting made me walk differently, which put unusual strain on a bit of the foot, which made that hurt instead, and so on. But I’m grateful that it’s not that bad after a few days of rest, and I had enjoyed several months of it all feeling perfectly normal.

• Got a little ear infection, which I thought mainly affected children and animals but I don’t think I’m either. It was really quite uncomfortable for a while. Woe unto me.