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.

Sick of everything being “incredible”. What I would give for something to be “awesome” again.

Some work.

Streaming HTML has been on my mind for a few years. I have some things like big timetables that take unacceptably long to to render, and these days a lot of people would use JavaScript to load the slow bit after the rest of the page has loaded, but that’s like (the urban myth about) NASA inventing ballpoint pens instead of simply using pencils. Streaming HTML is a bit of a pain in the arse, just like trying to use a pencil on a spaceship – I had to convert a template from the Django template language to the deceptively similar Jinja, which supports streaming and is also a bit faster – but I managed it and it’s good.

I’d like to embed a video of a side-by-side comparison here, but I’m tired and I don’t know how to, so you’ll have to imagine: on one side, the top of the page appears a bit sooner than the bottom; on the other side, it’s blank until eventually the whole page appears at once.

Got caught in some downpours, the most hailstorm of which washed the mud off of my bike and my bicycling jacket, and I didn’t mind it – it’s an excuse for sitting damply with one’s trousers off afterwards, is that good?

None of your business but I voted Green by the way, although our Labour MP is a good egg and I had some beeves with the Green candidate’s nimbyism. Not to make everything about myself, but I won £2.04 on a bet I’d forgotten placing last year.

This morning I heard a mysterious noise in the kitchen, like a soft crackling … it was a decomposing pear.

Big week. After years of foot-dragging and it being a sort of white whale, I’m finally displaying my calculated “ex-pected” departure times (for most bus stops in England and Wales etc, subject to availability and all that). It’s imperfect and done in a slipshod manner, and I was ready to rollback the changes if the servers freaked out about all the extra work, but they didn’t – computers are fast. And now that the gaze of the public is on it, I’ve an incentive to keep improving it.

A series of scummy cups of tea led me to seek out those wire balls for putting in kettles – they work on the theory that the limescale gets attracted to the large surface area, leaving the water and the heating element cleaner. They’re hard to find in shops – kettle-mongers in hard water areas are missing an opportunity to cross-sell a complementary product, or maybe they think there’s more money in selling chemical descalers and replacement kettles. So I searched an e-commerce website, but “kettle ball” dredged up gym equipment and “kettle wire” got me a load of cables.

Which made me remember this bit in The Castafiore Emerald, and I wondered about the cable/wire situation in other languages, whether any only have one word for them.

The live music I’ve enjoyed in June 2024.

Girl Ray (a) (Islington Assembly Hall), marvellous.

CSS (a) (Islington Assembly Hall). I remember when they were an impediment to googling information about Cascading Style Sheets, but oh how the tables have turned. Yes they played the song from the Zune advert and the song from the iPod advert (they’re the same song).

Above all I’m grateful to my immune system for making me feel OK just in time to go to leafy leafy London.

One thing I did last week was take down, using my knowledge of 3M Command damage-free hanging solutions, some framed posters – live, laugh, love in a cursive font, things of that nature – and I can’t believe no one’s done a hilarious see it, say it, sorted poster in the same style.

A few days in the Liverpool City Region. Nice.

If you’re paying more than £10 per month for a mobile phone data plan, stop. I’ve been playing the MVNOs off against each other, with a dual-SIM phone, but it feels time to commit to one – probably the daftly named 1pMobile which combines the good network of EE with the cheapness and ease of leaving of giffgaff etc. I’m only a bit hesitant because turns out my da’s moved to the first place I’ve found where the EE signal is much worse indoors than other networks’, but it’s not a big problem because WiFi exists.

If you type “Euro 2024” into the iPhone search box it helpfully informs you that €2,024 is £1,714.21.

Monday. I’ve got a sort of cold, which I think is a complication of hayfever, and several flies are flying around in circles, so consistently avoiding the sticky green paper I’ve pegged to the ceiling that I think they’re taunting me, they know what I’m up to. I’d say I only need to be lucky once, they need to be lucky always, but it’s only a matter of time before I absent-mindedly walk into the trap.

I couldn’t remember the incantation for searching the macOS dictionary to help with Wordle, so I added a search page to this website (using Pagefind). The search page itself doesn’t support the kinds of search I’m on about, but it helped me find the time I mentioned the incantation. And actually, I managed to solve the Wordle (ANGST) without recourse to cat /usr/share/dict/web2 | grep -x '^a.g.t$' after all.

Maybe I’ll remove some of the older content from here – not because the powerful search engine is struggling with the amount of content, far from it, but just because if you’re not embarrassed by things you wrote more than ten years ago then you’re not growing as a person.

Some work. With quite a lot of effort, I merged three different kinds of map view (“big”, “trip” and “operator”), so navigation between them is smooth and faster in a single-page app kind of way (“Are you getting it? These are not three separate maps”). After one evening, no one’s said anything about the change, which I’ll take as a positive. I look forward to seeing how, if at all, it affects the map tile hosting bill and the programmatic advertising figures.

Next week it’s the summer solstice and the the website’s ninth birthday, both apposite times to launch or announce stuff… but I’ve got nothing big, and I prefer to drip-feed small changes. I was going to save the above for then, but I’m too impatient.

I bought a “grab bag” of stale Doritos as part of a meal deal. Turned out they were past the best before date, but also there was a small hole in the bag. So, as per the instructions on the back of the packet, I wrote to Walkers – they no longer advertise a freepost address, maybe plastic waste campaigners led them to stop it, I used a stamp in case. They sent me back £7 of vouchers – I can’t see myself remembering to spend them – and disappointingly ignored my P.S. asking what exactly “grab bag” means.

• What about the current advert where Thierry Henry and David Beckham (whither Gary Lineker?) say “Walkers” unnaturally often, eh? I wondered if there’s an international version where they say “Lay’s”, and indeed there is. Also I enjoyed an investigative journalism podcast about crisp packet colours a while ago.

Out to Brian Butterfield’s Call of Now. Due to factors, I went twice, days apart, which was an accident but it stood up to the second viewing.

It’s worth going to the Hammersmith Apollo just enjoy the seats and how the curved armrests rise and fall elegantly with the folding action.

After being so smug last week about my frozen berry habit, I got a blackberry seed stuck in my teeth, but the day or so of minor annoyance was almost worth it for the satisfaction of finally dislodging it (it made an audible noise as it landed in the bathroom sink).

Some work. You’ll be fascinated to learn that I’ve eliminated the need to use Docker regularly, and I’ve made my tests run a minute or two faster, which is not the same as the important work I’d hoped to do but never mind.

Which reminds me I’ve been reading How to Make Things Faster, written by an enterprise software man, which contains a story about having the shits in South Carolina.

It was time to re-setup my fragile digital terrestrial television receiver, ready to feel superior to everyone struggling to use ITV X to watch the Euros. I wished I’d made some notes last time, so here I’m making some for next time: in order to get the few HD channels, I had to look up the frequencies for my local transmitter and slightly correct the Tvheadend settings accordingly.

Just weeks ago, I finally threw away a mysterious sachet of little screws, and now it turns out that they were the “mechanical spacers” for attaching the Pi TV Hat securely to the Raspberry Pi. Of course I’d coped for a few years without them, but it means a careless movement can unseat the thingy from the GPIO pins and this is why people become hoarders.

Ordered some wet, soupy noodly supper as treat, and someone hadn’t sealed the container properly and the broth leaked out. I was chill, but I feel bad that I didn’t think to offer the delivery fellow some paper towels to help clean up the inside of his insulated bag.

Last week a man asked me if I knew where the Copmanthorpe bus was, and it took me a while to realise he wasn’t saying “the common folk bus”.

My only world class basics, high performance habit or ritual is preparing my breakfast the night before: muesli (weighed), frozen berries, milk, into the fridge. Eaten next to hot coffee in the morning, the contrast between hot and cold is like having a hot pudding with ice cream. (I say habit, but quite often I’ll have forgotten or been too tired so it’s toast instead.)

Some work. Lost some time to trying to improve my development experience – after so much command-tabbing between one’s text editor and the terminal, one starts to wish one could click on the file path and line number in a log and be taken straight to that line of the file in the editor. If only there existed a development environment that integrated these features, it could be called an integrated development environment or IDE for short.

Two nights in York. Took the X46 to Hull and back, and maybe I could have made more of my visit. Went to the architecturally cool, unusually low-ceilinged Foss Bank Sainsbury’s for surely the last time – I didn’t remember the ceiling being so low, maybe I’ve gotten taller.

Adam Buxton’s podcast’s live show (a). He’s been playing with AI image generators, which is a shame.

Catherine Bohart (h), to whom I was grateful for bringing Thank You Farmer sun cream to my attention (by mentioning it on a podcast episode once).

Took some small electrical items to the household waste recycling centre, waited patiently on my bicycle in the queue of cars, huffing diesel fumes. It’s interesting how, like butchers, overwhelmingly everyone who works at such places seems so cheerful and pleasant, you never meet a miserable one.

Sometimes there’s a Wikipedia article about someone that seems obviously written by them or, more likely, one of their staff. It might be tempting to rewrite it to be better and less advertisement-coded, but wait: why not leave it? Leave it and let the record show that they’re a self-promoting tube who can’t even write in an encyclopaedic style.

Twisted my ankle, for which the blame lies squarely on flint cobbles. But of course you can’t lay anything squarely on flint cobbles, they’re so uneven.

🎦 Love Lies Bleeding (2024).

That’s my da moved house. It’s funny how removing all the books and soft furnishings from a room really changes the acoustics.

I have some boring regrets about the state the old place was left in, things that should have been taken to the dump but weren’t, and even (to a lesser extent) a few that were but I wouldn’t have minded keeping. I did some cleaning, but inexplicably didn’t use the vacuum cleaner even though it was one of the last things the removal lads packed.

On Sunday I faced a choice: wait an hour for a bus, or spend several hours on two buses going the long way home, which of course I chose. There was a variety of weather, and it was disappointing that a three-year-old bus would have leaky windows, but conditions soon improved and my elbow dried out. A gang of posh young holidaymakers were very impressed by the vehicle – “I’ve never seen a table on a bus before”, they clearly didn’t go to Oxford.

The newest series of Jer Clarkson’s Farm covers some ground I’m already well-acquainted with – George Lamb’s regeneratively farmed wheat, growing mushrooms, the moral imperative to eat venison – but/so the biggest revelation is that there’s a quite good Norwegian weather app, presumably Yr. It is good.

This week, there’s been a news story about Clarkson being voted a sexiest man. No offence to the leathery repellent, but needless to say it’s a bullshit concoction intended to promote an obscure dating site; let’s say the poll was less rigorous than the Driver Power survey. Well done to the public relations people responsible – it’s less harmful than working than working for the oil, tobacco, or weapons industries, so they can sleep soundly – but none of the newspapers’ coverage actually links to the website, so it might not have met their marketing objectives. (If they want another publicity stunt, perhaps they could legally threaten the owner of the homophone elicit encounters dot com.)

Anyway, it gives me an idea for something, like a poll to find the most average bus route or the most algal bus shelter, for the furtherance of my own business interests.

To London’s Conway Hall for the Interesting conference, or just Interesting as some of the cooler people call it. It was lovely and interesting as advertised, so thanks and well done to everyone.

The parental house-move approaches its climax, and there’s still so much stuff, it makes me reflect on my own stuff. I purport to have a one in, one out policy, but I’ve still got two kettles. Not owning a car is, in some way, helpful in limiting the size and number of things one can accumulate.

Years after I broke my second Chemex (a poncy flawed coffee pot made of glass), I finally gave away the remaining filters on Olio, which took too many days of negotiations and rescheduling – partly my fault for, at first, not letting the app send me notifications (but now it’s pestering me about all the mouldering sandwiches being given away nearby). I didn’t interrogate the donee about whether they planned to use the filters or sell them, they didn’t seem like a Chemex user but then who does?

My iCloud storage has become full, and it’s a big leap from 200GB to 2TB – damn you, Ian Cloud. So what do I do, delete some photos? Of a packet of Hula Hoops I had in 2016? No.

On that side of things, I recently learnt about how the order of table columns in PostgreSQL matters, and I have some big tables that I now know are occupying disk inefficiently, but their size is proportional to the amount of ache in the arse it is to reorder columns, so I’ll never be happy.