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