Week 233: knob

Sunday 3 September 2023

• Some work. The website gets less and less shit, and better at calculating the lateness (or otherwise) of a bus, and it turns out that computers are faster than I sometimes imagine them to be.

  There’s a regular spike in traffic at around every 2am. I didn’t have much logging set up, let’s say for privacy reasons, but some of the unsuccessful requests are for URLs ending in things like %23map (#map URL-encoded) which is a sign of a new kind of badly-programmed crawler/bot. And now I’ve some better (still privacy-preserving) logging set up in readiness for the next morning, to investigate further, and I can hardly wait.

• Bought a new toilet brush a few weeks ago. (I agree that toilet brushes are horrible and ought to be unnecessary, but so are many things in life.) Went to the local branch of Argos just as it was closing forever, so I had to go to a different one. Now the problem is I can’t bring myself to soil the nice new toilet brush, so I can’t throw away the yucky old toilet brush.

• Increasingly frustrated the with stickiness of the Fellow Stagg kettle’s power button/knob (see previous discussion), I followed the manufacturer’s instructions to remove it for cleaning. (See also this video.) There was a tiny piece of debris which I blew away. I noticed that pressing the naked metal core with my bare finger was just as unreliable as pressing the assembled plastic had been … but once I’d reassembled it (which was slightly tricky), I found it worked more reliably. Brilliant.

  (It’s still a bit less than 100% reliable, which is infinitely worse than the switch on any normal electric kettle.)

• To Future Islands (previously mentioned here in 2019). Sad to learn that frontman Samuel T. Herring is an Evertonian, but no one’s perfect. The physicality of his performance was everything I hoped it would be; his movement around the stage is especially good if your view is obscured by a concrete pillar.

• 📺 The Following Events Are Based on a Pack of Lies. I’m a bit sick of things being described as “deliciously dark”, and maybe it’s a bit too achingly quirky, all the harpsichord music and title cards, but never mind. It’s got Paul Putner in it.