Week 251: not a guillemot

I try not to start anything new in January, not wanting to appear to make a cringe New Year’s resolution. But I went to the dental hygienist and was reminded I’d been neglecting part of my mouth, so I’ve changed my brushing a bit. And I installed Atuin (“Magical Shell History”) on the computer – I don’t really care for it yet, it feels jarring.

To Edinburgh.

• A little of what might be described as “microdosing parenting”.

• Stayed in my first Airbnb. The radiators needed bleeding, and the freezer defrosting, but I did neither. My bed was a mattress up on a ledge – the idea of a mezzanine excited me, but not the reality of climbing up and down a ladder if I needed to wee in the middle of the night, and I’m not a guillemot, so boringly I slept down on the sofa instead.

• The zoo! Didn’t know rhinos had such hairy ears.

• The sun sets early there. Like a bird flying into a window, I thrust my card into what I thought was a gap in the bus driver’s assault screen but was in fact the assault screen. Funny story.

Mostly resisted doing any work, until “why not? Why shouldn’t I?”

I’d forgotten one of the improworsements in Django 5.0: they’ve removed the setting that makes the DATE_FORMAT, TIME_FORMAT and DATETIME_FORMAT settings have any effect, so you must pepper your templates with format strings if you don’t like their weird (American?) default (5:49 p.m.).

So I’d forgotten to specify the time format in one place, and people were quick to notice. Turns out Barry Doe is not alone in reviling the 12-hour clock. (Sometimes I think about adopting the 12-hour clock one April Fool’s Day, just for 12 hours – it would be immature attention-seeking annoyingness, and wouldn’t it be awful if actually no one noticed?)

The website GTFS.pro: some aspects of its design, bits of microcopy etc., feel familiar, I can’t quite put my finger on it. But it’s OK, everything is a remix and all that, and it has some admirable innovations. And there’s an amazing portrait of the founder pulling a very serious face, amazing, imagine being that serious.