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My e-reader wasn’t connecting to the internet, so I put the “worry free guarantee (two-year limited warranty)” to the test, and the next morning a gleaming “new old stock” Kindle was at the door – sickeningly efficient. But the replacement wouldn’t connect either, and I realised that I – or rather the quirkiness of my Wi-Fi router – was in fact at fault. In the end it was a boring but ultimately soluble problem, which I’d made more complicated by dicking about with a Pi-hole a while ago, so really it serves me right for such ad-blocking hypocrisy.
I feel bad about the e-wastefulness of it all. I slightly wish the Amazon people had been a bit less customer-centric about it, treated me with suspicion, maybe asked me to try a different Wi-Fi network. And I bet the new new Kindles have USB-C, and maybe they’ve moved the power button somewhere less stupid so the thing doesn’t switch off when you prop it up on a surface (moaned about previously), but this has delayed the point at which it would be acceptable to upgrade.
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Resigned myself to having lost my MP3 collection. (I think that’s a synecdoche for a collection that also contained MP4s and FLACs and probably even a WAV or two.) It’s not a big deal – this wouldn’t have happened if it mattered, I’d’ve had backups and a copy on my computer – but I feel like I’ve fallen short of the glory of God. While I was distracted by Spotify, bits rotted and hard drives got wiped and Google Play Music was sunsetted and I stopped subscribing to iTunes Match. (At least I did manage to recover a few albums from an old MP3 player.)
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To London’s glittering Palladium to watch another podcast like a loser. Enjoyed it more than some of the critics on Reddit appeared to – guest Julian Clary treated the endeavour with the contempt it deserved, and it finished (quickly) in time for me to easily make the second from last train.
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To the medium-sized local venue to see Richard Herring’s show, and several days later to see Ania Magliano’s. Bicycling home, I felt invigorated and stuff, but I don’t know if that’s the effect of emotionally hefty stand-up, or cycling.
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🎦 Opus (2025). It’s not about the permissively licensed audio codec. One of John Malkovich’s character’s sobriquets is “the wizard of wiggle”, which is hardly “the nabob of sob” is it. A highlight was perhaps the nicest-looking bread I’ve ever seen on screen.
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Anora (2024) was certainly the best film I saw all week.
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📺 I had no complaints about the last episode of Severance.