Toby Atkin-Wright

Would you accept an offer?

2021-07-09T13:36:32Z

Every time — every time — that I list things for auction on eBay, I get queries from prospective purchasers asking if I’d accept an offer for items.

No. I put the items up for auction.

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GB News

2021-06-16T10:42:21Z

It is interesting to see a news channel launch with a different style and a different target audience. I think it is probably a good thing to have some variety of presentational styles in our news output, and GB News is clearly aimed at people who feel ill-served by the other major news programmes. I haven’t watched much of their live output, but I’ve seen plenty of clips shared on social media so far this week.

I quite like the idea of the hosts expressing their personal views, particularly where they don’t coincide with one another, and therefore don’t parrot a channel-wide editorial line.

Initial impressions are that the sets, lighting, sound, and camera work all look cheap. So cheap that some of the interviewees have better setups at home. Maybe it is an intentional choice, to distinguish themselves from the high-tech well-lit professional Sky News and BBC News. Or maybe they didn’t have much money and launched in a hurry.

I have also learned that I largely agree with whatever Andrew Neil says, and I disagree with almost everything that Dan Wootton says. Opinions on other hosts will develop over time.

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Three is too many

2021-05-31T10:48:07Z

Back in February I reworked my desk at home to have three monitors on a Duronic DM653 desk mount. Previously I had two monitors on my Mac, but on their own built-in stands. I liked the idea of using a combined mount, so the monitors would “float” over the desk, and let me store things under them. The Mac is currently on my desk having previously been mounted on the wall; I’m still thinking about whether to mount it back on the wall or under the desk.

Since then, I’ve been slowing coming to the conclusion that three monitors is just too many to be useful. In practice, I mostly use the middle and right screens. Two is still significantly more useful than one, particularly when screen-sharing for work. I share the right-hand screen, and find that much handier than sharing individual apps.

Currently I have three 24" 1080p screens. I reckon two 27" 4k screens might be my preferred solution. But that is somewhere in the future.

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Barnard Castle

2021-05-26T13:26:00Z

I used to drive around a fair bit. To Dundee on a weekly basis. Around town. For shopping. Occasional trips further afield. A couple of thousand miles per year.

In the past year I’ve driven the car a handful of times, the furthest distance probably being 1½ miles to the St Andrews hospital. At most, tens of miles since March last year.

This summer we are thinking of driving down to my parents in Nottingham, and then on to Salcombe in Devon for a family holiday. I now find the idea of driving that kind of distance extremely daunting, and increasingly find the idea of making a short trip to a nearby town to “test my vision” quite a reasonable thing to do.

I’m really not sure that I can safely spend hours driving, concentrating at the road ahead, since I am so out of practice.

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Wonky bread has arrived

2021-05-25T13:35:51Z

Our first Earth & Wheat box arrived today. I’ve cleared space in our freezer, though I think I’ll need to rebag some of the items into meal-size portions to make them easier to get at once frozen.

Some Scotch pancakes, white wraps, wholemeal wraps, panini, and plenty of crumpets.

https://checkout.earthandwheat.com/?r=456653&s=14279

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Wonky bread

2021-05-24T12:30:33Z

qidane pointed me towards Earth & Wheat, who do a weekly subscription of 2kg of “wonky” bread. I thought it sounded interesting so have signed up — we’ll see what turns up in a couple of days.

Earth & Wheat

It is fresh bread that otherwise would have been discarded. Makes one wonder why bakeries are making so much wonky bread in the first place.

Anyway, less waste seems a solid goal. And “wonky” is a good word.

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Questions

2021-05-23T15:42:02Z

I made the mistake of winning the work quiz night last month, so I’m asking the questions for the next one, later this week. It is one way of giving other people a chance of winning.

So I’ve spent the weekend writing questions. Hope they are sane. Just need to work out how to load them into the Kahoot system that we use for the quizzes.

Turns out that Beth’s parents’ evening is also on Thursday, so it will be a busy evening. I’ve asked her to book slots with her teachers between 4 and 5.30pm, so it should be all done before the quiz starts.

Her school use Google Meet, which is my least favourite of the mainstream video call programmes. Meet is the only one that leads to audible fan noise from my Mac. I’ve learned not to use Safari with Meet cos the sound skips. Just a terrible experience all round.

Edge it will be. I refuse to use Chrome, on the basis that one shouldn’t use “free” products from companies that make most of their money from advertising.

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Second dose

2021-05-20T22:07:26Z

kateaw and I received our second doses of the Pfizer vaccine first thing on Monday morning. We were lined up, well spread out, in one of the corridors of the St Andrews Community Hospital just after 8am.

The first dose had left me feeling dozy and my arm sore for three days. This time the effects were a bit more pronounced; I was sleepy all day Tuesday and it has felt like every muscle has been aching. Still, could be worse. The crib sheet tells me that a rare side effect is “temporary one-sided facial drooping”.

I took advantage of the relaxation of the rules this week to be a little more confident about going out. The only indoors places I’ve been to in the past 14 months have been for medical appointments, but I felt very daring and adventurous this week as I made a brief trip to Morrisons, and then a briefer trip to M&S for food shops. What luxury to be able to shop in person rather than ordering online. End-of-aisle specials! Yellow-label bargains!

I might go shopping again. Later in the summer, maybe.

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Migrations

2021-05-20T18:42:11Z

O2 to Giffgaff. Having been with O2 since the day that the original iPhone was released, my annoyance with them has built to such a level that I thought I’d give Giffgaff a go instead. I know they come from the same place, but their website exudes honesty whereas O2’s just feels a bit weaselly.

Ubuntu to Alpine. At work most of our team’s Docker containers are running Ubuntu-based images, but as our projects grow and as we think about permanently-remote work on variable quality internet, it becomes obvious that bandwidth will be more important in builds and deployments. Alpine images are oh so much smaller. Our Ruby images seem to migrate reasonably, whereas some Python libraries have been a right pain. In general, some things are just tricky to build on Alpine. But I think it is worth it.

Phusion Passenger to… Puma? I’ve been running internal Rails-based apps on Passenger for many years, but what once felt friendly and self-configuring on physical servers now feels clunky and painful in Docker. So I think it is time to go for a simpler serving tech.

Oh, and our local chip shop Dino’s has started doing mushy peas again. Why would mushy peas be a casualty of the lockdown? Maybe we’ll never know. But they are back now, so I had chips and peas for tea.

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Pizza speculation

2021-05-19T16:44:20Z

Last week I ordered pizza for tea, and got £10 worth of Bitcoin with the order.

A week later, it is now worth £6.74. I think there is a lesson to be learned.

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Command-line 2FA?

2021-05-19T13:01:11Z

I’ve been using Authy as a code generator for some time now. The key feature for me is that it has native apps for my Mac and phone and iPad, and syncs data between them, so I’m never scrabbling to find another device when I need to enter a code.

But to automate connections, I’d love to find a solution that allows command-line access to codes, rather than relying on a UI. Has anyone come across a code generator that works from the command-line?

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Hung parliaments

2017-06-09T14:56:37Z

Why are hung parliaments greeted with the expectation that the large parties will do a deal with whatever small parties will make up their numbers? This puts undue power in the hands of fringe political movements (and associated pork-barrel politics).

Wouldn’t it make more sense for there to be an expectation that the two largest parties should do a deal, and hence find a compromise that matches the largest number of voters. We’ve had a National Government work for us before.

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Harmony

2017-06-06T07:34:04Z

We use a Harmony universal remote to control the hifi and TV at home. But recently the button to turn the volume up has stopped working.

I found the amp remote, put some batteries in it, and now I can turn the volume up. But the volume down button on the amp remote has stopped working.

Currently we need to use two remotes to control the volume; one to turn it up and the other to turn it down. So much for making life easier.

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4 ✖️ 25 minutes

2017-05-10T22:06:18Z

Watching Doctor Who last weekend, it dawned on me that the fundamental problem with modern Who is not the nonsensical stories, the feeble characterisation of the Doctor, or the emotional outpourings. The problem is the 45-minute episode length. Barely has a story started before it is ending, and there is no space for middle, for development, for subplots, or for a change of pace.

The typical length of a classic Who story was four 25-minute episodes, giving a total story time of just over 90 minutes. Which is a far more natural length for visual drama.

Having watched the first four seasons of Elementary earlier this year, I came to the same conclusion. It would have been a significantly better television programme if there were half the number of episodes, and each was double the length.

I think the same goes for most televisual drama; we are stuck in the wrong format. The 100-minute length of television films is far better for story telling than the 45-minute length of episodic television.

Of course, in the world of Doctor Who we are spoiled with Big Finish creating a steady stream audio plays, many at the optimal length of between 90 and 120 minutes.

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Private delivery of NHS services

2017-04-24T08:23:57Z

My most frequent interactions with the NHS are collecting repeat prescriptions, for me and for the rest of the family. For the last few years I’ve used the pharmacy at our local Morrisons supermarket; it is friendly, efficient, has good parking, and most importantly, is open long hours. It cannot be overstated how important it is that pharmacy services are available in weekday evenings, and seven days a week.

The existing pharmacies in town — Boots, Lloyds — seem happy to collaborate rather than compete, and still close at 5.30pm. It took a new entrant to the market to add a better level of service.

This is private-sector delivery of NHS services, free at the point of delivery, and providing a better service that anything that has gone before it.

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Switch

2017-04-18T20:38:28Z

Friend me on Nintendo Switch! My friend code is SW-5497-5999-8077

So far I mostly have friends from the office, but I must know more Switch owners than that.

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Political evil

2017-04-18T18:16:53Z

Two of the most poisonous political philosophies of the past hundred years are socialism and nationalism. I find it disturbing that many of our mainstream political parties can be identified, to some extent, as socialists (Labour, Green) or nationalists (SNP, UKIP).

I could never consider voting for such a party, although I’m sure that most of their politicians, members, and voters are well-meaning and don’t subscribe to the nastier side of their parties’ political heritage.

The only mainstream political parties without the taint of political evil are the Tories or the Lib Dems. Both, I suspect, will do very well in the forthcoming election.

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Television debates

2017-04-18T16:30:06Z

Televised leaders’ debates are bad, because they focus attention on party leaders rather than local candidates.

They’re bad because different parties stand in different parts of the UK.

They’re bad because there isn’t time for policy detail, and challenging questions.

They’re bad because they’re terrible, unwatchable, television.

So I’d be happy if they don’t occur, and wouldn’t watch them if they did.

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Rogue One

2017-04-10T21:34:29Z

Well, that was a fine film.

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Cold calls

2017-04-10T14:33:15Z

A Birmingham number — 0121 014 2875 — just called me, and told me that they were contacting me because of my recent road accident. This happens far too often, despite my number being on do-not-call lists. And of course I haven’t had a recent accident.

As usual, I told the caller that they should be ashamed of themselves, calling a number that they shouldn’t and telling lies. I told her how upsetting it would be to be called like this if we’d had an accident. And I told her that she should be ashamed to do such a job, and should reevaluate her life.

We got rid of our house phone a while ago, when I worked out that we were making and receiving approximately zero calls on it. Now I’m wondering whether the phone functionality of my mobile is worth the bother; I receive far more junk calls than real calls. Almost all of my real communication is done through FaceTime, Skype, or Slack.

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Telegraph ads

2017-04-07T16:33:10Z

I subscribe to the Daily Telegraph web site. I’m a long-term reader of the paper, and although I haven’t picked up a physical copy in years, and it is now a feeble shadow of its former self, I still find enough premium content for the subscription to be good value. And I think it is important to pay content creators and service providers.

But they’ve started adding pop-ups telling me to turn off my ad blocker. I find it hard to describe how annoying this is. I’m paying them money, and yet they are nagging me to let them show me adverts that I don’t want to see. There is something very wrong with the world. And with companies driven by advertising.

(On a more positive note, I’m hoping that YouTube’s changes to disallow smaller channels from joining their advertising programme will mean that many fewer of the videos I watch online will have ads.)

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LiveJournal

2017-04-06T22:25:08Z

Back in June 2003, I created a LiveJournal account. Since then, after peaks and long, low, troughs, I feel that I want to fight against the pervasive feeling of disappointment, and I want LiveJournal to be the special thing that it used to be. Though I blog infrequently, it still feels like it should be home.

In June 2005 I paid $300 for two permanent accounts, one for me and one for kateaw, and I have no regrets. I was happy to support LJ, and over the past twelve years, I’m sure we have received good value from that purchase.

A combination of the long, slow decline in LJ, together with event calamities like we’re seeing this week, will serve to drive more and more people from LJ, and perhaps into using their Dreamwidth accounts, but I fear that we won’t see much more evidence of an active online community.

But let’s be hopeful. Maybe something good will come from this.

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Irn Bru

2009-12-14T20:24:03Z

It was Beth’s last full day of school today before her Christmas holidays. The children watched some films, including The Snowman. Beth lay in bed this evening singing “Walking in the Air” to herself. When I asked her if she enjoyed the film, she told me that it was sad at the end and this version didn’t have Irn Bru in it.

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The Dam Busters

2009-12-04T22:58:09Z

With the news of the death of Richard Todd, we took the opportunity to re-watch his finest film this evening: The Dam Busters.

It is a film that is always a pleasure to watch; the performances are uniformly excellent, its connection with history (and the resources provided for the filming) could never be repeated, and the emotional power of the sense of loss expressed in the final scenes is astonishing. There is no celebration of victory; only an acknowledgement of the importance and sadness of sacrifice.

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Christmas music #4 — Phil Spector

2009-12-04T22:45:11Z

One of the all-time great Christmas albums is A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector. It fits into that rare sub-genre of Christmas music by a convicted murderer.

Featuring his regular artists, the album showcases Spector’s famous “wall of sound” production technique. Designed to reproduce effectively on AM wireless (in mono), it was an innovative attempt to make the most of the limited quality of the equipment that was typically used to play pop music in the early 1960s. To modern ears it can sound dense and heavily compressed, but the arrangements and production set standards that have been much copied since.

And it is quite Christmassy.

http://open.spotify.com/album/4usxfUImNER8bHZANHcd0J

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