Toby Atkin-Wright

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.