Phil Gyford’s writing

Last time Electromagnetic Field was on, two years ago, I felt a bit bad that I didn’t go given that I would love there to be more events near here that interest me, and this was fairly close. But I don’t like camping and also don’t like driving far (the site is about an hour away from us), so I didn’t go then and, again, this year I didn’t try to get tickets. But at the beginning of this week I saw a post saying there were some people who couldn’t make it selling spare tickets and, this…

I started the summer’s scything this week. It’s the fifth consecutive year we’ve let the lawn grow into a meadow and then I’ve scythed some/all of it over July and August. This year I have a deadline of the end of July to have enough mown to put up a marquee for a birthday party. Jeopardy! These days I’m free of the tyranny of the alarm clock but I tend to wake up early in the summer anyway so I’ve been able to get some scything in before it gets too hot (we’ve had afternoon temperatures up to…

Flickr recently updated their iOS/iPadOS app to version 5 (App Store link) and, while it’s not radically different, for a service whose changes have been incremental over recent years it contains a lot of differences. However I’ve yet to find any official changelog or update information. In the App Store the release notes for last week’s version 5.0.0 are: Flickr is back and better than ever — rebuilt from the ground up with a fresh new look and feel. And for today’s version 5.0.1: Bug fixes…

I completed a thing this week which, these days, feels like a major event. I spent two more days working on the lawn edging which I began a month ago (and continued). Behold, the before and after photos: There’s about 14 metres around the conservatory and down one side of the house and the process was – of course! – harder work and more time-consuming that anticipated. The day after I’d spent one morning sledge-hammering in the remaining half of the 45cm pegs, including a couple of very…

Welcome back. Toe update: two weeks after stubbing my toe it’s still a little painful but gradually less so each day. It was definitely more than a standard stubbing. I’ve been trying not to put too much weight on it, and avoiding any cardio exercises, and skipping things like lunges at the gym that would require bending and weight-bearing. A bit bored of it now. § Early in the week I changed my three main web projects from using pre-commit to prek, a drop-in Rust-based replacement. The only…

The first four days of the week whizzed by, with the gym, parents, and a bit of website admin. I also went for my first ever guitar lesson. I found a guy who teaches about 25 minutes drive from us, crucially on this side of Hereford. So no queues, traffic lights, congestion, etc. to contend with. Only narrow roads, oncoming tractors and, in winter, floods. This was only a quick half-hour getting-to-know-each-other session but he seemed very nice and he presumably approved of me because my first…

My heart predictably sank at the predictable announcement by Kier Starmer that the UK government will ban social media for under-16s. The ban sounds ineffective, imposes restrictions on everyone (providing ID to use social media), and largely lets the big social media companies off the hook for what happens on their services. I a post by Iain Mansfield that lists objections to the ban and sets out his arguments against them. I wanted to clarify some of my thoughts so I’ve taken his structure…

Some progress made this week. § For months, at least, I’ve been putting off updating my three Django websites to use uv to manage their versions of Python and third-party packages. I’ve been using uv for development for ages, and like it a lot, but have never liked doing things on web servers because I don’t understand a lot of it and have no desire to learn more. Every time I thought, “OK, I’ll finally do this!” it was near the end of the day, or the end of the week, and I’d put it off in case…

A cooler, damper, but mostly better week. § We had three men come and replace three radiators with larger ones (the men were also different sizes). This (the radiators) should mean the future heat pump can heat all the rooms despite its lower water temperature. § It seems we’ve reached peak birds-hitting-the-windows season. I assume it’s young birds who haven’t yet learned to look out for conservatory windows. Every day a few will hit the windows. Most either bounce and fly away, or else hit…

I’ve just added a couple of new charts to the self-absorbed Stats section of the site. Both are on the money page, and those will be updated at the end of each year. § First I’ve got one showing how much I’ve spent each year on music over the past 30 years: CDs, downloads, and streaming. Here’s an image of the current state of it: Amount spent on music listening per year This doesn’t include spending in cash, which I didn’t track, and was more common in the early years when buying CDs. I mainly…

We went on a group walk yesterday, not usually my kind of thing – the walking or the grouping – but it wasn’t far and it was a nice day and nice people. But I still tried to avoid talking to anyone; I have nothing to say. I did end up alongside one woman and, after the usual weather chat: Her: What sort of things do you like doing round here? Me: Erm… … Her: Walking? Cycling? … Fishing? Any hobbies? Me: Er… I don’t know. I don’t get out much. In the past I might have tried to justify “making…

The past few days I’ve been listening to Charlotte Cornfield’s recent album, Hurts Like Hell: It hasn’t (yet) grabbed me as much as some earlier ones but I like her tunes and simple stories. § For the first half of the week I was still in Essex making some slow progress on sorting through the old family home. Ahead of time I’d thought that, by the time we left, we might reach the point we’d looked through everything, but I reckoned without the slow process of paperwork. We want to check every…

I arrived in Essex on Friday evening for a few more days of sorting through the old family/parents’ home. We’ve made loads of progress over past months but there is still a daunting amount to do. On Saturday morning Royal Mail collected five boxes – 80kg – of old copies of Renewal, Dissent and The Problems of Communism on their way to the Internet Archive for scanning and storage at some point in the future. Having given several other piles of journals to various archives and libraries, these,…

Two weeks of notes, in the middle of which I went to Glasgow for three nights and then Edinburgh for the same. A “holiday”. I was lucky with the weather and had a good time. I was touristing with my friend J, from Germany, and despite having seen very little of each other over the past 30+ years, we got on fine, saw several sights, drank nice coffees, and ate nice foods. Neither of us had been to Glasgow before, and there: We did the Sightseeing Bus one day which does make you (me) feel like a…

After last week’s “Onward to next week. Nothing can go wrong, nothing.” how did I do? The week didn’t start great but generally, another good one. (Let’s take it as read that I will largely continue to ignore the wider world in these solipsistic weeeknotes right up until the point at which it comes hammering on the doors of me and my loved ones. A stance that would get me pilloried by the righteous strikeforces of Bluesky. But we’re not there, we’re here, and lacing every one of my “What I did…

This week I finished the final little bit (80%) of making PDFs of my mum’s local history books and booklets. It was inevitably more complicated and confusing than I expected so I’m describing what I did in case it helps anyone do something similar, better, in the future. I’m doing all this using macOS. Scanning inner pages I had extra copies of all the books so was able to cut all the pages out, slightly laboriously, using a scalpel and ruler. I could then feed all the inner pages through my…

It’s been a few months since the last post so here are some blogs and newsletters I’ve started following since. Here are the previous posts and here’s my blogroll. I should maybe stop splitting that (and this) into blogs / newsletters because that distinction seems less useful than topics. Blogs Ben Brown – Ben is blogging again! Good stuff. Building Slack – I’m surprised I haven’t mentioned this previously because I’ve been reading it a while. A history of Slack, the app(s) and the company.…

A good week, something I hesitate to say because my mind assumes something good is naturally followed by very bad things. But we must press on regardless. I felt good, busy, keen to get things done, and enjoyed doing them. § Lots of baking this week: a loaf of bread (this one, but 50% whole wheat); a surprise fruitcake while Mary was away, for her birthday later in the week; pizza dough for Friday night pizza; and two more loaves of the same bread. When baking bread by hand (instead of using…

Wales Goes Pop!, Garage shelving, ‘Deadloch’, ‘Minari’ and ‘Project Hail Mary’.

My notes from reading the book.

Spotlight, ‘This Farming Life’, ‘Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man’, ‘Last One Laughing’, ‘High Fidelity’, and ‘Dying for Sex’.

We emptied the beach hut I've been visiting since I was a child.

Birthday, folk night, Arc'teryx repair, Michael Barrymore, new lawnmower, sheeple, why code, ‘Sentimental Value’.