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2025-10-29

Week 251: Fixed

The washing machine repair was booked for Wednesday with the company to which LG contract out warranty jobs. They said they give a window the day before, and they did: 07:00–11:00. I’m not a morning person, there are very few occasions when I’m up before seven, and I did not relish having to get up at a stupid hour.

The engineer came about 08:20, replaced the control board, and was on his way in half an hour. Then I took a nap. I woke up with the sun streaming through the window, feeling a lot better.

My big computer hasn’t been working well for a while. I used to have an Nvidia graphics card, but dealing with Nvidia’s crappy proprietary Linux drivers was a hassle. I sold that and replaced it with an AMD card, and everything was fine for a while.

However, after a while, it stopped booting, and the only way I could get it to work was to use an old kernel. The sound went weird sometimes, for reasons I couldn’t divine.

In case my installation was in a weird state, I reinstalled Debian 13. That’s not a big hassle – I have /home on a separate logical volume – but I still couldn’t get it to boot unless I stuck with a low resolution VESA graphics mode. 1600 by 1200 isn’t so bad, but when you have an ultra-wide monitor it’s almost unreadable. And now I didn’t even have an old kernel to fall back on.

I ordered a new graphics card, using a much newer AMD architecture. It’s way more capable (and thus more expensive) than I need, but graphics cards seem to exist in a bimodal distribution with no real middle ground between ancient and modern. I’m not a gamer, and I don’t have any real desire to run large language models, but I wanted something that was supported by the mainline kernel.

Anyway, it works, and now I don’t have to think about it any more.

I borrowed a stepladder off a neighbour and fixed the porch gutter. The clip holding up one end had come off in strong wind a while back, which meant that it hung down, which meant that it filled up with gunk, which made it hang down more.

It took me ten minutes to clean out the aforementioned gunk, drill new holes, and screw the clip in place.

On Thursday evening we watched Hamlet at the National Theatre, directed by Robert Hastie and starring Hiran Abeysekera. I’ve seen a lot of productions of Hamlet, in multiple languages. This wasn’t my favourite, but it was perhaps the most accessible in terms of how it was clear what was going on. I enjoyed the staging of the ghost and of the play-within-a-play. The thoroughly mad Hamlet is charming, and Francesca Mills is a phenomenal Ophelia and perhaps the real star.

We experienced more culture on Saturday at Musica Antica’s La Caxa di Vitio e Virtù, a recreation of the kind of musical soirée that one might have experienced at the house of a 16th century Venetian sex worker. In a church. They would once have been widespread, but we don’t see so many singing lutenists these days; Kristiina Watt did both, at the same time, flawlessly.

The clocks have gone back to winter time and I hate it. What’s the use of daylight in the morning? I’m only sleeping or getting up or eating breakfast. It’s all a plot by morning people, who are awful.

Must be time to switch on the SAD light.

A few links for the week:

• chd is a Unicode-aware hexdump utility.
• This website has no class. You don’t have to use class to match elements for styling.
• Generative AI is a societal disaster. “In short, they’re sacrificing the wellbeing of their citizens and arguably the foundations of a democratic society for a chance at short-term investment.”
• OpenAI Says Hundreds of Thousands of ChatGPT Users May Show Signs of Manic or Psychotic Crisis Every Week. The massive plagiarism machine can also feed your delusions.
• I Made a Binary Search Tool for Videos To Embarrass British Transport Police Into Doing Their Job.