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Week 283: Expensive plastic
The small crack in the shelf in the fridge door has graduated to a big crack, and a shard even fell out. I looked up the spare part – it’s just a squared-off polystyrene bucket – and it costs £82! That’s one eighth of the cost of the entire fridge! Unfortunately, the extended warranty on the fridge was only for three years, and this is closer to five years old.
However, I did find the same part for sale from France, with free delivery, taxes paid, for half the price, so I’ve ordered it from there. It takes a little longer, but I’ll put up with a few days’ delay to get it for half the price.
I found a mechanical keyboard for £5.50 in a charity shop, and, after a quick search to see whether it’s possible to flash new firmware (yes), bought it. It didn’t work as a keyboard when I plugged it in, but I could see it was recognised as a USB device. I compiled QMK and flashed it, and it worked! I think it was just set up as a Bluetooth keyboard before; flashing it made it work as a USB keyboard by default. It’s also supposed to have some LED backlighting, but they’re off. I’m happy with that: I don’t need flashing coloured lights on a keyboard.
It’s fun to be able to tweak my own keyboard layout; I’ve set it up so that Tab works as a layer key when held down, and Tab-u gives me an underscore, the key that I least enjoy having to stretch to reach on a normal keyboard (and which I have to type a lot while programming).
Friday was overcast, so the sun didn’t get a chance to heat up the loft, and I finally had the opportunity to spend the day up there sorting it out. I found a couple of things I had been looking for, cleared out a lot of old cardboard boxes, and brought down some things to donate to the charity shop.
Now there’s more space up there, I was able to move some things from my office that I don’t need so frequently.
In the loft, I came across my old point-and-shoot camera, a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX01 with a 6 megapixel CCD sensor from 2006. I looked through the pictures on it and was impressed with how good a job it did. The photos really look like photos somehow. Here are a couple from 2013, taken in San Francisco in the now-defunct United States of America:
San Francisco Chinatown
Looking downhill towards the Bay Bridge
Also on the 2 GB SD card: a photo of someone I used to work with, who is now worth $3.9 billion (I checked). It’s a reminder of a very different time in my life, that could have gone in another direction entirely. But I’m glad my life turned out how it has, even if I do have to pay a mortgage.
The rubberised coating on the camera had gone the way of all such rubberised coatings, but with a bit of effort and some methylated spirits I was able to remove it to leave a slightly shinier but no-longer-sticky device. I bought a new battery (the old one no longer held a charge) and I’m going to take the camera out for a photo walk some time soon.
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Week 282: Frankenpad
I attended a Prokofiev concert. Not that one, although Gabriel Prokofiev is the Russian composer’s grandson. Even though I used to go to gigs at Iklectik regularly when they were in Waterloo, since they’ve moved into their new venue in the same building I work in I hadn’t been until last week. It doesn’t help that their website’s “What’s on” page still says that they’re updating it; I only knew about the event from a poster.
Week 281: Melting
Hello from London on a 34 C bank holiday Monday. I’ve lived in hotter places; I’ve even lived in places that were both hotter and more humid; yet the UK remains one of the worst places to be in a heatwave. There’s little air conditioning, and British houses lack the thermal mass to regulate the temperature downwards. All they can do is keep the sun off, at best.
Git push directly to another workstation
You don’t need GitHub to work with git on multiple computers, and you don’t even need a git remote set up to do it.
Sometimes I’m working on some code that is incomplete, or is speculative, or there’s another reason that I don’t want to push it to the remote branch yet, but I need to swap from my desktop to my laptop or vice versa.
Git is a distributed version control system, but I think people often forget what that implies. A git repository can be as simple as a directory available via
ssh, which means that your other computer is already a git repository as long as you cansshto it.Week 280: Six days’ notice
Amazon sent me an email on 14 May to tell me that my old Kindle would be completely unsupported “Starting May 20, 2026” – i.e. six days later.
Older entries can be found in the archive.