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2026-04-29

Week 277: An annual inconvenience

I gave blood on Wednesday. I usually go to Stratford, but they’re currently refurbishing the donor centre, and the temporary replacement (a van in a car park) has far fewer slots. And, of course, it’s a van in a car park, which is not such a pleasant experience. But on Tuesday, as I was looking for slots for Friday, I noticed that there was a session in Peckham the very next day, only a minute’s walk away from where I rent a desk. I booked in for mid-afternoon and spent a relaxing hour reading (A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, loved it) while I waited, donated, and ate crisps afterwards. Maybe it doesn’t sound like a relaxing afternoon break to most people, but it was for me.

I started trying to tidy up my office at home, which has been a disaster since I dumped everything in there after our house was renovated. There’s a long way to go, but it’s a start.

Everybody loves the London Marathon except for those of us for whom it’s an annual inconvenience. We don’t live near the marathon; no, we’re surrounded on three sides by it. You can’t cross the road; you can’t take the tube without queueing for hours to get into the station; there are crowds hooting and hollering everywhere. And, even worse, apparently they want to make it a two-day event next year.

At least we have a few underpasses and bridges that cross the route near here, so we were able to escape to the riverward side of the route and cycle along the Thames to the South Bank.

At the Hayward Gallery, we met a friend and visited a combined double exhibition.

Yin Xiuzhen’s installation was charming, and varied in scale from tiny and whimsical cities stitched from old cloths to a vast heart in which a dozen people can sit.

Pictures can’t capture the sheer amount of thread in Chiharu Shiota’s installation. It’s like several cat’s cradles, each the size of a room, and had me puzzled just trying to work out how you’d even construct such a thing.

If you time your visit well, I hear that you can even see performers get in and out of the beds through some invisible gaps in the webs. (We didn’t.)

I’ll be playing sanshin and guitar and singing with London Okinawa Sanshinkai at Yokimono Market in Stratford this coming Saturday. We’re doing two half-hour sets, one at 12:00 and the other at 15:30.

Fun fact: the Japanese word for set in the context of a musical performance is ステージ (sutēji), from English stage. And stage shouldn’t be mixed up with スタジオ (sutajio) which means studio. It can get confusing in a multilingual setting.

I slightly regret missing Haggis Ruby. It would have been an excellent excuse for a trip to Glasgow, and I was tempted.

However, I’m avoiding conferences this year because I can’t face the prospect of being trapped in a room having AI explained at me. I would be very keen to attend a 100% Generative AI Free conference somewhere reachable by train, if anyone wants to promise such a thing.

Slow Horses is good, isn’t it? We’re very late to the party, but that means we won’t run out for a while. I have a lot or respect for Gary Oldman for making himself quite so repulsive in it: I fully believe that that shirt wasn’t washed at any point during the making of the first two seasons.

I have a prediction: some time between now and the local elections on 7 May, BBC News will run another set of migrant-bashing headlines like their recent “undercover investigation” into immigration lawyers.

Links:

• The people do not yearn for automation. “But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! The entire human experience cannot be captured in a database. That’s the limit of software brain. That’s why people hate AI. It flattens them.”
• Do I belong in tech anymore? “Ironically, what I’ve gained from AI is a deeper appreciation for human communication, in all its messy imperfection.” This rings true to me too.
• parli_protect for Drupal. “The Parliament Protect module will protect your website from UK Parliament. There are two options for protection: A silly form asking for far too much personal information or a simple message to be displayed.” There’s a convenient list of IP addresses in the source if you too want to inconvenience the MPs responsible for the Online Safety Act.
• Tunera Type Foundry offers attractive and usable free SIL-licensed fonts.
• Nebula Sans is Nebula’s new brand typeface, based on Source Sans, free under the SIL Open Font License.
• How To Create A Responsive Navigation Menu Using Only CSS.
• FontCrafter: Create Your Handwriting Font for Free. Print page, write letters, scan, get font.
• On the acceptance of GenAI. “If any of these facts are new to you, you haven’t been doing your due diligence.”
• Debunking zswap and zram myths. “If in doubt, prefer to use zswap. Only use zram if you have a highly specific reason to.”
• Piper is a “fast and local neural text-to-speech engine that embeds espeak-ng for phonemization.”
• The Necessary Pain Involved in Blogging (if you want your work to be preserved beyond your lifespan).
• File Wizard is a “self-hosted, browser-based utility for file conversion, OCR and audio transcription.” Can be run via a Docker image.
• Document Converter Pro is “A powerful, Docker-based document and image conversion application with a modern web interface built using Streamlit. Convert between multiple document and image formats with ease, including batch processing capabilities.”
• Modern Frontend Complexity: essential or accidental? Presents an alternative: “We can utilize HTMX, HTML Web Components and a templating language to build websites and apps in a way much more aligned with how the browser works - without sacrificing user experience, complex features or developer experience.”
• DSPi “transforms a Raspberry Pi Pico or other RP2040-based board into a very competent and inexpensive little digital audio processor.”
• whosthere is a LAN discovery tool with an interactive TUI.
• Ultramaster KR-106 is an open source Roland Juno 106 emulator.
• On the abdication of Chief Prophet Tim Cook. John Ternus has been appointed as Steve’s representative on Earth.