w/e 2021-02-21
Hello hello.
§ My favourite tune of the week is All My Internet Friends by Amanda French (via Denise) which, given it’s from 2008 and has its own domain name, I’m surprised I haven’t heard before.
But all my internet friends give things away
They just really like to make stuff even when it doesn’t pay
They say, Hey, girl, here’s a picture, here’s a poem too
Here’s a blog post, here’s a podcast
Here’s a song and here’s a lolcat
And an iPhone application all for you
Also this week I listened a lot to Spotify’s Hyperpop playlist which is excellent and also terrible, given that the night after listening to a lot of it, I was half awake most of the night, my head full of nothing but rapid drumbeats and glitchy sounds and processed vocals and all the rest.
§ It was only after spending a lot of time working out how to get Docker and Django running for local development that I stumbled across a repository doing much the same from 2018 by some philgyford guy. Is it too late to get a refund on this brain because it’s apparently incapable of remembering anything useful?
But at least I could spend a few hours updating that minimal 2018 example code and its README with things I’ve learned since in case it’s useful to anyone else. Because what the world needs is yet another slightly different way of setting this stuff up cobbled together by an amateur.
§ Pinboard is encouraging its long-time users to start paying annually, rather than relying on the original one-time fee we paid years ago. Which is fair enough really if it’s still useful.
I still use the site but I was in two minds. If I didn’t want to pay, I’d feel I should stop using it, despite the fee being voluntary. And having written (too much) code to mirror my Pinboard bookmarks to my own site I could easily stop using Pinboard and add links directly to my own site instead.
But I’ve paid for a year to see how I feel about it, and added the archiving and full-text search which I’ve never had before. Maybe knowing that’s there will make me use the site more, and save more things?
§ We had plumbers here for two days this week. They removed the cold-water tank in the loft, the hot-water tank in the kitchen, and the old boiler, and replaced the lot with a single new combi boiler. All with the aim of (a) getting a more powerful shower in the future, and (b) getting all that water out of the potentially-freezing loft.
The only wrinkle was that after the tanks and boiler had been removed, the plumbers discovered the water pressure wasn’t high enough to fill the new boiler. So now, in order to increase the pressure, we have an extra pump that turns on when the water runs, sounding like a small craft gently taking off. On the plus side, both boiler and thermostat are satisfyingly modern, with shiny backlit digital displays. Not internet-connected though. Why would we do that?
Now we have a new boiler, and now that I’ve heard of balancing the heating system from Anna, I’m thinking we should maybe do that, although it sounds like quite a faff. Still, please do join this domestic plumbing weeknotes webring.
§ We’ve watched Hip Hop: The Songs That Shook America which was pretty good. I found the Run DMC and Queen Latifah episodes the most enjoyable. As with almost every music documentary there’s a tendency for those involved to describe events as World Changing but, then, I guess there are many worlds and the events changed theirs.
§ Still no daffodils.