w/e 2025-01-12

Hello, to-doers.

A productive week, as it should be after all the blogging about productivity apps etc.

I assigned tasks to days. I only left tasks sitting in “Today” if I was going to continue working on them the next day. I ended the week with nothing urgent hanging over the weekend.

I did get a bit sidetracked when my monthly review of my various sites/projects involved me being unable to update my django-spectator code (used for tracking my reading and going to events). Something I’d changed on my laptop at some point, I don’t know.

So I decided to pull a future task forward and update how I package that project for release on PyPI. I’ll be modern, I casually thought, and move the configs from the tox.ini file and the setup.py file into the pyproject.toml file.

It took me two or three afternoons to get everything working. I don’t know why I frequently feel like I’m doing something no one has done before. So often I can’t find one example of exactly what I’m trying to do. Examples for different parts of it, sure, but putting it all together? Nope. So often I’m on my own, presumably doing it entirely wrong, not actually breaking innovative ground.

Three times I reached the point of writing a question on Stack Overflow – which I only do when I’ve exhausted every other option. And each time, after writing the question with a minimal example of the problem, I only then realised what the solution was.

So I eventually stumbled my way through to get it working. I still don’t understand how Python packaging works, only that I have found one of the seemingly infinite number of ways to, hopefully, successfully publish a package.

§ Last week I realised my mobile contract was coming to an end so I went on Three’s website to see what confusion they could offer me. I decided I probably didn’t need “unlimited” data and that 15GB/month would be plenty – twice as much as I’ve needed in my most online month over the past year.

The website said it would cost £10, compared to the £18 I have been paying. But when I added that plan to the basked it appeared as £15. I persuaded the online chat to let me chat to a real person to try and sort it out.

While trying to make the real person understand the problem, something that one of us was failing miserably at, I looked up which MVNOs use Three’s network. because it’s the least bad where we live. I went on to Smarty’s website and found a similar plan – except with 50GB/month for the first 15 months – for only £8.

I managed to sign up for that before Three’s real person had understood the problem.

This week I got the SIM, and my number was ported over. It’s quite a relief to be away from Three’s terrible website and always painful customer service. Smarty’s site and app are nice and simple and, so far, appear to work.

Obviously, Smarty is owned by Three. Capitalism!

§ I bought a headphone stand this week for the big headphones that I wear at my desk. It seems like a silly, poncey, audiophile thing to have and yet, for £19, it feels so nice to put headphones on a stand rather than down on the desk. A daft little thing but surprisingly pleasing. I can pretend I’m an audiophile now. That particular one – Avantree HS102 – is nicely thought through and simple.

§ We had our own little film festival this week, going to Hereford’s Courtyard for three consecutive nights. We saw:

• All We Imagine As Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024). It was good but I’m not sure why I’ve seen people raving about it quite so much. I feel like I’m missing something.
• Small Things Like These (Tim Mielants, 2024). I probably wouldn’t have gone to this on my own but it was very good. I wanted it to continue beyond the end, but I’m not sure where it could end, other than at least 15 years later.
• Conclave (Edward Berger, 2024). Also very good. Not entirely convincing but fun and interesting nevertheless, and it’s always nice to watch Ralph Fiennes looking concerned.

§ I finished reading Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead this week which was excellent. A furniture salesman in 1960s Harlem on the edges of the criminal underworld. Well written and a gripping read, unusually for books I read. More of that, Phil.

§ I’m now back in Essex. The weather in Herefordshire recently was beautiful – a chill mist, low sunlight, scenery fading into the distance, snow on the hilltops, daffodils poking through frozen grass.

Have a good week. Maybe even a productive one.