Reply to: test please delete

[NickFitz]

Tonight’s holiday motion picture premiere was Obsession (2025) in which a young man wishes on a lucky charm for the girl on whom he has a crush to fall in love with him. All a bit monkey’s paw, you might think, and so it proves. Many denizens of Bluesky have been going on about how good this one is since it first appeared, and in this case the crowd has wisdom. Excellent film, though not for the weak of stomach at times

Incidentally, and I may have mentioned this before, but although W. W. Jacobs wrote the very fine macabre short story The Monkey’s Paw, he was mainly a writer of humorous tales. It must be over twenty years ago that, seeing him described on Wikipedia as a writer of horror stories, I set to work to correct this misapprehension; and to this day, a good chunk of the stuff I wrote that evening before going down the pub is still there

Unlike the pub

Onwards to a couple more episodes of Dark Matter, which is either slightly less confusing now or I’m getting used to it. It’s still very confusing, but in a good (if confusing) way

Goodnight all

[WTFH]

It’s a tad breezy down here.

[NickFitz]

Tea has been an M&S slow cooked lamb shank in a Middle Eastern coconut-based sauce, with rice. Very nice, though I think I prefer my lamb shanks with a red wine-based sauce

[NickFitz]

Is that the Indian one with the private key of '4'?

Yes, that’s the one! Though I believe they also used 56 and 115, so it isn’t all bad

Unsurprisingly, there was an update to a Python library that checks the validity of certificates and sits somewhere in the dependency chain of our project

[NickFitz]

That’s me done with ClientGov for ten days!

[ladymuck]

Lunch has been a couple of leftover roast chicken thighs

Among today’s tech debt tasks, there’s an automated pull request for an update to a dependency to fix the root certificate issue that would have been the biggest IT security news of the week if the PHP thing hadn’t dropped at the same time. It seems like only yesterday that I was reading about it for the first time, probably because it was

Is that the Indian one with the private key of '4'?

[NickFitz]

Lunch has been a couple of leftover roast chicken thighs

Among today’s tech debt tasks, there’s an automated pull request for an update to a dependency to fix the root certificate issue that would have been the biggest IT security news of the week if the PHP thing hadn’t dropped at the same time. It seems like only yesterday that I was reading about it for the first time, probably because it was

[WTFH]

Morning all
CBS, etc.
Woken up early by Max, so we went for a walk in the dark. Need to recharge the head torch I was using - or swap it for a charged one before tomorrow.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

The sky this morning is a mix of cloud and blue patches, with the cloud tending to recede or disperse after overnight rain, leading to sunny spells later before it gets cloudier again in the afternoon. Still not warm at 8°C, which “feels like” 4° because it got a bit windier overnight too; the expected high for the day is 12°. The barometers are up a bit at 993/1001mB

In fact, they may not be up quite that much, as last night I finally got around to swapping the SIM card over and so I am now fully migrated to the iPhone 18 Pro Max, and I noticed that its barometer reads a touch higher - I can’t remember by how much, but it was a bit less than a millibar

The 12 Pro Max will, I think, spend its retirement hooked up to the Mac Mini as a way of testing any iPhone apps I write - though it’ll be obsolete for that too in a year or so. I originally got it because my iPhone 6 was too old to run the Covid tracing app

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Thursday.

Damp.

Grey.

Rosy fingered dawn.

Torrential overnight.

15.4 deg in here, 14.8 in the kitchen, 12.5 in the leanto, 9 out the back.

1003 mBar, 29.62 in Hg, 752.3 Torr, 14.55 psi, (up from 1000 last night), 65% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 7th of April 2020 between 10:25 and 10:51, in popped Brillo, BR14, NF, and me.

Entertainment: Out of Town with Jack Hargreaves: Stow horse fair. Gypsy Flash Carts. John Picket wagon builder & painter. Sean Martin General Dealer.

Was woken about 03:00 by demented beeping from the batphone: Western Power Distribution had deemed this A Good Time to send a text about the incoming storm and possible power disruption. Whilst staggering around in the dark I managed to plug the phone charger in the wrong way round so the phone wasn't charging. Turned the fecker off in the end to get some peace. I hate things that go beep randomly at night.

Walk (unabbreviated, towpath) walked in the sunshine.

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: Thing about the Cambridge 5. dashcam bollox S5 E9.

Alaska Homestead Rescue. Tennessee, patron state of shooting stuff. They were all vegetarians so no talk of offing feral pigs in this one. Two RVs, one of which looked very like Walter White's RV in BB. . Dug a well. Dug well again. Dug well third time which finally seemed to work. Tree greenhouse: i.e. a hexagonal greenhouse about 6 feet up a large tree. Seemed to work. A mobile chicken coop. 3 vegetable raised beds to go with the mobile chicken coop. I dozed off about halfway since it was not particularly inneresting other than the chest development of one of the ladies. .

Tea: beans on toast: to avoid replication of the haematoma the crusts were cut off & the toast wasn't particularly toasty. What it is to get old & increasingly fecked up. Entertainment: PM with more about that scion of good behaviour who seems to like to indulge in sodomy without consent. FFS.

Bab5 S5 E10 "A tragedy of telepaths". Oh dear, the teeps are getting uppity again & pissing everyone off. Bester's back.

Sky Arts: Classic Movies: Bill & Ted's excellent adventure. No Bonnie Greer though her chair is still there. .

Dream Car Fixers: Reliant Scimitar GTE. Is that the one with the Essex V6? Yup.

Well that brought back some memories of humping engines & gearboxes about. They complained that the autobox was heavier than the manual gearbox: I'm not sure there was much difference from what I can recall. Both took some doing when you're working on your own. I even changed an automatic to a manual which was a minor triumph in itself, another of my bodgeit specials, taking out the pedal box & putting in a manual pedal box, plus drilling a hole in the bulkhead for the clutch cable. Feck, it's nearly 40 years ago.

Oh, the autobox was a lot heavier than the manual, assuming they've got the right boxes.

In other news it's been raining since about 18:00 or so and it seems to be getting heavier.

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Cloudy and damp from overnight rain. Currently 9 degrees ('feels like' 7) with a high of 14 expected. Sun set to make an appearance from mid-morning. Barometer up to 1007 mBar.

Sunrise 07:38; Sunset 17:54 BST

Back at Heathrow T4 this morning, in the Air France lounge. HWMBO and I are off to Bologna for a long weekend, it being our 10 year anniversary.

I omitted to mention that the winter duvet (10 tog) was put on when making the bed yesterday.

[NickFitz]

This evening’s viewing was the rest of the episode of A House Through Time I started watching last night

Tonight, I finished reading Chindit in which they were stuck for ages in terrible conditions, essentially living in a swamp during the rains, with more and more ending up sick or injured. By the time they were brought back to India, there were six officers and 120 other ranks considered still fit for duty out of 2,500 - and that doesn’t even count all the ones who’d been evacuated earlier, or had died

Thursday tomorrow!

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

I had some good sausages to cook for tea so, feeling adventurous, I made a sausages and potato wedges traybake with a paprika and honey glaze, based on a recipe off Waitrose’s website. It was very nice but as and when I make something similar again, I think I’ll tweak the recipe with a few more spices; a bit of tomato purée would probably help too

[NickFitz]

That’s Wednesday done. Just got to get through Tech Debt Thursday tomorrow and I’m off for a week, meaning ten days!

It’s rained a lot here, sometimes quite heavily, but has stopped for now. The magpies are taking advantage of this, assiduously working their way over the lawn a few yards apart, pecking at whatever it is they peck at

[xoggoth]

Group walk this morning. Took a lady neighbour there, we might go to a local music thing this weekend. Anuvver lady in me life?