Saturday 18 July A beautiful, sunny Saturday morning but instead of sitting in a field in Hook Norton, drinking real ale, laughing, chatting rubbish and analysing the football season with my mates, instead we enjoyed a long overdue visit from my wife’s hairdresser. She is self-employed and a mobile hairdresser. We opened up the garage door and prepared chairs, black bin liners (to avoid using her capes) and an extension cable for her hairdryer and clippers....

I am not sure I like this increasing but irritating use of the ‘More’ or ‘Sensitive Content’ tag on Mastodon. From a cursory glance, I can’t even see how to add it from the Web interface. I’m not sure whether it’s enforced by the Mastodon instance or actively selected by the user. I presume it’s the latter. Microblogging to supposed to be short, snappy and spontaneous. I understand why sensitive media content might merit another key click (to protect the children) but if you’re posting about politics, I’d really rather see all the content in one fell swoop and then I would feel free to choose to ignore it....

Five years ago, I purchased a Roberts Digital radio for the kitchen. Mainly to listen to the radio but also this device could play music from Spotify, a USB stick or act as a UPNP client. As I already had the Plex Media Server set up which had a DLNA option, this looked attractive. The setup worked pretty well apart from one minor glitch. And, like a dripping water tap, or the endless, harrowing screams of a baby played on a tight loop in an American interrogation facility, any minor technical glitch can’t simply be ignored....

I anxiously coaxed my wife out of the door to her work trying not to raise her suspicions. My stomach was fluttering as I had an important early morning meeting. To fully prepare, first, I chose my mask. I had two options; a flesh coloured creation that resembled a one bosom bra or a more sinister black model. I tried the pale pink mask but as it, err, masked my nose, mouth and chin, it made me resemble a burns victim who had endured time consuming and expensive reconstructive surgery which had either failed or was still ongoing....

There’s nothing worse than yet another lockdown Netflix list. Sons Of Anarchy Heard about this series from Linux Outlaws many years ago. Jax Teller is a very handsome man. I am convinced he is the bastard son of Kurt Cobain and Brad Pitt. A decent series about biker gangs in California that inevitably features gratuitous violence and goes through peaks and troughs (the season when they went to Ireland was very weak)....

Today is the 18 May 2020 and marks the 40th anniversary of when Ian Curtis took his own life so I was pleased to see that Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris are remembering the event - ‘Moving through Silence’ I grew up in South Manchester and it’s hard to describe how important music and football were during my formative years. I never saw Joy Division play live but some of my schoolmates did (‘He did this weird dance’)....

Sometimes, I spend a lot of time on technical tasks that are of seemingly questionable benefit or limited practical use. For example, I remember converting the format of my 977 blog posts between markup languages and migrating the content to esoteric blogging platforms (more then once). I also wasted an unbelievable amount of time meticulously editing the meta data (YAML front-matter) and writing scripts simply to preserve Disqus comments after a change to the permalink structure....

‘Mum, mum. Please calm…’ ‘You don’t understand. I just want to be able to see the grandchildren. I just want to hug them, to hold them, to cuddle them’. ‘Yes, Mum. I realise that but this won’t…’ ‘Is it too much to ask to sit out on the patio, drawing and colouring with them ? Is it too much to want to spoil them with toys and treats ? Like any proud Grandma ?...

Frustratingly, I can’t locate it now but I recently saw a post on Mastodon from someone who had great difficulty creating a new file in his ‘Documents’ folder. This struck me as very amusing but I think the point he was trying to express was that his ‘Documents’ directory is a disorganised, unstructured, cluttered mess of files so he is incredibly reluctant and can barely bring himself to compound the issue further by typing ‘vi linux-notes....

Wife: ‘Jane told me yesterday she just found it all quite overwhelming last week and just sat down and had a little cry’. Me: ‘There’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve think we’ve all had wobbly moments. I certainly know I have.’ Wife: ‘Have you ?’ Me: ‘Yeah, it was a couple of weeks ago now. I heard yet another radio interview with a lady who’d lost her Mum, she couldn’t visit her in hospital and now her Dad is left grieving on his own....