Denis Defreyne

Weeknotes 2026 W28: Home troubles

July 6​–​12, 2026

These week­notes are brought to you live1 from the Barbican.

Quick bits

  • For no discernible reason, my to-do list had the item “retractable baguette” on it.

  • I’ve had just about no time to continue with game development. I miss my desk setup.

  • I have totally converted to Actual. I’m not going back to YNAB. I’ve even canceled my subscription!

London bits:

  • London has a remarkably high density of people with Metallica T-shirts.2

  • The taste and especially the smell of the tap water is different in London. I had a similar observation when I moved to Berlin: it took me a year to get used to Berlin’s water.

  • It’s so nice to have English-language book stores in London. In Berlin there were only a handful, and the English-language sections of regular book shops consistently made me sad.

  • I adore Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures in Tate Modern.

  • I paid my TV licence. The licence type says “colour,” because this is the 21st century and colour TV is the norm. (I have never seen a monochrome TV in my life.)

  • I have finally figured out why my ID card hasn’t been working. I need activation codes — that is what error messages like C_FindObjectsInit(session, attributes, attribute_len) returned 0x5 and eid_vwr_p11_read_graph_vers(0) returned 0xffffffff mean. Unfortunately, those activation codes can only be sent to the Belgian embassy in… Berlin.

    The alternative is to register in London the analogue way, by going through the registration process from scratch, filling out a form with questions like “when and where did your parents marry” (even though that information is already in the system), get a passport photo taken, glue it onto that paper form, and then post it by mail. I expected 2026 to be a bit more digital, but alas. It’ll have to wait until I can get my printer set up.

Tech bits:

  • The pv (Pipe Viewer) tool is part of my toolbox, but every time I use it, I think: p⋅V=n⋅R⋅Tp \cdot V = n \cdot R \cdot T. The formula for ideal gasses got stamped into me in high school, and it clearly does not want to leave my brain.

Shower thoughts

  • Many beer drinkers go to hell. But many also go to dunkel.

  • Metal doors: made of metal. Stone doors: made of stone. Fire doors: made of… not fire? Made of literally anything but fire.

Home troubles

All my stuff arrived from Berlin earlier this week. I’ve been spending some time unpacking and sorting through all the things. It’s a lot of work.

The new place is not as large as I thought. It is, in fact, slightly smaller than my place in Berlin, and the floor plan that I got was (to put it generously) misleading. It looked much larger when it was completely empty. Right now I severely lack storage space, and I’m not sure how to fix it just yet. One complication is that some of the walls are sloped, and that prevents me from putting shelves against them.

My fancy dining table made it all the way from Berlin, but needed repairs to one of its legs, which cost me £250. Expensive furniture means expensive repairs. The tabletop needs some maintenance too (cleaning, sanding, and oiling) but that is something I can take care of myself.

Of some of the furniture, some screws are missing. I cannot reassemble my office desk, my clothes ladder, and the last dining chair. The screws have to be somewhere, but I simply cannot find them.

And I’ve still got no internet. I won’t have internet for another week, and I’m still stuck tethering through my phone using 5G. The good news is that it’s just £20 for 100 GB of data — much cheaper than in Berlin. The bad news is that I have no connection inside the house (no EDGE, not even GPRS), so I have to keep my phone outside the house to use it a personal hotspot.

For now, I’m still sleeping on a mattress on the floor. My bed frame is a non-standard UK size, and getting the right mattress will take and money. Besides, I’m not even sure the bedroom is large enough to accommodate my bed properly. I’m not sure what to do yet.

I had to go to IKEA to pick up some essentials that I was missing, and this is the first time I realised how dreadful IKEA is, especially when you’re by yourself. It doesn’t let you quickly get what you need, instead trapping you in a labyrinth where you need to backtrack but can’t. I keep thinking of the remarkably appropriate description “The backrooms, but Swedish”. Confusingly, while I was busy screaming internally, I bumped into a cute couple who were making out in one of the model kitchens — wow do our IKEA experiences differ.

It has been a few days, and I am getting used to the noise of the nearby train line. I can close the window, which makes the noise not too much of an issue, but then it gets quite hot. Fortunately, the bedroom has air conditioning, though! Or rather, there is air conditioning installed… but currently broken. The maintenance people have not been able to fix it yet. There are a few more almost-30°C days that I will have to endure.

I am not having the best week.

  1. By “live” I mean “alive.” I was alive in the Barbican yesterday. Today, I am alive elsewhere. In an undisclosed location! How mysterious. ↩︎

  2. Probably a case of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon at work. ↩︎

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