Weeknotes 2026 W33: Continued scorching

Quick bits

• The scorching of the Earth continues.

• My godfather and uncle passed away earlier. I have said it before, but it remains true: fuck cancer. I have made a donation in his name to Cancer Research UK.

• I¹¹1 Along with everyone else in the UK, presumably. I’m not that special.  got a national emergency alert for a high risk of wildfires. Not just that — I got the emergency alert three times, each one hour apart.

  Perhaps controversial, but I don’t believe that a national emergency alert is the right channel for notifying about a high risk of wildfires. In my mind, a national emergency channel is for imminent danger that requires immediate action. I dismissed all three notifications without taking action. Maybe what’s needed here is a channel for high-importance notifications that aren’t emergencies; I really do not want my phone to repeatedly jump-scare me with a maximum-volume siren sound for something that does not apply to me.

• I had a TfL failed revenue inspection — a fine, in other words — which I disputed and got a refund for. Victory! I believe I forgot to tap out at a DLR station, and my tap-in at the same station a while later got misinterpreted as a tap-out.

• I gave myself a haircut. At some point, I’d like to have a professional take care of my hair, but at least I’m more or less presentable once again.²²2 One less excuse for not leaving the house! “But it’s too hot” remains a valid excuse (and the contrarian in me wants the heat wave to last forever). 

• At long last, I have functioning Internet:³³3 Is “Internet” still supposed to be written with a capital I? It is a proper noun and there is only one Internet. I myself am not consistent in how I spell internet. (See what I did there?) In any case, the capitalisation is it’s divisive.  I’ve got my hands on a 4G router, and while it’s a far cry from the fibre internet I had in Berlin, it’s most certainly functional. I could get fibre internet here in London too… but not without a 24-month contract (eek).

  I am so glad that unlimited 4G SIM data plans exist. Back when I lived in Belgium, there was a monthly cap on cable modem data. I remember having only 100 GB of data a month!

• My search for a new flat continues, but I’m in no rush. I also still am not sure in what area exactly I’d like to live, and not sure what kind of house/flat, either. I’m taking the time to figure that out.

• I’m on the hunt for a writing desk. I don’t want to use my dining table for that. It is not its purpose, and I dislike how my dining table ends up permanently cluttered with writing material.

  Writing desks went out of fashion many decades ago, unfortunately. It’s hard to find one that is functional and fits aesthetically, too. I’ve set up alerts on The Saleroom and Easy Live Auction, in any case.

• I spotted an Egyptian goose in Wapping!

  

  It must be pointed out that Egyptian geese (Alopochen aegyptiaca) are neither true geese (a member of neither the Anser nor the Branta genera), nor Egyptian (they don’t have passports and don’t give a shit about national borders).

Flashbacks

This week, for no particular reason, I was remembering some happenings from long ago. Why? No clue. But they are too interesting not to share:

• Back when I was in late high school or early university, I was deejaying at a birthday party, where the DJ table was set up right next to a dartboard. Not an ideal setup, especially as I couldn’t leave the DJ table without being in the line of fire! As the night progressed and the dart players got progressively drunker, I resorted to crawling under the DJ table, for safety. Very elegant.

• A few years ago, I was on my way back home from acting class on my Brompton bike, through cold rain in the the winter darkness, when my shoelace got caught in the chain. My foot locked up right as I was attempting to avoid a Berlin police car parked on the cycle path, and I crashed onto the ground. In my attempt to untangle my shoe from the chain, the chain came off.

  With so many things going wrong at the same time, I instinctively just… gave up, and laid there for a while, in the icy rain, certainly aware of my discomforts, but simultaneously entirely unbothered by them.

  The entire time, the policewoman in her (illegally parked) car spent her time texting and ignored me (and my troubles) completely. Berlin police: always classy and helpful.

Eclipse

I didn’t get any eclipse glasses, but I walked around the area, vicariously enjoying other people’s experiences. Many people didn’t seem to care at all. A few fools were staring into the sun, squinting (“don’t worry, I’ll be fine”). A stranger let me borrow his eclipse glasses, so I got to see the red sliver of a luminous crescent after all.

During an eclipse, the shadows change drastically. Here’s a particularly nice example of some komorebi (木漏れ日) projected onto a near-blank wall:

On my eclipse Photography walk, I got distracted by cats, who cared neither about the eclipse nor about me. Classic cat behaviour.

A small regret is not taking my proper camera (the Sony α6400) with me. The photos I took are all taken with my iPhone 14 Pro, whose built-in camera appears to be constructed from sadness.

Thinking about ddenv 2.0

ddenv, as much as I love it, has an enormous limitation in that it is deeply opinionated on how certain goals are achieved. Have a look at this simple ddenv.yaml file:

up:
  - ruby
  - bundle

Achieving the second goal — bundle — is pretty straightforwardly only achievable by running bundle. But for the first goal, there are a dozen choices (off the top of my head: mise, asdf, ruby-build, ruby-install, Docker) each with their own configuration.

There is a similar issue with PostgreSQL:

up:
  - postgresql:
      version: 17
      env:
        DB_URL: "postgres://{{ .User }}:{{ .Password }}@{{ .Host }}:{{ .Port }}/mydb"

There are different ways of installing and managing PostgreSQL. ddenv installs PostgreSQL using Homebrew and manages it through brew services. But it would be entirely reasonable to want to use a Docker container for PostgreSQL instead.

There might be a neat solution that would not need ddenv.yaml to change: a file like ~/.config/ddenv/backends.yaml could specify the preferred backend. Here’s an example of such a file:

backends:
  ruby: homebrew
  node: mise
  postgresql: docker

This file would not be committed to a repository, and instead live as per-user configuration. After all, two developers working on the project will both need Ruby installed, but they might differ in how they want Ruby installed.

With this backends.yaml approach, the ruby goal would then find the most appropriate backend and delegate the Ruby installation to it.

This might not require much work at all, and would make ddenv much more flexible, and also cross-platform, and it would allow integrating with existing tools like mise and asdf.

Entertainment

• I’ve attempted to watch Doctor Who series 13⁴⁴4 Doctor Who: Series 13, written by Chris Chibnall (BBC Studios, BBC Wales, Bad Wolf, 2021).  but it just can’t keep my attention. It’s a mess; it tries too much and can’t keep things aligned. It also does not seem to innovate.

• The Incident at Galley House⁵⁵5 The Incident at Galley House (William Rous, Evil Trout Inc., 2026), published by Evil Trout Inc.  is spooky. I’m maybe halfway through? It’s really hard to tell! I love innovative games like these — it reminds me of TR-49⁶⁶6 TR-49 (inkle Ltd, 2026), published by inkle Ltd.  in that way.

Links

• OpenDAW: Ooh! I don’t intend to use it, but I imagine it could certainly be relevant to some of the people I know.

• Ordinary Abundance (Jordan Dworkin): A good reminder of how good we’ve actually got it.

• Fastmail offers EU data region: Oh, I missed this announcement! I wrote to Fastmail a while back about an EU (or at least non-US) data region, so this is very welcome news.

Tech links:

• lychee: A nice link checker! Something that belongs in my toolbox. (via Christian Tietze)