Weeknotes 162

The days are getting longer, with the distinct feeling that the rate of change is itself increasing. 🌱

I caught my first cold since 2019. Retro!

The sore throat and cough were only a very mild inconvenience but enough to stop me streaming and I had to cancel social plans because that’s how The After works. I’m feeling better now.

I went for an MRI to investigate pain in my hands. It was pretty psychologically intense. I had to lay motionless in a narrow tube for about twenty minutes wearing ear protectors while a powerful electromagnet thudded and buzzed around me, and then as a treat they injected me with contrast dye for the last few minutes.

It was all comfortable enough but it’s still a very unusual, science-fiction-in-real-life experience. In a weak satire of modern society, the hardest part was staying completely still with nothing to occupy my frayed attention. I kept myself entertained by trying to cobble together an understanding of how an MRI scanner works: something about radio waves? hydrogen?? Without the ability to fact-check any of my vague science thoughts it might as well have been powered by a portal to hell.

When I got home I filled in a boring form to ask the hospital to send me a copy of the DICOM image data, so if nothing else I might get a 3D picture of my hands out of this adventure.

I will never stop being grateful that healthcare is free at the point of delivery.

My needlessly complex UniFi Dream Machine stopped emitting wifi and I couldn’t face the prospect of arguing with nerds online about how to make wifi start coming out of it again so I’ve decommissioned it with a sigh of relief. Not worth it. (Nightmare machine.)

I bought a well-reviewed Linksys thing in a sale to replace it, but that also turned out to be too complicated and couldn’t reliably provide wifi faster than about 10 Mbps, so I’m returning that and exchanging it for a well-reviewed TP-Link thing. I might have to keep doing this until I accidentally land on a thing that works.

I don’t understand why the entire product category of wifi routers is as bad as it is. There’s so much choice but it’s way too hard to pick a default sensible thing that’ll just work. I’d rather use the wifi built into my broadband modem but that’s even worse. What do normal people do?

While I was already faffing about with wires I decided to replace my discontinued TRÅDFRI smart home hub with its DIRIGERA successor. This went very smoothly and the new hub is better in every way: it’s physically smaller and nicer, the process of pairing with bulbs and outlets is significantly easier without being silly, and the new iOS app feels way more polished.

I’m glad to be rid of the various remotes that the old system needed. At first it seemed that controlling the lights with a dedicated physical object was going to be more convenient than using an app or a voice assistant, but in practice the remotes’ batteries run out so quickly that they’re dead most of the time and I’ve learned to not bother trying to use them. Now they can go in a junk drawer where they belong and I can stick to relying on my phone.

The HomeKit integration already feels faster and more stable than before so I’m curious to see what (if anything) changes when they roll out Matter support later this year.

Unlike the Shep, Look mum no hands! had survived the pandemic and looked like it was doing fine the last few times I ate there, but no, it closed down this week. It’s very sad to see it go and I’ll miss meeting friends there for breakfast. Er, where now?

In other hyperlocal economic tragedy news, Unto This Last also closed recently after a last-ditch effort to save themselves from the spiralling cost of raw materials. Such a shame.

The performance of Alice-themed actor Murray Bartlett in The Last of Us encouraged me to finally watch season one of The White Lotus, which was nicely made and mildly entertaining but not that good. The excellent music does more of the dramatic heavy lifting than the writing, the satire’s a bit smug & shallow and doesn’t engage with the substance of the hot takes it trots out, and the narrative’s so flimsy that there are long stretches where no plot happens at all. At least Jennifer Coolidge is always great value, and there’s a good bit with a poo.

I also watched Our Flag Means Death and enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s not amazing but it’s pretty fun and likeable which I think is all they were going for. It probably helped that I didn’t have any expectations. Nice to see Rory Kinnear’s faces again.

If anyone in the world can get me to read about large language models, it’s best living sci-fi author Ted Chiang. His New Yorker article does an excellent job of explaining what’s going on and — from my perspective — why it’s not particularly interesting.