Weeknotes 193

It’s finally, undeniably autumn. There’s already a thick carpet of brown leaves in the park. I felt a bit cold at one point.

There were a couple of brief power cuts this week, and each time I lost the ability to control my IKEA lights via HomeKit, presumably because the various parts of the system came back online in an unhelpful order. On one occasion I wasn’t home so I knew the lights were all switched on — that’s what the DIRIGERA hub is configured to do after a power outage — but without HomeKit control I couldn’t do anything to turn them off remotely.

So I’ve unplugged the hub from its power adapter and moved it to one of the downstream USB ports on the Raspberry Pi 400 sat beside it in the hot cupboard of cursed objects. It turns out that sudo uhubctl -⁠-⁠location 2 -⁠-⁠action cycle will briefly interrupt USB power and thus reboot the hub, which’ll give me a way to recover from this situation without having to come home (or stand up from the sofa) in future.

I watched Cobweb last week because it’s basically spooky season, but I forgot to mention it, so I’ll mention it now.

My expectations were low because the reviews were generally bad (with one notable exception) but I enjoyed it a lot. Its execution is good enough that I didn’t mind it being fairly by-the-numbers. I liked the way it looked, I liked the performances, and… I dunno, it’s just fun and simple like a fairy tale, and appropriately creepy for this time of year. A nice tight 90 minutes that didn’t overstay its welcome.

My attempt to read Wool began promisingly but sputtered out halfway as usual despite its content being unchallenging (versus, say, Authority’s test of patience or Klara and the Sun’s lack of appeal).

One problem I noticed this time is that I find reading to be physically hard work in the evenings; I think my eyesight’s good enough to read clearly, but it definitely feels more difficult when I’m tired.

I’ll probably rebuy it as an ebook so I can switch away from paper to comfortable backlit text when I need to. Or, erm, maybe I’ll get an eye test.

I haven’t warmed to Alan Wake Remastered but, in its defence, at least the subtitles can be made massive.

I watched the first two episodes of The Morning Show’s new season which were absolutely terrible despite the presence of a steamed Hamm. It’s become so bad that I think I’m starting to enjoy it. Delightfully devilish.

On Thursday I got out of the office and sat ostentatiously on a picnic blanket in Elder Gardens for lunch with Murray. This was very nice and only slightly marred by the realisation that I’d let the guy at Merkamo upsell me on a samosa I didn’t really want, like a rube would.

Well done to Alice for five years of weeknotes. Because of how spacetime works, she’s still 69 (not 70) weeks ahead of me, although her 53% lead last July has now narrowed to 36%, so if current trends continue I’ll catch up with her as long as I keep going for another couple of years. That’s just maths.