Weeknotes 257

I’m running on fumes a bit. One more week til my Christmas break.

Last Sunday I made triple quantities of Ruby Tandoh’s hot and sour red lentil soup to stock my fridge with meals. It’s one of my favourite recipes ever because it’s so simple to make — although producing 3¾ litres of boiling water is easier said than done — yet so satisfying to eat. Now that I’ve had it for several lunches and dinners in a row, I’m ready to try something else for a bit.

I finished season three of Industry. It was more of the same: the drama robots manufactured drama by hooting back and forth, calling each other narcissistic or broken or talentless out of nowhere, sometimes crying, dying and/or bonking unexpectedly, with nothing signifying or connecting to anything, while the pound shop cover version of The Social Network soundtrack played in the background. It’s badly written and not very interesting; I thought Harper was the protagonist but by the end they’d almost completely forgotten about her. I can’t imagine what the fourth season is going to consist of.

Finishing Industry meant I had time to go back to Silo’s current season and watch episode two, which made the very weird decision to not have Rebecca Ferguson in it at all. I’m nervous that the frustrating pace of the first season is already being recreated. After spending an entire season trapped in a single location, it’d be really nice to see something different.

Also, Tim Robbins is now much older than he was in The Hudsucker Proxy, which doesn’t make any sense because that film came out like… five years ago? Ten at most?

Speaking of contemporary box office disappointments, I rewatched Office Space. It holds up well and doesn’t feel 25 years old to me, aside from the note in the credits saying “this film was cut entirely on a computer” and the way the line “what if we’re still doing this when we’re fifty?” hits different.

As someone who was once very invested in understanding every detail of React, I started reading about the new features in React v19 but had to give up when I realised it’s become a lost cause. So it goes.

I don’t lug a laptop around with me, so when I’m not at home I write my weeknotes by sshing into my Raspberry Pi from my iPad and running Vim & Jekyll there. This weekend I suddenly couldn’t connect, and when I checked Tailscale’s admin console I discovered the Pi’s key had expired a few days ago.

I could’ve just set the key to never expire but I thought I’d follow Tailscale’s instructions for renewing an expired key. Those instructions say the process “currently involves bringing down the Tailscale connection” and that didn’t sound so bad — I don’t mind if my ssh connection drops during the process of renewing the key. But, as I then immediately learned, that message actually means “you’ll lock yourself out permanently”, because tailscale up --force-reauth revokes the old key before beginning the reauthorisation process, leaving no way to connect remotely. While you do have to add --accept-risk=lose-ssh to make that happen, maybe --accept-risk=break-everything would be more appropriate. What a naff user experience.

So, anyway, I had to write all this from a GitHub Codespace. Pretty undignified but it’s impressive that it works at all.

One more week.