Weeknotes 300

It’s October. Love it. Bought a pumpkin today.

Gym? Three.

The beeping continued throughout Sunday night and I started to question my grasp of reality, like a man in a film taking place in a universe where the laws of nature are clearly different from ours but none of his beliefs or decisions take that into account.

Although I’d already used my ears and brain to conclusively determine that the sound wasn’t coming from the mains-powered smoke alarms, several readers got in touch to tell me that even a mains-powered alarm contains a battery and will beep if it’s about to die, which planted enough of a seed of doubt that I felt I had no option but to act on it.

I don’t know anything about acoustics really. Maybe — maybe? — the beep was somehow being projected upwards into the ceiling cavity, and somehow bouncing around, and somehow emerging elsewhere before reaching my lying ears, taunting me from afar like a shit ventriloquist. Seemed pretty unlikely but I couldn‘t rule it out.

In the evening I pulled the alarms out of the ceiling so they were dangling by a wire. Unsurprisingly for me, but disappointingly for science, the sound which had been audibly not coming from them turned out to not in fact be coming from them. “Worth a shot,” I thought cheerfully, as a bead of sweat rolled down my plaster-dusted brow.

I was out of ideas. The high-pitched and intermittent nature of the sound made it hard to triangulate, but my best guess was that it was coming from inside the walls or flue or roof, the anti-theft alarm on a bottle of Amontillado bricked up a decade ago by a spiteful builder. I’d exhausted my ears’ native capabilities so in desperation I installed Extra Ears on my phone, added a mechanic’s stethoscope to my Amazon basket, and started mentally exploring the multiple choices of how best to knock a neat hole in the fabric of my home once I’d pinpointed exactly where to do it.

I worked from home on Monday while being interrupted by a beep every thirty seconds. Around bedtime it suddenly stopped and I haven’t heard it since. That’s the end of that then. Another great example of how some problems just solve themselves if you ignore them for long enough.

On Tuesday I had lunch with Alice at Koya, coincidentally a year after the last time we did exactly the same thing. What isn’t a coincidence is that I had the kinoko atsu-atsu again.

I also had a phone appointment with a physio who said my wrist pain is probably caused by compression of the ulnar nerve and that it usually takes six weeks in a splint for that to get better. It’s been three weeks so I suppose I’ll keep wearing it and see what happens.

That night my Raspberry Pi 5 crashed and wouldn’t boot back up so I had to reformat its SD card and start again from scratch. I’m pretty sure this annoying interruption has happened with every Pi I’ve ever owned even though I always buy the official cards. This time anylinuxfs made it much less inconvenient by giving me a way to mount the card’s ext4 filesystem on my Mac to copy off my home directory before I wiped it. Magic.

Ghost of Yōtei arrived on Thursday and I took Friday off work to play it.

I’m loving it so far. More than anything it’s a breathtakingly beautiful depiction of nature; the lighting, colours and animation look incredible in ray-traced 60 FPS. The gameplay feels like a welcome refinement of Ghost of Tsushima, I always much prefer a female protagonist — Erika Ishii is great in it — and I’m starting to get into the story too.

I had tickets for Saturday’s performance of ROHTKO but, in a truly adult piece of behaviour, decided not to use them cos I didn’t fancy it. The Barbican gave me a refund so I’m calling that a clear victory.

Instead I popped to Maltby Street Market on my bike and nearly got defeated by Storm Amy as it whistled through the canyon of Bishopsgate in the opposite direction.

Alright, look, I don’t expect anyone to care about this, but it’s a big deal for my specific combination of psychological problems so I’m going to write it down for myself.

Decades ago I created an iTunes Store account for buying music and films, and at some later point I created a separate MobileMe account for syncing contacts and calendars, and over time both of those accounts evolved into fully-fledged Apple IDs (now called Apple Accounts) and I got stuck with them.

That’s left me in a situation where I have to rely upon macOS & iOS’s relatively obscure support for signing in with two different accounts simultaneously: one for media & purchases, the other for iCloud. It isn’t a huge inconvenience most of the time but I keep forgetting I’m in this wonky state and it trips me up every time I set up a new device or reinstall an old one. It also just makes everything a bit more difficult and confusing to have two sets of credentials to maintain and two different usernames showing up in unexpected places in the settings UI, a tiny yet constant tax on my ability to understand what the hell is happening in my digital life.

Basically I irrationally hate it to the extent that I’d daydreamed about completely abandoning the first account and paying whatever it cost to rebuy everything on the second just so I didn’t have to think about it any more.

So I was delighted back in February when it became possible to migrate purchases between accounts, then crestfallen when I realised the feature wasn’t available in the UK. What I should’ve done was keep checking to see whether that limitation still existed, but it took until today for me to realise that it had been lifted a few weeks later.

I went through the migration today and… everything seems to have worked. Phew. Good riddance, ancient second account! You will absolutely not be missed.

Exorcising both that account and the beeping has produced a state of mental tranquility I didn’t think was achievable. I doubt I’ll have a more satisfying week for a while. A good start to the three hundreds.