Weeknotes 319

More rain, more daylight. Saw a nice rainbow from the office. Serenity now.

Three gyms as per.

I finished Revelation Space. It was entertaining after a slow start, and the story’s scope became gratifyingly epic towards the end even as its mechanics went a bit off the rails. (██ █████ ██ aren’t enough to explain why everyone suddenly became so committed to ███ ██ ████, but I suppose the plot needs what the plot needs.)

I plan to continue with Redemption Ark but after 22 hours I need a break from the Shrouders first, so I’m looking forward to starting Shroud next week as a refreshing change of pace.

Yesterday I had another nice lunch at Corner Deli during a brief gap in the rain. It almost felt like spring.

My tiny BILRESA three-packs arrived in a massive box.

The colours are nice, and the dual button remote is (as expected) a better product than the scroll wheel on account of being simpler and more straightforwardly useful for turning things on and off. I’m really impressed by how easy the Matter setup is with these; I paired a couple of dual button remotes directly in the Home app and got them working without needing to open the IKEA app at all. I’ll likely buy another three-pack once they start stocking them reliably.

I haven’t been tempted to set up another scroll wheel yet. The ability to switch between three modes feels like too much of a hassle to actually be convenient. Maybe I’ll ignore that feature entirely, configure one as a single-purpose dimmer and see whether I end up using it.

But overall: these work great, Matter compatibility is a big improvement so far, AAA batteries are much less of a faff (and hopefully last longer?) than button cells, and I’m amazed by how cheap they are. I hope the stock situation improves — the ALPSTUGA air quality sensor has remained stubbornly unavailable — and that their other Matter products coming later this year are up to the same standard.

I bought Gris on sale because I loved Neva and was hoping it would be more of the same. Unfortunately, because Gris came first, it’s more like a less refined version of the same. It’s very beautiful but unfortunately doesn’t develop its ideas quickly enough, so ultimately I found it a bit too boring and turned it off.

As if by magic, Neva: Prologue comes out next week, so I’ll play that instead.

Last week’s Zendesk spam was quickly followed by a second wave of identical apology spam from most of the affected companies:

We understand you may have received an unexpected email from our customer support system confirming that a ticket has been created in your name. 

Please rest assured that this was not caused by a breach of our systems.

Unnecessarily annoying, but it all appears to have stopped now.

Nothing else to report. Bye!