Then my internet connection developed 50% packet loss somewhere on the ISP’s side of things. I’m not going to name the big UK DSL provider I’m using, because that would limit my ability to say that their service is a sack of cack and they should be ashamed of themselves for letting it develop such an egregious fault without it being rectified all day.

Long story short, I ended up making an impulse purchase to keep me going until they finally get FTTP down my street, whenever that might be.

Distasteful though I consider giving money to Mr Musk, Starlink does work remarkably well even if it’s just propped up on your patio. Well over 100Mbps downstream, maybe 13 up, proper native IPv6 and equipment that can be put in “bypass mode” if you just want to use it as a modem with your existing network.

Hopefully I won’t need to shell out for it for very long, and I can re-sell the kit when I move on, although the fact that you are only signed up on a month by month basis might well mean this sticks around as a backup option even after I’ve got fibre.

Update No need to spend even more money on the robustly priced official mounts, the cheap and cheerful ones off Amazon do the job:

Actually writing code with it is definitely a skill in its own right, and not one learned overnight, but personally I’m finding it a breath of fresh air as it cuts out the bit I was never very patient with - trawling through API documentation and Stack Overflow trying to work out what prior art existed for what I’m trying to do. If it’s quicker to verify the solution than come up with it yourself, then using Generative AI to write code is a sure-fire productivity boost.

My next venture, sure to be written up here, is to go properly “agentic” and try and get it running my part of the village magazine for me. Don’t worry, it won’t be running amok without human verification of the actions it’s proposing to take, but I fancy my chances of cutting four hours a month down to about 15 minutes, and it’s a nice low-stakes test bed for doing more elsewhere later.

And although the communications were poor from start to finish, the system did get there in the end (in my opinion). I was even awarded compensation - although given this is only paid to me when the offender pays the court, I’m not spending it quite yet.

Much like my brief experience of jury service in 2024, the whole thing convinced me that our justice system is hopelessly inefficient - whether the root cause is not enough money or something else, it’s hard to say, but it felt like a large part of the problem.

I feel an e-mail to my MP coming on.

The price (thanks TrainSplit) was good, under £50 return is hard to argue with given the current price of petrol. Somewhat as expected, travelling on the evening before a bank holiday was an overcrowded nightmare - although I did at least manage to evict the wrongful occupant of my reserved seat.

Coming back the Tuesday after Easter was … fine … apart from a 20 minute delay. Could be worse, and I’ll give the train a few more second chances.

Just this morning, using a nice new dock at a relative’s house, the monitor plugged into it kept flickering. Ah, maybe that monitor I bought during the first lockdown (six years ago!!) on eBay isn’t up to much now? NOPE. Reconnect the HDMI directly into the laptop and the problem disappears. And no, it’s not the dock, other laptops work through it just fine.

A search of the internet suggests I’m not alone, and I will be throwing my weight behind the idea of jumping ship to another vendor.

You’ll have to check back next week to see if John Lewis manage to repair it under warranty or end up sending me a brand new one (the 24 month warranty is why you buy these things on the high street), but as you can imagine, I was … displeased.

I ended up pulling an un-remarkable Acer Chromebook out of the pile of old gear in my office; this was a church purchase that had hardly been used by anyone, including me.

Somewhat to my surprise, it’s very usable as a primary system. ChromeOS even has a WSL-alike these days, 1password’s QR code based setup of a new system was a delight, and other than video editing, I can get basically everything I need out of this thing.

It also has USB-C ports on both the left and the right - what a concept! Other laptop manufacturers take note.

Late breaking update according to John Lewis’s sub-contracted repairer’s report, “software” was replaced and the laptop is on its way back to me. The IR receiver was right when tested, which is impressive as it doesn’t have one. It’s almost as though a box-ticking exercise by a bunch of jobsworths has taken place!

Out in Wales last weekend visiting a friend, I was admiring their electronic butter dish. This maintains a consistent temperature and means your butter is spreadable all year round.

An indulgence, for sure, but also an excellent idea. I added it to my mental list of things I could justify buying one day in 20 years when I’ve paid off my mortgage. The inventor must have a patent on it, because there’s no sign of cheap clones being available: you have to go directly to the source.

Seventy-two hours later, the Premium Bonds dropped £50 in my lap, and I thought to myself … I know what I’ve seen recently for that price …

It’s too soon to say whether the maintenance needed (blowing dust out of the fan) will become a drag, but I can confirm that putting a block of Anchor into it and setting the knob to about the 2/3 position does an excellent job.

One could almost justify this as a health-related purchase, since properly spreadable butter should put an end to having oversized lumps of it on toast and sandwiches.

I’ve somewhat fallen out of love with the Amazon Echo ecosystem lately. The withdrawal of APIs for third party to do list apps was a particular kick in the teeth, and the Echo Auto is one mid-journey misbehaviour away from being ejected from the car on the Oxford Ring Road.

However, I have stumbled across something which is actually useful.

For many years, one of the Echos on my account was located 140 miles away on a relative’s kitchen counter (for reasons that definitely didn’t involve sharing subscriptions in a non-approved manner). And so I never had the chance to hit the “everywhere” button in apps like Spotify when deciding what device to play music on.

That arrangement has now come to an end, and for the first time the other week, I hit the everywhere button on a podcast.

And it worked! My house is by no means big, and as it turns out, an echo in two rooms upstairs and two downstairs provides pretty good coverage. Crucially, you can wander around the house going about your business while listening to podcasts, radio, etc. without a break in the content or having to carry a phone on speaker round in your pocket.

For sure, I’d put ceiling speakers in if I were refurbishing the place from scratch, but in the absence of that, this is a pretty usable alternative.

I’ve long been skeptical about (Generative) AI, watching with wry detachment as the tidal wave of hype and BS sloshes through every aspect of modern life.

However.

I am starting to see opinions from people who I respect that suggest it has its place, and can be a win for productivity if used responsibly.

With this in mind, and feeling ever shorter of time to get things done in all of my personal, voluntary and professional lives, I decided it was high time to give it a go.

PC Pro magazine published a very well timed group test of different AI providers, and off the back of that, I decided to give Claude a shot.

As regular readers will know, I run an invoicing system for my church. It’s a Python/Django project with around 3,500 lines of code, so it presents an ideal non-trivial test bed to see what Claude can do.

The project also contains a markdown file with my list of features I’d love to have, big and small. And under normal circumstances, making a dent in a list largely untouched since 2019/20 would be an unlikely activity to while away the jet-lagged hours in a hotel room half way across the world.

Claude Code and I knocked more items off that list in an hour than I’d done in five years before that.

I was particularly pleased with the CLAUDE.md file the AI generated to describe the project and guide its work: it provided a summary of the architecture and key choices which reminded me, the original author of the project, of several things I’d decided and promptly forgotten.

It’s not a silver bullet - more like having a pretty capable junior developer. Sometimes it gets things wrong, and you have to tell it to try again and try harder. It worked really well on this project because it’s a relatively small codebase and I have no difficulty in reviewing changes and confirming if they make any sense.

However, in the space of a jet-lagged hour, it cracked performance problems, implemented features, and generally got stuff done which I could have done by hand, given an entire weekend to devote to the cause.

The manner in which it can use tools is especially nifty, e.g. when asking it to make changes to the appearance of a web page, it can fire up a headless browser and “look” at the results of its CSS changes.

Colour me impressed. More to come on this as I push it further.

Had some time to play the tourist today. The book shops in this town are good, but like everything else on this island, expensive.

On the other hand, if the Logos Hope happens to be docked nearby, you too can rediscover the Alex Rider series on the cheap - apparently Anthony Horowitz kept writing them even after I was a teenager.

We had a wander round the historic Royal Navy dockyard - presumably the reason why the British wanted this island in the first place.

I may have bought myself an “I survived the Bermuda Triangle” t-shirt.