📚Read about Mary Toft last night. Glad I had eaten my dinner long before. It seems the desire to gain notoriety and fame, and the ability to do pretty much anything in order to get it, stretches back a long, long way.

📺 Very much enjoyed Gods Of Snooker. I have so many happy memories of watching snooker on TV with my dad in the ‘80s, wondering how he always seemed to know what shot the players would go for next. I was once off sick from school and watched the entire Mita World Masters too.

Bubble reality check.

I didn’t pay a lot of money for an iPhone only to have the Music app nag me to subscribe to more services every flipping time I open it. For years.

📚 Finished reading Personal Kanban by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry. Disappointed by this; I was hoping for a book that assumed some existing Kanban knowledge and gave insights into using it for personal productivity, but it was more of an introduction to the theory.

🎶 It’s Album Club time again…

📚 Finished reading The Long Distance Cyclists’ Handbook (2nd ed.) by Simon Doughty. A very useful guide, albeit a little dated in places. I searched the author’s name and was so sorry to read that he suffered awful injuries when a drunk motorist hit him on his bike in 2006.

🚲 Found something to do one sunny Saturday this summer. I’ve plotted a similar route a couple of times at my desk, but with no knowledge of the best roads to take. The fabulous folks at the Tring Audaxers have plotted a route with plenty of coffee stops along the way.

🎬 Chaos Walking (2021) is a travesty. The trilogy by Patrick Ness is some of the best fiction I have ever read; to say I was disappointed by the film is a massive understatement. The plot barely hangs together without the broader context of the later books. Terrible ending.

🎶 Here’s a mixtape* of stuff I’ve been enjoying over the past year or so. Female vocalists all the way!

(*ok, yes, it’s a playlist.)

Very sorry to hear that Nuzzel is going away following Twitter’s acquisition of their parent company. The app has long been one of the main ways I use Twitter, scanning the most-shared links from the people I follow, and the people that they follow, along with their comments.

🎙 Great idea at the end of this week’s Risky Business podcast. Get software to ship with a ‘bill of behaviours’ manifest so that you know what it will try to connect to and why. So simple, you wonder why nobody has thought of it before.

Troy Hunt was given the Coinhive cryptominer domain, and has done some interesting work to repurpose it for good. Websites or that embedded a Coinhive miner in your browser now instead show a modal dialogue box to warn the user, and send them to where they can get more info.

🎙 I love this quote I heard on episode two of the Agile Engineering Podcast:

If you want to go fast go alone
If you want to go far go together

Why are Microsoft Word table defaults so poorly chosen?

• Rows break across pages
• If your design has a header, it doesn’t repeat on each page
• Headers get detached from the first data row if there is too much content above

I’ve spent so many hours over the years fixing tables.

🚲 Signed up for my first Audax ride, the Mid Bucks Vale of Evesham 300 in July. I’m putting it out there now that if the weather is terrible, I reserve the right not to set out! Hoping for a glorious day in the saddle, and a sense of achievement at the end of it.

First dose! Incredible operation from start to finish, with so many volunteers. To think of the scale of this effort going on up and down the country is mind-boggling. I’m so grateful. 🙏

Enjoying myself at Album Club #122.

🚲 Just found out about the St George’s Sportive happening this Sunday, starting in Princes Risborough. Signed up. Looking forward to riding in a group event again, it’s been so long.