Weeknotes 135

Season Two of Jon Ronson’s Things Fell Apart is now available and is as interesting as ever.

Ever since the first screeches of my 56k modem I’ve craved faster Internet access. I waited and waited for ADSL to become available, and when it finally was, it was a genuine revelation. I don’t think any speed could ever beat that feeling now.

The 70Mbps broadband I have at the moment has been fast enough to get work done, and reliable. I’ve flirted with the idea of changing to Virgin where I can currently get 1Gbps, but I’ve been waiting. Waiting to see if local altnets can change the game with symmetrical connections – as fast up as down. And so I’ve watched with interest over the last 5 or 6 years as my house has fallen in and out of “planned” network building areas.

Then FTTP was announced. I was “planned again. And then I wasn’t (not sure what happened there). Well, now that I’m moving, guess what’s happened? Yep, FTTP is here and I can now get 1.6Gbps down – a speed that teenage me would have lost his mind over.

What would you even do with 1.6Gbps? Listen, I would find a way to use it – have some ambition, Bill.

The only real option at the new house is 1Gbps Virgin, which is great, but the lack of alternative is worrying. A different altnet, CityFibre, brings the potential for even faster broadband to that area – maybe up to 2.5Gbps symmetrical 🤯

It’s in the “planning” stages.

Zed is now open source

This blog post on getting heat pump installed did not encourage me to get one.

Boilers tend to ‘just work’, but with heat pumps, things like flow temperatures, the width of your pipework, radiator size, heat stores and buffers, and peak demand at design temperature can make the difference between cheap clean heat and a system that struggles. No consumer should have to understand any of this, and the fact that I felt I had to is testament to how immature the market is.

One day maybe.

David Mills, inventor of NTP has died.

RIP the man who was the absolute incarnation of XKCD’s “one random dude holding up the entire internet”. You may never have heard of David Mills, but your entire goddamn world depends on what he did.

Via @memory@blank.org.

The Post Office Horizon scandal continues and I listened to a good interview with Nick Wallis who was involved in early reporting (and still is).

I Made This by John Siracusa.

I’m not 100% against AI, because I think it can be useful, but I am definitely wary of what is to come.

Your Apple TV is a Subnet Router for Tailscale now! – this is very cool. Allow access to local devices which can’t install Tailscale themselves via your Apple TV.

The toner ran out on my Brother HL-L2350DW printer. In order to figure out how to change over the replacement I had to watch a YouTube video to and do a Google search 😆

As part of the home buying process I was required to fill out “source of funds” checks this week.

It requires you to connect your back accounts via Open Banking and it will, it says, find your “income” and flag all the transactions as such. Except for it doesn’t, obviously. It just shows you a load of transactions it thinks are income and then you need to manually change all the incorrect guesses.

What a farce.

Avoiding another Horizon scandal by Mike Bracken, former Chief Digital Officer in charge of GDS.

But it is important to stress - this is not simply an IT failure or one rogue supplier. This is an organisational and systemic failure. One where senior officials and politicians did not get it right in ways that are predictable and repeated.

Kagi are giving away a t-shirt and sticker pack to their first 20,000 paying members.

Now, you may ask, why did we go through all this trouble and allocate nearly a third of our investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts?

I’m totally up for stickers.

Episode two of True Detective season 4 is still on-point 👌