23 October 2026
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New Ways of Reading

The main Bible app I’ve had on my phone for sometime now is YouVersion. It does give access to many translations and it is free but it has some annoying quirks. I don’t like the way it keeps nagging for reviews and, although for a while I enjoyed the gamified element of seeing how long I could keep a reading streak going, it lost its attraction after it turned out to be easy to lose a long run for no apparent reason. More recently, I’ve found it painful trying to pick reading plans (poor previews and search tools) and a week or so ago, the plans seemed to switch to “doomscroll mode” where commentary and whichever bits of passages they want to included flow down in one long page. I want to keep my orientation in the Bible, not just run my eyes over several screens of text.

I’ve looked around for alternatives and have settled, for now at least, on a hybrid approach. I’m still using YouVersion to put the Bible at my fingertips but I’m now using another app, called Learn of Christ, to track my reading. It has far fewer translations available but it lets me record the chapter or chapters that I’ve read. I can also follow up my reading of the plain text with the notes and cross-references it provides, should I want help pondering a bit further. Most importantly though, it lets me get on with my reading discipline like a grown up rather than treating me like a child who needs to be spoon fed with whatever someone else has decided they want to put on the spoon.

22 October 2026
by wpAdmin
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Patches Ahoy!

Some of my brain time over the past 24 hours has been taken up responding to the recent news of two major vulnerabilities with the PHP language that many web servers run on, including ones I am responsible for. In the situations where I’ve got sufficient control, I know that I’m covered because the companies hosting the websites have quickly patched the language code but I wouldn’t be surprised if these kind of days become more common, with AI tools accelerating the rate at which obscure bugs can be found (and, fortunately, often fixed too).

20 October 2026
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Half Improvised

Most of the time in the concert band setting, the string bass part is just a duplicate of the tuba part but written an octave above where it sounds. However, every now and then one or other of the instruments carries on while the other one gets a rest. Tonight the Charnwood Concert Band was rehearsing an arrangement of Miss Saigon and the conductor spotted one such example, where I was enjoying a few bars of rest and, if we presently had a regular tuba player, they would be adding some movement underneath flowing chords from other instruments.

Phil didn’t have a tuba part available so I took a photo of his score and quickly jotted down what I could onto my part. Unfortunately my photo only covered the first half of what was needed so I had to busk the rest by ear! Keeping my ear-based skills up proved valuable and I was able to carry on for the next few bars in a way that fitted.

It turns out I do have a scan of the tuba part from when it came out a while ago with the Charnwood Symphonic Wind Orchestra so my homework will be to write in all the proper notes more neatly but, having recently been able to observe how well my sight reading has come on through working with those bands, it was pleasing to also affirm that I’ve got some other playing approaches at my disposal and at a level which also fits in those contexts.

19 October 2026
by wpAdmin
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With Occasional Frustrations

Web development is the kind of work that is often very satisfying as you type in your code and create something that is both beautiful and functional. Sometimes you think you’ve finished and then find a number of small improvements which are best worked in straightaway (also satisfying) and sometimes you make mistakes where you can quickly see what has gone wrong. Those aren’t as satisfying but at least you can see what needs to be done to get back on track.

The most frustrating kind of problems are the ones where you know things aren’t working right but it isn’t obvious why. I made an update on a live server on Friday night which didn’t go quite as planned. It didn’t bring the whole thing crashing down but I started seeing a message on the login screen that should only have turned up on a development system. I did some more work on Saturday morning and, although I did make some useful observations about other things to improve, I didn’t feel any closer to a solution. Truth be told, I had taken a worthwhile step forward and the note to self I wrote on Saturday gave me a way in this morning that wasn’t starting from scratch. However, it took the best part of two hours of further work to realise what the problem was and to get it fixed (a step I’d figured out to fix a problem on a similar system earlier in the week turned out to be responsible for the unhelpful signals I was getting back when applied on this other one).

I’m now back on the last few bits of tidying up, which will include improving the documentation for both systems. I can at least say that I’ve learned a fair bit through the process although it isn’t quite what I wanted to spend that time on. Still, learning is satisfying, so I think I’m back on track.

18 October 2026
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Supporting the Washing Up

We’re still between dishwashers (ie. we haven’t replaced the one that broke a couple of months ago). I think we probably will get a replacement but, meanwhile, it has been back to washing up by hand. One of the limitations is draining space. We’ve got an extension board but it doesn’t sit high enough to let the water run back into the sink rather than on to the worktop. However, that probably shouldn’t be a problem for someone with a 3D printer…

This evening I’ve printed off a couple of supports that sit under the back of the board and lift it several centimetres higher. In turn that should give enough of an angle for the water to drain as we want. I’m looking forward to testing it after breakfast tomorrow and finding out if I’ve probably solved the problem or need to chalk this edition up as a prototype.

17 October 2026
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Games on the Table

I was right that a chop saw was the tool for reducing the length of the legs on what is now our front room coffee table (see “Chopped Down to Size“). I took them round to my friend and he did in less than ten minutes what felt like it took me the best part of a couple of hours, with a better finish as well.

This evening, we put the table to good use by getting out some of our board games. The ones we played were Kodama (building trees by laying down cards with pictures of branches) and Patchwork (filling in a board with tiles representing patches, trying to cover as much of it as possible despite all their odd shapes). It was nice to have a large playing surface in the room with the comfy chairs!

Patchwork is particularly good for us, as it is designed for two players although Kodama, where you play fairly independently, also flows well. Many excellent games really need 3 or more players otherwise you just end up with the two players slugging it out rather than having to keep alert to threats coming from more than one direction.

16 October 2026
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Back to The Good Place

Looking back on my blog, I see that it was in 2018 that I was watching The Good Place. It is a comedy series that manages to weave in some high-brow philosophy. The germ of the idea is that people who have died wake up in paradise but the protagonist is painfully aware that she doesn’t deserve to be there. It was enough to convince me to sign up for (a free trial month of) Netflix to watch it but I was delighted to see that it recently turned up on U.co.uk, a free channel in the UK.

I can’t remember quite how far I got with it and I have a suspicion that it “jumped the shark” at some point but I’ve enjoyed going back over series 1. Theologically, it already has deficits. I’ve recently been studying Paul’s letter to the Ephesians which makes it very clear that our eternal destiny is not based on the merits of our actions but on whether or not we have chosen / been chosen to die to self and live in Christ Jesus. There is a certain ambiguity there but not one we can get a proper perspective on so we have to rely on more fundamental questions like do we believe Jesus lived, died and rose again… or can we prove that he didn’t despite evidence like the growth of the Christian church despite intense persecution in its early years.

It looks like I presently have all four series available to me so I imagine that, fairly soon, I’ll be finding out how far I got before and where it ended up.

15 October 2026
by wpAdmin
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More Autumn Seeds

The lettuce and spinach seeds I started earlier this month have begun to sprout although the germination rate is relatively low so far and none of the seedlings are big enough to do much with just yet. I’ve moved the pots with seedlings to an uncovered propagator on the kitchen table and that frees up a few slots in the smaller, covered one.

That’s good because I’ve got more I want to get going. Today I started another batch of komatsuna (a leafy green in the brassica family) and some winter purslane (Claytonia perfoliata, also known as miner’s lettuce). Both of these should produce salad leaves, possibly during the winter and certainly as we come into next spring.

I grew komatsuna earlier this year and found it did well in the polytunnel (12 harvests, typically a handful or two at a time) but was a waste of time at the allotment (both batches suffered with some sort of flea beetle leaf damage and I didn’t harvest anything). Starting it off in mid-autumn is experimental but I’ve got a decent amount of seed so I’ll see what happens and probably get another polytunnel batch going next spring. I’ve not grown the winter purslane before but it has a reputation for being pretty cold-tolerant. I’m expecting something along the lines of lamb’s lettuce, which has done well before, even outside.

14 October 2026
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Need to File

When I take photos, I post them to my Flickr account and file them away in an organised fashion… most of the time. There is a directory on my computer that contains subdirectories that got from the camera to the computer and didn’t make it any further and some of those are from almost a decade ago. I did manage to deal with another one last night, which included this slow-shutter / motion shot of the outside wood burner at our holiday cottage in the Wye valley in 2018:

I thought I still had another two days worth of photos from that holiday to work through but I realised I had already uploaded them and not done the local refiling to finish the process. I wonder how many others are closer to completion than I think.

I will be trying to dig in more frequently. For one thing, I often find my old photos by searching on Flickr. That is one of the main reasons for maintaining my Flickr account (although it also makes dropping on the blog very straightforward). For example, I might look for “fire” pictures I have taken and I would have missed these until last night.

13 October 2026
by wpAdmin
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Everything May Be Fake

I probably should revise that headline: everything online may be fake. Online misinformation goes back a long way. In the early days, that was more likely to be a consequence of misunderstanding but, certainly since the Internet became widely used (>70% of the global population using it daily was the figure I found by searching; that may itself be wrong but it is likely to be more than half of people in countries with a developed communications infrastructure as frequent users), there are plenty of people spreading deliberate misinformation. The rapid growth of AI tools has only increased that; now machines are on the job too.

A couple of times recently, I’ve spotted reports that Rowan Atkinson (Blackadder, Mr Bean, etc) had died. It caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I recall hearing him mentioned elsewhere recently and, secondly, I haven’t seen the widespread ripple of stories across online media that I’d expect for the passing of such a major figure in the UK entertainment world.

I did a quick search in my coffee break this morning. Sources that I’d tend to trust, like IMDB and Wikipedia (both actively edited and fact-checked by many people), didn’t mention it and one of the results mentioned a current hoax video linked to a malware payload. Be very careful in following up such rumours – this isn’t the only time that traps have been baited with what is expected to draw in unsuspecting prey.

As far as I can tell, Mr Atkinson is alive and well but, in the Internet Age, curiosity is killing more than cats!

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