5 November 2026
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Food Waste Collections

It seems like a long time ago now that the local council told us that food waste collections were coming and at least a month since the new bins arrived. There’s a small one for indoors and a larger one to put out for collection. Finally we got to this week when we were able to start putting the larger bin out alongside the other regular collections (refuse this week, recycling next week).

We did actually manage to scrape together a few bits to go out. Vegetable peelings and trimmings and other things continue to be directed towards home composting and we try to minimise the waste of actual food but there are a few things that don’t fall under either heading, like bones or teabags. That isn’t the contents of the teabags, which are excellent for composting, but the bags themselves which take a long time to break down in a home compost heap. I imagine that they will go down quicker in whatever kind of commercial scale operation takes all the collected food waste.

4 November 2026
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Small boiler

Having had our new gas boiler replaced this week, we’ve now had to replace another kind of boiler. Our electric kettle, bought from Lidl in July on what I termed “gadget day“, stopped working. Jane checked the fuse with no joy, so I’m pretty sure the microcontroller inside the machine has gone (the bit that would detect power, water temperature and button presses, return a temperature reading to the display and turn on an appropriate LED light based on that reading).

I’ve spent a while looking online at various options. Variable temperature kettles aren’t uncommon but the reviews of the cheaper ones often mention problems like randomly breaking after a short time while the expensive ones are simply very expensive for what ought to be a fairly simple set of operations.

I’d almost settled on a Bosch one from Argos at about £65 but, meanwhile, popped back to Lidl to return the faulty one. Since it isn’t just that I’ve decided I don’t want it but the device is faulty, it was a no-quibble return and refund. However, on wandering round afterwards to pick up a few essential groceries, I found another Silvercrest kettle in the middle aisle.

This one was about £25 and less fancy than the one I took back but it covers all the essentials. The controls are in the base rather than directly on the kettle but they do have proper buttons rather than a smooth surface that didn’t always seem to register finger presses. It only offers 70, 80, 90 and 100°C settings rather than 5°C from 40-100°C but, even with the great range of options, I only seemed to use 70, 90 and 100°C so this will be more efficient. The lights and the live temperature read out were nice-to-haves but I can live without those.

Now I’m just hoping that this one lasts somewhat longer than four months.

3 November 2026
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Heating… on

The boiler is installed and working! It has left me feeling somewhat lighter in the bank account but I think it will be worth it. We are certainly having to run far less water to get the hot taps to live up to their name. I’m also impressed with the new thermostat. It looked a bit plasticky in the photos but turns out to be impressively weighty and pretty easy to program. A good job to have done now that winter continues to draw on.

2 November 2026
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Heating… off

We’ve never been entirely satisfied with the gas boiler in our house since we moved in and, although it has been regularly serviced, it seems to more often need the pressure topping up for heating and for lots of water to be run to get it hot. After we had it serviced at the start of September we decided it was time to have it replaced. Of course, early autumn is a busy time for boiler folk, so we’re just having it fitted this week.

We’ve reached the point where the new boiler is installed, plumbed in and the gas is back on. However, our installer will have to return tomorrow to do the flush and fill that lead to its final commissioning. Fortunately we’re out for dinner with friends tonight, we’ve got an electric shower in the bathroom and a kettle downstairs. I suspect our trusty oil-filled electric heater will also get a little service to take the edge off the morning chill.

We can survive that although I’m looking forward to enjoying some improvements to heating and hot water once the process is complete by about lunchtime tomorrow. Maybe it would have been better to get it done back in the summer but, then again, would we have been able to test the heating when the ambient temperature already felt like the inside of an oven?

1 November 2026
by wpAdmin
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Toasted Cheese Sandwich

I’m not sure if the air fryer is the ideal way to make a toasted cheese sandwich. It is a small, hot oven but it has the disadvantages of a powerful fan and deep-sided drawers. It probably took about 15 minutes all told in my effort tonight and I’m not sure it was quicker or any better than toasting a couple of slices of bread, making a cheese sandwich with them and then microwaving the result to finish off the cheese.

Better still is to use a frying pan. The bread can be buttered and lightly fried, sandwiched around cheese and then returned for finishing off. The lower sides of the pan make it easy to get in with a spatula or slice for flipping and I’ve got a “burger press” which can add the compression that helps the melting cheese glue the two halves together.

There are plenty of things the air fryer excels at but, in my experience, the toasted cheese sandwich is not one of them.

31 October 2026
by wpAdmin
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Sing Around Songs – 31 October 2026

It’s been a few weeks since I made it to one of the local sing around sessions but I got down there today with my resonator guitar. I had to leave early but I managed to contribute two songs.

I started with Wayfarin’ Stranger, which I’ve done several times on various instruments. On 21 November I’m gigging with the Charnwood Training Band and have an opportunity to do a solo song in the middle. Early on, we’ll be playing a medley called the Southern Folk Rhapsody, which is a beautiful orchestration of several traditional gospel tunes from the “Deep South” of the USA and starts with this tune so I thought it would work to do a version with the lyrics later on. It worked well and suits my voice although I might need to play with a plectrum to get the sound projection from the guitar (which is the kind of thing I wanted to find out by playing it today).

For that tune, I dropped the top and bottom strings of the guitar down to D, since I was playing in D minor. However, I was due to help someone else out with another tune later on that would take all my jazz chords so, during the break I reverted to standard EADGBE tuning. In turn, that meant that rather than the other pieces I’d been considering, I made a snap decision to break out my version of 20th Century Boy by T-Rex. What makes it “my” version is that I’ve added a couple of additional chords to the chorus – I think the original just plays A B A B but I’ve tweaked it to A B C D, giving a little more musical interest without disrupting the raucous rock character too much.

I also got to support a version of the jazz tune All of Me in the key of Ab and including an improvised guitar solo. Jazz guitar is not my forte but being back in standard tuning at least allowed me to make a decent go of it.

30 October 2026
by wpAdmin
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Rumbledethumps

For tonight’s dinner, I had some mashed swede and cooked cabbage to use up so I did a search online for ideas and came across rumbledethumps. It is a Scottish dish with a fantastic name and I didn’t closely follow the recipe on that link but, as is my wont with cooking, used it as a starting point for some improvisation. The swede and cabbage get combined with mashed potato and then baked with cheese on top. It turned out very tasty, which wasn’t overly surprising. It is along the lines of things like ‘bubble and squeak’ (mashed potato and leftover greens, often bound with some egg) and most things work well covered in melted cheese.

I cooked both the rumbledethumps and sausages in the air fryer (separate drawers). I think the silicon liners I used slowed down the cooking but the made the cleaning up much quicker, not least because half the rumbledethumps is still in that liner but now sitting in the fridge.

29 October 2026
by wpAdmin
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Moneyball

We recently borrowed some DVDs from a friend and the first one we watched, this evening, was Moneyball (2011). It is about a baseball team that struggles because it doesn’t have the budget to keep up with its competitors until the General Manager hires an unlikely geek who (if I understood it correctly) revealed that being statistically above average is better than producing a few one off performances that make the selectors think you are a hero.

I think I’d appreciate it more if I cared much about baseball or competitive sports in general. If I had a good grasp of the subject, I wonder if I’d see it as an accurate depiction of a significant historical change or so much more Hollywood slop? As it was though, I was glad to have seen it (being a film I’ve heard of and statistics being something I am interested in) but I think this is one I will politely return without watching again.

28 October 2026
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Free for Patriots?

Issue 001 of Reform UK’s free “newspaper” dropped unbidden through my door earlier this week. Apparently it is free for patriots but I’m fairly certain that neither I, nor many of the other recipients, qualify under their definition of the term but there is no obvious way to return this rag that I didn’t want and would not be willing to pay for. Let’s count that as as issue #1.

The front page has three main stories, all of which are “dog whistle” politics. The small ones promise that, if elected to power, Reform UK will stop the boats (what might be called the details on p.3 fail to mention that the number of small boat crossings has already begun to fall significantly) and a hagiography of the late Ann Widdecombe. They don’t use such a long word but they are very clearly casting her as a saint and martyr. The big picture shows Nigel Farage with what I assume is his dog and he is even wearing a dog whistle. I’m not sure if that is carelessness or contempt. The big words promise a fix for “Broken Britain” and that if a Reform Government doesn’t deliver in 100 days, the ministers responsible would be sacked. No word is given about whether that would apply to himself, presumably cast in the role of Prime Minister and thus ultimately responsible for his cabinet.

I won’t work through the whole release although there are problematic things on every page. For example, it seems a bit odd on the centre pages to make a big point of how 14 years of failed Conservative government and yet several of the people flanking Mr Farage were prominent members of that failed government. I suspect the indication of horns behind a couple of their heads is probably another example of lack of attention in their media department. Finally, I note on the back page that although I got this paper for “free”, I’d have to use a stamped addressed envelope to mail in to become a member. I guess they are clever enough not to open up a FREEPOST address which would probably get lots of unwanted items.

Nothing seems to let a good fact get in the way of a partisan opinion. Meanwhile, since there’s too much ink on this unwanted “newspaper” to make it good for fire starting, I’m going to see if I can get it in the recycling bin before they come round to collect it today.

27 October 2026
by wpAdmin
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Let’s Just Build It

I continue to be impressed with how quickly AI tools can help develop useful systems. Today I had several documents in Markdown format to read which were made challenging because they featured tables with significant amounts of information. I’ve often been using a command line program called glow but that was truncating the information. Since I’m going through a phase where I’m having to interact a lot with AI I asked it to suggest some options. I knew some of the results it came up with (which included glow) but I didn’t really want to install another program, so I asked a further question, about whether there was a website I could load a Markdown file into and have it render in a flexible table. The answer was yes but not all were entirely clear about my requirement for local processing. Some of the data I’m working with is potentially sensitive so I don’t want it being hoovered up elsewhere.

That led me to asking if it could build me such a web page to run locally and, about three minutes later, I had just such a solution. As a sanity check, I asked a different AI tool to assess the page for security and it came up with a number of small refinements, such as verifying the content delivery networks that provide some of the JavaScript tools involved. All told though, it was about 15-20 minutes and I had a web page that not only does an excellent job of rendering Markdown in the browser (including large tables) but bonus features I didn’t ask for. I can drop a file onto the page and, if I drop a second one, it creates a new tab within the page allowing a batch of files to be assessed.

Back in the old days (in other words just a few months ago), that kind of task would have been a non-starter. I’d have needed hours to research, code, test and develop. The security audit wouldn’t even have been covered as I’d have put far too much time in just to get to the starting line. As it is, I’ve got a tool that has already saved time from what it would have cost to try and browse the files with glow and I’m sure is going to be used again and again. AI coding support hasn’t reached the point where I can just put my feet up and let it do all the work but it is often able to speed things up in a way that, not too long ago, would have seemed entirely like science fiction!

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