Had it about an hour ago: a sort of one-pot pasta and lentil stew thingy, made in our slow cooker. I wouldn’t call it it a particular favourite of mine, but it has the advantage of being dead easy and surprisingly substantial.

Thanks for the update and for the work in building the new instance!

I’ll be keeping my eyes open for further news.

Jona Lewie - Stop The Cavalry. Apparently not originally intended as a Christmas song anyway.

With us, anything that is/would be smelly goes in some kind of container.

Cleaning - I would say once every 3-4 months or so in normal circumstances. Quite possibly longer.

I am not a dog lover. I find them needy, melodramatic and hierarchical: some of the features that I try to avoid in humans.

I work in an office around one day a week which often has more dogs than humans - since one of the regular staff has two dogs. In general, however, they aren’t much of a problem. One frequently nudges people’s elbows to get attention and howls whenever a phone rings. Another gets in the way of the door an awful lot - resulting in the owner installing a child gate at an inner doorway, and another has been traumatised in the past and needs to be taken out whenever a fire alarm test is due. However, this is not more that the needs and quirks of other people, really, and is fairly easy to work around.

I am glad that I do not have to work in that office all the time, but overall it is not a big deal.

Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy. I used to spend lot of time on TheEnvironmentSite.org some time before Slashdot, but I cant recall whether anything else came in between those two.

Relay (Pro) when using my phone although most of the time I was using RES on a laptop.

I have seen them, but a while ago, whilst binging through all of the show to S11, which was airing at the time. I’d say, yes - go and watch them, but I don’t recall them as particularly stand-out from the rest of the show.

Too early to say yet. The best part of the show is the Empire arc, IMHO. If you don’t care for that in S1, I doubt that there is anything tp grab you so far in S2. Personally, I think that it has some interesting ideas and some good character beats. The rest is merely OK.

Right now Strange New Worlds which has been extremely good this season following the merely OK first episode; Foundation which seems to have improved the weakest arc - the actual Foundation arc - from the first season; and Futurama which, on the evidence of the first episode, I can best characterise as being ‘back’.

That’s a really difficult one. The book Bond is a snob in a way that doesn’t really translate to the later culture in which so many of the films are set. Plus, I stopped watching the movies after Quantum of Solace - and had only been slightly interested from around Licence to Kill onwards, until Casino Royale.

If I had to say then perhaps a mix of Craig in Casino and Connery in the very early ones. Book Bond was a bit rough around the edges and definitely not dropping ‘witty’ one-liners all the time.

Yes, they are. They are stylish and pacy and all the rest. They are also very much of their time and, as well, are a completely different beast to the movies: they are spy stories primarily - not action adventures (though both of those are still there), and are much more low key overall.

Bafflegab’s Baker’s End series and Radio Static’s Minister of Chance are two excellent Doctor Who adjacent shows. The BBC podcast The Whisperer in Darkness is a great Lovecraft adaptation.

There isn’t a lot of today left here in the UK, but I’ll be getting bed early and listening to an audio drama shortly.

Tomorrow, I have some shelves to put up, and there may be some clearing up in the garden after the winds today.

From an outsider’s perspective it would be the places that I work - which I am not going to reveal in any detail to avoid doxing myself, but include nationally and internationally important historical and archaeological sites.

From my perspective, although they are certainly interesting and I love working at them, it doesn’t play a particularly prominent role in what I do day-to-day, so it would be the wide range of problem solving involved: I lead a team dealing with maintenance, compliance and health & safety for a national charity.

Most recently finished: The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher - an enjoyable, but not exceptional, folk horror.

Currently in the middle of: Finnegans Wake, Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Flashman and Madison’s War by Robert Brightwell, and a collection of Para Handy tales by Neil Munro.

Total drive space is probably something like 40 to 50 TB.

Around three quarters of that is in use, mostly my Plex libraries: film, TV, music, spoken word.

Any interest that I have in this is entirely due to Paul King and his work on the Paddington films. It could be good as a result.

Meanwhile, of course, The Great Glass Elevator is sitting resentfully in the lobby, tapping it toe.

It was a Sinclair ZX81, which I built from a kit with my brother. I was astonished when it actually worked.

It came with a tape which included about 6 games in BASIC - all extremely simple since they had to fit in 1k of memory, of course. I can’t actually recall what they were exactly though.

My dad would frequently trot out “You’ll eat a peck o’ dirt before you die.” - where peck would be the UK version of the volumetric measure: a little over 9 ltrs.

He had a very laid back approach to contamination due to his old-school farming background. I had a rather more strict approach when young but, with age, I have become much more relaxed and do use the phrase myself at times.