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.

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.

It was when the third or fourth thing ended up persistently broken after an update and the whole system became too much of a pain to use. I honestly don’t recall if it was XP or Win 7.

I had used a couple of Linux flavours before for a short periods and originally planned to dual boot, but this time, just never got around to putting a new Win partition on and found that I had no need for it anyway.

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.

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.

Werewolf of London (1935) - a solid werewolf movie for the period, but with no surprises in the plot - and without a lot of the ‘standard’ lore that developed around the time.

Chiefly notable, I thought though, in showing a surprisingly independent woman in a failing marriage (failing due to her husband being a werewolf…) and in portraying a drunken upper-middle class woman (and contrasting that with fairly stereotypical drunken working class women). Warner Oland features in one of his many bizarre yellow-face roles too.

Just prior to that I went to a 50th anniversary screening of The Wicker Man (1973), which was as great as ever.