Could the second finally be getting some FTTP internet at home?

I discovered this week that Openreach have now made FTTP available to every house on my street except me and two of my immediate neighbours.

Andrews and Arnold used to have a legendary reputation for chasing BT/ Openreach to get the best outcome for their customers, but their reply to my sales enquiry can be summarized as “nothing we can do mate, try asking Openreach yourself - here’s the link”.

How the mighty have fallen.

I had already filled in Openreach’s form - to be fair to them, they do have an enquiry route for “my neighbours can get FTTP so why the hell can’t I?”, and I gather they’ve had to pass it to another team … here’s hoping they’ll get it fixed soon so I can stop shelling out for Starlink.

That really would make it a good week.

And while they technically have been for months, I’d yet to find a single provider who had actually done the work to connect to them.

Quite why there has to be per-provider per-bank work when it’s a standard is a question for another day.

The good news is that GoCardless have finally gone and done it:

… it still goes bang if you try and fetch data for a too-big date range, and it will need tediously re-authorizing every 90 days, but having machine-to-machine hands off access to this stuff is a long, long overdue leap forward.

Regular readers will have heard this rant before, and really, I ought to be finding a specialist who can actually find and fix the leak, not just fill it up again for over £100 and hope I’ll be far enough away in time and space before it all leaks out.

However, being a busy man, I decided to take a punt on a self top up kit:

The instructions were easy to follow (but do read them carefully as the valve is the opposite of what you might think) and to my surprise and delight, the vents started blowing cold again and the system has held for a week now. Not bad for less than half the price a garage charges, and I still have a half full can for next time.

This is a drop-in replacement for the ordinary shaver socket that your bathroom possibly has (don’t forget to safely isolate before you get knee deep in electrics).

It’s an indulgence, sure, but there is something very satisfying about eliminating yet another charger and set of trailing cables, and the brushed steel faceplate looks the business. As you may be able to see in the photo, this model also has a 240V shaver socket on it too for any non-toothbrush devices. No 115V, but when was the last time you saw anything requiring that in the UK? Exactly.

This does of course mean that I’ve committed to using a Philips toothbrush forever after, but mine has been great for over a year now and the battery life is excellent, so why not?

And don’t even get me started on the mad mix of levels and the odd gravel filled “flower beds” that it featured. All sorted out now:

Yes, the crappy concrete path in the foreground isn’t great, but one expensive garden change at a time…

Oh, and if you’re in Oxford(shire), White Oak Landscaping are the people to call. They ain’t cheap, but they are good.

Despite the rage-bait title it did end on an optimistic note. Thanks to the Oxford CompSoc for hosting me, and here are the slides.

Had a very enjoyable week walking in the north of England (if we’d been any further north, we’d have been in Scotland).

No, seriously, just because my only photo is a distillery doesn’t mean we didn’t get some exercise. This was our rainy day activity.

Then my internet connection developed 50% packet loss somewhere on the ISP’s side of things. I’m not going to name the big UK DSL provider I’m using, because that would limit my ability to say that their service is a sack of cack and they should be ashamed of themselves for letting it develop such an egregious fault without it being rectified all day.

Long story short, I ended up making an impulse purchase to keep me going until they finally get FTTP down my street, whenever that might be.

Distasteful though I consider giving money to Mr Musk, Starlink does work remarkably well even if it’s just propped up on your patio. Well over 100Mbps downstream, maybe 13 up, proper native IPv6 and equipment that can be put in “bypass mode” if you just want to use it as a modem with your existing network.

Hopefully I won’t need to shell out for it for very long, and I can re-sell the kit when I move on, although the fact that you are only signed up on a month by month basis might well mean this sticks around as a backup option even after I’ve got fibre.

Update No need to spend even more money on the robustly priced official mounts, the cheap and cheerful ones off Amazon do the job:

Actually writing code with it is definitely a skill in its own right, and not one learned overnight, but personally I’m finding it a breath of fresh air as it cuts out the bit I was never very patient with - trawling through API documentation and Stack Overflow trying to work out what prior art existed for what I’m trying to do. If it’s quicker to verify the solution than come up with it yourself, then using Generative AI to write code is a sure-fire productivity boost.

My next venture, sure to be written up here, is to go properly “agentic” and try and get it running my part of the village magazine for me. Don’t worry, it won’t be running amok without human verification of the actions it’s proposing to take, but I fancy my chances of cutting four hours a month down to about 15 minutes, and it’s a nice low-stakes test bed for doing more elsewhere later.

And although the communications were poor from start to finish, the system did get there in the end (in my opinion). I was even awarded compensation - although given this is only paid to me when the offender pays the court, I’m not spending it quite yet.

Much like my brief experience of jury service in 2024, the whole thing convinced me that our justice system is hopelessly inefficient - whether the root cause is not enough money or something else, it’s hard to say, but it felt like a large part of the problem.

I feel an e-mail to my MP coming on.