Out in Wales last weekend visiting a friend, I was admiring their electronic butter dish. This maintains a consistent temperature and means your butter is spreadable all year round.

An indulgence, for sure, but also an excellent idea. I added it to my mental list of things I could justify buying one day in 20 years when I’ve paid off my mortgage. The inventor must have a patent on it, because there’s no sign of cheap clones being available: you have to go directly to the source.

Seventy-two hours later, the Premium Bonds dropped £50 in my lap, and I thought to myself … I know what I’ve seen recently for that price …

It’s too soon to say whether the maintenance needed (blowing dust out of the fan) will become a drag, but I can confirm that putting a block of Anchor into it and setting the knob to about the 2/3 position does an excellent job.

One could almost justify this as a health-related purchase, since properly spreadable butter should put an end to having oversized lumps of it on toast and sandwiches.

I’ve somewhat fallen out of love with the Amazon Echo ecosystem lately. The withdrawal of APIs for third party to do list apps was a particular kick in the teeth, and the Echo Auto is one mid-journey misbehaviour away from being ejected from the car on the Oxford Ring Road.

However, I have stumbled across something which is actually useful.

For many years, one of the Echos on my account was located 140 miles away on a relative’s kitchen counter (for reasons that definitely didn’t involve sharing subscriptions in a non-approved manner). And so I never had the chance to hit the “everywhere” button in apps like Spotify when deciding what device to play music on.

That arrangement has now come to an end, and for the first time the other week, I hit the everywhere button on a podcast.

And it worked! My house is by no means big, and as it turns out, an echo in two rooms upstairs and two downstairs provides pretty good coverage. Crucially, you can wander around the house going about your business while listening to podcasts, radio, etc. without a break in the content or having to carry a phone on speaker round in your pocket.

For sure, I’d put ceiling speakers in if I were refurbishing the place from scratch, but in the absence of that, this is a pretty usable alternative.

I’ve long been skeptical about (Generative) AI, watching with wry detachment as the tidal wave of hype and BS sloshes through every aspect of modern life.

However.

I am starting to see opinions from people who I respect that suggest it has its place, and can be a win for productivity if used responsibly.

With this in mind, and feeling ever shorter of time to get things done in all of my personal, voluntary and professional lives, I decided it was high time to give it a go.

PC Pro magazine published a very well timed group test of different AI providers, and off the back of that, I decided to give Claude a shot.

As regular readers will know, I run an invoicing system for my church. It’s a Python/Django project with around 3,500 lines of code, so it presents an ideal non-trivial test bed to see what Claude can do.

The project also contains a markdown file with my list of features I’d love to have, big and small. And under normal circumstances, making a dent in a list largely untouched since 2019/20 would be an unlikely activity to while away the jet-lagged hours in a hotel room half way across the world.

Claude Code and I knocked more items off that list in an hour than I’d done in five years before that.

I was particularly pleased with the CLAUDE.md file the AI generated to describe the project and guide its work: it provided a summary of the architecture and key choices which reminded me, the original author of the project, of several things I’d decided and promptly forgotten.

It’s not a silver bullet - more like having a pretty capable junior developer. Sometimes it gets things wrong, and you have to tell it to try again and try harder. It worked really well on this project because it’s a relatively small codebase and I have no difficulty in reviewing changes and confirming if they make any sense.

However, in the space of a jet-lagged hour, it cracked performance problems, implemented features, and generally got stuff done which I could have done by hand, given an entire weekend to devote to the cause.

The manner in which it can use tools is especially nifty, e.g. when asking it to make changes to the appearance of a web page, it can fire up a headless browser and “look” at the results of its CSS changes.

Colour me impressed. More to come on this as I push it further.

Had some time to play the tourist today. The book shops in this town are good, but like everything else on this island, expensive.

On the other hand, if the Logos Hope happens to be docked nearby, you too can rediscover the Alex Rider series on the cheap - apparently Anthony Horowitz kept writing them even after I was a teenager.

We had a wander round the historic Royal Navy dockyard - presumably the reason why the British wanted this island in the first place.

I may have bought myself an “I survived the Bermuda Triangle” t-shirt.

If you’re still using other speed testing apps/websites, I’d say it’s time to shift over to fast.com, which is a Netflix project and has a nice clean advert-free interface:

As you can see, the VPN (left) back to the UK doesn’t slow me down much, and as is increasingly true the world over, the fixed line internet provided is soundly beaten by mobile - my Airalo e-SIM giving 71Mbps down and 23Mbps up.

But enough of such nerdish things. What about the island outside my hotel room?

Well, if you’ve ever wondered what England would look like with palm trees and some US/Canadian influences thrown in, I can now tell you. The pubs and cafes have a recognizably British feel to them, but certain north American innovations I rather like (sitting and eating at the bar for example) are here too.

This is not the ideal time of year to visit, but doing my usual Saturday 5k in 14 degrees rather than 4 was very nice.

If you’re reading this, I’ve survived flying over the Bermuda Triangle on Friday 13th. Fortunately, I’m not superstitious, and judging by BA’s prices and how full the flight was, neither is anyone else.

(And yet, most streets in Britain omit number 13 to this day…)

OK, so I will admit, unless there’s a disastrous amount of wind, the flight from Heathrow comes nowhere near the dreaded Triangle, but it’s a better story if we pretend that it does.

Did BA manage to bring my checked baggage? Yes! So I’ve got my hotel room set up all nice. Shout out to Tony for supplying the UK extension lead with a US plug on the end, it does help.

I’ll report back on what this island with the same population as my home town is like. General vibes - very much like Britain with palm trees and some flashes of the USA/Canada mixed in.

Oh, and for the record (thanks to the many many people sending me this story from the UK) - no, the cat’s death was nothing to do with me. RIP Palmerston.

There are days when I complain about my job.

And then there are days - not very often, but one so far - where I’m packed off on an urgent business trip to Bermuda.

Needless to say, it’s an imposition.

As if it weren’t bad enough being forced to swap England in February for literally anything else, the way flights are priced meant it was way cheaper to send us out the Friday before rather than on the Monday.

The nerve of it!

OK, seriously. Spending a weekend Somewhere Else at your employer’s expense is a privilege, and one I haven’t exercised since 2022. I do appreciate it.

Normally, I do my best to avoid long haul flights, but at least when someone else is paying, the additional leg room of premium economy is on tap. Will being 5kg lighter than last time I flew long haul make it a more comfortable experience? We can only hope.

It’s not hard to pick your flight to Bermuda from the UK, because this last vestige of the empire is served by precisely one airline with a direct route. Unfortunately, it’s the same one that forgot to bring my suitcase last time I flew long haul!

You’ll have to wait for episode 2 to hear if they’ve learned from their mistakes, but I have - the hold bag has a Tile in it (like an AirTag, but open to customers who don’t own any Apple devices), and my hand luggage has a couple of days’ worth of clothing etc. in it.

What else can I tell you at this stage? Getting a taxi to the airport is the one true way, although it was nice not to have to fork out for it myself. Heathrow continues to have the shiny not so new scanners, so apart from having to take my belt off, security was a breeze. I have two laptops and two battery packs on me, and nobody said a word. Meanwhile my colleague with a chunky paperback got his bag manually checked(!)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a couple of Merlot minature bottles I need to drink to free up space…

I have.

And while I am pleased with them, having sprung for the blinds themselves, adding £269.10 to the bill for the official gateway that hooks them up to wifi, Alexa, etc. … wasn’t going to happen.

Fortunately, someone on the internet has figured out a different solution: a cheap ESP32 device with a radio transceiver attached can control these blinds and you just pair it to them like a remote control.

£12 on AliExpress and a bit of a wait for delivery later, the parts arrived, and just three short months later, I finally got bored of them lying on my desk and put them together. The hardware assembly was straightforward:

I’m so pleased with it that I might have to get a 3D printed case, or at least punch some proper holes in the cardboard box it currently lives in.

The installation/flashing experience was surprisingly slick; I had no idea all this sort of thing could run directly from a web page these days, but it can, and it even prompts you to install the (proper signed) device driver for mounting the ESP32 as a COM port.

It took a couple of evenings fiddling with the settings and reading the github issues to get everything configured to the point where the device reliably makes the blinds move 100% of the time, and always picks up the remote controls.

It’s still not quite right when it comes to tilting the slats, but I almost never do that anyway, so whatever.

Next stop, Home Assistant integration!

But when they just start churning out stuff like this, they’ve lost the plot. If Debian, largely staffed by volunteers, can back-port patches to older packages, why is this beyond an organisation with the might of IBM behind it?

Just slap a new middle digit version in there, virtually guaranteeing to break whatever people have deployed on it and causing chaos. Why not eh.

Can we please all agree that we don’t need so many Linux distributions, and that Dead Rat (yes, yes it’s a cheap shot and an ancient joke, but I don’t care) is first up against the wall when the revolution comes?

I’ve been getting on so well with my laptop that I recommended the same range to two family members recently. They didn’t need quite the horsepower I do, so they went for the sub-1k sibling of mine. No touch screen, a bit lighter, excellent battery life - very nice to work with.

I helped set them up, it was all going so well, and then…

A pet hate of mine is when perfectly good hardware gets thrown on the e-waste mountain because somebody couldn’t be bothered to provide drivers for newer versions of Windows.

But surely that wouldn’t be an issue here: the hardware in question all worked just fine on Windows 10, and although Windows 11 has changed quite a lot under the hood, the device driver stack is near-identical. Right. Right?

Up first was the ancient black and white Brother laser printer, connected over USB.

No sign of the drivers, and a suspiciously small list after fetching from Windows Update.

Up next was the trusty ScanSnap S1300. Not the S1300i, the S1300. One of the most robust sheet feeding full duplex scanners ever made, I bought it second hand off eBay years ago and for light duty it just keeps on going. Right until you can’t for the life of you get it to work on Windows 11.

Fujitsu have done their best to disappear all evidence of this device ever existing, but even taking a gamble on copies of the drivers/software which random users on Reddit claimed worked on Windows 11 for them didn’t work.

I looked up how to export drivers from Windows 10, learned some new PowerShell commands, and even those were resolutely ignored (there’s no error message, it just takes you back to the dialog you started from).

By now you’re probably shouting at the screen (or you read the title), and yes, the difference is that device drivers are traditionally built for Intel/AMD processors, and these laptops have SnapDragon processors. i.e. ARM. Sure enough, my laptop, with the Intel Ultra 9 processor, can use both of these devices.

Fortunately we picked up a colour inkjet/scanner for a song, and the ScanSnap won’t go to waste as I can use it. But it’s surely not beyond the wit of Microsoft to put up a clear dialog explaining why the drivers that you’ve gone to such trouble to find are being ignored?

And don’t even get me started on why Linux drivers that work on the Raspberry Pi (also ARM based) exist and work just fine for both devices!