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Aug 29, 2025:
Squeaky stairs and the Upside Down Marshmallow test
I learned by my teens that the sides of stairs don’t squeak. I needed to stay inaudible and invisible to my parents while they screamed at each other …
Aug 28, 2025:
Does anyone have a cloud service that works seamlessly across Windows and Linux? So far I've tried OneDrive, iCloud, pCloud, Filen, Mega, Dropbox and Box. Nothing meets my simple needs.
I want one that ‘just works’. I want to be able to work in Linux or Windows in my dualbooting laptop with my data in its own partition, so …
Aug 27, 2025: It is a dead parrot.
Aug 27, 2025: Read: Death on the Island by Eliza Reid 📚 Christie fanfic, right down to the island location, and Roger Ackroyd shaped red herring. Passed the time …
Aug 26, 2025:
Linux is Right and Righteous, but I don't want to pay a cloud service over the odds and still have to tit about with rsync
The other thing that’s putting me off Linux at the moment is the flakey cloud services. Theoretically, Ubuntu’s Network package should …
Aug 18, 2025: Asda: re your Times Radio advert in which someone identifies herself as a ‘colleague’. Your corporate decision to replace the word ‘employee’ with the …
Aug 18, 2025: Breaking news: a slim young guy on the opposite pavement suddenly stopped, put down the coke bottles he had in each hand, pulled his t shirt up, and …
Aug 18, 2025: Rewriting is so much easier than the initial writing. Sadly, I can’t rewrite without having writ. #writing #amwriting #writingcommunity
Aug 18, 2025: Abandoned: Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck 📚 DNF. East German love affair round end of East Germany, trans. Michael Hoffman, booker winner 2024 Intense and …
Aug 14, 2025: Read: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas 📚 Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes Rebecca, and both elements are Good Things. #booksky #BookSky #bookstodon …
Aug 14, 2025: Read: Astor by Anderson Cooper 📚 Wearying and padded out with tangential ‘context’. Most bios can be top and tailed: first 2 chapters for …
Aug 12, 2025: Read: Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel 📚 Recognisably, POTUS goes mad and wants to take over Canada, and surveil everyone. Unrecognisably, the …
Aug 11, 2025: Very, very difficult to get my head round the most powerful, richest, and until recently, in many ways the free-est country in the world flip into …
Aug 10, 2025:
What’s the most rock solid and smoothest cloud storage that works across iOS, Windows and Linux?
I only need 100-200g and I’m fine with the standard levels of security. I’m using it for synching mostly documents and photos across …
Aug 6, 2025: Read: Ardis - A life on water by Timothy Paleczny Read: Ardis a life on water by Timothy Paleczny 📚 I’m a sucker for wartime shenanigans and science, so this was great for me, with spying and marine …
Aug 5, 2025: Just finished the vomit draft of quick side-project short story that was only going to be a couple of thousand words then back to the main gig. Quick …
Aug 4, 2025: Read: Transcription by Kate Atkinson Fictionalised version of actual counter-spy operations in England against the Germans in WW2. I read the nonfiction book it’s abased on ages ago, and …
Aug 1, 2025: So this was the other Saturday. Both car and dude are normal size, but my iPhone did weird things.
Jul 31, 2025: Read: A Necessary Evil by Abir Mukherjee 📚 Loved the setting, and the humour. Mysteries can be so po-faced. Made me want to try his non-series …
Jul 28, 2025: My grandfather got out of the car, and casually asked me to move it down the hill while he was inside the office. I was 12. The first time I acted …
Jul 25, 2025: Read: Triple Cross by Tom Bradby 📚 Smart, efficient, gripping. Does what it says on the can, in a very good way. #bookstodon #booksky #iamreading
Jul 17, 2025: Read: My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor 📚 Less than keen on his others, but this is manages to be richly told without losing suspense. …
Jul 13, 2025: Abandoned: Red Queen by Juan Gómez-Jurado 📚 No feeling for pace, language or humans, for people who would secretly prefer a comic but a book makes …
Jul 10, 2025:
Driving my grandfather’s car
My grandfather stretched his left arm across the passenger seat and looked out of the back window of his ancient Renault as he reversed into the …
Jul 5, 2025: Read: An Honest Man by Michael Koryta 📚 Straight ahead innocent man vs corruption, gripping and unpretentious. Fast, easy read. #Bookstodon #booksky …
Jun 30, 2025: Read: Heartwood by Amity Gaige Great American wilderness novel on the Appalachian Trail. Three women intersect after one of them gets lost. It’s …
Jun 28, 2025: Read: This Is Not a Game by Kelly Mullen 📚 Self consciously smart arse and genre-aware. People say things like ‘but how could the maid be leaving the …
Jun 25, 2025: What's going on at Byline Times? Why is Byline Times serving up generic US political slop? Is it turning into Reach PLC?
Jun 24, 2025:
Read: The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel by Doublas Brunt
The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel📚 Safe to skim everything before Chapter 24 (which covers Diesel inventing his engine and getting rich in a …
Jun 23, 2025: On the lake
Jun 21, 2025: Got some CDs
Jun 21, 2025: As a recidivist 80s nerd who spent high school in what we were pleased to call ‘the computer room’, I’m loving Halt And Catch Fire on ITV. It’s a …
Jun 18, 2025: Breaking news: the new head of MI6 (C) got started with spying when she was given the Usborne KnowHow Book Of Spycraft. I too have this book and …
Jun 17, 2025: Read: Never Flinch by Stephen King 📚 King is always compulsive, without me being able to figure out why. He’s sneaking some suspense in there …
Jun 17, 2025:
Short story - King of the Mountain
He’d felt watched, but there was nobody there to watch him. He lifted a single eyelid and checked his cycle was still leaning against the bench. The …
Jun 17, 2025: Trump’s been outplayed by Putin, Netanyahu and every other world leader because he’s all ego and bluster and not very bright. All he has left is lying …
Jun 16, 2025: Read: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly 📚 Audiobook recorded by the author, Liz Pelly, in an intensely irritating? slackjawwwd valleh girrl drawl? that almost …
Jun 9, 2025: Read: Who Could Ever Love You by Mary L. Trump, PhD 📚 As fellow family-of-a-narc, I found a few moments in this resonated, but if you’ve come …
Jun 8, 2025: I bought a stack of very cheap CDs yesterday at a stall at a Thing. They sound marginally better than Tidal High Quality but mostly, I can’t …
Jun 7, 2025: Read: Come Closer by Sara Gran 📚 New York architect is either possessed or has a psychotic breakdown in a tightly written novella. Psychological …
Jun 5, 2025: So that’s the plotting done. Now it’s just… typing. Which is great and also daunting. #writingcommunity #iamwriting
Jun 5, 2025: The world’s richest man and most powerful man bitching about each other like mean girls. Meanwhile the climate is in meltdown, there are at …
Jun 5, 2025: Read: [The House of My Mother](https://micro.blog/books/9781668065419) by Shari Franke 📚 Read: The House of My Mother by Shari Franke 📚 What life was actually like for the kids of picture perfect but abusive 8 Passengers vlogger Ruby …
Jun 4, 2025: Read: Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow 📚 Courtroom thriller that actually uses the legal procedures and tactics for its twists, and plays with the …
Jun 1, 2025: Read: How to Lose a Country by Ece Temelkuran 📚 Turkish writer who’s fled Erdogan tries so hard to stay humane, humorous and hopeful despite the …
May 26, 2025: Watched/went to a webinar about making money from short stories. The good news is that there are many more outlets for my genre than I thought. The …
May 24, 2025: Read: Black Money by Ross Macdonald 📚 A classic noir thriller apparently, but felt more like it appealed to the 1960s desire for genre fiction to be …
May 22, 2025: Read: The Rule of Stephens by Timothy L. Taylor 📚 Elizabeth Holmes-alike has some kind of existential crisis over her biotech startup after …
May 16, 2025: Read: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 📚 One of those high concept books that falls in love with its premise and gets tedious after a while.
May 11, 2025: A 16 year old skateboarder - baseball cap, plaid shirt - takes repeated runs at jumping off an 18 inch concrete step on the concrete plaza. Every …
May 10, 2025: Art and culture has gone to shit Commendably long and thoughtful piece by Spencer Kornhaber in The Atlantic arguing that Substack’s @tedgoia ‘s declinism in essays about 21st Art And …
May 10, 2025: Try new ‘Woombitz’, the perfect BBQ crunchy snack for the menstrual woman. Artisanal and free-from most things, except hormones.
May 10, 2025: Two twenties women on main street are wandering up to blokes and asking them something… it’s all fun and not sketchy but who knows what it is. …
May 9, 2025: Everyone is not Trump My therapist once pointed out that ‘everyone is not your mother’ - ie don’t respond to everyone like they’re a malign narcissist. Dont let that …
May 9, 2025: A tiny woman slides past slowly on a huge Harley chopper her hands reaching way above her head to grip the handlebars. It’s way too big for her. Dudes …
May 8, 2025: Finished reading: The Survivors by Jane Harper 📚 As ever, quality small town murder mystery, intelligent and grown up.
Apr 27, 2025: Finished reading: the company by Robert LIttell 📚 Long, suspense-free fictionalised history of the CIA in novel form. I’m sure the CIA approved …
Apr 27, 2025: Door I must look like I’m meditating. I’m not. I’m waiting to die. I sit, foursquare on a bric a brac dining chair behind the empty boho cafe counter, …
Apr 24, 2025: Voyage I scuttled from the quay down the ship’s gangway, the overhead rigging clattering against the masts and booms in the early summer evening. No-one …
Apr 23, 2025: HuffPost making a song and dance about the 'hilarious' way a CNN presenter kept returning to a question that the interviewee didn't want to answer. The US media must be incredibly supine for this to be remarkable. That exact tactic is utterly normal in the UK www.huffpost.com/entry/abb…
Apr 23, 2025: Men This cafe is full of older men. Retired. Or lone laptop typers, like me, habitues with a coffee and a scone or a sandwich. Who knows what we’re …
Apr 16, 2025: Nightmare He’s woken by her twitching beside him in the undergrowth, dreaming. Small gasps and whimpers as she squirms and jerks, eyes closed, body tensing and …
Apr 15, 2025: Defiance Two of us were studying music for the exams at the end of high school, and I was the only one also in the school band, private piano lessons, the …
Apr 15, 2025: Finished reading: The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota 📚 Very English -Yorkshire countryside, botched communication, embarrassed romance, virulent …
Apr 14, 2025: Finished reading: Hello, Transcriber by Hannah Morrissey 📚 Midwest smalltown shithole noir, feels like no-budget indie film. Enjoyably scuzzy and down …
Apr 13, 2025: Finished reading: Torch by lin anderson 📚 Meh.
Apr 12, 2025: Trump’s best thought of as a social media platform in himself. He exists to keep people’s attention; that’s his remuneration. more …
Apr 10, 2025: Mama The woman in the supermarket queue in front of me is swivelling left to right, eyes panicky wide, combing the gaudy aisles of the supermarket. Wedged …
Apr 9, 2025: Finished reading: Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad - Daniel Finkelstein Finished reading: Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad by Daniel Finkelstein 📚 Everybody should read this. It manages to put both the Holocaust and the …
Apr 7, 2025: Finished reading: Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd 📚 More of the reliably cracking mid-20th century Zeligishness, somewhere in the general …
Apr 7, 2025: Finished reading: The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov 📚 Snarky and charming police procedural where the police are ambivalent and making up the procedure …
Apr 7, 2025: On the opposite pavement, a bloke in a tracksuit has paused, phone in hand, to shout at my compost recycling bin.
Apr 6, 2025: Abandoned: Death Under Little Sky by Stig Abell 📚 This is what happens when an arts journalist thinks he’ll knock out a cosey whodunit during lockdown …
Apr 5, 2025: Finished reading: Sociopath by Patric Gagne 📚 I had far more sympathy for sociopaths after reading this than I did before. Which is exactly what a …
Apr 5, 2025: I’ve lost interest in politics. British politics isn’t relevant, I don’t have the appetite to the learn the detail of Canadian …
Mar 27, 2025: Finished reading: [The Seventh Floor: A Novel](https://micro.blog/books/9781324086697) by David McCloskey 📚 As everyone says, McCloskey’s very good, and shifting more to character and personal betrayals just makes him even better.
Mar 26, 2025: Finished reading: [Careless People](https://micro.blog/books/9781250391247) by Sarah Wynn-Williams 📚 Another one of those tech bro biogs where all the good bits have been in the news anyway.
Mar 25, 2025: Grave The sexton had seen this before. A year after the funeral, a thin strip of pale dead yellow grass outlined the shape of a coffin in the burial ground, …
Mar 25, 2025: Finished reading: Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper 📚 Well executed LA Confidential/Chinatown update. Quality pulp fiction.
Mar 18, 2025: Song The lino round the base of the toilet is badly cut, leaving a few millimetres of gap between the porcelain and the curled edge of the vinyl. He lays …
Mar 17, 2025: Finished reading: Patriot by Alexei Navalny 📚 There’s a really good doc with him on BBC iPlayer, which would be time better spent.
Mar 14, 2025: Finished reading: Daughter Of Mine by Megan Miranda 📚 Murky past and the web of family tensions in small town America wrapped round a murder mystery. …
Mar 13, 2025: Gang She catches up with him in the corridor outside the classroom. He’s backed into a corner, she’s holding back, swaying from her ankles, her hand …
Mar 13, 2025: The standard metric for measuring written English clarity in science is called Hemingway. I assume that’s because he worked hard to write clear, simple, concrete prose, rather than ending up alone with his cats, a bottle of rum, and a shotgun.
Mar 10, 2025: Motel The reason it’s a cliché is because it’s true, Lloyd Cole sung, clunkily. But the cliché is also true, like mirrors facing each other, infinitely …
Mar 10, 2025: Finished reading: Don’t Point That Thing at Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli 📚 PG Wodehouse on a bad day pastiching Raymond Chandler. Still wittier than …
Mar 8, 2025: Finished reading: Lucifer’s Banker by Bradley C. Birkenfeld 📚 Messianic blowhard international banker turns dickwaving/self pitying …
Mar 7, 2025: Butterflies You wouldn’t look twice at the Butterflies Of The Night. The secret of their international dominance has been keeping it drab. Even their outer …
Mar 6, 2025: Fishing The winches at the back of the Jerry’s boat creak and haul the net into the stern, and Jerry’s eyes are pinned on the winch, his hand tight on the …
Mar 4, 2025: Just watching the Trump Not State Of The Union. Do you think Americans understand what a bunch of thick twats they come across as when they chant …
Mar 3, 2025: Family He knows where each stair creaks, whether it will groan when his foot hits the left, the right, or the middle, as he creeps slowly down from his …
Mar 2, 2025: Finished reading: Fire Weather by John Vaillant 📚 Scary and inclusive, with a nice linking of the fire’s voraciousness with the oil …
Mar 2, 2025: Saloon Amongst the increasing dross on Substack, there’s someone putting up a word each day as the prompt for a 100-word ‘story’. …
Mar 2, 2025: I was never lost on boyhood bike rides, until I got home As a child, I never got lost when I was out. That only happened once I got home.
Feb 28, 2025: Trump planned the ambush to make up ground with his base after he was nice to other foreigners earlier in the week, but the angle of attack was a …
Feb 28, 2025: The stroppy, awkward independence of open source For at least the last 25 years, since I read Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, I’ve flirted with Linux every so often, and it’s so …
Feb 24, 2025: Up your Chromebook game with this simple file manager trick I’ve been using a Chromebook as my main computer for months now, and for almost everything, it’s a great laptop. Almost everything. The one thing it …
Feb 24, 2025: How it feels to not grieve your parents When Logan Roy died fishing his iPhone out of the toilet on his private jet in Succession, his daughter Shiv hesitated over whether to go and see his …
Feb 23, 2025: Finished reading: Harlan Coben - Win by Harlan Coben 📚 His books are so much smarter and snarkier than his TV series.
Feb 23, 2025: At the diner table next to me, a middle aged man monologues about painting his house, taxes and other middle aged man things to his largely silent …
Feb 21, 2025: Snotty upmarket opticians: no sir, that loose hinge on your glasses is irreparable. You will need a new pair. Walmart opticians: give me five minutes, …
Feb 19, 2025: Writing across iOS and Chromebook - the options I’m spending far too much time recently figuring out my best options for writing apps across a bunch of platforms, and having finally been forced to …
Feb 17, 2025: Finished reading: We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets 📚 Douglas Coupland lite, hyped because of the social media moral panic.
Feb 15, 2025: Finished reading: Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra 📚 I read it fast, which is a good sign. One of those ‘does what it says on the can really …
Feb 14, 2025: TIL that Google Keep doesn’t have a way to add photos from Google Photos. Image files from your drives, yes. Photos Google already knows about, …
Feb 14, 2025: Roses are read Violets are blue The ASCII for ‘space’ Is Code 32
Feb 13, 2025: Snowy, innit.
Feb 10, 2025: When I log into iCloud in Chrome I get a weird serif font in Reminders. On the other iCloud account, same browser, literally logging out of one …
Feb 8, 2025: I find I’m filtering all the coverage of the US through my ‘what would the Germany-in-1933 version of that be?’ touchstone to gauge implications.
Feb 7, 2025: Disturbed to find Martin from Friday Night Dinner as a murderous baddie in the very bad final Da Vinci Code film. He has yet to say ‘shit on it’ and …
Feb 7, 2025: Most journalists (some of my best friends etc.) want to get the story right, but they need your help. Find out what you can do in this close analysis …
Feb 7, 2025: Most journalists (some of my best friends etc.) want to get the story right, but they need your help. Find out what you can do in this close analysis …
Feb 6, 2025: A planned post for my True Science Stories substack about how a study got covered in the media didn’t turn out how I expected. Always good to figure …
Feb 5, 2025: I think humanity is safe from AI for the moment. I just had to beat Google’s Gemini into submission after it had come up with four erroneous …
Feb 5, 2025: Et tu, BBC? Just heard Fi Glover on Times Radio being immensely dense about a study saying banning phones in school doesn’t materially affect educational …
Feb 4, 2025: Trump trying to outsource taxation and make other countries pay for the US via tariffs is a kind of analogy for how he wants likes to manage his …
Feb 3, 2025: Finished reading: Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks 📚 Really interesting stuff about early psychiatric/neurology research, but not enough plot and too …
Jan 30, 2025: A dudebro behind me in this café, having grown weary of praising Trump oh-so-ironically, is now explaining to a fellow dudebro how Kraftwerk invented …
Jan 30, 2025: My attempt to provoke Gemini into an existential crisis by asking what the point of it was just failed. I asked it to collate contact names from public websites like LinkedIn and employee profile pages. But it can’t use that dataset. It can make up …
Jan 29, 2025: When you realise that of your five Substack readers, one is yourself, another is your ex wife keeping tabs, and another is a bot. The other two are …
Jan 29, 2025: How the fuck does anyone ever break through Substack if they don’t bring followers with them?
Jan 28, 2025: Things coming together Reading through some old journal entries about the whys and hows of my writing. I’d come a long way when I wrote them nearly three years ago, and I’ve …
Jan 28, 2025: When accidentally leaving your laptop at home reminds you that sometimes scrawling stuff into an actual physical paper notebook hits a vein of way …
Jan 28, 2025: Oscillating between anxiety about paying bills (unwarranted because I can afford them) and reassuring myself that Big New Plans are panning out as I …
Jan 26, 2025: Today I found out that Canada could’ve joined the nukes club at the start of the Cold War but chose not to, unlike the UK, which should’ve made the …
Jan 23, 2025: As a Brit in Canada, this whole Trump Tariffs insanity is sounding very much like Brexit - the triumph of deluded bigotry over the mutual benefits of …
Jan 23, 2025: Alistair Campbell on TRIP: “I don’t consider myself part of The Establishment” Also Alistair Campbell on TRIP: “As I was saying to Al Gore…”
Jan 22, 2025: Trying to file the current lunacy south of the border as some half arsed mafia state rather than the demise of a country I used to think of the least …
Jan 22, 2025: Talking to a friend in the UK today and realised I’m actually used to -5c being ‘warm’. This is what two months in Canada does to a …
Jan 19, 2025: Turns out going to the pub to watch jazz and get drunk with your partner is a very nice way to spend Sunday afternoon
Jan 19, 2025: Finished reading: Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore 📚 The chapters on his death and the subsequent manoeuvring, with some of the players and their …
Jan 18, 2025: The Paramount version of Le Bureau (The Agency) doesnt have the panache and elan and sheer … Frenchness …of the original.
Jan 18, 2025: Currently reading: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann 📚 Wish me luck. It’s a long climb.
Jan 18, 2025: A lot of Canada so far has been white snowy parking lots at night hard cut with near-empty zombie mall stores.
Jan 18, 2025: Currently reading: Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore 📚 There’s a lot of juicy gossip in here, but you have to wade through a lot of tedium too.