Err, yes, it seems to have been a while since I updated this blog. 😳
It’s not that I haven’t done anything since September 15th, just that I haven’t got my arse into gear and written anything about it. So a few mini entries to fill the yawning gap in content.
Open House London
18th September
I didn’t get to visit anything big and grand this year but did manage a few interesting smaller exhibitions. First was “Frames of Reference” at Pushkin House, 5A Bloomsbury Square, WC1A 2TA. This is an arts and cultural centre focussing on Russia and the former Soviet Bloc countries. They presented a display of “‘Thaw-era’ photographs that, unlike the staged assemblages of socialist realism, offer a more humanistic vision into everyday life in the USSR.” Next up I went to the People’s Museum in Somers Town, 52 Phoenix Road, NW1 1ES, a small space (single shop unit sized) packed with all sorts of interesting stuff from the area, particularly the Ossulston Estate, a prime example of pre-war Social housing in which it is located. Every part of the space is used with posters, photo albums, videos, and a recreated living room with lots of things you’d maybe recognise from your parents or grandparents homes. The volunteers were lovely. Of the visits I made this day I enjoyed this one the most.
From Somers Town to Soho and the De Lane Lea Studios at 75 Dean Street. I’ve long been fascinated by Soho so couldn’t pass up “Timelines: 300 years of Soho” at the former Warner Bros. Sound Studio. The exhibition space was possibly smaller than that at the People’s Museum but they’d gathered some good artefacts to display “The People, The Places, The Pulse” of the West End’s urban village. My next stop was far to the west, on the way home I dropped in to Hounslow Library at 7 Bath Road for the London Borough of Hounslow 60th Anniversary Exhibition. It took some finding on the first floor and was only a display of a couple of dozen photos taken around the borough in 1965 and with contemporary views with which to compare them but this is (or rather was) my “manor” so had to take a look.
Cardiff Bay
October 6th
I needed a getaway so braved the trains and had a few days in South Wales. I’d spent an afternoon in Cardiff Bay more years ago than I’d like to count but never stayed there. Booked the Premier Inn who then emailed to say that my sea view would more likely be the inside of their builder’s scaffolding so I cancelled and rebooked at the Future Inn, which was fine if slightly further to walk to the waterfront.
And yes, Torchwood 😀
I arrived a bit later than scheduled because of course GWR fucked up but the room was huge and the weather was if not sunny at least not raining. Yes, in Wales, who’d have thought it.
The following day I took a walk out across the Cardiff Barrage and got a bit carried away and ended up on Penarth Pier.
It was a nice walk though and easy to get the train back. The weather was better the next day so I got a train to Caerfilli and visited the huge castle. It’s a good one, well presented and takes a good while to get around. The sun came out (yes, in Wales) and I even went full tourist and bought a commemorative tee-shirt - they even had my size.
The day after that I came home with 156 photos to sort through and a Delay Repay claim to submit. It was a good getaway.
Cardiff Trip Photo Album on Flickr
The rest of the month was taken up with days out locally and to the coast because I find it hard to resist going to the seaside if it’s sunny. After a meeting in Acton I caught the District Line to Cannon Street and then went for an early evening stroll along the north bank of the Thames, ending with a pint in The Grapes in Limehouse, as you do.
No sign of Gandalf.
Steve Knightley and The Winter Yards Band
November 1st
I intended to go to more music gigs this year. I haven’t done very well at that but managed to go and see Steve Knightley at the Haymarket in Basingstoke. This was part of his post-Show Of Hands solo tour with a new band. It was of course an excellent evening and one where the support act, True Foxes, was as good as the main act. (They also provide vocals for Steve and the Winter Yards Band.) Both are well worth seeking out to see live although when not touring with Steve True Foxes are mostly to be found near their native Cornwall. Check out their website.
Computer touching - experiments with GhostBSD
My main desktop and travelling laptop both run Xubuntu. I like the simplicity of the XFCE desktop, no fancy bells and whistles that I don’t need and runs well on older machinery. I’d been playing about with GhostBSD on an old Packard Bell but it was a bit painful especially as it didn’t have a working battery. To find out what it was like on something that wasn’t basically a wreck (which also weighed a ton!) I splashed out on a refurbished laptop, a Lenovo Thinkpad L470. It’s hard to go wrong with a Thinkpad, especially at under £100. It even has the extra capacity battery which lifts the back of the keyboard up and makes it quite comfortable to type on. Essentially this is the same type of laptop as the last one I had at work but without Windows 10 and BT’s corporate crapware which makes it quite a nice device. Indeed I’m using it to type this blog post.
Not however running BSD. It was an interesting experiment, trying out an alternative OS. I had some fun and games installing it which turned out to be something to do with using Ventoy to create the bootable USB stick. Re-creating the USB stick using old fashioned CLI tools solved that. The OS booted quite quickly and ran OK. It was a little like using Linux ten years ago though. A major pain was WiFi. It all connected OK but only at 2.4 GHz, no drivers are available for 5 GHz so it was rather sluggish. More than I’d expect even for 2.4GHz to be honest. Not all the software that I wanted was available, in particular my preferred cross-platform password manager Enpass. I couldn’t find a way to export from Enpass to KeepassXC that worked and manually transferring passwords etc. got old quite quickly. The standard desktop on GhostBSD is MATE, which is OK once you find your way around it. What isn’t OK is when the taskbars/menus randomly vanish and you have to poke about blindly to restart the Caja file manager to get them back. In the end I decided that GhostBSD is an interesting and light weight OS but you need a lot of enthusiasm to run it as a daily and I don’t quite reach that level of geekery. So this laptop is now running Linux Mint (the XFCE version of course) which works much better. I’m going to see if it would be OK as a Snap-free OS to replace Xubuntu on my other machines although so far I’ve found little to favour one over the other.
...and finally
It’s that time of year again, roll on January. I’ll try not to leave it so long before the next blog post. 😉
