Nonsense. You can’t bite into an American meal without immediately tasting a wonderful selection of flavours, like:

• salt
• corn-derived sweetener

No-one screeches louder than the Daily Mail whenever the wokerati try to force innocent, right-thinking, God-fearing drivers to surrender their freedoms for the communist orthodoxy of walking and cycling, so it’s surprising to see them allow such an anarchic voice to be heard on one of their channels. Hopefully soon normal service will be resumed and they’ll get someone to tell us why coal mining, landlords, JK Rowling and fascism are good and proper, and how Greta Thunberg, bus lanes, oat milk and solar panels are to be feared and hated.

Good. While we’re at it, could the government start labelling these people, who use acts of terror to cause their targets to feel terrified and impose on wider communities a state of terrorism, as, y’know, some kind of terroriser or terrerismist or…

This is why I love radio stations like BBC Radio 6. While they enforce a John Peel styled A-B-C playlist, their DJs are still given a lot of freedom to play their own choices. Without exception they’re all well-informed and enthusiastic music fans with a love of specific genres and, more often than not, musicians or producers themselves.

“She looked like she was going to do herself an injury.”

That’s EXACTLY how abusers talk about their victims. What is there left to say about that utter failed human? Is there literally no depths he won’t gleefully plumb?

Find yourself someone who looks at you the way Ten-Names Tommy’s Definitely Heterosexual Adjutant looks at Definitely Heterosexual Ten-Names Tommy.

We need the computer room back? Well, then, there’s only one thing for it.

Yeah, then it would be easy to simply walk into Mordor. You’d fuck your nose up.

They might as well say “you may not react”.

In my experience there seem to be four types of people: those who don’t have a lawn; those who have never heard of clover on lawns; those with clover on their lawns; and those who live under the unrelenting glare and iron thumb of a homeowner’s association.

I kinda feel that “plain black coffee” in it’s various forms - Americano, drip brew, whatever - is the only way to actually drink coffee. That’s not to say I don’t approve of milk coffee or lattes or whatever - I love them - but they’re drinks which have coffee in them, even if it’s a dominant flavor. A banana smoothie isn’t a banana.

Modern music is fine.

I think one of the least self-aware thoughts someone can express - and that I hear often - is that “music now isn’t as good as it was in <decade of my youth>”, then they’ll go on to name the top five acts of that decade. Go back in time and listen to the track that was at number 53 in the charts on some boring week in mid-August in that decade and it’ll almost certainly be absolutely tepid mediocrepeice made by a forgotten artist and no better than the song that was playing on the radio that caused the comment in the first place. By the time that Josephine was coaxed onto that Flying Machine pop music had long been established as a commercial product to be produced at industrial scales. No-one alive today grew up in a generation that had exclusive access to “real music”, and if anyone tries to use that phrase to describe Motown in particular you have my permission to stab them in their eyes with a spoon.

A solved problem is an unexploitable problem.

ZigBee is a fully local mesh protocol. Matter is a local protocol that can run over either WiFi or over Thread, a local mesh protocol designed to replace ZigBee. Zigbee, Matter and Thread are your friends.

I cannot even begin to recommend this highly enough:

https://sonoff.tech/en-nl/products/sonoff-zigbee-thread-usb-dongle-dongle-plus-mg24

Get one of those - or an equivalent device from another manufacturer - to allow Home Assistant to talk directly to your bulbs using Zigbee or Thread. With that, you HA can speak directly to any bulb that uses Zigbee, Thread or Matter which is 99% of the bulbs worth bothering with.

Anything that connects to WiFi without explicitly using Matter should be avoided at all costs and especially if it uses Tuya - look for the mark of the beast hidden on the packaging of kit sold under other brands.

IKEA Tradfri (ZigBee) and Kajplats (Thread) bulbs are excellent, especially for the low price. Philips Hue (ZigBee/Thread) is the gold standard but not cheap.

Devices running ESPHome or Tasmota are rarer but also highly hackable and work entirely over local WiFi. Take a look at Local Bytes for some good kit like that.

“Are there no prisons? …And the union workhouses, are they still in operation?”

I love it when century-old stories include lines like this to remind us that these people have always existed.

New debate: if we’re going down the route of compressing animating images as if they were movies, why not just use a video format?

Sometimes I have to wear a duty belt. That duty belt has some heavy-duty pointy metal things stored on it. I’d just make sure my duty belt is nice and secure before I squeeeeeeze past.

Flawless.

I used to date a guy who had that EXACT machine. I appreciate it’s a popular model but it brought back memories.

Anyway, he made the shittiest coffee, real dirty-tasting brown sludge and I couldn’t figure out why. When he wasn’t about one day I tested the machine with some cheap supermarket grounds and I couldn’t believe it: it was fine. Perfectly cromulent, surprising clean tasting, and hassle-free.

Anyway, after a while I figured it out. Turns out he was putting Nescafé instant coffee into the filter.

Also Turkey, but less flavourful.