March 2024 Archives

Zap

This week, I received a ~240V AC electric shock. I can’t recommend it.

A 10-year-old girl hangs from a scaffolding pole outside a white house. — As you may have guessed based on photos in previous posts, our house is currently wrapped in ~~a convenient climbing frame~~ scaffolding.

We’re currently having our attic converted, so we’ve had some electricians in doing the necessary electrical wiring. Shortly after they first arrived they discovered that our existing electrics were pretty catastrophic, and needed to make a few changes including a new fusebox and disconnecting the hilariously-unsafe distribution board in the garage.

Lifted floor showing central heating pipes and a tangle of electrical cables. — The owner before last of our house worked for SSEN and did all of his own wiring, and left us a rats’ nest of spaghetti wiring that our electricians described as being unlike anything they’d ever seen before. Also a literal rats’ nest under the decking, but we got rid of that already.

After connecting everything new up they began switching everything back on and testing the circuits… and we were surprised to hear arcing sounds and see all the lights flickering.

The electricians switched everything off and started switching breakers back on one at a time to try to identify the source of the fault, reasonably assuming that something was shorting somewhere, but no matter what combination of switches were enabled there always seemed to be some kind of problem.

Electricity shining a torch into a cupboard containing an fusebox with an open cover; the switches are in a mixture of on and off positions. — You know those escape room puzzles where you have to get the right permutation of switch combinations? This was a lot less fun than that.

Noticing that the oven’s clock wasn’t just blinking 00:00 (as it would after a power cut) but repeatedly resetting itself to 00:00, I pointed this out to the electricians as an indicator that the problem was occurring on their current permutation of switches, which was strange because it was completely different to the permutation that had originally exhibited flickering lights.

I reached over to point at the oven, and the tip of my finger touched the metal of its case…

Blam! I felt a jolt through my hand and up my arm and uncontrollably leapt backwards across the room, convulsing as I fell to the floor. I gestured to the cooker and shouted something about it being live, and the electricians switched off its circuit and came running with those clever EM-field sensor pens they use.

Somehow the case of the cooker was energised despite being isolated at the fusebox? How could that be?

I missed the next bits of the diagnosis of our electrical system because I was busy getting my own diagnosis: it turns out that if you get a mains electric shock – even if you’re conscious and mobile – the NHS really want you to go to A&E.

At my suggestion, Ruth delivered me to the Minor Injuries unit at our nearest hospital (I figured that what I had wasn’t that serious, and the local hospital generally has shorter wait times!)… who took one look at me and told me that I ought to be at the emergency department of the bigger hospital over the way.

Off at the “right” hospital I got another round of ECG tests, some blood tests (which can apparently be used to diagnose muscular damage: who knew?), and all the regular observations of pulse and blood pressure and whatnot that you might expect.

And then, because let’s face it I was probably in better condition than most folks being dropped off at A&E, I was left to chill in a short stay ward while the doctors waited for test results to come through.

Two electricians, one in a hard hat, look in an outdoor metering cupboard by torchlight. — Apparently our electricity meter blew itself up somewhere along the way, leaving us with even less of a chance to turn the power back on again.

Meanwhile, back at home our electricians had called-in SSEN, who look after the grid in our area. It turns out that the problem wasn’t directly related to our electrical work at all but had occurred one or two pylons “upstream” from our house. A fault on the network had, from the sounds of things, resulted in “live” being sent down not only the live wire but up the earth wire too.

That’s why appliances in the house were energised even with their circuit breakers switched-off: they were connected to an earth that was doing pretty-much the opposite of what an earth should: discharging into the house!

It seems an inconceivable coincidence to me that a network fault might happen to occur during the downtime during which we happened to have electricians working, so I find myself wondering if perhaps the network fault had occurred some time ago but only become apparent/dangerous as a result of changes to our household configuration.

I’m no expert, but I sketched a diagram showing how such a thing might happen (click to embiggen). I’ll stress that I don’t know for certain what went wrong: I’m just basing this on what I’ve been told my SSEN plus a little speculation:

By the time I was home from the hospital the following day, our driveway was overflowing with the vehicles of grid engineers to the point of partially blocking the main street outside (which at least helped ensure that people obeyed our new 20mph limit for a change).

A driveway full of vehicles spills out onto the nearby road. — We weren’t even able to get our *own* car onto our driveway when we got back from the hospital.

Two and a half days later, I’m back at work and mostly recovered. I’ve still got some discomfort in my left hand, especially if I try to grip anything tightly, but I’m definitely moving in the right direction.

It’s actually more-annoying how much my chest itches from having various patches of hair shaved-off to make it possible to hook up ECG electrodes!

Anyway, the short of it is that I recommend against getting zapped by the grid. If it had given me superpowers it might have been a different story, but I guess it just gave me sore muscles and a house with a dozen non-working sockets.

Fedicard

Yeah, that’s about right:

With thanks to Nash and Hexephre, of course.

Yours Quim-cerely

A lovely letter from the Vagina Museum – which I’ve not had the opportunity to visit yet – came through my letterbox:

“Yours quim-cerely,” doesn’t appear in any style guide but is now the best sign-off in any letter I’ve ever received.

This moment of joy was kick-started when I casually dropped in on a conversation about printer recommendations. I’ve got a big ol’ Brother printer here, and it’s great, not least because even though it’s got a tonne of features like duplexing and (double-sided) scanning and photocopying and it’s even got a fax machine built in for some reason… it doesn’t try to be any more “smart” than it needs to be. It doesn’t talk to Alexa or order itself more toner (it even gets-by with knockoff toner!) or try to do anything well… except print things, which it does wonderfully.

For this and other reasons I recommended they buy a Brother.

Then, alongside some other Fediversians, I chipped in to help them buy one.

Totally worth it for the letter alone. Now I just need to find an excuse to visit an exhibition!

Bumblebees surprise scientists with ‘sophisticated’ social learning

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…

First, bees had to push a blue lever that was blocking a red lever… too complex for a bee to solve on its own. So scientists trained some bees by offering separate rewards for the first and second steps.

These trained bees were then paired with bees who had never seen the puzzle, and the reward for the first step was removed.

Some of the untrained bees were able to learn both steps of the puzzle by watching the trained bees, without ever receiving a reward for the first step.

…

Ian Aikman (BBC News)

This news story is great for two reasons.

Firstly, it’s a really interesting experimental result. Just when you think humankind’s learned everything they ever will about the humble bumblebee (humblebee?), there’s something more to discover.

That a bee can be trained to solve a complex puzzle by teaching it to solve each step independently and then later combining the steps isn’t surprising. But that these trained bees can pass on their knowledge to their peers (bee-ers?); who can then, one assumes, pass it on to yet other bees. Social learning.

Which, logically, means that a bee that learns to solve the two-lever puzzle second-hand would have a chance of solving an even more-complex three-lever puzzle; assuming such a thing is within the limits of the species’ problem-solving competence (I don’t know for sure whether they can do this, but I’m a firm bee-lever).

But the second reason I love this story is that it’s a great metaphor in itself for scientific progress. The two-lever problem is, to an untrained bee, unsolvable. But if it gets a low-effort boost (a free-bee, as it were) by learning from those that came before it, it can make a new discovery.

(I suppose the secret third reason the news story had me buzzing was that I appreciated the opportunities for puns that it presented. But you already knew that I larva pun, right?)

BBC News… without the crap

Did I mention recently that I love RSS? That it brings me great joy? That I start and finish almost every day in my feed reader? Probably.

I used to have a single minor niggle with the BBC News RSS feed: that it included sports news, which I didn’t care about. So I wrote a script that downloaded it, stripped sports news, and re-exported the feed for me to subscribe to. Magic.

But lately – presumably as a result of technical changes at the Beeb’s side – this feed has found two fresh ways to annoy me:

The feed now re-publishes a story if it gets re-promoted to the front page… but with a different <guid> (it appears to get a #0 after it when first published, a #1 the second time, and so on). In a typical day the feed reader might scoop up new stories about once an hour, any by the time I get to reading them the same exact story might appear in my reader multiple times. Ugh.
They’ve started adding iPlayer and BBC Sounds content to the BBC News feed. I don’t follow BBC News in my feed reader because I want to watch or listen to things. If you do, that’s fine, but I don’t, and I’d rather filter this content out.

Luckily, I already have a recipe for improving this feed, thanks to my prior work. Let’s look at my newly-revised script (also available on GitHub):

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'bundler/inline'

# # Sample crontab:
# # At 41 minutes past each hour, run the script and log the results
# */20 * * * * ~/bbc-news-rss-filter-sport-out.rb > ~/bbc-news-rss-filter-sport-out.log 2>>&1

# Dependencies:
# * open-uri - load remote URL content easily
# * nokogiri - parse/filter XML
gemfile do
  source 'https://rubygems.org'
  gem 'nokogiri'
end
require 'open-uri'

# Regular expression describing the GUIDs to reject from the resulting RSS feed
# We want to drop everything from the "sport" section of the website, also any iPlayer/Sounds links
REJECT_GUIDS_MATCHING = /^https:\/\/www\.bbc\.co\.uk\/(sport|iplayer|sounds)\//

# Load and filter the original RSS
rss = Nokogiri::XML(open('https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml?edition=uk'))
rss.css('item').select{|item| item.css('guid').text =~ REJECT_GUIDS_MATCHING }.each(&:unlink)

# Strip the anchors off the <guid>s: BBC News "republishes" stories by using guids with #0, #1, #2 etc, which results in duplicates in feed readers
rss.css('guid').each{|g|g.content=g.content.gsub(/#.*$/,'')}

File.open( '/www/bbc-news-no-sport.xml', 'w' ){ |f| f.puts(rss.to_s) }

It’s amazing what you can do with Nokogiri and a half dozen lines of Ruby.

That revised script removes from the feed anything whose <guid> suggests it’s sports news or from BBC Sounds or iPlayer, and also strips any “anchor” part of the <guid> before re-exporting the feed. Much better. (Strictly speaking, this can result in a technically-invalid feed by introducing duplicates, but your feed reader oughta be smart enough to compensate for and ignore that: mine certainly is!)

You’re free to take and adapt the script to your own needs, or – if you don’t mind being tied to my opinions about what should be in BBC News’ RSS feed – just subscribe to my copy at: https://fox.q-t-a.uk/bbc-news-no-sport.xml

RSS > ActivityPub

RSS is better than ActivityPub¹.

When I subscribe to content, I want:

Resilient failsafes. ActivityPub has many points-of-failure. A notification might fail to complete transmission as a result of downtime, faults, or network conditions, and the receiving server might never know. A feed reader, conversely, can tell you that an address 404’d or the server was down.
Retroactive access. Once you fix the problem above… you still don’t get the message you missed: it’s probably gone forever – there’s no retroactive access. The same is true when your ActivityPub server connects with a peer for the first time: you only ever get new content after that point. RSS, on the other hand, provides some number of “recent” items the moment you first subscribe.
Simple subscriptions. RSS can be served from a statically-hosted single file, which makes it suitable to deploy anywhere as well as consume using anything. It can be read, after a fashion, in anything from Lynx upwards.

RSS ticks all these boxes. If I can choose between RSS and ActivityPub to subscribe to your content, and I don’t need a real-time update, I’m probably going to choose RSS.

About a month later, Matthias Pfefferle wrote a great post that makes a good “next stop” if you’re on a deep dive…

Footnotes

¹ I feel like this statement needs a few clarifications and caveats, but my hot take looks spicier if I bury them in a footnote!

By RSS, I mean whichever pull-based basic HTTP you like, be that Atom, JSON Feed, h-entry, or even just properly-marked-up HTML5: did you know that the <article> element is intended to be suitable for syndication use?
Obviously I appreciate that RSS and ActivityPub are different tools for different jobs, and there are doubtless use-cases for which ActivityPub is clearly the superior solution.
I certainly don’t object to services providing both RSS and ActivityPub as syndication options, like Mastodon does, where both might be good choices.

Young Squirrel Talking About Himself

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Parry Gripp

This week, Parry Gripp and Nathan Mazur released Young Squirrel Talking About Himself.

You might recognise the tune (and most of the words) from an earlier Parry Gripp song. The original video for the older version is no longer available on his channel, and that’s probably for the best, but I was really pleased to see the song resurrected in this new form because it’s fabulous. I’ve been singing it all day.

Magical

For World Book Day (which here in the UK is marked a month earlier than the rest of the world) the kids’ school invited people to come “dressed as a word”.

As usual, the kids and teachers participated along with only around two other adults. But of course I was one of them.

This year, I was “magical”.

Cable Gore

If you enjoy a bit of “cable gore”, let me introduce you to the fusebox cupboard at my house, with its plethora of junctions, fuses, breakers, switches, timers, and cabling everywhere! Banana for scale.

Out as Poly at Work

During one of the periods today that Facebook wasn’t down, a friend who makes use of the platform shared a Facebook post with me, which read:

Has anyone informed work/colleagues about being ENM and how was it received?

I’ve informed a few colleagues but I am considering informing my team as part of my Team Champion and EDI role.

…

I’ve been “out” at every one of the employers¹ since I entered into my first open/nonmonogamous relationship a couple of decades ago.

I didn’t do so immediately: in fact, I waited almost until the point that coming out was an academic necessity! The point at which it was only a matter of time before somebody thought they’d caught us “cheating”… or else because I didn’t want to have to lie to coworkers about e.g. from whom a romantic gift might have come.

Here’s how it went to be “out” at each of the three full-time jobs I’ve held over that period:

SmartData

We lived and worked in and around a small town, and in our small tight-knit team we all had a reasonable handle on what was going on in one another’s personal lives. By the time I was actively in a relationship with Ruth (while still in a relationship with Claire, whom all my coworkers had met at e.g. office parties and the like), it just seemed prudent to mention it, as well as being honest and transparent.

It went fine. And it made Monday watercooler conversations about “~~who~~ what I did at the weekend” simpler. Being a small team sharing a single open-plan office meant that I was able to mention my relationship status to literally the entire company at once, and everybody took it with a shrug of noncommittal acceptance.

The Bodleian Libraries

The Bodleian Libraries was a much bigger beast, and in turn a part of the massive University of Oxford. It was big enough to have a “LGBT+ Staff” network within its Equality and Diversity unit, within which – because of cultural intersections² – I was able to meet a handful of other poly folk at the University.

Dan poses with Bodleian coworkers in front of a party feast in a low-ceilinged office. — This motley crew were exactly as warm and accepting a bunch as you could ask for.

I mentioned very early on – as soon as it came up organically – the structure of the relationship I was in, and everybody was cool (or failing that, at least professional) about it. Curious coworkers asked carefully-crafted questions, and before long (and following my lead) my curious lifestyle choices were as valid a topic for light-hearted jokes as anything else in that fun and gossipy office.

And again: it paid-off pragmatically, especially when I took parental leave after the birth of each of our two kids³.

It also helped defuse a situation when I was spotted by a more-distant coworker on my way back from a lunchtime date with a lover who wasn’t Ruth, and my confused colleague introduced herself to the woman that she assumed must’ve been the partner she’d heard about. When I explained that no, this is a different person I’m seeing my colleague seemed taken aback, and I was glad to be able to call on a passing coworker who knew me better to back me up in my assertion that no, this wasn’t just me trying to lie to cover some illicit work affair! Work allies are useful.

Automattic

I’ve been with Automattic for four and a half years now, and this time around I went one step further in telling potential teammates about my relationship structure by mentioning it in my “Howdymattic” video – a video introduction new starters are encouraged to record to say hi to the rest of the company⁴.

A convenient side-effect of this early coming-out was that I found myself immediately inducted into the “polymatticians” group – a minor diversity group within Automattic, comprising a massive 1.2% of the company, who openly identify as engaging in nonmonogamous relationships⁵!

That was eye-opening. Not only does Automattic have a stack of the regular inclusivity groups you might expect from a big tech company (queer, Black, women, trans, neurodiverse) and a handful of the less-common ones (over-40s, cancer survivors, nondrinkers, veterans), they’ve also got a private group for those of us who happen to be both Automatticians and in (or inclined towards) polyamorous relationships. Mind blown.

My relationship structure’s been… quietly and professionally accepted. It doesn’t really come up (why would it? in a distributed company it has even less-impact on anything than it did in my previous non-distributed roles)… outside of the “polymatticians” private space.

In summary: I can recommend being “out” at work. So long as you’d feel professionally safe to do so: relationship structure isn’t necessarily a protected characteristic (it’s complicated), and even if it were you might be careful about mentioning it in some environments. It’s great to have the transparency to not have to watch your words when a coworker asks about “your partner”. Plus being free to be emotionally honest at work is just good for your mental wellbeing, in my opinion! If you trust your coworkers, be honest with them. If you don’t… perhaps you need to start looking for a better job?

Footnotes

¹ I’m not counting my freelance work during any of those periods, although I’ve been pretty transparent with them too.

² Let’s be clear: most queer folks, just like most straight folks, seem to be similarly-inclined towards monogamy. But ethnical non-monogamy in various forms seems to represent a larger minority within queer communities than outside them. There’s all kinds of possible reasons for this, and smarter people than me have written about them, but personally I’m of the opinion that, for many, it stems from the fact that by the time you’re societally-forced to critically examine your relationships, you might as well go the extra mile and decide whether your relationship structure is right for you too. In other words: I suspect that cis hetro folks would probably have a proportional parity of polyamory if they weren’t saturated with media and cultural role models that show them what their relationship “should” look like.

³ Unwilling to lie, I made absolutely clear that I was neither the father of either of them nor the husband of their mother (among other reasons, the law prohibits Ruth from marrying me on account of being married to JTA), but pointed out that my contract merely stipulated that I was the partner of a birth parent, which was something I’d made completely clear since I first started working there. I’m not sure if I was just rubber-stamped through the University’s leave process as a matter of course or if they took a deeper look at me and figured “yeah, we’re not going to risk picking a legal fight with that guy”, but I got my leave granted.

⁴ If you enjoyed my “Howdymattic”, you’ll probably also love the outtakes.

⁵ There are dozens of us! Dozens!

Loud Helpline

I guess installing a sign was cheaper than retraining the helpline operators not to shout at everybody.