August 2026: Keyboards and cricket
Hello again, belatedly! This newsletter gets later and later every month, which reflects the speed at which I deal with emails (sob). Eventually we’ll get to a point where a newsletter is sent more than a month late, but we’re not there yet!
August was a fun month – the UK heatwaves finally started to subside a little, and I was able to get outside and enjoy some of the summer.
My partner and I had a fun day enjoying some cricket at the Oval, as part of the Hundred – a competition designed to get non-cricket fans into cricket. It works! The game was exciting, if shorter than the home team might have liked. 😅
August was also quite a social month – I got to celebrate the birthdays of three friends, see Pride at the theatre, and visit my family. Naturally, the family cat was most interested in whether he could steal my breakfast.
Perhaps my favourite bit of adventuring with friends was to the Young V&A, for an exhibition about Aardman, the animators of Wallace and Gromit (among other things!). There were lots of props and behind-the-scenes art, which gave a sense of the size and scale of their models. Here’s a garden scene which shows the intricate detail in every scene:
Closer to home, I am (still) trying to sell my house and move in with my partner. There isn’t much progress to report, except that I’m gradually packing and sorting my possessions. My living room is a sea of boxes, and my local charity shop has been doing very well.
As part of the clear-out, I found a cupboard full of unread books, many of which I had when I moved into my current house six years ago. I finally tackled one of the longstanding white whales – Uncle Silas, by Sheridan Le Fanu, which took me the whole month to read. I’ve had a copy for over a decade, after being introduced to Le Fanu through the Carmilla web series.
Another thing I found while sorting was an old keyboard and a set of new keycaps. (In separate places, of course.) I can finally combine them into a delightful keyboard with blank key caps; a white-and-green combination that matches my office walls:
September promises to be more of the same: more house clearing, more reading old books, and hopefully more time spent with friends.
What have I been writing?
August was another quiet month for writing, with most of my free time taken up reading.
The big thing I published was How we tracked down a 16-year-old SQLite bug on the Tailscale blog, which is a write-up of six months of troubleshooting and incidents. I’m very proud of this, both the work and the write-up, and the reception has generally been very positive.
On my own blog, some misunderstandings about file formats led me to ask Why can’t you combine .tar.gz files with cat? I learnt about the structure of files I’ve largely taken for granted, and now I understand why concatenating these files doesn’t work. I also had a lot of fun drawing format diagrams.
I also had the usual collection of notes:
My favourite discovery this month is that for certain Arctic reindeer, their eyes turn bright blue during winter to help them pick out certain lichens.
What’s making me smile?
🙏 I enjoyed Annie Rauwerda’s story about the couple behind Wikipedia’s “high five” photos, who are still together. What a lovely bit of Internet history!
The third season of Silo was excellent, and I can’t wait for the final season. I was a bit sceptical when it opened with an amnesia plotline, but it quickly developed into a chilling exploration of what it would mean to lose your memory.
🏳️🌈 Pride at the National Theatre was good fun; my partner took me there for a recent date night. I’ve never seen the film and I knew very little about Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. It was an entertaining and an educational evening.
Have a lovely September, and I’ll write again soon.
~ Alex