October 2025: closures and clean-ups
Hello friends! October has been a month for enjoying the autumn colours – I’ve spent a lot of time outdoors, including a trip to Wakehurst with a friend, and Batsford Arboretum with my siblings. All the trees are delightful shades of red and gold.
Unfortunately, October was also marked by two of my favourite venues disappearing.
Ruby Violet was an ice cream parlour near King’s Cross, where I used to go for an end-of-week treat when I worked in Euston. It was a warm and cosy vibe, especially as the nights get longer and darker, but it closed at the beginning of October. They’ll continue to do online orders, but the waterside parlour is gone.
A week later was the final performance of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which has been running at the Ambassadors’ Theatre for the last year. It’s a show with a beautiful message about making the most of the time we have, and an abundance of talent on stage. I'm sad to see it close, but I'm glad I got to see the final show surrounded by the friends who made me fall in love with the show in the first place.
On a happier note, I'm now firmly settled into my new job and starting to find a steady routine. I always feel a bit nervous when changing jobs, but I’m past that point now, and I’m glad I made the switch.
In my free time, I’ve been working on a big project to review my personal social media archives. Over the decade or so I used Twitter, I saved over 80,000 tweets – stuff I’d posted, or tweets that mentioned me or that I liked. This data has been a complete mess for years, and I’ve been tidying up and deciding what to keep. I’ve finally finished all that manual review, and the archive is much cleaner now. This parallels the work I did on bookmarks earlier this year, and I plan to write about it soon.
What have I been writing?
Most of my free time has been spent on this social media archiving project, and you can se hints of that in what I’ve been posting – a lot of stuff around downloading videos and social media posts. This includes:
Creating a personal wrapper around yt-dlp – so I can reuse some video downloading code across different projects
Why can't my iPhone play that video? – I discovered that my iPhone is too old to use the AV1 codec, which is what my Mac downloads by default
I also wrote about Doing my own syntax highlighting (finally), which is about how I colour code blocks on my blog. This is something I’ve wanted to do for years, and I finally got the inspiration for it this month. This was accompanied by a short TIL post: How to find the Pygments token type for a short name.
I wrote three other “today I learned” posts:
Look at the
__annotations__to learn about the definition of a TypedDictRemove the microsecond precision from a
datetimein Python
I have a bunch of half-finished blog posts from my social media project, so expect to see more about that in the next few weeks.
What’s making me smile?
🐍 The Python Software Foundation have withdrawn a grant application for $1.5M, because the grant would forbid any DEI-related activity. I’m pleased to see the PSF for standing up for their principles, and it makes me proud to be part of the Python community.
🥾 After somebody threw a brick at a Philadelphia shoe store, owner Steve Jamison cut a boot in half and turned the smashed window into a creative art installation.
🎷 YouTube recommended another live performance of The House of the Rising Sun, this time from the New Orleans jazz festival, performed by Mumford & Sons, Celisse and Trombone Shorty. It’s an electric performance, which I’ve been listening to on repeat all week.
Have a lovely November, and I’ll talk to you next month.
~ Alex