iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 3h

Legal in England; and I know a couple of people who were homeschooled.

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Millionaire Brownie in Ballymena

A cake with brownie on the bottom and then a layer of caramel and a layer of chocolate 🍫

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Thank goodness for this map on the Waterloo & City line - now I can stop worrying about getting off at the wrong stop!

A map of the line showing just two stops

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Ah yes - the famous English town of “Cheshire”!!

A Netflix screenshot - the show is Leaving and it says “In the English town of Cheshire”!

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Did the Beatles endure a dreadful flight from Miami Beach for nothing?

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Jewel was almost a test-run for Taylor Swift with her genre-hopping from singer-songwriter to country to "let's make a pop album with the bloke who wrote Robbie Williams' biggest hits!"

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Turn it up and you can even hear her crack-up after she’s said it.

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

10/10 for the delivery of "completely insufferable"!

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I want an iced capp now!! (Tim Hortons 4 Eva!!)

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

It turns out the one thing worse than VAR is… no VAR!

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

You can't hate on Cleveland for being a glitter pen song - that's like hating on this tree outside my window for being a tree. Also… c'mon - the delivery of "You only need to find one person in this entire world who doesn't find you completely insufferable!" - that's a 10 right there!

The tree outside my window - it's a tree - a medium-sized horse chestnut, to be more precise. Most of the leaves are fallen to the grass below.

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I reckon Taylor saw my recent Apple Music Replays and was like: "Who the freak does Jax think she is? I'll show her!"

May top artists for August:

1. Jax (1,016 minutes)
2. Taylor Swift (344 minutes)

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Suspect the answer is that no one* would sign it? (*No one capable of actually delivering the service, anyway.)

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I have the very cheapest one for tracking my runs and getting notifications, and it is fine. It doesn't have an "always on" screen, so you have to tilt your wrist or tap it; but if you can live with that I think the "it just works" of going all-Apple is generally worth it.

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Watching Ludwig after having watched Star City. Keep expecting Anna Maxwell Martin to shoot someone in the head.

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Looking at getting a heat pump in outer-London and every company we have spoken to want £250 up-front to do a quote (“survey”) so to get just two quotes is going to be £500! Is this normal?

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Charging my laptop from my sofa like I’m living in the future!

My MacBook attached via a USB C cable to a charging port in my fluffy sofa

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I was all-in on consoles (had an XBox One + a PS4 in the previous gen); but I've moved to a SteamDeck and feel like it has been sooooo much better value.

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Related frustration for my mum (now in her 80s) in recent years has been companies refusing to speak to her in her capacity as "Mrs Patrick Egan" which is how they had always done things.

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I get where this is coming from, but… * The lesson of sports is that banning ads for things you don't like just leads to more ads for genuinely bad stuff - gambling; crypto; etc. * There should be an equivalent of Godwin's Law for falling back on mentioning tobacco ads in these conversations!

bristol247.com

Council bans advertising of fast fashion, flights and cars

Adverts for high carbon products will no longer appear on council-owned ad spaces

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Oddly… or perhaps not “oddly”… no. Because they are almost all “nots”. (It feels like a very different dynamic to our generation.)

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Boarded up shop fronts for rent/sale in Spain. None of it is real - they are illusions and everything you see is intricately painted on to the boardings.

A blue door with a lamp above and a flower pot by the steps

A wooden door with brass bars and a shuttered window

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

It is more like Mel-bn - the last part is very short. (I’m English but I work in cricket so I know a lot of Australians and I have been several times.)

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Empowering super-smart people who work at the FT or JP Morgan is great. Empowering the folks who work at my business would almost certainly result in them very quickly doing stuff that was literally illegal, albeit out of ignorance rather than malice.

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

For example, the issue here would far more likely be that there was a reason it was like that, and you’ve just screwed up an entire other department’s dataset and/or business process.

There may well be speed and efficiency advantages in no longer having to track down an expert colleague for help with something like a software issue, albeit possibly at the cost of a less collaborative and conversational culture. (And provided you don’t wade into mistakes the specialists eventually have to fix anyway.)

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I can see how this works at the kind of businesses SOC knows - places like merchant banks and newspapers, where everyone is super-smart; but at most “normal” businesses (certainly the one I work for) this would be a messy disaster.

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

How it started vs How it’s going

Two glasses of drink - a tinto y lemon and a beer

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

“Peaceful protesters expressing their legitimate concerns.”

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Yes - if it was on the beeb, 100% - they *really* care about their exclusivity on "proper" cricket.

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

The problem is that Sky would kick back against the loss of their exclusivity so in practice it would cost the ECB a chunk of cash which they would need to make up. Also the YT feeds… while great for fans… are very low quality in both technical and production terms. (I know - I've worked on them!)

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

FWIW Google Maps in the UK is still showing "Lake Ontario".

A Google Maps screenshot from today (2 September 2026) showing "Lake Ontario".

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

While not denying that this is a problem (I worked in NHS IT for 8 years - I have an idea of the answer!) in some ways this is actually less of a concern if the worst fears come to pass, because *everything* will be vulnerable - being on Windows 11 won’t protect you!

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

At least two of these get explained in S3!

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

It is 50 overs but not a knockout - groups stages then a short knockout phase.

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

I work in cricket not football, but in cricket the players/ coaches are heavily pushed to call e.g. the One Day Cup “the Metro Bank” when doing media; but it tends not to catch on among the fans partly because written press will change it back to “One Day Cup” unless the sponsor also pays them.

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Donald Trump sure does seem to be keen to name things after a 15th Century Italian explorer - I wonder why he is such a fan? * Checks Wikipedia * Oooooh - he was a fantasist who probably didn’t do half the thing he claimed, and was involved in the slave trade. Right. Makes sense now.

en.wikipedia.org

Amerigo Vespucci - Wikipedia

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

The Government: You can have plug-in solar now! Also The Government: You can fit it all yourself. Except for the bits you can't and which you almost certainly don't already have. Also-also The Government: You might need Planning Permission too! Who knows? Not us, we are merely the government!

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

“Second Hand Greggs” in Newcastle

Greggs Bakery Outlet - a slightly run down looking shop

A shelf selling milk chocolate shortbread offcuts

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Interesting from Sam Freedman's latest - talking about Reform's proposals for welfare savings.

Another big saving (it’s not clear how much) comes from shifting costs on to employers. The policy, borrowed from the Netherlands, would see employers having to cover the cost of a sick employee for the first two years. In practice this would force businesses to get insurance. Reform says they would reduce employer national insurance by 0.2% to cover the cost. But in the Netherlands the insurance costs anywhere up to 5.5% of payroll. Even if our benefits were less generous it would still cost a lot more than 0.2%. So it’s essentially a tax on business.

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Tho ironically I think the introduction of mandatory insurance in the UK would in practice be highly redistributive… from the poor to the rich; as it would inevitably be farmed out to Capita etc b/c there would be no other way to establish the system from scratch, and they would game it to hell!

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

What is the difference really between "mandatory insurance" and tax? Especially as it would have to be highly redistributive? It's just semantics, isn't it?

The other is that you decide we need to take a leaf out of our peers’ books and decide that more of the cost of healthcare and of an ageing population will be paid for out of private spending — whether through mandatory insurance, a mixed model or something else entirely.

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Something feels off about this supposed AI map that is doing the rounds - my guess is that it is NOT actually AI - not all the way down, anyways - it has been created by someone with an agenda to make AI look silly/bad.

The (aledged) AI UK political map everyone is talking about

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Feels like it has been dreamed up by a spad who has never actually been to a parents’ eve? You typically get 5 minutes per teacher with the first two minutes spent hard-staring at the previous parents whose time has overrun!

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

* The accents thing wtf!? (Iykyk!) * I assume there are people I’m supposed to recognise from down the line in For All Mankind, but… I don’t! (Although I accept that I’m particularly bad with names.)

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Watched the first ep of Star City last night. Thoughts… * It’s very grim; possibly too grim - we’ll see! * I’m not sure it works as “alternate history” because I don’t know the real history… and I did 2nd/3rd year modules in modern Russian history at uni, so I’ve got a head start on most people!!

tv.apple.com

Watch Star City - Apple TV

Step into a thrilling chapter inspired by For All Mankind. Same alt-history universe. Different perspective: the Soviet Union’s. Go behind the Iron Cu…

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

In my case because it was 1987 and CDs cost (adjusted for inflation) nearly £50 ($70 US) - 3x what an LP cost at the time - so it was a really big deal!!

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Syd E @syd-e13.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I also bought that, but on tape!

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