w/e 2024-03-03
March already. I hope you’re all well on the way to reaching your Q1 targets.
§ One lingering annoyance on ooh.directory is how a bunch of feeds return a 403 “Forbidden” error when my code tries to fetch them. I’d heard tales that a “Cloudflare Worker” might get around it but I’d been reluctant to try this because I realised my appetite for learning entirely new things is much, much lower than it once was.
But this week I plucked up the courage and it turns out it wasn’t too complicated to get one of those things up and running and I didn’t even have to install Node or anything else stupid like that. I just copied and pasted and edited some JavaScript into a form and eventually I had a thing working… I could pass it the URL of a feed as a GET argument, and it would return the contents of the feed 🎉
Except it still returns 403 errors for those problematic feeds, so it appears to be no use at all.
It is so infuriating that there’s this “protection” for feeds, that stops feed-reading code reading them. Computers are tiring.
§ A while back we took in the bird seed feeder – leaving the nut feeders out – because seeds that the birds dropped attracted rats. During yesterday’s cold and snowy weather I put it out again, with a little tray hanging underneath to help catch the dropped seeds.
Within the hour a rat was back, scavenging the fragments the stupid birds were still letting fall on the ground.
I’ve just seen two rats out there. So no seeds for the birds after all I guess.
§ We watched The Way on iPlayer this week and, unfortunately, it wasn’t very good. The first episode was OK, and dramatic, if a bit silly. Somehow a small riot in Port Talbot resulted in a border going up around all of Wales, no one allowed out, and the English treating Welsh people like dirty foreigners, coming over here taking our jobs (ahhh, do you see…?!). All in a matter of days.
The remaining two episodes just weren’t very interesting – if there had been any more we’d have given up after the second. It felt like so much time was spent on the relationships, problems and dysfunctions of this one family, there wasn’t much time for the bigger picture. And so that was just a handful of clunky parallels to current-day small boats, immigrants, etc.
§ We watched The Outfit (Graham Moore, 2022) on Netflix which was good. Very much like a play, lots of talking in a single location.
And we’re part-way through the local Borderlines Film Festival and have been to two movies so far:
- Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt, 2022) which was quite slow, and very little happens, in a good way. It’s almost like a film about things before any events happen. Michelle Williams is always excellent.
- Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, 2023) which is also good, and Sandra Hüller excellent too. The only fault in this “what actually happened?” plot is that I didn’t believe that any of the possibilities were possible.
That one we went to see in a church hall in Ross-on-Wye. Last time we were there it was for the film festival in 2020 and we were looking around thinking, “Is this OK? Should we be here?” It already seemed risky, but we weren’t sure how risky. Nine days later the first lockdown was announced.
Very good to be back.
§ That’s all. May all your requests be 200 OK.