I hear we’re posting Ko-fi links today. The way to support my very occasional musings is now here! ko-fi.com/wiredfire supporting Musings may also support rescue hens and 3 cats so there’s that ^_^

How is it Monday again tomorrow already?? 😩

I see Spotify's continuing identify crisis is going well.. lifehacker.com/tech/spotify...

Everyone seems shocked and bitterly angry about the Mandleson Epstein antics. I'm neither shocked or angry. It's all par for the course. They're all utterly terrible people and it's all just noise to me. Maybe we'll collectively try something different next general election. #ukpol

I hear a bunch of gatekeeping Star Trek fans are upset about a Klingon healer in Star Trek Academy. What so they think every single Klingon is a warrior? Right.. so who built their starships? Who designed them? Who makes their clothes, farms the ingredients for their gagh and brews their bloodwine?

“More Personal Computing”, being as I understand it to be stuff Microsoft sells to actual end users, was the division reporting a decline. Feels like a small sign that People are starting to call bullshit on Microsoft’s nonsense. GOOD. Your computing stuff should work for you, not for them.

“in my case I was just being a bit of a dick so you could argue that blocking my requests was the correct course of action, but AI guardrails already block plenty of perfectly legitimate requests when the LLM playing nanny gets it wrong” abbeybridge.consulting/articles/adv...

I wonder what the Green’s position is on technological overreach masquerading as “protecting children” is. Ultimately they're politicians so chances are their capability to properly understand the subject enough to effectively legislate is limited.. but I sure would enjoy being proven wrong.

Uk government mulling requiring “age verification” aka ID registration for using VPNs. Sure, good luck with that when many VPNs wouldn’t be under UK jurisdiction for this so no need to comply and by the very nature of any decent encrypted no-log VPN would have zero way to actually enforce it 😂

I have a hankering for a regular old dumb-watch. I also don’t want to spend a lot 😅 I'd like an "illuminator" or "indiglo" thing but I'll probably just got for the cheap classic Casio F-91W. Open to suggestions though!

New screen protector day

Nasty racist joining nasty racist party seems about right. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I'm not suggesting we abolish all established forms of human governance and just put cats in charge, but that is exactly what I'm suggesting. International incident? Feathers on a string. Global warming? Licky snack. Problematic male celebrity? Scritches. Sounds like a mad dream? It needn't be.

@zackpolanski.bsky.social please less reposts! I get a flood of damn near the same thing all at once and that really doesn’t make me pick up the message. Please, whoever is managing your social media accounts, spread out the reposts throughout the day and don’t do more than one or two at a time.

By-elections to be called automatically when MPs defect to another party petition.parliament.uk/petitions/73...

This please really does go full “twitter“ if you dare say something , huh 😂😅

This page has a handy view of how many users on Bluesky have blocked ICE. You may also find their bluesky handle there if you would like to block them too. Which seems like a good course of action. Better might be to question if Bluesky is still a reasonably safe space to be in. ice.0x0.boo

So I hear Bluesky is now cool with verifying ICE and tolerating other more questionable people and organisations..

I’m using Lemudroid over Retroarch on my RetroidPocket 3 now. I kinda miss some of the features of Retroarch but the “ready to go” nature of Lemudroid means I spend more time enjoying the games over endlessly tinkering with settings. #retrogaming

The arrogance of demanding “creatives” go to where he is instead of himself following where the community he “performatively” claims to care about went.

"If you're not paying for the product you ARE the product" really is becoming impossible for even the most blasé of users to ignore. boingboing.net/2026/01/09/g...

All the more reason to use you stuff for longer & buy refurbished when you need to replace.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a gamer in possession of an interest in retro gaming must be in want of a Nintendo DS #retrogaming

I hear absurd DRAM prices are going to make SSDs (and non-crappy USB sticks as far as I can see from prices) get silly expensive. Well that’s rubbish. I probably should have sorted that replacement nvme for my laptop sooner..

Finished reading Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet last night. Such a fun sci-fi read. Feels less like a big story and more like a series of “episodes” each of which shows the reader more about the characters and the rich and varied galaxy they inhabit.

iPhone internet has been sluggish on WiFi for a fair while, but lighting quick on mobile data. Other devices on WiFi absolutely fine.

You know something else that’s great to love about #RetroGaming ? No AI tomfoolery to be found anywhere. Lovely stuff.

Good King Wenceslas got take-out, From a guy named Stephen, He ordered a big pizza, Deep-pan crisp and even, Quickly came the feast that night, Met with his approval, Food delivered on a bike, Saving lots of fuuuuu-el

I know that factually once I’ve scanned all my old physical photos there’s no real need to keep the originals. Let's face it the overwhelming majority of my photos are already digital-only already.

Your leg being broke is not an illness. Your liver failing is not an illness. Your cancer is not an illness. At what point are these awful awful people going to stop marginalising mental health??

And also, life is not supposed to be *permanently* stressful. We're adapted to short periods of stress. If you maintain that kind of thing for weeks, let alone months or years, with no respite or hope, that's putting people into PTSD territory.

Wish I could find a Discworld book club, where we just read Discworld books. I own nearly all of them but have no one to talk to about them as I read :(

Chancellor vows "direct action to tackle cost of living" then in the same budget says "ordinary people to pay a little bit more". Do Labour even hear themselves when they’re speaking?

Printers are the WORST. Worse than that though are printer manuals.

Remember remember the month of November, fireworks every damn day 😒

Cats upset by the seemingly longer and longer firework “season” 😭

@barns.bsky.social @n7dante.bsky.social sums up what I mean when I harp on about gaming having hit diminishing returns. The last 20 years have not yielded the jumps and leaps in what a game can actually *be* that the 20 before did!

Can I follow someone here but not see what they repost? Followed a political guy who's interesting to me but they're flooding with reposts that just become noise. I don't want to see sycophantic supporters, just want to hear what the guy has to say.

There is nothing as energetic as a tired toddler

Cloud storage really isn’t great value when I need over 1TB for my off-site backup. Microsoft’s OneDrive is easily the best “value” but I want nothing more to do with MS. So basically I need to set up a hard drive as a trusted friend’s house as my remote backup.

Wait, the clocks go back tonight? Even for exhausted parents? Well bollocks to that!

Going to the Railway Museum I totally get what kids see in trains. These old steam trains are HUGE and impressive and feats of engineering that are staggeringly cool. I’m stood in front of the legendary Mallard!

Some good advice. Ask for consent before giving hugs though.

The late 90s and early 00s turned me into a massive Trance music fan, loved to this day, but I do take my hat off to the contemporary EDM scene for dolling out utter filth like this! Dance music is strong and I enjoy how it has shifted and changed ^_^ https://jamshare.app/q0wr

WTF? My mobile data is what’s blocking Tailscale!! When on mobile data I can’t even get to Tailscale.com , hop on to a VPN then it’s there. Fk sake.

Fk sake Deliveroo have arbitrarily changed their maps range for a place we order from dozens of times the last few months and now we’re literally a 30 second drive out of range. Apparently this shithousery is some AI fuckwitery to drive “efficiency”. 😡😤

Urgh.. flag wankers have started at the end of my street. Thankfully the other end and it’s a fairly long road but still.

Cached US Kindle giveaway: 10 copies of Terry Pratchett's SOUL MUSIC, which is not my favorite book, but only because all the references go over my head. I mean, I got "Bud of the Holly," but not a lot else. This is a Death & Susan book. #KindleBookGiveaway #GNUTerryPratchett

Is there such a gadget as essentially a basic phone handset that connects to my smartphone via Bluetooth for use? The idea being to have a couple of these handsets in key rooms of the house to be able to access a phone for calls if needed while being able to leave the smartphone out of reach a bit.

I hear the CEO of Bluesky is being deciededly unpleasant and haa taken to mocking her userbase while still pretending that the platform is in any meaningful way decentralised. On the up side it's lovely to see more folk coming back to federated places like Mastodon that actually are decentralised