Having the exact same issue with a Fitbit Charge 5. Seriously unimpressed. Just beyond the warranty period, now broken by adding Fitbit's own firmware.

London is Over, Finished, and Washed Up By Professor Matt Goodwhinge From the new Private Eye, out now.

I don't really understand why this regulatory change holds any significance at all. In practice, all of our post, 1st class and 2nd, arrives as a job lot, once per week, or twice if we are lucky.

The great irony (and massive challenge) in all of this is that a lot of people regard the details of how public money is raised and spent as soooo booorrrinnng 💤🥱 and yet they still have incredibly strident and self-confident views on it 🗣📣.

Experienced similar watching Springsteen at Anfield. The level of distraction in the audience was just incredible. Hard to avoid the conclusion that many were only there to get the "right" photo or video to post on social media and had little interest in the event otherwise.

Is there actually any official public health information about Covid anymore? Or do we all just have to rely on variable quality reporting (much of it presumably AI generated) on media websites heavily overburdened by advertising to try to learn about the new Stratus variant?

It's the fourth anniversary of that time I tweeted the wrong Sisters Of Mercy

The Chief Inspector of Schools thinks it's a problem that scrapping headline school gradings will stop local house prices shooting up and down in response to Ofsted reports? For real? www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Enjoyed this by @martinlewis.moneysavingexpert.com on his time as Gen Sec of LSE Students' Union in the 1990s. Back then, I assumed those weekly UGMs were just normal student life, replicated at universities across the land. They really weren't! blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2025/06/bull...

The Poundland in your pocket is still worth £1. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Shame she'd left academia. Could have been a great impact case study for a Criminologist. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Full marks to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic for putting Brahms and Liszt next to each other in their latest brochure. #RhymingSlang

Right now, the UK has no large political parties. Whether it stays that way, following the rest of Western Europe, remains to be seen. But sustained fragmentation of left and right like this, under FPTP, would be a serious problem.

I didn't know that just one 'fentanyl laced pill' could kill more than 10 people. How does this work? Do they chop the pill into 10 and each die of the 1/10th? Or does one eat it and then go and kill the other 9?

A portrait of former Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands by Andy Warhol, along with nearly 50 other works of art, appears to have mistakenly been thrown out by the southern Dutch municipality of Maashorst, according to an investigation.

So so good...

More wonders of AI. There is no Yonge Street in Crosby, Merseyside. It's actually in Richmond Hill, Ontario.

Discuss.

I think my radio had been infected by the Welsh Mind Virus.

The upcoming by-election means one Cheshire village will soon have it's fourth MP - in less than four years. But why? Find out here: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Student Loans Company relies on manual inputting across six incompatible IT systems by people on practically minimum wage after years of underinvestment bit.ly/4jg2eaT it manages more than a quarter of a trillion pounds of debt

Due to a highly unusual combined impact of by-elections and boundary changes, circa 1000 electors in Guilden Sutton, Cheshire, will soon have their 4th MP in 4 years. But exactly how rare is this? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

From Arwa Mahdawi's column on Trump supporters in today's Guardian. We underestimate this dynamic at our peril. We are almost certainly deeper into it in the UK than we realise. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Some good news at last! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Martin Wolf is not messing around here www.ft.com/content/d96d...

Primal Scream at the Liverpool Guild of Students tonight.

This is a good piece. So worried about the implications of AI for university teaching... hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/why-ai-is-...

Trump: "The European Union was formed for one reason - do you know what that was? To rip off the United States. So put that in your bonnet." Where to even start?

From the current maelstrom, some kind of new political economic orthodoxy and reconfigured global order seems certain to emerge. I would really like that not to involve 3 expansionist, authoritarian superpowers battling for control of shipping and drilling in the Arctic as the ice melts.

This is as good as people say.

Excited for all the new American banana and coffee factories.

I asked the AI search function in Google a) why Liverpool is so rich as a city and b) why it's so poor. It provides superficially plausible answers (if you know little or nothing about the topic) to both questions while simply accepting each polar opposite premise as true.

What on Earth happened to world trade this week? Don’t ask an economist, ask a psychoanalyst www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/econom...

Yet another email from an online shop telling me they have been hacked and I should take precautions. And I bet that same online shop will continue to do everything it can to force customers to share a maximal amount of personal data and to set up an account when purchasing from them.

This is absolutely right. It also makes careers guidance for current university students extremely difficult. Whatever their personal priorities are (fun/intellectual stimulation/money), the options seem really limited.

That's my lecture slides sorted for "contemporary developments in US domestic politics and the global economy".

The last time the weather was this good in early April (2020), there was also a scary global crisis unfolding. Swings and roundabouts, I guess. 🤷‍♂️

I’ve messed this up. Please help.

I see Blue Sky now has a "trending videos" feature. So that's probably the beginning of the end for this platform.

Ticket inspector on the connecting train from Preston looked at our tickets more closely than normal and then said: "Is that a made-up place? I don't even know how to say it. I thought it was German at first". Just wish our end destination had been Fazakerley. 🤯

Today, I learned that, having demolished Charles Rennie Mackintosh's house in the 1960s, the University of Glasgow later reconstructed the interior of it, 100 yards away, as an extension to the Hunterian Gallery. Very cool.

That time I described @clairewelles.bsky.social as 'Ray Davies and Kate Bush on mescaline channeled through a haunted 4-track.' I miss my old Unknown Pleasures column www.getintothis.co.uk/2018/07/unkn...

More of this sort of thing, please.

Elbows up, Canada.

Turns out there is first mover advantage if you are a university nearly going bust www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

Ah, that most wonderful time of the year when a late winter cold is indistinguishable from early spring hay-fever.

3 in 4 universities expected to be running deficits by September and redundancies mounting. Nobody is doing anything about it, but OfS has hired 10 extra people to catalogue how bad it all is. So there is that. www.ft.com/content/b512...

Impressed by all the students who can't ever make Monday 11am lectures, heading into central Liverpool, fully dressed up, to be in an Irish Pub by 11am for St Patrick's Day.

Sorry, Mr Trump. You have no cards.