Year: 2024

Playlist of the month: Eurovision hits

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Unlike last month, I’m actually publishing this month’s playlist mid-month. And seeing as it’s Eurovision week, these are all my favourite hits from previous Eurovision years. My verdicts on this year’s songs are here.

You can listen along to this playlist on Spotify if you wish.

  • “Dancing Lasha Tumbai” by Verka Serduchka. A memorable performance from Ukraine in 2007. Allegedly ‘Lasha Tumbai’ was changed from ‘Russia goodbye’, as Eurovision tries to be non-political (but invariably is). It came second, losing to Serbia. It’s one of those very silly songs that epitomises Eurovision.
  • “Euphoria” by Loreen. Currently holds the record for most votes for any song performed in a Eurovision final and rightly a winner for Sweden in 2012. Loreen went on to win Eurovision again for Sweden last year, although I’m not so keen on her 2023 song “Tattoo”.
  • “Ooh ahh… Just A Little Bit” by Gina G. The British entry from 1996, and an absolute gay anthem. It didn’t win, although it came seventh which is pretty good compared to recent British Eurovision performances (2022 excepted). Gina G is actually Australian, and now Australia competes in Eurovision. Please don’t think too hard about the geographical implications of this.
  • “Satellite” by Lena. A fun little song which won for Germany in 2010. Lena would represent Germany again in 2011 but wasn’t as successful.
  • “Je Me Casse” by Destiny. The Maltese entry in 2021. A friend described this as Lizzo meets Mr Saxobeat (an Alexandra Stan song) and I agree, but it works. It came seventh. 2021 was an unusual event as it was the first show since 2019 and had a significantly smaller audience. Also, four countries (including the UK) got nul points that year.
  • “Only Teardrops” by Emmelie de Forest. This was the 2013 winner for Denmark.
  • “Thing About Things” by Daði Freyr. The probable winner for the contest that never was. This was Iceland’s entry for the 2020 contest that was cancelled due to you know what. Daði Freyr came back with a new song for 2021 but didn’t win.
  • “Diva” by Dana International. This won in 1998 in Birmingham, following Britain’s most recent win in 1997. Dana International was the first openly transgender Eurovision contestant and won with a great song.
  • “Toy” by Netta. Israel’s win in 1998 was followed by another win 20 years later, with this unusual but catchy song.
  • “Glorious” by Cascada. Whilst Cascada’s lead singer is British, this was the German entry for 2013. It didn’t do so well, coming 21st overall.

Eurovision 2024 – my verdicts

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An AI-generated image of a performer at Eurovision waving a Swedish flag

It’s Eurovision time again! It’s in Sweden again this year, after Loreen chalked up her second victory last year. The first semi-final was last night, and the second semi-final is tomorrow, with the main event on Saturday.

Watching the Eurovision finals used to be a big thing for us, and we would either go to friends’ houses for a Eurovision watching party or host our own in previous years. However, with an eight-year-old to get to bed, it’s not proved practical in recent years. Still, I’ve listened to all 37 entries on Spotify, and here are my highlights and lowlights:

Douze points

  • “The Code” by Nemo (Switzerland). Heartfelt lyrics by the singer about coming to terms with their non-binary identity.
  • “No Rules” by Windows95Man (Finland). This was the first song that I heard, due to its video going moderately viral on social media a few weeks ago. Very much a novelty song, but catchy.
  • “Rim Tim Tagi Dim” by Baby Lasagna (Croatia). A thumping beat drives this song.
  • “We Will Rave” by Kaleen (Austria). Feels like 1990s Eurodance, but in a good way.
  • “Always on the run” by ISAAK (Germany). A good voice; Germany came last in 2023 (they should have chosen Patty Gurdy) and this is a much stronger entry.
  • “Unforgettable” by Marcus & Martinus (Sweden). Not as strong as some of Sweden’s previous entries but a good performance on Saturday could see Sweden hosting two years in a row.
  • “Liar” by Silia Kapsis (Cyprus). This was ranked top in last night’s first semi final, and rightly so. Silia is only 17 too.
  • “SAND” by SABA (Denmark).
  • “Loop” by Sarah Bonnici (Malta). Malta have put entered some good songs over the years but never seem to win, which is a shame. This is a good one.
  • “Ulveham” by Gåte (Norway). I like this one. It won’t win because songs that aren’t in English rarely do well.
  • “11:11” by Megara (San Marino). As above, unlikely to win but this is a pretty storming song.

Nul points

  • “Europapa” by Joost (Netherlands). Like Austria’s entry, sounds like 1990s Eurodance but not in a good way. More suited to kids birthday parties.
  • “Doomsday Blue” by Bambie Thug (Ireland). This just sounds like a lot of noise and unnecessary shouting to me, but it made it through last night’s semi final.
  • “Hurricane” by Eden Golan (Israel). This is a by-the-numbers Eurovision entry that will probably not get through the semi-finals because of who the host country is. I’m surprised Israel was permitted to take part this year, as Russia and Belarus have been banned for the past three years.

The UK Eurovision entry

This year, the UK will be represented by Olly Alexander from Years & Years with “Dizzy”. It’s not bad; I don’t think it’s the best song, but often success is determined by the quality of the performance on the night.

The UK has had mixed success in recent Eurovision competitions; Sam Ryder’s “Spaceman” came second in 2022, leading us to host last year through Clearing as Ukraine (the actual winners) couldn’t host, due to being invaded by Russia, another Eurovision country. However, last year, Mae Muller’s “I Wrote A Song” didn’t achieve the same success and came second from bottom. Which was a shame as I felt it deserved to do better.

It would be nice if the UK could repeat its 2022 success, but I don’t think it’ll be our year.

Home Assistant and Google Home broadcasts

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Screenshot of Home Assistant showing a script to broadcast a message via Google Home when my washing machine finishes

We have six Google Home Mini devices around our home, and now I can get Home Assistant to automatically deliver broadcast messages. Here’s how I did it.

Broadcast messages

When you have more than one Google Home device, you can say ‘Okay Google, broadcast [message]’, and it will relay that message to all of the other Google Home devices in your home. It’s useful for announcing that dinner’s ready, for example. Our house is long, rather than square, and I’m hard of hearing, so we use this quite a lot.

What I wanted to achieve was automation of these broadcasts, so that a broadcast was triggered by an event. This is possible thanks to the Google Assistant SDK integration. It’s a bit of a faff to set up – I recommend following this guide or watching the video embedded below:

Call the service

Once it’s set up, you can test it by opening Home Assistant’s Developer Tools. Click the ‘Service’ tab, and choose the ‘Google Assistant SDK: Send text command’ service. In the command, type something like ‘broadcast "This is a test"‘ and click ‘Call Service’. If you’ve set everything up correctly, your Google Home devices should all say something like “Incoming broadcast; it says: This is a test”.

Create a script

As I write this, the latest version of Home Assistant (2024.4.x) doesn’t allow automations to call services directly. So, to be able to trigger the broadcast, we’ll first need to create a Script in Home Assistant. In my example, I have a script called ‘Washing machine finished broadcast’. The ‘mode’ is left at the default setting of ‘Single’, and then I’ve created an Action which is to Call a Service. As above, I have selected ‘Google Assistant SDK: Send text command’ as the service to call, and then entered ‘broadcast "The washing machine has finished"‘ as the command, which I have ticked. I’ve left the rest blank.

Whilst here, I’ve also added a time condition. As this will be triggered when the washing machine finishes, I don’t want it to run when we might be asleep. We have Google Home devices in each of the bedrooms, and we sometimes run the washing machine overnight.

Home Assistant runs script actions in order. So, if you also want to add a time condition, you’ll need to add this before the Google Assistant SDK service call, or re-order the actions. In this example, I have created a Test action, where the current time is between 8am and 8pm. Outside of those times, the script will fail and not process the next command, so the broadcast action won’t be executed.

Link it to an automation

Now that we have a script, we can integrate this with an automation. I’m using my existing automation that sends a phone notification when my washing machine finishes. In my case, this is triggered using Meross energy monitoring smart plugs (sponsored link).

So now, as well as sending a notification, it also triggers a broadcast (within the time constraints).

Other things you can do with Google Home

Once you have the Google Asssistant SDK integration installed in Home Assistant, you can use scripts to run any other command that you would say to Google Home. You could, for example, create a button on your Home Assistant dashboard, which triggers the text command ‘play Never Going To Give You Up by Rick Astley on Spotify‘ if you want to automatically rickroll the other occupants of your house. It can also control smart home devices which work with Google Assistant, but do not yet have a Home Assistant integration.

11th wedding anniversary

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An AI-generated image of a four tier wedding cake made out of steel.

Today marks 11 years since Christine and I got married, on the 4th May 2013 in York. This apparently makes it our ‘steel’ wedding anniversary, hence the AI-generated image of a steel wedding cake that accompanies this blog post.

We don’t have any major plans to celebrate this year; for our tenth anniversary last year, we had a nice lunchtime meal at Engine Social Dining. Also, I turn 40 this month and so we’ll be celebrating that instead.

We are aware that May 4th is Star Wars Day (May the Fourth be with you…) and whilst our wedding wasn’t specifically Star Wars themed, Christine did come down the aisle to a string arrangement of the Imperial March.

Looking back at my blog archives, I posted the day before and day after the wedding in 2013. I wrote a mere two sentences in 2014, and then didn’t really write anything more until our fourth anniversary in 2017. I may or may not have written anything in 2018 for our fifth anniversary, but if I did, it’s not in the Web Archive. And whilst I had resumed blogging again by the time of our tenth anniversary last year, I didn’t write about it at the time.

Christine and I are still happily married, and we try to take the time to keep making our relationship work. Here’s to at least another eleven happy years.

Election day

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An AI generated image of a ballot box overflowing with election ballots in the countryside

Today is election day for much of the UK. It’s not a general election, as much as I would like it to be; that will be sometime between mid-June and mid-January. But here in Sowerby Bridge, we have two elections taking place:

As I am a card-carrying member of the Labour Party, I’ll be voting for them in both elections. It’s likely that Labour will win both too. Our local authority, Calderdale Council, is already a Labour-controlled council, as are the four other local authorities that make up West Yorkshire. And Tracy Brabin, the incumbent mayor, will almost certainly be re-elected. Although very little local polling has taken place, Labour are polling significantly ahead of all other parties nationally.

If you are voting today, remember that you need to take some photo ID with you. This will be my second election where photo ID has been required, but may be your first. Even though the actual rate of electoral fraud was almost completely insignificant before voter ID rules were introduced.

New mayoralties

Over in York, my parents will be able to vote for an elected mayor of York and North Yorkshire for the first time. This will be a more interesting contest, as York tends to lean towards Labour and the Liberal Democrats, whereas the wider (and more rural) county of North Yorkshire leans Conservative. If David Skaith wins the mayoralty for Labour, it will mean that the Conservatives really are in trouble when they finally call a General Election.

There will also be mayoral elections for the first time in the North East and East Midlands, and the Conservative mayors of Tees Valley and the West Midlands will be hoping to be re-elected. Again, should these mayoralties fall to Labour, it’s a sign that the Conservative party are a spent electoral force.

London mayoral election

And there’s the London mayoral election, where Sadiq Khan will be looking to become the first modern mayor to be elected for a third time. The ULEZ seems to be the key issue here; it was a key part of Khan’s manifesto and most of his rivals want to scrap or curtail it. The exception seems to be Count Binface, who instead wants to expand free parking to electric vehicle users between Vine Street and the Strand. Except for those who drive a Tesla.

We’ll get most of the local council elections tomorrow, with the mayoral election results coming in over the weekend. It certainly promises to be an interesting few days in British politics.

Playlist of the month: Covers

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Screenshot of the Covers Spotify playlist that I created for this blog post.

So I’m leaving this month’s playlist to the very end of the month. Again. This month, I’m doing some of my favourite cover versions of songs – some of which you may not realise were covers. Here’s the Spotify playlist.

  • Natalie Imbruglia – “Torn”. This was Imbruglia’s debut single, and most well-known. If you haven’t seen David Aramand’s interpretive dance version, you should. Most people don’t realise that this was a cover and was originally sung in Danish.
  • Rage of Light – “Lollipop (Candyman)”. British music fans may be less familiar with the original song by Aqua, as it was never released as a single in the UK. I really like this cover by Swiss heavy metal band Rage of Light.
  • Mark Ronson featuring Amy Winehouse – “Valerie”. I’m sure Amy Winehouse would still be wowing us nowadays in different circumstances. She lent her vocals to this upbeat cover version of a song originally by the band The Zutons.
  • Disturbed – “The Sound of Silence”. Disturbed have done some slower songs in the past (Darkness, for example) but this cover of the Simon & Garfunkel song is superb. I much prefer it to the original.
  • Leona Lewis – “Run”. Originally Lewis sang this as part of BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge, but it was subsequently recorded for her album and became a number one single on downloads alone. It’s a cover of a Snow Patrol song, a band that I also like, and both versions stand up well.
  • Aurora featuring Naimee Coleman – “Ordinary World”. This was originally by Duran Duran, but this trance cover version features vocals from Naimee Coleman which were allegedly recorded in one take. A more acoustic version appears on Aurora’s album, Dreaming.
  • My Darkest Days – “Come Undone”. Come Undone is my favourite of Duran Duran’s songs, but this rock cover is also excellent.
  • Bastille – “Of The Night”. This opens with lyrics from Snap’s ‘Rhythm is a Dancer’, but then switches to Corona’s ‘Rhythm of the Night’. I love Dan from Bastille’s voice and this takes Corona’s song in a different direction.
  • Bowling for Soup – “1985”. This was a more well-known version of a song by the band SR-71, but both have different lyrics. There’s also “2002” by Davvn which uses the same melody but updates the lyrics.
  • Kerry Ellis – “Defying Gravity”. This is the best known song from the musical Wicked, and whilst it was originally performed by Idina Menzel, Ellis has also played the role of Elphaba in London’s West End. This version was produced by Queen guitarist Brian May and makes it more of a rock anthem. This is one of my go-to pick-me-up songs.

Is it worth using premium car fuel?

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An AI-generated image of a superhero using a petrol pump with premium fuel.

Regular readers will know that I’ve been having some car issues of late, which has seen it spending a lot of time in the garage being fixed. So far, it’s been running okay for the past couple of weeks, and so I’m very hopeful that there’ll be no more expensive repairs due for a while at least.

At its most recent garage visit, to have the particulate filter cleaned, the mechanic asked whether I was using supermarket fuel. Because, in his view, this was why I was having problems with the filter. Premium fuels – the ones that you pay extra for – have additives which claim to help clean out your car’s fuel line. As well as preventing the filters getting full, they should – in theory – boost efficiency and result in you getting more miles per gallon of fuel. Once the car was fixed, I was therefore advised to stick to premium diesel for a few months.

This was a topic that the excellent BBC Sliced Bread podcast covered back in January last year. There’s also some information from Auto Express and Which? (for which you may need a Which? subscription to read). The consensus seems to be that premium fuels can help keep a car running better, but they only need to be used occasionally. Supermarket fuel – or at least, supermarket petrol – should be fine to use most of the time. And it is generally cheaper than even the basic fuel from branded petrol stations.

As instructed by the mechanic, I filled up with Shell’s ‘V-Power’ premium diesel earlier in the week. You pay quite a bit more – it was £1.76 per litre, as opposed to £1.58 per litre for their standard diesel. For context, £1.53 per litre is the current cheapest price locally for diesel, according to PetrolPrices.com. My tank was low – the fuel warning light had come on – so I paid almost £100 for a full tank. This was £12.65 more than if I’d filled up with regular diesel at the cheapest nearby petrol station.

We’ll see if it makes a difference. Although my car does track its fuel usage in miles per gallon, it doesn’t use a moving weighted average and so it’s prone to fluctuations, making it a bit useless. My car is over 11 years old, and so anything to clean out the fuel lines and injectors is welcome.

I’ve also used some engine cleaner from Halfords; you put this in once your tank is below a quarter full (i.e. three quarters empty) and then take it for a decent drive until the fuel warning light comes on. It recommends that you use it around four times a year, and this may be a better option. Theoretically, it does the same job as the premium fuel, but costs £10-20 each time. Overall, that works out cheaper than paying more for premium fuel.

So, in honour of Betteridge’s law of headlines, the answer to the question ‘is it worth using premium car fuels?’ is probably no. You can use supermarket fuels, but maybe pop some engine cleaner in now and again – especially if you have an older car. Or go electric – I’m sure our next car will either be a plug-in hybrid or a fully battery electric vehicle.

Not going out

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No, this isn’t a blog post about Britain’s second-longest running sitcom. It’s about how we haven’t had many days out this month.

As we’re parents who both work full-time, we try to do something fun with our eight-year-old at weekends, and this is often a trip somewhere. Indeed, in March, we had a weekend in London, Sci-Fi Weekender, Snook spotting in York and a visit to East Riddelsden Hall.

But we’re still paying off some of the money that we borrowed to buy our solar panels. And as mentioned earlier in the week, we’ve had to spend a lot of money on our car recently. And if our car reaches the point where it’s beyond economic repair, we’ll need to take on more debt to buy a new one. This, combined with typical changeable April weather, has meant that we’ve tightened our belts and had quieter weekends at home this month. We’ve also tried to have more meals at home, and not eaten out or had as many takeaways. We’re fortunate that we had quite a lot of leftovers in the freezer to work through.

This is partly to explain why I haven’t blogged about any trips out recently. Our trip with friends to see Unfortunate was a bright spot in an otherwise relatively dull month. The good news is that we have managed to save quite a bit of money this month, and can use this to pay off some of the debts.

As for next month? Well, we are planning some adventures for May. I’ll be turning 40 (no, I can’t believe it either) and so we’re looking at having a nice weekend away to celebrate. So hopefully, I’ll have some fun things to write about and new photos to share.

More car-related shenanigans

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An AI-generated image using DALL-E 3 of a small car in a dog kennel in the rain

Last month, I wrote about how our car had been for repairs multiple times in recent weeks. Since then, it’s been back in the garage again.

This time, the engine would only run in safe mode and so it had limited power. We live in the Pennine Hills in England – the emphasis there being on hills – and so had a not particularly enjoyable week flooring the accelerator whilst trying to get up a steep slope at 20mph. I have small Bluetooth OBD-II adaptor (sponsored link) that allows me to read the car’s error codes on my phone using a free app, and this suggested a fault with one of the cylinders in the engine.

My usual local garage couldn’t fit us in, so I tried a different garage. Their ODB diagnostic system was a bit more thorough and identified that, in fact, the engine’s particulate filter was full. They cleaned this out, and also replaced the sensor (since it still reckoned it was full even when it wasn’t) and, for the most part, the car drives okay again now. But this has set us back another £150.

Our car is approaching 120,000 miles on the clock and so it’s not worth much. Whilst it probably cost tens of thousands of pounds new in 2012, the couple of quotes I have had are around the £1500 mark. Which is certainly less than we have spent on keeping it on the road just in the last few months.

Whilst we have been lucky that it wasn’t a more expensive repair, we certainly need to look more keenly at replacing the car in the next year or so. I hope there are no more expensive repair jobs required, but if there are, the car is at risk of becoming beyond economic repair.

Butterfly Tale

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Film poster for Butterfly Tale

At the weekend, I took our 8-year-old to see Butterfly Tale at the cinema. It was only released in the UK on Friday, but has been on general release elsewhere as early as October. It’s a joint Germany and Canada production – indeed, the first minute of the film is just the various logos of producers, distributors and funders. I hadn’t heard of it before, and according to iMDB, it’s grossed less than a $1million so far.

The film is based on the migration of Monarch butterflies. The main characters are Patrick, a butterfly with mis-sized wings who can’t fly, and his friend Marty, who is still a caterpillar. Because they can’t fly, they have to come up with a plan to join the rest of the butterflies on their migration.

It is very much a film for kids. Indeed, our eight-year-old really enjoyed it. It’s not a ground-breaking piece of cinema, and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend seeing it at the cinema unless you have young kids. The animation and story are nothing special. It’s likely to be the sort of random film that you can let you kids watch on streaming if it’s a wet afternoon and you need some peace. Indeed, seeing as the UK is one of the last countries to see a cinema release, I imagine it’s already on streaming services elsewhere.

Most cinema chains seem to have at least a few showings of it right now. When we saw it, there were only around 10 people at the showing – despite it being at the biggest screen. I suspect it’ll have a rather limited run in cinemas.