HACS – community components for Home Assistant

A screenshot of the HACS web site

Whilst Home Assistant is already the most flexible smart home platform, with hundreds of built-in integrations, HACS is an optional additional tool to add even more integrations.

HACS stands for ‘Home Assistant Community Store’, and it allows you to download and install custom components from the wider Home Assistant community. It’ll also keep them updated for you. Home Assistant has long supported so-called ‘custom components’, which allows functionality beyond the standard built-in integrations, but HACS makes finding, installing and updating these much easier.

A couple of weeks ago, version 2.0 of HACS was released. This includes a new addon for those using Home Assistant Operating System or Supervised mode, which makes it easier to install. Updates are now handled via Cloudflare for improved performance.

As well as additional integrations, HACS also allows you to install different cards for your dashboards, and different themes. For example, Mushroom is a set of replacement cards which some prefer the look of.

Compared to the built-in integrations, which are maintained by the Home Assistant project, those in HACS are maintained by the community. This means that they may not be tested as rigorously as the official integrations, and so it’s important that you have regular backups in case things go wrong. Also, expect more bugs.

As for why integrations are only in HACS and not Home Assistant itself, there are a few reasons:

  1. It’s a niche service that may only apply to one country, or is of limited wider use.
  2. It uses scraping – this is where there isn’t a publicly available API for the service and so it scrapes the contents of web pages to work. These aren’t permitted in core Home Assistant integrations.
  3. It’s still in active development and not ready to be merged into the main Home Assistant release.
  4. It duplicates the functionality of a core Home Assistant integration but does so in a different way.

I’m currently using eight custom integrations through HACS, and I’ll discuss these in a later blog post. If you’re a Home Assistant user and haven’t already checked out HACS, have a look to see if you can extend its features even further.

A visit to Gawthorpe Hall

A photo of Gawthorpe Hall, a National Trust property in Padiham near Burnley in Lancashire.

Burnley is known for many things, including its football team, its history as a mill town, and the birthplace of Sir Ian McKellan. But it’s also home to Gawthorpe Hall, a stately home connected with the mill trade, which is now in the care of the National Trust. We went to visit it last week on the August Bank Holiday Monday.

Technically, Gawthorpe Hall is in the neighbouring town of Padiham, although the two pretty much flow into each other. There has been a building on the site since the 14th century, although much of the hall dates from the 16th century. It was then extensively rebuilt in the 19th century, and passed into National Trust ownership in 1970. Prior to the National Trust taking it on, it had been in the Shuttleworth (later Kay-Shuttleworth) family throughout its history. Over the years, the Shuttleworths hosted a number of famous historical guests at Gawthorpe, including Charlotte Brontë and King George VI.

Inside Gawthorpe Hall

Inside, there are three floors to explore. Downstairs there’s the dining room, with a balcony, and the drawing room which has some very detailed plasterwork on the ceiling. There’s also the usual shop in the entrance hall.

Upstairs is home to the Gawthorpe Textiles Collection, run by an independent charity that was founded by Rachel Kay-Shuttleworth, the last of the Kay-Shuttleworths to live at Gawthorpe. Rachel was a keen collector of textiles from around the world, and some samples from the collection are on display across the middle floor.

Up to the top floor, and there’s a family room, which is home to some toys for visitors to play with. There’s currently an exhibition about Gawthorpe Hall in the 1600s, including its links with the infamous Pendle Witch Trials. There’s also the Long Room, which spans the whole of one side of the house, and the Huntroyde Room; a bedroom with a four-poster bed.

The gardens and parkland

Outside, there are some formal gardens, although they’re not very extensive and situated around three sides of the hall. The grounds beyond are more extensive, although much of these were closed off due to damage from Storm Lilian. The gardens and grounds are normally open from 8am until 7pm at this time of year. There currently isn’t a café; I gather that there used to be one in one of the outbuildings but it looks like it’s been closed for some time.

Accessibility

The gardens and grounds should be accessible to all, and there are disabled toilets (but no Changing Places toilet). There are steps up to the hall, although once inside a wheelchair can access the ground floor, and an interactive computer workstation to view images of the upper floors. There is no lift.

The nearest railway station is Rose Grove, which is a 35 minute walk; Burnley Barracks and Burnley Manchester Road stations are a little further away. There are apparently frequent buses to the end of the drive from Burnley bus station, and then it’s around 10 minutes walk up the drive.

Although the National Trust own Gawthorpe Hall, it’s operated by Lancashire County Council and so it doesn’t take part in any free entry promotions. However, National Trust members do still get in for free, as do holders of a National Art Pass.

Heritage Open Days

Over the next couple of weeks, various historic places will be open for free for Heritage Open Days, and this includes Gawthorpe Hall on Saturday 14th September. Normally, entry is £7 each for adults (under-18s are free), so if you’re not a National Trust or National Art Pass member, this is an opportunity to explore the hall for free. However, maybe consider arriving by public transport; the car park on site is small, and we struggled to find a parking space when we visited.

Joining all the Brits and Brazilians on Bluesky

The tl;dr version of this post is that I’m now considering Bluesky to be my primary public social media presence, with Mastodon a close second and Threads a distant third, and here are the links to my profiles:

Last month, Elon Musk basically tried to incite civil war in the UK on Twitter (which he calls ‘X’). This seems to have been the last straw for many Brits who were still active over there and who don’t consider themselves to be right-wing, and so there’s been another exodus. This time, Bluesky seems to have been the main destination, and so I’m now reconnecting with lots of people that I used to follow on Twitter before I basically quit almost two years ago in November 2022. Since then I’ve been mostly hanging out on Mastodon.

Now, I like Mastodon; especially its decentralised nature and that many servers are run by the community with donations. It’s also got some good and mature third-party clients like Ivory, which I use. But it still feels like a niche social network that attracts a more technical audience. And it’s notable that, given the choice between Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads, most Brits leaving Twitter haven’t chosen Mastodon.

The Brazilian Twitter exodus

Over the past couple of days, there’s been another mass exodus from Twitter, this time in Brazil. However, this is because Twitter is now blocked in Brazil. In a nutshell: Brazil’s previous right-wing president, Jair Balsonaro, was ousted in an election; there was an attempted coup by his supporters, and then a Brazilian Supreme Court judge demanded that Twitter suspend the accounts of those suspected of being involved in the coup whilst they were under investigation. Instead of complying, or even challenging the court order, Elon Musk closed Twitter’s office in Brazil and sacked its staff. So, the supreme court judge gave Twitter an ultimatum to appoint a representative in Brazil; Twitter refused, and so it’s now blocked. As in, the whole web site is inaccessible from within Brazil.

Consequently, Twitter users in Brazil have been looking for a new home, and most seem to have landed on Bluesky (although some have gone to Mastodon too).

If these statistics from Statista are right, then Brazil made up the sixth biggest audience on Twitter, just behind the UK. Which means that Elon has alienated two of his top ten biggest markets in the space of a month.

Oh, and it gets worse. It turns out that Brazil was home to many large fan accounts on Twitter; many of these posted in English and so it wasn’t immediately obvious that they were based there. So they’re gone from Twitter too. At this rate, Twitter is going to become like the alt-right social network Gab, just with some brands wondering where all their engagement has gone.

Galaxy brain

Before his purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk had a reputation for being a forward-thinking successful entrepreneur. Tesla was a pioneer in all-electric cars, SpaceX has contracts with NASA, and his Starlink network allowed people living in remote areas to access satellite broadband internet.

But he’s completely ruined Twitter. I’m not sure whether it’s some kind of galaxy-brained scheme that mere mortals like myself are unable to comprehend, or whether he’s actually not that intelligent but has lots of money to throw around to see what sticks. Or somewhere in the middle. Either way, he seems to keep making unforced errors that seems to make no kind of sense business-wise. It’s worth noting that, despite being probably one of the world’s richest people, he took on a lot of debt to buy Twitter, and those loans will be accruing interest. It can’t be long before Twitter goes bankrupt, can it?

As for my Twitter profile? It still exists, mainly so that I don’t lose my username. But my profile is private, and I’ve deleted my avatar and background. I haven’t had the Twitter app on my phone for over 18 months now.

Business models

My only worry about Bluesky is its business model. In the long term, how is it going to make money? Are we going to start to see adverts, like on most other social media? Will there be a premium tier?

On Mastodon, I pay small monthly contributions via Patreon and Ko-Fi to the overall project and server owner respectively, and that suits me well. And Threads is part of Meta. I’m assuming Blueksy is backed by venture capital money, but at some point it’s got to be able to make money on its own terms. I just hope it’s done in a way that won’t massively alienate its user base.

Playlist of the month: 90s Summer

A screenshot of the 90s Summer Songs playlist on Spotify

We’re getting to the end of another month, and so with just a few hours remaining in August, here’s this month’s playlist. I appreciate that the weather hasn’t been particularly summery this week (stormy more like) but this month’s theme is songs that remind me of the summer holidays of the 1990s. You can listen along on Spotify if you want.

  • ‘Steal my Sunshine’ by Len. This Canadian band ended up being something of a one-hit wonder with this upbeat song 25 years ago.
  • ‘Waiting for Tonight’ by Jennifer Lopez. Oooh, a JLo song for the second month running. I listened to a lot of Galaxy 105 (now known as Capital) during the school holidays and this was in regular rotation.
  • ‘Save Tonight’ by Eagle Eye Cherry. This was everywhere in the summer of 1998, from the half-brother of Neneh Cherry. Whilst a second single and an album did well, you may be surprised to know that a further five albums followed – I certainly was.
  • ‘Lovefeel (Tee’s Club Radio)’ by The Cardigans. The dance remix of that song from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, courtesy of American DJ Todd Terry. It was some time later before I heard the slower original.
  • ‘Staying Out For The Summer’ by Dodgy. Dodgy had been around since the early 90s, and this song was originally released in 1994. Their 1996 single ‘Good Enough’ was what brought them fame, however.
  • ‘Cecilia’ by Suggs, Louchie Lou & Michie One. The original was by Simon & Garfunkel, but Suggs from the band Madness released this speeded up version with some additional reggae vocals in 1996.
  • ‘In The Summertime’ by Shaggy & Rayvon. We’re in 1995 now and another cover, this time of the Mungo Jerry classic with additional rapping from Shaggy.
  • ‘Twist and Shout’ by Chaka Demus & Pliers. Another cover! Reggae music was big in the mid-90s and I prefer this to the original.
  • ‘Wake Up Boo’ by The Boo Radleys. A mainstay of the student club nights that I went to in the early 2000s, but originally from 1995. They’re regarded very much as a ‘one hit wonder’ despite having released eight (!) studio albums, the most recent of which came out last year.
  • ‘Macarena (Bayside Boys Remix)’ by Los Del Rio. And we’re back in remix territory. The original came out in 1993, but it was the 1995 remix by the Bayside Boys, and subsequent dance moves, that made this song so popular. Sorry, but I actually like this song.

A return trip to the National Coal Mining Museum

A photo of Caphouse Colliery at the National Coal Mining Museum for England.

Last weekend, I took our eight-year-old to the National Coal Mining Museum for England. It was our second visit, the first being in 2017 which I wrote about at the time. Our eight-year-old was only one then, and so we couldn’t go down the old mineshaft, but this time we could.

This is now the third mine that we’ve been down in as many months; last month, we went to the one in Beamish, and in May we went to the one in the Black Country Living Museum. Caphouse Colliery, the mine at the National Coal Mining Museum, is different as it’s primarily a deep mine, and so the tour enters and exits using a lift in a 140 metre deep mine shaft. There is a drift entrance to the mine as well, but it’s mainly there for emergency evacuations now and isn’t part of the tour.

Mining ceased at Caphouse in the 1980s and it became a museum shortly after. So, whereas Beamish and the BCLM are set in the early twentieth century, here the mine tour covers the full history from the early 1800s right up to the more mechanised latter times. Though coal is no longer mined here, the mine is still regulated as an active coal mine and all battery powered devices have to be surrendered before the tour – hearing aids being the only exception. As such, I don’t have any photos from down the mine.

Back on the surface, we had a look at the indoor exhibitions, about miners’ lives and a special exhibition marking forty years since the Miners’ Strike. Around the colliery, you can see the old steam engine that powered the lift mechanism, and the Pithead Baths, where miners would start and end their shifts with a communal shower. There was also a cage with some canaries – the literal canaries in a coalmine.

We then caught the narrow gauge paddy train which takes you to the other end of the site, where there are new stables for horses and ponies. Ponies were still used down coal mines as recently as 1994, and so when the museum opened, it served as retirement stables. Whilst the ponies there now are rescues, none of them have worked down a mine.

As it was the summer holidays, there were some additional activities on for kids. A large sandpit was outside the Hope Pit to recreate a beach; when miners eventually became eligible for a week’s paid holiday, thousands would go to various UK seaside resorts like Blackpool, Skegness and Cleethorpes.

We had a good time; in retrospect, I’m surprised it’s taken us so long to go back, as it’s only just over half an hour’s drive away.

Accessibility

The underground mine tour is mostly accessible to wheelchair users, but the no batteries rule applies. Some of the buildings aren’t accessible due to their age. There are accessible toilets but the nearest Changing Places toilet is a ten minute drive away. More information is available on the web site.

Parking is available on site; it’s normally free, but there’s a £5 charge in summer (which in turn gives free use of the paddy train). There’s an hourly bus service between Wakefield and Huddersfield which calls at the museum.

Our go-to cookbooks

A photo of the four cookbooks mentioned in this blog post

Cooking at home is one of my wife’s passions, although it’s something I enjoy too. Over the years, we’ve amassed a selection of cookbooks, but there are four that we use the most at present. So, partly as a way of sharing nice recipes, and partly as a cynical way of getting Amazon affiliate commission, here are our four go-to cookbooks.

All the links to Amazon below pay me a small amount of commission should you choose to buy these books from there. However, we often borrow cookbooks from our local libraries. I’ve also added links where some of these recipes are available online.

A photo of the cover of the India Express cookbook by Rukmini Iyer

India Express by Rukmini Iyer

Of the four cookbooks mentioned today, India Express by Rukmini Iyer is our newest. We found it first in our local library, and then bought a copy as there were so many recipes that we wanted to try. All the recipes are vegan, vegetarian or pescatarian, and are generally quite quick – almost all can be done in an hour and many less.

Our favourite recipe so far is Spiced Roasted Paneer with Tomatoes and Peppers (available at this link). Paneer is an Indian soft cheese that you can usually get at larger supermarkets – our local Sainsbury’s stocks it in the chilled world food section. The recipe is basically a traybake – preheat the oven, put the ingredients in a roasting tin, and cook for 30 minutes. We’ve also enjoyed the South Indian-Style Black Pepper & Fennel Prawns recipe and had this a couple of times.

A photo of the cover of 'Bored of Lunch: The Healthy Slow Cooker Book' by Nathan Anthony

Bored of Lunch by Nathan Anthony

Nathan Anthony’s Bored of Lunch: The Healthy Slow Cooker Book, is apparently the biggest selling slow cooker cookbook in UK publishing history. I can see why – there’s some really good recipes, and the majority just require you to throw all the ingredients together and leave the slow cooker to do its thing. Other slow cooker cookbooks add on significant extra preparation, and undermine much of the ease and time saving that a slow cooker offers.

We typically have a slow cooker meal once a fortnight, using the slow cook mode on our Instant Pot. Almost all of the recipes come from this book, and the most recent we had was the Chicken and Peanut Curry, made from peanut butter and coconut milk. We also like the Thai Basil Beef and Gin-Infused Spiced Beef, and I was really impressed with the Garlic Parmesan Chicken with Potatoes which involves layering the ingredients to get a full meal in one pot. We also have the follow-up, Even Easier, but use the first book more.

A photo of the cover of the Persiana Everyday cook book by Sabrina Ghayour

Persiana Everyday by Sabrina Ghayour

We’re both big fans of Sabrina Ghayour’s Persiana cookbook, but we use the follow-up Persiana Everyday more often. I would recommend both if you like Middle Eastern cookery or food with a lot of flavour. We’ve recently tried the Sage Butter, Feta & Black Pepper Pasta, and our favourites are the Baked Halloumi and Za’atar, Paprika & Garlic Chicken.

There’s also some good side-dish recipes, especially for making flavoured rice.

A photo of the cover of Nigella Express by Nigella Lawson

Nigella Express by Nigella Lawson

Christine had this book when I met her, and though it was published 17 years ago, it still gets plenty of use. We have several of Nigella’s cookbooks, but Nigella Express is the one we use the most.

We recently had Mirin-Glazed Salmon for the first time, and Chicken Schnitzel with Bacon and White Wine is a favourite of ours. No Churn Pomegranate Ice Cream is a great base for lots of ice cream flavours that can be made without a dedicated ice cream maker.

Honourable mentions

We don’t own it, but we’ve cooked several good recipes from Donal Skehan’s Super Food in Minutes – we particularly like his Red Lentil Daal which we have with paratha. Most of the recipes in this book come with lots of vegetables.

If you have an Instant Pot, or another brand of pressure cooker, then Modern Pressure Cooking by Catherine Phipps is a worthwhile purchase.

Dishonourable mentions

My wife has gotten rid of several of her cookbooks recently, having not really used them. Jamie Oliver’s 15 and 30 Minute Meals both went – I’m sure you could cook the meals in 30 minutes with a full team of staff but they seemed to take us far longer. We also picked up the first two River Café cookbooks at a charity shop, and they’ll probably end up back there soon too. The Grains as Mains book seemed like a good idea, but we were underwhelmed – some are really basic recipes that just happen to have some extra wholegrains sprinkled on.

Storm Lilian

On Friday, the UK was visited by Storm Lilian, the twelfth storm of the season (which runs until the end of this week). And it took out our electricity supply.

I was all ready to start my working day at home, when my screen went black. I use a laptop, so that was still running, but with no internet and a rapidly depleting battery. This was around 8:30am.

Thankfully, almost instantly a text from Northern Powergrid, the privatised company that runs the local electricity distribution network, informed me that they were aware of the problem. But a fix wasn’t likely until 10am, and August is my busiest month of the year at work. As rush hour had passed, I could be in my office in half an hour if I drove, so I got in the car and drove to work.

This turned out to be the right decision, as when I got to work, another text arrived, this time advising it would be 6pm before the power would be back on. As it was, everything was up and running again by 1pm, but it’s been a very long time since I’ve known a power cut last for over four hours. It turns out we were one of around 36,000 people without power in the Northern Powergrid area. Thankfully, nothing in our fridge or freezer spoiled.

Whilst we do have a massive battery in our cellar, linked to our solar panels, this doesn’t automatically kick in if there’s a power cut. Instead, we have two dedicated sockets that run off the battery. I did try running an extension cable from there to the fridge-freezer, but it didn’t seem to do anything, so I plugged the fridge-freezer back into the mains and left for work.

As mentioned, Storm Lilian is the twelfth named storm of the season, and it’s the first time since the storms were named in 2015 that we’ve reached the letter L. The season ends this Saturday and so we probably won’t experience Storm Minnie, but the fact that we’ve had this many storms over the past 12 months is rather worrying. Is this going to be the new normal with climate change, and are we going to experience more power cuts like this one?

What we didn’t do in Northumberland

I managed to span the list of things we did whilst on holiday in Northumberland to eight blog posts, representing the seven days that we were on holiday. Because it was a short holiday, there were lots of places that we could have visited, but didn’t have the time. Here are some of them.

Alnwick Castle

Whilst we did visit The Alnwick Garden, which is adjacent and shares a car park, we didn’t go into the more famous castle next door. It dates from the 11th Century, following the Norman Conquest, although it was extensively re-modelled in the 18th and 19th Centuries. It’s often been used as a filming location, with the first series of Blackadder set there. More recently, it was used in last year’s Dungeons and Dragons film, and featured in the first two films about that wizard boy whose enemy cannot be named.

Howick Hall

Not far from Seahouses is Howick Hall, the ancestral home of the Earls Grey. The hall itself is open to visitors, as are its gardens and arboretum, and of course there’s a café where presumably there’s an expectation that you’ll drink Earl Grey Tea. Whilst the Earls Grey have owned the site since the 14th Century, the current house is less than 100 years old, having been substantially rebuilt following a fire.

Craster

Craster is another pretty fishing village like Seahouses. Whilst Seahouses claims to be where kippers where invented, Craster Kippers are more well-known. Craster is also known for its lobsters and crabs.

Dunstanburgh Castle

Had we visited Craster, we could have also called in at Dunstanburgh Castle. It’s a ruin – moreso than Warkworth Castle – and it’s just over a mile’s walk from Craster where the nearest car park is. We saw it from a distance as it’s on the coast, but the long walk from the car park and the fact that it’s a ruin put us off.

Beadnell

One of the main roads into Seahouses from the A1 passes the village of Beadnell, and so we drove past it multiple times without actually going into the village itself. It’s also a harbour, and looked quite pretty in some paintings that we saw.

Grace Darling Museum

Up the coast in the village of Bamburgh, and just a short walk from Bamburgh Castle, is the RNLI’s Grace Darling Museum. Grace Darling lived on the Farne Islands and was a daughter of one of the lighthouse keepers. She came to fame in 1838, when she was 22 years old, by risking her life to rescue the stranded survivors of a shipwreck – of the 62 people on board, all but three were rescued. Whilst she died a few years later aged 26, she managed to go down in history as a local heroine. The museum opened in 1938 to mark 100 years since her dramatic rescue.

Whilst the museum was very close to where we were staying, we’d pencilled it in for a day of bad weather. As it was, we were really lucky with the weather and so didn’t need an indoor backup plan.

Northumberland Zoo

Our summer holidays normally result in a zoo or aquarium visit, but we didn’t find the time this year. Had we stayed for longer, then we may have gone to Northumberland Zoo. It’s less than 10 years old, and tends to have smaller animals; the largest are medium-sized cats like servals, lynx and snow leopards.

Morpeth Chantry Bagpipe Museum

Most people associate bagpipes with Scotland, but Northumberland has its own bagpipes, and there’s a museum about them in Morpeth. Indeed, it’s home to over 120 pipe instruments from around the world.

I’ve no doubt that we’ll have another holiday in Northumberland at some point in the future, and we may well visit some of these places that we didn’t manage to fit in.

Our 2024 holiday: Beamish

A photo of the main street in the 1900s town at Beamish

This is the eighth, and final, blog post about what we did on our 2024 holiday to Northumberland. Previously, I wrote about Cragside, and today is about our visit to Beamish.

‘Wait a minute’, you may be thinking, ‘Beamish isn’t in Northumberland’. And you would be right – Beamish is in County Durham. But we called in on the way home and so I’m counting it as part of the holiday.

Beamish is an outdoor, living museum – very similar to the Black Country Living Museum that we visited back in May. It’s split into different areas, each representing a different time period, from the 1820s through to the 1950s. I’ve been a few times, and all three of us last visited in 2019 for my 35th birthday.

Beamish is huge, and it’s now just about impossible to see everything in one day. So, as we’d been before, we strategised and focussed on visiting a few key areas that we wanted to see.

The 1820s landscape at Beamish. There is a thatched-roof cottage in the foreground

1820s Landscape

This is the area set 200 years ago, around Pockerley Old Hall, a farmhouse and one of the few buildings that was in situ and not rebuilt on the site. Elements of the farm have been there since the 15th century. At the farm, there are a few horses and pigs to see, and a brand new tavern where we had lunch.

This area is also is home to a waggonway, which was a predecessor to the railways and has a replica of Puffing Billy to haul visitors up and down a short section of track.

A old fashioned bus parked outside the church in the pit village at Beamish

1900s pit village

Jumping forward, and there’s the pit village – a small community around a coal mine, set around the peak period of coal production in the area. You can go down the Mahogany Drift Mine, which was a real mine – if you go down a closed off mine road and keep going you’ll end up about a mile away. The village shows how people lived – there’s a school, church and several miners’ cottages.

Two houses and a police station in the 1950s town at Beamish

1950s town

This bit was still being built when we last visited, and is now mostly complete. In a way, this felt like the oddest bit of the museum seeing as the houses are just like those that friends used to live in. You can go into the houses, and they have been decorated as they would have been when new. There’s also a playground and a high street with a toy shop, cinema and appliances shop. You can book to have your hair done in a 1950s style, and there’s a fish and chip shop.

It’s the first time in a while that a setting in Beamish reflects a time in living memory.

A tram and a bus in the 1900s town in Beamish

1900s town

Joined onto the 1950s town is the 1900s town, one of the older sections of Beamish and probably the most well-known. It’s expanded somewhat over the years and includes many transplanted buildings, including a bank, sweet shop, pub, co-operative store and a pharmacy. It’s certainly the busiest bit of the museum and the most complete.

This was all we had time to see – the weather was starting to turn, and we had a two hour drive home ahead of us, so we missed the 1940s home farm, the 1950s farm and the fairground.

A tram at Beamish

Getting around Beamish

Beamish is a large site, and unless you’re super fit, you’ll probably want to make use of the transport options provided. One of the things Beamish is known for is its tramway, which forms a circuit of the site and connects most (but not all) of the areas. At peak times, there are three trams in operation. They’re all heritage trams, although not all from the North-East of England – one is from Oorto, although painted as if it was from South Shields.

For the areas not reachable by tram – namely the 1900s Pit Village and the 1950s Town – there are a series of heritage buses running. These are all diesel, but there’s a plan to run electrically-powered trolleybuses into the 1950s town in future.

Wheelchair users can use a replica classic bus which has had a foldaway lift added at the back. It’s an on-call service reserved for those with mobility issues.

Accessibility

Accessibility at Beamish is pretty good, considering that there are lots of old buildings – you can tell that some thought has gone in to ensuring access where possible. But that doesn’t mean that every building is accessible, although the newest areas like the 1950s town are the most accessible. Indeed, the 1950s town is home to a Changing Places facility, and many of the buildings have lifts to access upper floors where needed. There’s an extensive accessibility guide on the web site.

Tickets for Beamish are valid from one year of purchase; as mentioned, it’s more than one day out and so you can visit as many times in the subsequent 364 days without paying again. At time of writing, tickets are around £28 each for adults and £17 for children. A Max Card discount is available on tickets bought on the day. However, I would recommend buying tickets in advance as we had to queue for quite a while to purchase them on arrival.

There are regular direct buses from Newcastle, Sunderland and Chester-le-Street. Chester-le-Street is also the nearest mainline railway station, served by regular Transpennine Express and occasional LNER and CrossCountry services. The bus services seemed well-used when we went, and drop you right outside the front entrance.

How I stopped Teams from glitching

Ever since we started using the ‘new’ Microsoft Teams, my home computer would glitch whenever joining a meeting where I wanted my webcam on. By ‘glitch’, I mean both screens going black – usually just for a couple of seconds, but sometimes longer. It may also be triggered by someone sharing their screen during a meeting – meaning I could hear them, but not speak.

Finding new graphics drivers

The simple solution to this was to update my graphics drivers. At home, I use a relatively basic Lenovo laptop bought in 2018. In 2021, I upgraded the RAM from 4 GB to 16 GB, which has helped to keep it going despite its age. Its processor is too old for Windows 11, but Windows 10 still works fine for me.

When I opened Device Manager to check my graphics drivers, they hadn’t been updated since 2018. Over the past few years, more and more applications have been updated to take advantage of GPU hardware acceleration – as I write this, Firefox, Outlook, Excel, Teams and Spotify are all using my GPU. That was less of an issue in 2018, but is now.

Windows Update wouldn’t offer any new drivers, and nor would Lenovo Vantage, the tool that shipped with the computer for vendor software updates. And on Lenovo’s web site, the latest software downloads were the same driver that I already had.

As the laptop uses Intel built-in graphics drivers, I instead went to Intel’s web site to download them. Sure enough, Intel had drivers updated as recently as May this year. So I downloaded them, ran the installer, and got an error, saying ‘Your system has a driver that is locked to manufacturer specification.’

Bah. This means that Intel only wants me to download drivers from Lenovo, but Lenovo are not offering updated drivers.

Getting around the manufacturer specification lock

The good news is that you can get around this, and I found the solution thanks to this Reddit thread. You tell Windows to use a generic driver, and then install Intel’s updated drivers as an alternative.

Here are the step-by-step instructions:

  1. Do a complete back-up. We’re playing with drivers here, and the wrong driver can render your computer unbootable. Make sure you have a full system backup that can be restored in case something goes terribly wrong.
  2. Open Device Manager, find your graphics device, right-click, and choose ‘Update Driver’.
  3. Select the second option, ‘Browse my computer for drivers’.
  4. On the next screen, select ‘Let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer’
  5. You should have a driver called ‘Microsoft Basic Display Adaptor’. Select this, and click Next.
  6. Your screen will flash, and you may find that any external screens will stop working. When it’s done, restart your computer.
  7. Now, try to install the Intel drivers again that you have downloaded from the Intel web site. If all goes well, these new drivers will be installed instead.
  8. If not, repeat the above steps as far as step 3. Find the Intel driver download, and open it in a tool like 7-Zip to access the files inside, and extract them to a folder.
  9. Instead of following step 4, select the folder that you extracted the files to, and Windows should detect the drivers and install these for you.
  10. You can then check your driver version in Device Manager to verify that the latest version has been installed.

This resolved the issues for me, and now Teams works fine.

The fact that computer manufacturers can stop you from easily installing driver updates is unfair, in my opinion. Sure, the computer I’m using is old, but it still works pretty well. We have a massive problem globally with electronic waste, and we shouldn’t be making functioning computers obsolete through software.