Randomness

Filler content

by

I try very hard to make sure that a new blog post goes live on here every two days. And sometimes I have so much to write about, that I have three weeks’ worth of blog posts scheduled to go live. Typically, this is just after we come back from holiday, for example.

This is not one of those times. So this is a filler blog post, to make sure that I keep my unbroken streak of posting every other day, going back to last June.

We haven’t had many days out of late, and those that we have had, have all been written about already. Unless we went out somewhere yesterday – I’m writing this on Tuesday – but I probably won’t have time to write that up until later this week if we do. I also haven’t bought much new technology recently, nor had much time to tinker with WordPress or Home Assistant.

In terms of blog posts that I’m planning, I expect I’ll discuss our reasons for changing to a new ISP, and also reviewing the new router that we got. There’ll probably be an ‘unblogged November’ round-up of things that weren’t quite important enough for a blog post on their own. And probably a ‘oh good grief, how is it December already!’ post.

Button battery charger

by
A photo of a button battery charger with a LIR2450 battery inserted.

Battery chargers are just for AA and AAA batteries, right? Nope – it turns out you can buy rechargeable button batteries (also known as coin batteries) and a charger for them. Today, I’m reviewing this starter kit that I bought from Amazon (sponsored link) which includes a charger and four LIR2450 batteries.

The battery charger can charge two button batteries at a time. A red light shows that the battery is charging; it shows a green light when there’s no battery inserted, or the battery is fully charged. It’s not an intelligent charger, so it won’t tell you if the battery is dead, or give you an idea of progress.

As well as the provided LIR2450 batteries, this battery charger can also charge LIR2032 and LIR2025 batteries if you have these. These batteries should be compatible with any devices that take CR2450, CR2032 and CR2025 batteries, which aren’t rechargeable. It’s quite small, and gets its power via a USB-C cable, which is included. Batteries seem to take around two hours to fully charge.

I’ve got a Zigbee motion sensor that uses a CR2450 battery, and whilst it’s not needed its battery replacing yet, I can ensure that its new batteries are rechargeable. Disposing of batteries properly can be a pain, as they’re not supposed to go in household waste.

The starter pack, that includes the battery charger and four batteries, currently costs £16. Extra packs of four batteries seem to cost around £8 (sponsored link), so the equivalent of £2 each. That’s more expensive than buying the equivalent disposable CR2450 batteries, which can be had for about 50p each, but they should last longer and are better for the environment.

Miscellaneous notes on North Wales

by

This is the one final holiday post before I get on with writing about the other things we’ve done on this holiday. It’s a few assorted notes and observations from our time away.

North Wales is popular with dog owners

If you want to bring your dog on holiday, then North Wales seems to a popular choice. The cottage we rented was dog-friendly, with hard floors in most of the rooms, and in Llandudno we saw at least one hotel specifically marketing itself as dog-friendly. In fact, there was even a dog toileting area to the side. Alas, I didn’t catch the name of it, and can’t find it on Google Street View, but I think it was on Church Street.

We certainly saw plenty of people out and about with their dogs.

Charging our electric car wasn’t much of an issue

Getting a new electric car less than a week before we went on holiday was an interesting decision in retrospect, but we coped well. Whilst there are literally no public chargers in Conwy, and we weren’t permitted to charge it at the cottage we rented, there were a couple of rapid chargers a few minutes away in Llandudno Junction. These kept us going when we couldn’t charge on days out, however, several of the places that we visited did offer public charging. We only had to go out of way once to charge up; the rest of the time, we fitted our charges around the activities that we’d planned.

Signage is in Welsh first, then English

North Wales has a higher concentration of people who speak Welsh as their first language, than other parts of Wales. So, Welsh tends to appear first on road signs with English beneath. This isn’t universal, and elsewhere in Wales it’s English first. And whereas in Ireland, where the Irish text on road signs is in italics, both the English and Welsh are in the same font, same colour and not italicised. I don’t speak Welsh – I tried it on Duolingo for a couple of weeks before going back to French – and so reading signs took a little longer as I had to look where the Welsh stopped and the English started.

Christine, meanwhile, is still learning Welsh on Duolingo.

It’s also notable that all the Welsh signs instantly disappear as soon as you cross the border back into England.

The Welsh NHS is separate to the English NHS

I forgot to pack any spare hearing aid batteries, and so needed to find somewhere that sold them. Being English, I went to the nhs.uk web site to find somewhere that would sell them, but it turns out that, despite ending in ‘.uk’, nhs.uk is just the web site for NHS England. So when I searched for nearby pharmacies, for example, all the results were in Cheshire and Merseyside.

Healthcare is a ‘devolved’ matter in the UK, and so the regional governments in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own branches of the NHS. (Technically, it’s not the NHS in Northern Ireland but HSC instead).

NHS Wales confusingly has two web sites. The main NHS Wales web site, at nhs.wales, is more of a corporate web site – if you want health advice, or to find services, you need NHS 111 Wales, which is at 111.wales.nhs.uk.

I know NHS England is being abolished but you would expect a web site called ‘nhs.uk’ to apply to the whole of the UK, and not just England.

For completeness, health advice in Scotland comes from NHS Inform, at nhsinform.scot, and in Northern Ireland, it’s part of NIDirect.

LanguageCert HE Summit in Athens

by
Screenshot of the home page of LanguageCert's web site

The purpose of my recent visit to Athens was to attend a summit for staff working in admissions and English teaching in higher education, hosted by LanguageCert. LanguageCert offers tests in English, Spanish and Classical Greek for those wanting to prove their language proficiency for work, study or immigration.

I don’t tend to talk much about my day job on this blog, but as someone who works in international university admissions, I was already aware of LanguageCert. They offer a suite of tests, including an Academic test which is more focussed on the English skills needed for academic study at an English-speaking university. LanguageCert took over the running of the International ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) test from City & Guilds in 2015, and moved into online testing in 2019. Which, considering everything that happened in 2020, was a very wise move in hindsight.

Online testing

LanguageCert tests can be taken in a test centre – indeed, they’re one of only five providers offering a Secure English Language Test (SELT) approved by UK Visas and Immigration. But their tests are also available to be taken online at home, and it was good to hear more about the security and identity checks that they do for testers. I won’t go into too much detail, as I don’t want to share information given to me in confidence. Test takers have to download apps to their computers and mobile devices to verify their identity and to detect any cheating tools. We also got to see some examples of how they’ve been able to catch paid impersonators who have taken tests on peoples’ behalves. Their mobile app, ExamShield, can read the chips located in most modern passports, which can be compared with the printed details to avoid issues with fraudulent identity documents. The same app can also be used as a second webcam, typically positioned 135° from the primary webcam on the computer, to allow the proctor to see that the workspace is clear of any unauthorised materials. There’s more detail available here if you’re interested.

We also got to see behind the scenes, to see live exams being remotely proctored. They offer exams 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The AI elephant in the room

The topic of Artificial Intelligence came up several times during the summit, both in terms of opportunities and threats. AI, when used correctly, can assist humans with tasks – especially around fraud checks. But it can also be used for fraud, and this is something that LanguageCert are tackling. They have various tools and pre-test verification checks to detect deepfakes, where an impersonator will use live face-swapping technology to make themselves look like the person who was supposed to take the test. Their software is designed to lock down a computer, so, for example, it wouldn’t be possible to paste answers from ChatGPT into the writing section of a test.

Preventing fraud using AI is an ongoing arms race. LanguageCert’s software and platform is developed in-house – again, we got to see where their programmers work – and so they are well-placed to be agile in responding to new developments in the AI space.

The English testing market

LanguageCert is a relatively new entrant to the market for English testing. Most British universities steer people towards the IELTS test, which is run collaboratively between the University of Cambridge, IDP and the British Council. Meanwhile, TOEFL from ETS is usually preferred by American universities and Pearson PTE by Australian universities. Widening access to university education is something I feel passionately about, as I say peoples’ lives being changed every day by being able to undertake further study, and so having a wide range of accessible and affordable tests facilitates this.

Besides learning about LanguageCert’s products, and those from the wider PeopleCert group, the summit was also a good opportunity to network with colleagues from other universities. Several British universities besides my own were represented, but also universities from the US, Canada, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy and Poland. It was good to speak to other professionals, especially during a turbulent time for higher education in the UK and US.

It was a very useful and well-organised summit, and I really appreciated LanguageCert extending an invite to my employer and for covering our travel costs.

Integration

by

With Home Assistant, I think it’s fair to say that some of its integrations are easier to set up than others.

Some services offer a nice public API, and an easy way for users to get hold of an API key. Then, it’s just a case of popping this API key into Home Assistant, and off you go.

Some services are not so easy. They may offer an API, but require you to jump through hoops to sign up as a developer and create an application before you can get what you need. Or they may not offer an API, and the only way to integrate it with Home Assistant is to scrape web pages. Meanwhile, the integration developers have to constantly amend their integration to carry on working.

Now, this isn’t a blog post about Home Assistant – it’s using Home Assistant as a metaphor for immigration, and it’s inspired by this Guardian Comment piece from last week. We seem to want people who come to the UK to integrate with British culture, but integration works best when both sides work together.

In the late 1990s, there was a pioneering British sketch comedy TV show called Goodness Gracious Me, which was the first to feature an all British Asian cast. One of the recurring sketches was The Coopers, an Asian family that tries a little too hard to be British. I think it’s relevant to this, because, as someone who is white and indigenous to Britain, I have a duty to those who want to integrate with British society to feel welcome. We can’t tell people to integrate harder when we’re unwilling to do the same. Just because we happened to be lucky to be born into a country where lots of people want to live.

Britain is a better country because of immigration. I appreciate living in a multi-cultural society, where I can experience different perspectives on the world. Where there’s a range of different food shops and restaurants from the various diasporas who have settled here. Where the jobs that British natives don’t want to do get done, especially in health and social care. Where Christmas is celebrated alongside Eid, Diwali and Passover. When we all work together so that we can live together in peace, the world is a better place.

No Mow May

by
No Mow May logo

If you want to encourage wildlife in your local area, you can pledge not to mow your lawn this month, as part of No Mow May.

Allowing your lawn to get a bit longer allows wildflowers to grow, which helps pollinators like bees and butterflies. May is a peak month for wildflowers, and so it’s a good time to put away your lawnmower and let your garden be a bit more natural for a few weeks.

We’ve ‘done’ No Mow May for a few years. We only have one small garden and don’t actually own a lawnmower, but we have put our strimmer away for the month of May. I can’t say that this has always been a conscious decision; I’m not at all green-fingered, and Christine tends to be too busy to manage the garden on a regular basis. So sometimes we’ve not mowed the lawn at all in previous Mays just through pure laziness. The fact that we’ve probably helped the local wildlife in doing so is a nice side-effect.

No Mow May is a campaign by the charity Plantlife, and they have plenty of resources on their web site if you’re interested in managing a wild lawn all year round.

If you don’t have your own garden, there are other ways to get involved too, including contacting your local councillors to ask for public green spaces to be mowed less often. Leeds City Council has ‘relaxed mowing areas‘ alongside major roads to encourage wildlife, although the cynic in me reckons its partly a cost-saving measure too.

Is it the Easter holidays?

by
An egg with googly eyes in a flamingo-shaped egg cup. This is supposed to somehow represent 'Easter holidays'.

In most years, schools have their two week Easter holidays either side of the Easter weekend. But this year, Easter falls comparatively late – Easter Sunday will be the 20th April and a full three weeks later than last year.

If schools were to stick to the ‘two weeks either side’ model, that would mean they would be off this week and next week, with kids not back at school until the 28th April. It also means that the spring term at school will have been longer than normal, leaving a long stretch of teaching from Christmas onwards, and then a compressed summer term. So, our nine-year-old’s school is now in its second week of the Easter holidays, having had last week off as well. School re-opens the day after Easter Monday, on Tuesday 22nd April.

But not all schools are doing this. One local secondary school had an extended half term break before Christmas, giving them two weeks in October/November, and then shortened the Easter holidays to just a week and a bit. Over in South Yorkshire, they’re already done with their Easter holidays – they broke on the 28th March and were back at school on Monday. The actual Easter weekend is therefore detached from their Easter holidays. I suppose this keeps the spacing of the holidays more consistent but it feels a bit weird to have ‘Easter holidays’ that don’t include the actual Easter weekend.

My workplace always offers a customary holiday on the day after Easter Monday, and so I’ll be off work when our nine-year-old goes back to school. It gives me an extra break, I suppose.

Next year’s Easter holidays

In 2026, Easter Sunday will be a couple of weeks earlier on the 5th April. And, certainly where we are, that means a return to the standard pattern where the Easter holidays wrap around the Easter weekend. It’ll be another week earlier in 2027 as Easter Sunday will be the 28th March.

If you need to know when school holidays are, you can check local authority web sites which usually have dates for both this year and next year. However, individual schools may vary their dates – especially if they have Academy status.

The latest date for Easter

Wikipedia has a list of when Easter falls, and, in particular, the earliest and latest possible dates for Easter. Easter Sunday is comparatively late this year, but the latest possible date is actually the 25th April. The last time this happened was in 1943, and it’ll happen again in 2038. We’ll also have a late Easter in 2030 when it falls on the 21st – a day later than this year.

The earliest date for Easter is the 22nd March, and the last time this happened was before living memory, way back in 1818. Indeed, the next time it happens will also be (most likely) beyond the lifespan of anyone living today, as it won’t be until 2285. However, Easter Sunday fell on the 23rd March in 2008, something which I apparently didn’t blog about at the time. A shame, because the next time Easter Sunday falls on the 23rd March will be in 2160.

So, is it the Easter holidays?

So, to answer the question I posed in the title of this blog post: it depends. Most schools are off this week (the roads have definitely been quieter) but not all of them are. It’ll most likely be back to normal next year though.

Sci-Fi Weekender XVI – a retrospective

by
Paul McGann and Daphne Ashebrook being interviewed by David J Howe at Sci-Fi Weekender

So we got back from this year’s Sci-Fi Weekender on Sunday, and now that I’ve had a few days to recover, here’s what we got up to.

Thursday

We arrived on the Thursday evening. For lunch, we stopped off at Thaymar Ice Cream, which is just off the A1 near Retford and has a lovely tea room and farm shop. Oh, and the ice cream is great – I can particularly recommend the damson and liquorice flavour. After some food, we attended Pirate Pete’s Quiz and Karaoke. Sci-Fi Weekender normally opens with a quiz, and though the format was different this year, it was good fun.

With it being the first day, we called had a (comparatively) early night.

Friday

Our first on the Friday morning was a panel featuring Lauren K Nixon. Lauren is an author and a friend from university, and one of the people we gave a lift to down from Yorkshire on Thursday. Panel discussions are a big part of Sci-Fi Weekender, and Lauren was there for four of them, including discussions about traditional vs indie book publishing, and fantasy vs romantasy.

The headline guest for this year’s SFW was the eight doctor, Paul McGann, who appeared on stage with Daphne Ashbrook who played his assistant Grace Holloway in the 1996 TV film. They were both excellent guests, with really insightful answers to questions. Their interviewer was David J. Howe, one of the organisers of Sci-Fi Weekender and a writer of many Doctor Who handbooks.

In the evening, it was a welcome return for Jollyboat, who have performed at three previous SFW events.

Saturday

Whilst cosplay is encouraged throughout SFW, the cosplay competition normally takes place on Saturdays, starting with the preliminary round in the morning. The standard of cosplay is always really high, and there’s a really strong cosplay community around SFW. Throughout the weekend, there were several unofficial cosplay meets themed around fandoms like Star Trek.

There were also two events featuring John Robertson – a Q&A event at lunchtime, and then the The Dark Room in the evening. John has been at the majority of SFW events in recent years, but missed last year’s due to a clash. It was a welcome return – whilst the format of The Dark Room is consistent, there’s a lot of improvised material and it’s always hilarious.

Another session that we enjoyed on Saturday was a motion capture demonstration by Creature Bionics. They specialise in motion capture for films and videogames – especially for non-human creatures. It was really interesting and great to see the footage in realtime too.

There was also a great workshop by Artyfakes, a costume and props company, where they made an axe out of a plastic pipe and foam in about 90 minutes.

Right before The Dark Room were the Cosplay Finals on the main stage, where the 10 best entrants from the morning were asked to do a short piece of singing or acting. The winners were Hoggle and Ludo from Labyrinth, and much of the outfits were crocheted.

The Holodeck

SFW has normally been split between three rooms – the Main Void, the Spaceport, and the Timeport. The Main Void has the main stage, and the Spaceport is a smaller venue used more for panels. Over the past couple of years, the Timeport has just been used for vendors; this year it was home to various workshops. Meanwhile, the Games Room at the holiday park was rebranded The Holodeck, and was home to more vendors, a retro gaming set-up and ‘Full Size D&D’, which unfortunately we didn’t have time for. It was great to see this space better used; in previous years, it’s only been used for table-top gaming.

Things we didn’t get to see

Seeing as it’s split across four rooms, and we also needed to eat and drink occasionally, we didn’t get to see everything. The other big guest was Noah Hathaway, who we missed on the Friday, and there were some panels that we wanted to see but couldn’t. There’s more about this year’s event on Blazing Minds.

SFW XVII

Tickets for next year’s event are already on sale, and indeed may be close to selling out if the various emails and texts that I have received are anything to go by. There’s also a competition to win tickets – we were competition winners all the way back at SFW 9 in 2018, and it seems like lots of people have been lucky with the competitions in the past.

We’ve already booked for next year, and this time we will be sharing our accommodation with four of our friends to keep the costs down.

How many British Prime Ministers have you lived through?

by

I had an idle though recently about the number of people who have been British Prime Minister in my lifetime, and how that compares to people older or younger than me.

I was born in 1984, when Margaret Thatcher (urgh) was Prime Minister. She was first elected in 1979, and was around until 1990, when John Major took over. Then in 1997, Tony Blair came to power for 10 years, followed by Gordon Brown, until the general election in 2010 which saw David Cameron take over.

Following the Brexit referendum, Cameron stepped aside to allow Theresa May to take over for 3 years, and then we had 3 years of Boris Johnson. In 2022, we had Liz Truss for all of six weeks before Rishi Sunak took over, and then when Labour won last year’s General Election, Kier Starmer took over. And that’s where we are now.

So, in my 40 years of being alive, I’ve known 10 British Prime Ministers. A simple mean average of a new Prime Minister every four years then.

However, let’s compare that to our nine-year-old, born whilst David Cameron was Prime Minister. In their lifetime, there have been six Prime Ministers so far, for an average term of 18 months.

What about my Dad, who is in his 80s? He’s known 19 Prime Ministers (I’m counting Winston Churchill’s non-consecutive terms as one here), so an average of four and a bit years.

The point I’m trying to make, I suppose, is that historically Prime Ministers have lasted around four years on average, until very recently. Sure, Liz Truss only having been in power for six weeks has skewed things quite a bit. But Rishi Sunak also had a comparatively short term, and Gordon Brown, Theresa May and Boris Johnsons’ terms were all around the three year mark. The political upheaval we’ve seen in Britain in recent years is therefore unusual.

As for how long Keir Starmer will remain in power? I would be surprised if he’s not still Prime Minister in 2029, which is when the next election is due. That would make five years, and so would push the average up a bit. Whilst last summer, I was confident that Labour would win the 2029 general election, I’m not so confident now.

I’m hosting a webinar for LGBT+ History Month

by
A photo of the official LGBT+ History Month 2025 badge.

It’s February, which means that it’s LGBT+ History Month in the UK. LGBT+ History Month started in 2005, so this year is its 20th anniversary year, and the theme for this year is ‘activism and social change’.

In 2021, when we were back in lockdown, I hosted and co-hosted a couple of webinars through work. One was about Section 28, the legislation in force during my years at school which banned the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools. The second was a panel discussion with two other colleagues about what it is to be bisexual and some debunking some common myths about bisexuality.

This year, I’m hosting another webinar, with the rather long title of ‘From Ace to Zir – the A-Z of LGBTQ+‘. Over the space of an hour, I’ll be delivering a glossary of LGBTQ+ terms, including what they mean, and when to use them (or not use them if they’re now considered slurs). Starting with A, and terms like asexual, I’ll be going though each letter of the alphabet to help LGBTQ+ and their allies to understand the various terminology used. Many of these words are relatively new, and so I’m hoping it’s useful. I’ve also tried to include as many of the various pride flags as I can.

The webinar is free to attend – here’s the Eventbrite link to register. We’re also hosting several other webinars this month:

  • The fight for liberation – How it all started, about the Stonewall riots.
  • Queer South Asians – Looking back and forward, about South Asians with queer identities, especially in Bradford, and hosted by my colleague Usman
  • Stonewall postal action network documentary screening with Austin Allen, a screening of a short documentary and a discussion with Austin Allen, who ran a postal LGBT action network from his home in Queensbury, near Bradford.

There are also other events taking place across the wider Bradford district during February – details are available here.

Whilst Pride Month takes place in July, LGBT+ History Month is also important and different. Pride is, depending on your view, a protest and/or a celebration for LGBTQ+ people and allies. Whereas LGBT+ History Month has a more educational focus, looking at LGBT+ people in history and the key events that have pushed LGBT+ rights forwards (and sometimes backwards). As I work for a university, LGBT+ History Month is closer to our mission, and also happens during term time. Pride, alas, takes place when our undergraduate students are on their summer break.

By the way, if you want to buy the pin badge shown in the image above, here’s the link.