Three weeks away from home makes for a very pleasant month, not least because we were able to read about Rome sweltering from afar.

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Took myself off on an expedition today to the other side of town, to a fine and interesting area called Pigneto. Small, low dwellings that were occupied by railway workers line narrow streets and there’s a definite hipsterish vibe about the place. My purpose was to visit Zio Bici, a bike shop that specialises in Bromptons.1

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A lot of people derive great benefit from recording, usually daily, the things that bring them joy or for which they are grateful. That isn’t something I do — at least not publicly — although I will sometimes jot down something along those lines as a reminder to future me. That may be because I am e...

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There’s an internet refrain common when bad behaviour triumphs: this is why we can’t have nice things. I generally sympathise, but aside from trying to buy longer-lasting goods and mending when I can, I have not paid much attention to whether some things are, maybe, too nice.

Phil Gyford, having...

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The extremely rickety automation I built to download and rename logfiles collapsed (again) sometime after last Thursday. The failure only came to light this morning when I tried to run Bise, the little analytics program that gives me a high-level view of what kinds of visits my sites are welcoming. Because of the way the server rotates my log files out of existence, it is quite difficult, though not impossible, to recover after more than a couple of days. For now, then, I have given up on stats until I can get home and sort things out. The problem is how to avoid such mishaps in the future.

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