Well, it’s New Year’s Eve, and I haven’t posted any proper blog posts since April. So here’s a bit of an update.

We completed the purchase on our house and moved in around April.

We had a period of 40degC+ temperatures soon afterwards and it was _really_ uncomfortable to even exist during that time. I couldn’t even work in my bedroom during that time, and had all the windows open overnight.

And recently, we had a complete reversal, with temperatures hitting -6degC, and a thick layer of snow. Since the house is not on the main road, we no longer have priority with the gritters, which lead to some nerve-wracking drives on the Saturday when I headed up to morning shopping.

I later found out my former neighbour in the flat where I used to live (still find it strange to say that) actually lost functionality to their boiler during this cold snap (the pump to their boiler broke), so they had to wear like 5 layers of clothes and sit around a portable heater in order to keep warm — travelling to a relative’s house to get showered and stuff.

I also found out that two Muslim families have moved into the two vacant flats since we moved out. This now leaves only 4 flats out of the 12 available that are inhabited by non-Muslims. I am, sadly, not surprised by this turn of events, the local council have been aggressively buying up all the council properties they can, and then throwing probably the worst people into them — heck they even bought and sold one of the flats across to a neighbouring council — so essentially we have a flat in one council that is being used to house people from another council. 1 of the remaining residents is only there because they have a vulnerable relative nearby and will move out when she passes. Another is already looking for a new property, and the other two families haven’t made their plans known yet.

We’ve now gone through over 6 months in the new house and have been getting and going through the new bills. Trying to keep the house warm during the cold spell has been costing me over £15 per day in Gas alone. Thankfully, the cold spell only lasted around a week, and the government’s energy assistance did help with the Electricity side — giving £66 extra per month. That doesn’t help with the Gas costs, but it does mean I can use the space heater (which runs off electricity)

My Yaris seems to be having trouble with acceleration even without ECO mode on, so I’m going to start putting money aside to buy a full EV — maybe a Tesla, Hyundai, or Toyota EV (even if Musk has been an AH with the Twitter purchase, I’m still liking the Tesla interface — I even got to sit behind one this year, even if only briefly)

As with most people, I grew concerned with Musk’s handling of the Twitter purchase, so I picked up a side project a year or so ago: Mastodon.

Back when Twitter had issues with privacy, several projects spawned up: Ello, Diaspora* and Mastodon to name a few.

Ello basically failed and has now turned more into a portfolio site. Diaspora is sort of like a decentralized Tumblr and Mastodon was the Twitter equivalent, so much so that there’s more than one auto-crossposter now that allows you to Tweet to Twitter, and it will automatically crosspost it to Mastodon, and vice versa,

I decided to update my TfL Travel Updates project and allow it to post to Mastodon instead. I have it now posting to https://mastodon.xyz/@updatesbf but I am also looking at setting up my own Mastodon instance so I can experiment and break things on my own setup without messing up or flooding someone else’s instance