• Busy week.

  • We went to register ourselves as residents in Zürich. It took quite a lot of sitting in a big room while someone entered our details into a computer and cost a few hundred CHFs (“chuffs”). In the course of the whole episode I changed two nappies and did one round of portable potty on the loo, that’s how long it took. Anyway now it’s done and as soon as I have my permit in hand I can work.

    We also got the keys to our new apartment. It’s nice and (fortunately) feels larger than the floorplan suggests, though it’ll still be a squeeze to fit all of our stuff and bodies in. We’ll have to get a lot of shelves. I was a bit disappointed to see that it has the standard ultra-abrasive Swiss bumpy walls.

  • I’m home alone. Nanda and the kids went to Brazil and I’m back in the UK preparing for the movers, who come on checks Tuesday. I have been spending my time trying to put all examples of a given thing into one place, instead of our usual household configuration of having a little bit of everything in each room, in order to make packing and unpacking less chaotic. I also did some Polyfila-ing (Polyfiling?) and have some paint to touch up in the next few days. Fun times!

    I also made a handover document to give the new owner explaining how the heating works etc. It even has a QR code linking to the bin schedule! I am the best house seller.

  • Speaking of the house: the sale is creaking along and I hope it will all be done in the next week or two.

  • On a bit of a whim (and with a small amount of kid-free time on my hands) I bought a basic DJ controller. I don’t really have a plan for this aside from toying around at home. I certainly don’t intend to become a DJ, even the kind that does weddings in community centres, but it’s still quite fun. And it’s harder than it looks! I find music theory very scary but it’s easier to learn about when it’s directly relatable to something (e.g. beat matching → phrase matching → harmonic matching → uh oh circle of fifths is here).

  • I needed to edit ID3 tags in some MP3s. All the command line tools are old or have some kind of icky output that doesn’t lend itself to scripting, and all the Python modules have unpleasant-looking APIs (note: I didn’t spend long looking). So I thought, I know, I’ll just brew install ffmpeg, since that can edit ID3 tags and I can just wrap it in a shell script. Now I have ffmpeg installed and about a million dependencies including, for some reason, a DNS resolver (unbound). I’m going to uninstall it all again just so homebrew doesn’t spend its life keeping this mess up-to-date.

    Also, have I complained before about the kitsch terminology homebrew uses (“Pouring a bottle”, etc)? I can’t stand it.