Now that the blog has settled in comfortably at https://www.headfirstonly.com/blog.htm, I'm going to stop updating the site at its old headfirst.www.idnet URL. This is partly because it's a faff remembering to maintain both websites, partly because I want to encourage people to update their bookmarks and use the new site, but also because it's just making more work for me and life is too short for that. So this is the last time the old site will get an update; if you're looking at this in the future and wondering why I went quiet after today, it's because you're using the wrong URL.

I spent a productive afternoon in the studio yesterday and ended up with a five-minute piece that I rather like. It features lots of my hardware synthesizers and a bunch of the virtual ones as well plus my Warr guitar and a few selections from my collection of other guitars. The unusual tuning that the Warr has has proved very effective at pushing my melodic choices in unusual directions, and as my friend David commented on the chat during Thursday night's live stream, the results sound different, but they're still recognisably me. And that's exactly what I was hoping would be the case.

I now have more than forty minutes of fresh instrumental material in the can, so I'm feeling confident that I'll be able to achieve the goal that I set myself earlier in the month of releasing a full album before the madness of the 50-90 challenge kicks off on Thursday. At which point I can switch from making music to er, making music.

I have absolutely no plans for what I'm going to write and record for 50-90 this summer. I tend to use 50-90 as a theatre for research and development where I try out new ways of doing things and explore new forms of composition. These don't always pay off (and that's all part of the fun) but when they do, I nudge my abilities up another notch. And I need to do this, because after taking part for more than a decade now, I know that as soon as I hear what my friends on the site are doing, I'll realise that they've all levelled up. It's lovely to hear, and it's also a strong source of motivation to try and keep up.

Yesterday the 50-90 website went live in readiness for this summer's mammoth songwriting challenge (where you are set the target of writing fifty songs in the ninety days between July 4th and October 1st).

I've already suspended around eighty accounts that have been set up by spammers, including two that signed up in the last hour, and this is why we can't have nice things any more. However, the site has new features which make this sort of account extremely easy to spot, so I'm hoping that spammers get the message and head off elsewhere to try their luck with easier targets.

But I'm already very excited at the prospect of listening to lots of new music from my many friends on the site. And I'll be making some music of my own, too. Roll on next Thursday!

After a couple of days where it was 31°C (88° F) in the back garden, a cold front has rolled in and things have become a lot more tolerable for me, although I'm still in a lot of pain. From getting a truly dismal sleep score of 52 on Tuesday night I managed a score of 90 last night. Sorry to bore you with the stats, but this blog is a useful way for me to track my physical state from month to month.

I've been watering the plants a lot; I bought a plant mister when I visited the garden centre this week, and I've been amazed at how quickly my dwarf umbrella plant in the conservatory has responded to a few quick squirts of water every day. It's looking much happier.

I've just rinsed out and refilled both bird baths in the garden. They continue to get a lot of heavy use. And I've been pottering around in the back garden so much lately that the birds have stopped flying off when I appear. Indeed, I was just followed across the back lawn by one of the male blackbirds from hereabouts, clearly expecting me to provide a prompt handout of suet pellets. He got one, of course.

I broke the site's RSS feed during my last update. Oops. Sorry about that; it should all be fixed now.

I've just been pottering about in the garden topping up the bird baths, watering the acers (and putting slate chippings over the soil in their pots to keep in moisture and control weeds) and measuring pots for yet another visit to the garden centre later this afternoon. I didn't really exert myself, but after quarter of an hour I was dripping with sweat. It's 28° C (82° F) in the conservatory and 24° C (75° F) in the back garden, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that the bird bath had a queue; I've just topped it up again. It's supposed to get up to 26° C (79° F) outside this afternoon and the same again tomorrow before a cold front rolls in on Thursday and the garden birds all need to stay hydrated. So do I.

It's the first time this year when there have been a few days where things are on the verge of being uncomfortably warm, but the panels on the roof seem to be slowing down the rate at which the house warms up. The virginia creeper on the west-facing wall is also helping to keep things cooler inside than they would otherwise be.

This is very welcome, because I've not been in a good way for the past few days. I've been in a lot of pain, to the extent that it's been waking me up in the middle of the night. I made a point of getting more exercise yesterday and that seems to have helped slightly, because although I still didn't manage to get what felt like a good night's sleep last night, my bedroom stayed comfortably cool and I managed to earn a sleep score of 90 from my watch. Today I feel slightly better so once again I'll try to do more than just spend all my time sitting in the chair in my studio. The garden centre beckons...

Yes, we've reached the day when we get more hours of daylight than on any other day of the year, and how on Earth did we get here so fast? It only seems like yesterday that I was sitting on the sofa watching the New Year's Day concert from Vienna. When I visited the garden centre yesterday I mentioned to the chap at the checkout that the solstice was today, and the look of shock on his face reassured me that it's not just me who thinks this year is going by rather quickly.

When I was loading the car yesterday I somehow managed to shut my right hand in the door, and the middle finger on it is now very swollen and an interesting shade of purple. I won't be making any music for a few days, I suspect. I'm not going to bother with my Twitch livestream tonight, either.

In fact today I intend to do very little other than chilling out at home.

A new version of Netbeans dropped at the end of May, and I just got round to installing it this morning. My comments made for version nineteen apply here as well, but at least I knew what to do this time. It only took me a couple of minutes to have the new version firing up with an acceptable look and feel and no error messages. And once again, I've updated Notepad++ to the latest version as well.

The Netbeans GUI started up for the first time with a rather annoying "What do you want to do?" menu (let's face it, the sort of person who uses Netbeans is kinda going to know what they're doing), but at least once I'd got all that out of the way it remembered which files I was working on, as well as the position of the cursor in each file when the program last shut down. The look and feel still feels like something from the early eighties, though.

I've also been tweaking some of the other software I use for this site. I have now got Filezilla to log on to the FTP server at my ISP and go directly to the directory where I upload everything rather than just logging on to the root, which had been annoying me. And as LibreOffice is now at version 24.2.4, I updated that, and installed its revised help pack as well.

If at this point you're thinking that doing this sort of stuff doesn't sound like your idea of chilling out, you're undoubtedly right, but this is me we're talking about, remember. The usual tropes don't always apply.

This afternoon I passed another milestone: the second megawatt-hour of electricity generated by my solar panels since they were installed back in February. It's the peak time of year for solar power; the summer solstice is at 21:50 tomorrow evening, so it's not surprising that they're kicking out a fair amount of power at the moment.

It's been a nice day. I headed over to the garden centre this morning and the patio is now sporting a couple of nice acers in pots on stands that have castors fitted to them so I can move them about. The actinidia kolomikta at one end of the patio has been staked and tied so that it's no longer looking in such a sorry state as it was, and the dwarf umbrella plant in the conservatory has been staked and tied up too; it was getting rather gangly. It's getting on a bit. I brought it with me when I moved here from Milton Keynes back in 1995! I cleaned out one of my oldest planters and that's now sitting on the paved area next to the front doorstep with a nice, blue lupin sitting in it.

When I'd finished all of this, I sat on the bench with a mug of tea and just enjoyed the sunshine. The garden has been neglected for far too long, and it felt very nice to be able to do this once again.

This month, residents of the street where I live have been celebrating a bunch of 70th birthdays as well as a 30th wedding anniversary and even a 50th wedding anniversary. Needless to say, a street party was duly organised and it took place at the weekend. Much food and drink was consumed. There was a (most excellent) cake. I cooked a chilli (as I usually do) and was put in charge of the sound system (I stuck my old Rokit 5 monitors on the windowsill in the living room and hooked them up to my twelve-year-old laptop running Foobar2000 in shuffle mode) and made sure that I had every track that people had requested all cued up on a 256 Gb SD card (which was full). The KRKs did a good job, and were plenty loud enough.

The weather was a bit blustery and one or two showers rattled through in the afternoon, but everything went very well (apart from the clueless Amazon delivery driver who took out a couple of spans of the bunting, that is...)

Did I have a sore head on Sunday? Was lying in bed, groaning involved? I couldn't possibly comment; but I came downstairs thinking that I'd still got all the washing up to do from the day before and discovered that I'd done it all before I went to bed—and had absolutely no memory of doing so at all. That was a nice surprise, but also kind of disturbing. I spent the day tidying up and finally got round to re-potting some of my houseplants that have been getting rather pot-bound. But I think I'll be laying off the alcohol for a while, all things considered.

Now that the website has an https address, I've noticed that Google (and other search engines) have started paying attention to it once again. A couple of the search strings I typed in to my browser yesterday evening returned a page on my site as the top result, just like back in the good old days.

It's only a little thing, but it feels like I've won out over the system for a change, and that happens woefully infrequently these days.

After looking up the link for Foobar2000 for that last blog entry I noticed that there was a new version available, so I've just installed it. And now that it's finished indexing the music on my computer, I can report that I have more than 4,000 albums stored on it. Yes, that's right: 4,000 albums, not 4,000 tracks. While a fair few hundred of these albums are downloads, the vast majority are copies of physical media which I've bought over the past five decades or so.

It's no wonder I'm running out of shelves.

It's been nice and sunny today and—as should be expected now that we're just a few days away from the summer solstice—my solar panels have been generating enough power that this morning my battery was completely charged by ten o'clock. We're more than half-way through the month and my total energy costs (electricity and gas) so far are still under twenty quid. Not too shabby.

Way back at the end of November last year, I wrote in the blog about kicking off the first of a series of changes that I wanted made to the house. The magnolia in the front garden was cut down which made way for the scaffolding necessary for major work on the roof to put in a set of solar panels; I had a new central heating system installed and the water tanks in the loft and the old-style immersion cylinder that the old system used were removed. The immersion cylinder in the airing cupboard has been replaced with a pressurised water cylinder, two expansion vessels, and a boatload of additional plumbing. Now when I take a shower, I get slammed with a satisfyingly strong blast of water. But that work also led to me getting a wardrobe and shelves fitted in the guest bedroom to accommodate all the stuff which no longer fits in the airing cupboard. In January I had a loft ladder put in to improve my access to the roof space (and without any water tanks in there any more, there's a lot more space in the loft these days). The loft ladder also made it easier to upgrade the house's intruder alarm system, so that happened as well. The old tarmac drive and the paved back garden patio—both of which were looking rather shabby after thirty-five years—have been dug up and replaced with textured concrete and as I mentioned below, at the beginning of this month I had all of the house's gutters, fascias, and soffits replaced. Honestly, you wouldn't recognise the place.

Today, Mike from MD Aerials put a spiffy new logarithmic TV aerial on the outside of the house and fitted a powered distribution amplifier in the loft that is feeding the bedroom TV as well as the one in the living room. Reception downstairs is back to normal; the TV is picking up all of the Freeview channels again for the first time in months. Even better, the upstairs TV is now picking up all the channels that it is capable of receiving, and that's a big improvement on what used to happen when it was connected to its aerial in the loft.

So that means that every item I had on my list for phase 1 of my home improvements project has now been successfully completed. Phase 2 will involve a new kitchen and a new bathroom, and there are a few other things which I ought to get done such as replacing the insulation in the loft, but after the last seven months have seen work on the house happening what seems like every week, I'm going to take a breather for a while and enjoy the improved version of the house as it now is. And that reminds me; I need to get the lawn cut before tomorrow's rain arrives. That's the afternoon sorted, then.

I'm still recovering from whatever laid me out flat on Friday. Today I didn't get out of bed until after 10am, and it was very nice to be in the position where I didn't have to worry about doing that at all. In particular, I very much appreciated not having anyone ringing me up wanting to know why I hadn't come in to the office; I do not miss employment in the slightest. I've also been taking more naps than usual, and I have enjoyed every single one of them.

But I have also been moving the current phase of upgrades to the house forwards. Yesterday I was back in the loft sorting out another bunch of stuff to go in the recycling bins or the dustbin. The loft space is much less cluttered than it was before all the water tanks were pulled out for the heating system upgrade. The loft ladder has made access much easier, and I've taken full advantage of that to remove dozens of old cardboard boxes, bin liners full of old clothes, and miscellaneous junk. I've a lot more work to do but the loft is already visibly emptier.

Yesterday I was concentrating on making life easier for the TV aerial guy when he arrives tomorrow to fit a better one to the outside of the house. At present, I have separate aerials in the loft for the TVs in the living room and in my bedroom, but on both sets many of the standard definition channels have disappeared and some of the others stutter too badly to be watchable. I can't pick up any of the HD channels at all. I was expecting this, because the signal now has to make its way through an array of solar panels as well as the fabric of the roof but the more I struggle with DVB reception, the more I realise what an absolute con the whole technology has turned out to be; it's a classic example of what Cory Doctorow refers to as enshittification. The picture quality on my old analog TV was vastly superior to standard definition digital TV. And we used to have teletext back then, too. I miss those days...

Although meteorological summer began on June 1st, the weather here has been distinctly less than summer-like. For the past week I've had a run of nights where the temperature in the back garden has dropped right down to a rather unseasonal 3°C (37°F). I've not seen any bats in the garden this year yet, which is unusual. But the bird life around here seems to be doing okay and the bird table is being visited more often by the local corvid population. It's quite something to look out of the kitchen window and see a rook inside it, happily tucking in to the suet pellets I'd put out. The jackdaws and magpies also continue to be regular visitors, and I've even seen a crow pay a flying visit.

I've been continuing to work on the garden, and I'll probably give the lawn another cut this week. Although it's still recovering from all the construction that's been going on over the last few months it's looking much better than it did a month ago and my trail cam has been picking up hedgehogs cavorting across it almost every night!

I spent all of yesterday in bed. I was clobbered by something (which I suspect was food poisoning, because I hadn't noticed that the egg I used when I made my tea on Thursday evening was just a single day past its "use by" date) that completely knocked me for six. I spent a very uncomfortable twenty-four hours and lost three-and-a-half pounds toughing it out.

I'm still feeling a bit fragile today, but at least I'm up and about. I don't think I'll be doing much for the rest of the weekend, though.

It barely made the news (because after all, it's Elon) but this week's Integrated Flight Test 4 of SpaceX's Super Heavy booster and Starship stack was utterly astounding. I really did not believe that they were going to pull everything off from the way things were going. More than once, I sat watching the live stream thinking to myself, "Well, that's toast for sure."

I won't spoil it more than that. Just watch this excellent summary from Scott Manley, see for yourself, and be amazed.

It's been sitting on my "to do" list for years, but this month I finally got off my backside and upgraded my web hosting arrangements so that the blog now has a secure http connection and has reverted to the URL that it started out with, more than a quarter of a century ago. Many thanks to Brian at IDNet for making things happen as seamlessly as they did. If you've got a bookmark for the blog, please change it to https://www.headfirstonly.com/blog.htm to make sure you stay up to date with all the nerding out and inane waffle that this site has specialised in since 1996. My RSS feed has also changed, so if you've subscribed to that you should point your aggregator here instead.

I've also improved my email system, and that should make the administration of various aspects of my online life easier in a number of ways which are too boring to go into here; let's just say that I am feeling extremely chuffed that I've finally got it all sorted out.

Now that No Mow May is over and the bulk of the work has been done on my house's exterior, I spent several hours yesterday afternoon getting things in the garden back in to shape. The main flower bed in the back might still be an impenetrable jungle, but the rest of it looks much better (and I did manage to make an initial dent in the undergrowth with the strimmer, so it doesn't look quite as bad as it did last week). I had help, of course. I was followed around the lawn by a robin (which used the handle of the lawn mower as a convenient perch each time I emptied the hopper) and several blackbirds, all of whom were finding all sorts of juicy grubs and other treats that I'd revealed as I cut the grass. Even the local flock of starlings—and they're usually quite twitchy around humans—had decided it was okay to carry on as usual while I got on with the gardening. The jackdaws that nest in the chimney of the flats at the back weren't entirely convinced, but they still came over for a recce or two.

The old bee hotel that my sister gave me for my birthday years ago had rotted away, so it's been recycled and I picked up a replacement for it from the local garden centre. That's now been attached to the back fence and I'll be monitoring it closely to see if it gets used.

When I'd finished I was hot and pretty sore but it was rather satisfying to sit on the garden bench with a can of ginger beer and admire the garden. It hasn't looked this good for years. The local hedgehogs seem to like what I'd done too, as the trail cam picked them up scampering around the lawn last night along with the inevitable cats...

But today I'm taking it easy. I think I need to.

And it's the first of the month again. Where did May go? I've just checked my energy usage for last month, and from my power consumption figures you'd get the impression that May only lasted for eight or nine days; last year I used 371 kWh of gas and this year the figure was less than half that, at 173 kWh. But it's the amount of electricity that I've pulled off the grid that has fallen off a cliff. In May last year I used 242 kWh. This May, I was pretty much self sufficient: I took less than 9 kWh from the National Grid.

Whoa.

I've just asked for a three-figure refund from my energy supplier Octopus, because they set the amount of my monthly payment based on my energy consumption up until my solar panels came online at the end of February. In just three months my account was in credit to a ridiculous degree. I hadn't expected the system to make such a difference, but I'm very pleased that it has. Asking for a refund was easy—all it took was one tap on a button on the app of theirs which I have on my phone. Somehow I doubt that my previous energy supplier would have made getting a refund anywher near that easy; it took them nearly two months to refund my credit balance when I left them.

Although there's been a lot of drilling and hammering going on this week (as I will explain in a moment) I've been enjoying myself in my home recording studio. I've been working on another collaboration with my pal Craig which has been great fun, and I've also been getting better acquainted with my new (to me) Warr Guitar.

I've been updating various bits of software on the studio PC, and I've also been doing some maintenance on outboard gear. I have become rather keen on sourcing parts from eBay, and this week I spent the princely sum of £7 on a set of replacement ear pads for a set of Beyerdynamic headphones that I'm rather fond of. Whatever variety of foam was inside the original velour pads hadn't just rotted away, it seemed to have disappeared completely. £7 is a much better deal than having to buy a new set of headphones, that's for sure.

There's no work going on this weekend, so I suspect I'll be spending a few more hours working on more music. I don't think I could exaggerate how sustaining it is to be able to shut myself away in the studio and do that. It's what keeps me going, these days.

Meanwhile, work continues on the house and the garage. As of yesterday all the fascia boards, gutters and soffits have been replaced on both buildings. Yesterday afternoon I went up into the loft (which is a much easier task than it used to be thanks to the loft ladder—and I have finally painted the new hatch and its surround, too) and I can no longer see chinks of daylight between the roof and the top of the walls—this was definitely a feature of the house's original design and in some of my neighbours' properties the gaps are large enough to allow birds (usually starlings) to get into the roof and build nests. I still need to replace the loft insulation, but I'm sure that closing up the gaps will make a noticeable difference to the temperature in the house upstairs when the cold weather returns.

The last bit of exterior woodwork on the front of the house (which is so rotten that right now it has the consistency of Weetabix) will be replaced with maintenance-free uPVC on Monday. The wooden post holding up the porch, which was so rotten that the bottom couple of inches of it had disappeared entirely, has been replaced with a very hefty new pressure-treated version and it's been securely bolted to the front step.

I've needed to get all this stuff done for a long time. It's nice to finally be in the position where I can afford to make it happen.