It took longer than was necessary to try and install some GIMP plugins on the MacBook on Sunday morning. Plug and play this most certainly wasn’t.

I find the Mac community operates on two different extremes: the no nonsense out of the box approach, and then the confuse the fuck out of you with bloated tech talk. GIMP falls into the latter.

I wanted to recover an old batch manipulation script that I use across my work. My mistake was updating to the latest version of GIMP last week. This wiped out the existing scripts I had running. Sunday mornings aren’ meant for this shit. I resorted to Time Machine and reinstalling the old version of GIMP from last week.

There was the potential for Sunday to slip into tech hell. We had a problem with the not very smart boiler thermostat trying to talk with our phones yesterday. The WiFi connection wasn’t there. It piggy banks on a WiFi extender. I reset this, and then went about a hard install. This wasn’t straight forward with some very poor installation docs.

I finally got the extender back online, but still the bloody boiler was showing an offline status for the thermostat. New accounts were created, new accounts were deleted. I worked out that the extender had made contact with the thermostat, but no modern interweb signal was actually running through it.

A hard reset of the thermostat fired it back to life. Phew. I thought we were out for the count there. The smart thermostat even suggested that I call the original installer. Like that’s going to happen. Not so smart now, eh?

And so Sunday was just about back on track, albeit running behind schedule. Daisy was making hay; Daisy was also catching a mouse. Woh, steady the buffers, girl. She is a reformed character having lost a load of weight in recent weeks.

My procrastination to head outdoors couldn’t be delayed any longer. The wisteria was in need of its annual prune. I had about three hours of daylight left to achieve this.

Every year I’m told by A that I have hacked to much of the wisteria off; every year the wisteria EXPLODES into action for a couple of weeks towards the end of May. Back stronger, etc.

I had some decent podcast catch ups whilst outside. Rouler can be a little hit and miss. The live pod from the recent Rouler show had a great interview with Paul Smith from the Fair City.

Andy Kershaw Plays Some Bloody Great Records also made me smile. The original Pressure Drop was followed up by The Clash’s cover. He also played a bluegrass version of U2’s I Still Haven’t Found.

Sunday night was eBay night. I had a number of listings coming to an end. I finally managed to shift a Pixies Trompe le Monde cassette for a decent price of £15.

And so not a complete write off for a Sunday. These December days counting down to Christmas do drag.