I've read his later books "Year of the Mad King" and "Year of the Fat Knight" so knew what to expect, but still fascinating to see how he prepares, his nerves, and how the production works.

What I'm Reading 2
Court Number One by Thomas Grant. A lawyer review some of the most famous cases to be tried in Court Number One of the Old Bailey over the last century. Has lots of good detail and also sheds some light on how justice has changed over the period, with the flamboyant lawyers of the early Twentieth Century giving way to a cooler and more factual style.

Interesting detail, and some stories that I wasn't aware of, such as Timothy Evans who was successfully framed by serial killer John Christie for one of his own murders, and hanged.

What I'm Reading 3
The Godmother by Hannelore Cayre. French novel about an aging police interpreter who decides to use her inside knowledge to start a life of crime. Good novel with appealing grand guignol characters. Seems mainly plausible though with the odd error like a silenced revolver with a believable depiction of petty crime in France. Liked it a lot but the ending seemed a bit low-key.

What I'm Reading 4
How to Build a Car by Adrian Newey. Book by the famous Formula One car designer about his life and work. Has a lot of interesting anecdotes.

The cars have a lot of adjustments that can be made, and it's common practice for the second car in a team to copy the settings of the fastest: since the cars are identical they assume those are the best. So Nigel Mansell, whenever he left the car, would carefully turn the knobs to bad settings to handicap his teammate.

What I'm Watching
Saw "Knives Out". Light murder mystery but very well done, enjoyed it a lot. Even read the script afterwards as I loved the way the plot fitted so neatly together.

Me
Feeling a bit down with the new year.

Kid's been playing up in school. He used to be pretty good, got the top rating in every subject last year, but now he's being noisy and disruptive and not finishing his work. Been talking to him but doesn't feel like I can do much from home.

My home PC which I've had since 2009 is dying. Mostly won't boot up and it's still on Windows 7. Annoyingly although tablets have improved a lot and there are a lot of cheap laptops these days, it seems desktops haven't got much better or cheaper. The old PC has 1.5TB on two disk drives, quad-core processor, and a DVD writer and Blu-Ray drive which I use. Getting a new desktop replacement still costs a lot, and I didn't have a kid when I bought it so I had more money.

Not sure what to do. Could get a cheap generic laptop and plug external Blu-Ray drive and hard disks in, but it's a lot of cables and the PC would probably grind to a halt fairly soon. Could go second hand, or plug my existing drives into a new box, but was hoping to last a while.

Running isn't going too well. Was hoping to do short races in the first months of this year, but since the holidays I haven't been able to get much speed up. Might be illness, might be I focussed too much on long and slow running, or a combination. Looks like it will take me a while even to get close to my old 10km speed though.

Dentists have been nagging me for decades about an impacted lower wisdom tooth, but looks like I will finally need to get it removed. That means a hospital operation, dentist is referring me to hospital but that will probably take a while.

Work. Another release imminent. This project was supposed to be coming to an end so we can work on something with newer technologies, but they've just dumped another load of massively complicated new work on us.

Links
Socioeconomics. Why the NYC tax medallion tanked after Uber.

Sci/Tech. Living without pain. How much energy do lifts use. Old tractors popular, the right to repair. The Windows 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering.

Video. Corporate Music - How to Compose with no Soul (15 min). Driving from London to Bath in 1963 (9 min).

Pics. Snail habitats.

Random. Bird Guy's burden.