Books

I have recently finished:

• Inhibitor Phase by Alastair Reynolds
• Wayward by Hannah Mathewson

And I am currently reading:

• Drive your Plow over The Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
• Un Lun Dun by China Mieville
• The Forgotten and Fantastic 5 edited by Teika Bellamy
• The Chosen from the First Age edited by Noel Chidwick
• The Application of Chess Theory by Efim Geller

Haskell "done right"

There is a small portion of Java developers who dream about programming in Scala.
There is a sizable portion of Scala developers who dream about programming in Haskell.
All Haskell programmers want to program in Idris.

From IdrisTddNotes by Rober Peszek.

This tallies with my impression that Idris is Haskell "done right".

Books

In the past few months I have read the following books:

• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Farthing by Jo Walton
• Agency by William Gibson
• Witherward by Hannah Mathewson
• The Dark Remains by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin

I am currently reading:

• Ten Thousand Light Years from Home by James Tiptree Jnr
• At the Pond - Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies Pond by various writers
• Zurich International Chess Tournament 1953 by David Bronstein

Git Push asks for Password instead of using SSH Key

One recurring minor annoyance with git is that if you create a new local respository using git clone then it defaults to always asking for a password when you do git push instead of using a pre-existing SSH key. If you are pushing to Github then the push will fail because Github recently started blocking password-based access on security grounds.

To get it to use the SSH key you need to open .git/config in an editor and change the [remote "origin"] url so it starts ssh:// instead of https;//.

Leyland Kirby

One of the great joys of lockdown for me was discovering the works of Leyland Kirby (also known as 'The Caretaker'). At last I had found another experimental musician with with the depth and scope of William Basinski!

The best place to listen Leylands stuff is Bandcamp but his main site there is rather awkward to navigate in that you have to know to click through the Discography links to get to his full works on each project. The following links will take you straight there:

• The Caretaker
• Leyland Kirby
• The Stranger
• VVM

Probably the easiest place to start is with the older works on The Caretaker list:

• Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom
• A Stairway to the Stars

There is also a good interview with Leyland on Bandcamp here.

i like to think that BBC Radio 3 will sometime have a 'Leyland Kirby Day' and I will hear at least excerpts from The Death of Rave (VVM) on that classical music station.