Apparently I Like TV Now. Don’t Tell Anyone.

The series is a dark, medieval comedy set around the fictional French realms of Lamartine, Ségur and Havreval. Between these privileged domains, a violent cult called the Penitents terrorises the poor, demanding brutal sacrifices to end the devastating famine that has befallen them. Meanwhile at Lamartine, the corrupt vice consul lives in luxury… plotting his rise to the consulship and maintaining a band of killers to neutralise anything that gets in his way. One of his most loyal men is the handsome, cocky assassin called (you guessed it) Néro: a strangely likeable dickhead who is as good at killing his targets as he is pissing off everyone else.

Néro works because it never pretends to be real. Any expectation of historical accuracy is quickly tossed aside by a lore steeped in magic and witchcraft. The modern French dialogue and slightly anachronistic costume design seem to deliberately signal that this is not the 16th century you know, but a parallel one tuned for your entertainment. The violence is extreme even by medieval standards, yet is often framed in ways to make you laugh… then feel terrible about it. Even the tamer humour, like Néro’s naked journey through Limbo culminating in a dick joke, seems like a bad idea in theory but lands perfectly in execution.

So anyway, this isn’t really a review. It’s more of a reluctant admission. I still distrust television on principle. I still expect half-baked characters and soap-operatic decay. But every so often something like Néro turns up, gleefully ahistorical and morally unwell, and forces me to revise the complaint:

I don’t like TV shows. I just… apparently like this one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The More Things Change…

Remember the CRT era? When ‘adjusting the aerial’ sometimes meant balancing on one leg with a coathanger in hand, performing accidental interpretive dance to get rid of the snowstorm on screen?

Well, here we are in 2025, and much has changed… although we’re still waving things around like idiots (laptops or Wi-Fi antennas), chasing elusive bars instead of faint UHF signals.

With most Wi-Fi monitoring apps out there either too slow to update or requiring endless clicking to get live signal info, I just wanted to open a terminal, type wifistr, and get immediate, constant feedback. So I made a console app…

It works by finding the first connected WLAN adapter and outputting the signal strength every second. I originally used Python for this task, but the script kept breaking with random Python updates and Microsoft’s occasional changes to the netsh output format. An exe which utilises the Windows API shouldn’t have this problem.

Visit the repo, vet the code and compile it yourself, or download the exe, stick it in your Windows path, and call it when needed.

No Skip Button? No Problem

When Google burst onto the scene in the late 90s, its search portal stood out for its simplicity: Just a clean, white page with a logo, a search box, and two buttons. In an ecosystem overwhelmed by ad-heavy portals like Yahoo, Lycos, and Excite, this straightforward, no-nonsense approach was a breath of fresh air, playing a significant role in the company’s early success.

It is striking how much the tables have turned. How a forward-thinking company with such a focus on minimalism and innovation, has transformed one of its key acquisitions (a once cool and disruptive video platform that was devoid of ads) into the most hostile ads vs ad-blockers arm race the internet has ever seen.

I’m talking about YouTube of course, and the latest rumour (denied by Google) suggests the button for skipping ads is sometimes being hidden. The heated reactions raise an interesting question: Why don’t more users create an in-browser skip button themselves?

All mainstream desktop browsers allow us to create bookmarklets (a bookmark which runs javascript on the loaded page), and all HTML5 <video> elements can be manipulated with javascript. This means we can skip to the end of any HTML5 video we like (for now at least) whether YouTube provides a skip button or not.

javascript:(function() { 
    const video = document.querySelector('video'); 
    if (video) { video.currentTime = video.duration; }
})();

The Machiavellian Face of Roman Politics?

Amid countless idealized sculptures of Roman leadership figures, this bust of a senior male stands out for its raw, unflinching depiction of age and suffering. Remarkably, there is a pronounced asymmetry between the sides of the face which suggests one sided paralysis, perhaps caused by a stroke. It is truly unique.

The artefact is said¹ to depict Lucius Munatius Plancus, the founder of Lugdunum (modern day Lyon), and the contrast between the two sides can be better seen at Lugdunum museum’s website. More specifically, here and here.