Sam Easterby-Smith
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samsterby.com
Sam Easterby-Smith
@samsterby.com
670 followers 490 following 240 posts
Mobile Tech Lead at the Co-operative Bank, Green Party person, rider of massive bike. Withington, Manchester. He/Him
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samsterby.com
6: last day of my week off. Päntsdrunk.
Selfie: I am lounging on my sofa. Wearing a yellow t-shirt with a cat illustration and the word “MEOW” on it, but it’s a bit crumpled by my gut. In my lap is a bowl of Bombay mix. In my left hand I am holding a small yellow can of beer. In the background the Xmas forest twinkles brightly. Leopard-print carpet. I look very happy and comfortable.
December 1, 2025 at 3:23 PM
samsterby.com
5: I wallpapered the shed ✅
The interior of my shed. It has been freshly wallpapered with tiger pattern wallpaper - green on two walls and pink on the third. The floor is slightly cluttered with tools and cardboard boxes. It looks very nice, if a bit mad.
November 30, 2025 at 9:32 PM
samsterby.com
4: We installed the Xmas Forest ✅
Six plastic Xmas trees of varying size from tiny to quite big, and varying colours - rainbow and two shades of pink. Decorated and lit up in a corner of our living room. More fairy lights are strung up around the walls. A prominent decoration is a bottle of gin.
November 30, 2025 at 9:32 PM
samsterby.com
3: I went to the opticians. I now need reading/piano glasses. That’s it. I’m old now. ✅
Selfie. I am standing in front of a branch of Specsavers, wearing a peaked cap, coat, and headscarf. Selfie. I am in Specsavers trying on a pair of Elton John branded glasses. Thick black frames with little gold stars embedded in the plastic. Another glasses selfie. These ones are silly purple granny glasses. Another glasses selfie. These are sensible, thin tortoiseshell frames. I don’t look too insane.
November 26, 2025 at 4:49 PM
samsterby.com
2: affixed a dangling WiFi access point to the ceiling ✅
A WiFi access point shaped like a flying saucer. It is dangling from the ceiling by an orange network cable. The same WiFi access point is now affixed to the ceiling. In the background are the freshly plastered walls of my shed/studio and ball-shaped spotlights.
November 25, 2025 at 10:43 PM
samsterby.com
Welcome to my “week off work achievements thread”

1: hunted around in the garage for ages, found this, and bled the radiators ✅
A brass radiator bleed key thingy on a beige worktop.
November 25, 2025 at 10:30 PM
samsterby.com
The Greens (in England and Wales) may be all about crushing Labour right now with our focus on social justice, but we are also fighting traditionally blue areas by doing good work and not being awful people.

I was out today in leafy Hale, doing exactly that with @traffordgreenparty.bsky.social
The gates of a massive house, with a letter box mounted on the stone gatepost. The house is called “Green Trees”. There is a lush garden and indeed many green trees.
November 9, 2025 at 6:26 PM
samsterby.com
I was playing this anyway.
The top half of a page of sheet music. The title reads “Ding-dong! The Witch Is Dead”…
October 13, 2025 at 2:35 PM
samsterby.com
Boom!
Screenshot of the trainline app, showing the direct IC Nuit 5737 service from Paris to Beziers
June 22, 2025 at 5:48 PM
samsterby.com
Work in progress, suggestions for improvement welcome… #WokeRoundabout
Illustration of walking and cycling infrastructure designs, spelling the word WOKE. W is a serpentine cycleway (going up a hill I guess) O is a road junction with cycling roundabout (aka "CYCLOPS") K is cycleways joining each other (kinda clumsy) E is a zebra crossing
June 1, 2025 at 6:27 PM
samsterby.com
I’m on holiday in Angus, Scotland. It’s gorgeous.

(Its an industrial landscape, not in any way natural, and those hills want forests on them)
Sunset over a rural (industrial) landscape. Looking across a wide lowland river valley to distant hills on the other side. Fields and hedgerows plus a few scatterings of woodland. Dramatic clouds.
May 27, 2025 at 5:55 PM
samsterby.com
The results are in!
Screenshot of a mastodon post (by me). Text: Parents, what stops you from letting your kids roam freely like we did in the old days. Results of a 4-option poll. 5% Pedos 3% Gangs 0% Immigrants 97% Cars (I allowed multiple selection which is why it’s >100%)
May 16, 2025 at 8:30 PM
samsterby.com
Accidentally ended up leading Manchester’s #CriticalMass ride yesterday evening.

We had two sound systems, and a trouble-free ride. Good vibes. Not been for years and so lovely to see old friends and newcomers alike.

Last Friday of the month at the central library 6:30pm ish. 🥳🚲
A view of Deansgate in Manchester, UK. A group of people on bikes are riding down the road, using the segregated cycle route. One rider is pulling a trailer-soundsystem. Mid-rise urban buildings stretch into the distance. At the bottom of the frame, my face is popping up happily.
April 26, 2025 at 3:15 PM
samsterby.com
Oh bollocks. I’ve ballsed up installing a bootloader.
A widescreen computer monitor. On the screen is the grub bootloader, showing its command prompt. Because I’ve messed up its configuration such that the machine can’t actually boot.
February 1, 2025 at 5:27 PM
samsterby.com
One of my current piano projects is the Suite bergamasque by Debussy. I’ve hit the glorious moment with the Prelude where I can actually get through the whole thing, with some rough edges and leaning very heavily on the rubato 👍
A page of sheet music. Suite bergamasque Prélude It starts LOUD with some big chords, and then it’s all fast twinkly stuff in the right hand and oversize spread chords in the left. Occasional fingering notations in pencil.
January 24, 2025 at 8:48 PM
samsterby.com
I’m going straight to hell… on the Montréal metro system.
Screenshot of the game MiniMetro. A complex looking schematic map of the Montréal subway system. Brightly coloured lines connect stations, and trains are ferrying passengers between them.
January 16, 2025 at 10:14 PM
samsterby.com
Lancaster
A bike hanger. It is occupying a former parking bay. A man, wearing paint-splattered trousers and a light blue top is proudly holding the hanger open to reveal 5 parked bikes within (and space for more). A car is parked in one of the bays behind. In the background, the sun is setting over an urban park.
January 3, 2025 at 9:33 PM
samsterby.com
In family cinematic treats, we went to see Paddington In Peru today 🐻🍊

The Olivia Colman “started as a goodie and turned into a baddie” plot twist blew my 3yo’s mind 🙌🤣
Olivia Colman as Reverend Mother in Paddington In Peru: playing guitar and dancing, surrounded by other dancing nuns.
January 1, 2025 at 9:34 PM
samsterby.com
What’s the first major news story you remember as a child?
A line of British policemen wearing helmets. A miner, with a horseshoe moustache, wearing a fake policeman’s helmet with an “NUM” (National Union of Miners) sticker on it, faces off against them, staring straight into their eyes.
December 17, 2024 at 8:20 PM
samsterby.com
The big keys for me are the concepts of what we mean by centralised/decentralised/distributed architectures… and how these choices are not neutral and can have deep ramifications for control of the network and ultimately society at large. 2/2
Diagrams of three network topologies. A) centralised - nodes radiate from a central point B) decentralised - seven interconnected hub nodes, each of which has a number of child nodes, it’s almost a hierarchy but there is one extra link between the hubs. C) distributed - the nodes are connected as a matrix, there is no hierarchy
December 14, 2024 at 1:54 PM
samsterby.com
This is a test. Trying out Croissant app as a posting tool.

But the free version only lets me post to one account so it's not really testing cross-posting just yet.

Enjoying how it handles alt text for media.
Selfie. I am wearing a plastic Viking helmet. Background: a brightly coloured wall display with yellow flowers on a green background.
December 2, 2024 at 10:04 PM
samsterby.com
Kids party in the cold-war tennis bunker this morning. Absolutely love this place. 💚
An indoor tennis court. The walls are made of breeze blocks and concrete ribbing, and everything is painted a murky shade of green. It’s very atmospheric. A tennis ball wedged between a concrete rib and a drainpipe. Everything is painted green and damp. Wires are strung across the frame. The side of the tennis court. A concrete rib and section of the wall. A bin, a metal chair, some kind of modern flat-screen tennis computer on a stand. There are a pair of wooden slatted vent things with a few tennis balls wedged between the slats. Water has clearly been dripping down the wall causing discolouring and growth of green algae.
November 23, 2024 at 12:45 PM
samsterby.com
It’s #BlackIceFriday utterly fucking treacherous!
A pavement covered in a layer of ice. Another pavement covered in a layer of ice.
November 22, 2024 at 9:08 AM
samsterby.com
This feels like a job for the @garethdennis.bsky.social metro sorter.

hmmmm, yes it’s a bus
A flow chart in which we can determine which form of transport is which based on how many passengers they carry, whether they are on rails, whether they are suspended, and other attributes. Ranty’s bus is definitely a bus.
November 21, 2024 at 5:00 PM
samsterby.com
On polling, it’s literally in the govt guidance 👍👍 would also love to hear examples of where councils have done this properly.
Monitoring and evaluation As set out in Local Transport Note 1/20, trials can help achieve change and ensure a permanent scheme is right first time. Trial or experimental schemes should be left in place for the full duration of the temporary traffic regulation order (TTRO) or experimental traffic regulation order (ETRO), where appropriate, or where no traffic regulation order (TRO) is required, until at least 12 months' traffic data is available and has been published. This will allow them to settle in and for changes in travel patterns and behaviours to become apparent so that an informed decision can be made. Adjustments may be necessary to take account of real-world feedback but the aim should be to retain schemes and adjust, not remove them, unless there is substantial evidence to support this. In assessing how and in what form to make schemes permanent, authorities should collect appropriate data to build a robust evidence base on which to make decisions. This should include traffic counts, pedestrian and cyclist counts, traffic speed, air quality data, public opinion surveys and consultation responses. Consultation and community engagement should always be undertaken whenever authorities propose to remove, modify or reduce existing schemes and whenever they propose to introduce new ones. Engagement, especially on schemes where there is public controversy, should use objective methods, such as professional polling to British Polling Council standards, to establish a truly representative picture of local views and to ensure that minority views do not dominate the discourse. Consultations are not referendums, however. Polling results should be one part of the suite of robust, empirical evidence on which decisions are made.
November 21, 2024 at 1:18 PM