All I wanted was to know what was on at eight. To get an answer, one of the big guide sites wanted me to accept its cookies, sit through a car insurance video, and then sign up for a newsletter. It’s a schedule. Reading it should not be a negotiation.

So I built my own. It’s at uk-tv-guide.allanson.org - you open it, you see what’s on.

My three-year-old had a hearing test coming up. At that age it is done as a sound field test: tones played through a speaker in the room rather than through headphones, with the audiologist watching for a response. Unfamiliar room, unfamiliar person, unfamiliar sound - we wanted to take at least one of those out of the equation before the day.

The key to a calm appointment was not explaining the test to a three-year-old; it was making the sound boring before we got there. So I built a small warble tone generator, now living at warble.allanson.org. In the week before the appointment my kid pressed the start button roughly a hundred times, dragged the sliders around, and turned the whole business into a familiar game instead of a mystery. Playing existing recordings was considered, but the button is the point: pressing start yourself makes it your sound, not something done to you.