ttj - Tom Jones

I bring good news and bad news. The good news is that in the Air New Zealand departure lounge in Auckland, the wifi is open, and there’s no captive portal to kill time on.  It just works.  As well, you can buy things in the airport shops and they don’t ask to scan your boarding pass.  You can skip these little annoyances, and things are not just okay, but better.  So stop copying everyone else, and dare to be less annoying. The bad news is that the wifi onboard a Singapore Airlines A380 uses a captive portal, even if you’re upstairs at the front.  And I’m back to trying to force the OS to launch the browser on the captive portal’s URL, as per [1].  Except now I’m armed with new knowledge: you can use the real domain “ neverssl.com ” to contrive a plain-text http request, so that this can be intercepted by the layer-busting hotspot / router, and redirected to their.. schmactive schmortal.  Ta-da!  Geeks rule the world, if by ruling, we mean: bei...

I have many examples of trello indexing for search failing, but here's one. Search for "flight singapore london" returns no results. Actual card contains "fly singapore -> london", so fly and flight aren't treated as co-stemmed (whatever the term) by indexer. But in comment of card is "flights", so word and its regular plural by adding "s" aren't treated as co-stemmed? I've added "keyword: flight" as a comment, and will see if that gets indexed and affects the search "flight singapore london" at some point in the future. But in other cases, all the search terms do appear literally, but the search still fails. More interestingly, playing with this raises some thoughts about application architecture. Many applications are "eventually consistent".  New data is added, and at some point in the future, indexes are updated, linked records are updated, aggregates, and so on.  In almost no cases is there an...

 some people have been wittering on about “AI”, as though it’s this or that. according to derpawerp, they are even going to take over the world. i asked one what’s the third-most populous city in new zealand, and it said something implausible. it then claimed auckland was the second-most populous. immediately after, it said auckland was the most populous, but didn’t notice its mistake. i had to “prompt” it, by asking whether the same city was really the first and second most populous. at which point, of course, “you’re absolutely right”. but it continued, with a straight face, making not just incorrect, but blatantly incoherent, claims about city population rankings. these word salads don’t just fail on basic facts, they lack the self-awareness to pick up on themselves when, according to themselves, they are being ridiculous. one was bugging me for pictures ideas, so i said draw a projection of new zealand onto northern hemisphere, flipping latitudes and lining up the other axis wi...

To register a device for wifi on Princess ship, connect to wifi MedallionNet, and point. a browser at login.com. Background:  tardtards decided that wifi connection couldn't be done via wifi protocols, it had to be via a web page.  So were born "captive portal"s.  When web was plain-text, network provider's stack could easily man-in-the-middle user's web requests (assumption: user goes straight to web), and redirect to their captive schmortal page, and make them fill forms. Then the web went mostly-https, (SSL / TLS), meaning encrypted, so MITM shouldn't be possible, and the captive schmortal MITM attempts result in certificate errors.  User may choose "abandon ssl certificates", "do anyway" kind of things in browser.  But the client is now told, I think by a DHCP item, what URL to go to to do the captive schmortal.  This is somehow passed from the client's OS to the client's browser.  Sometimes a new browser window is launched, on ...

Crossing the Pacific westwards, the ship's time gets set back one hour at a time.  The ship's management arranges it so that at land stops, it is synchronised with the location.  Changes between one stop and the next are somewhat arbitrary, but the idea should be to keep changes smooth and have dawn and dusk at sensible wall times. I set around 5 clocks at each change. The Casio F-91W is the easiest.  I set the hour back using the three buttons on the watch.  The only annoyance is that I have to cycle +23 hours, as one can not decrement the hour directly.  It's not that annoying, and one knows it's going to work. For the Debian (Linux) laptop, I change the /etc/localtime symlink to point to location in /usr/share/zoneinfo/*/*, such as /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Vancouver.  This is fine when there is a well-known city to select.  It sometimes involves research and experimentation to choose one with the correct (current) offset.  Once the symlink c...

In " apple conflates time zone and time offset in the middle of MacOS ", we learned about conceptual muddle around time zones and offsets in MacOS's settings. Since then, I have set the Time Zone to St John's Newfoundland.  In the process, I learned just how primitive Apple's "MacOS" software is. I unchecked "Set time zone automatically using your current location".  I clicked in "Closest city" and started typing.  I was going for St John's.  After a few letters, there were no matches in the interactive matching.  I hit return anyway, and got the following: As if to validate its claim that an extension process had "exited", the depicted pane remained completely empty after I dismissed the "dialog" "box". I turned off and on again the settings window, and researched the topic.  Apparently you have to type it exactly to match what it's expecting, or it doesn't match and crashes.  In this case. ...