ttj - Tom Jones

 I have several domains registered with gandi.net. Domain name registration, being an element of the shitfrastructure, is not a service provided to an acceptable basic quality level by anyone.  Domain name registration sits with mobile phone networks, banking, payments, airlines, and so on, as having no satisfactory provider, yet somehow seeming essential to modern life. In this case, I have received an email from Gandi saying a domain will expire in 60 days.  I log in to try and renew.  It's not in my list of "Active" domains.  I look in "Pending".  It's in there: But it was previously in "Active".  The transfer had supposedly completed successfully. Here's their email from 2021-11-26: [GANDI] Final transfer status for the domain QOK.CH Inbox transfer-done@gandi.net Fri, Nov 26, 1:07 PM (21 hours ago) to tgj211 Dear customer, This is the final result of the domain transfer request described below. Domain: QOK.CH Result: successfully completed ...

 Wise.com (formerly Transferwise) promises a convenient payment card and accounts with them in multiple currencies. On Feb 20, I received an email saying they "need [me] to verify [my] account before 1 March".  There was I, thinking the account was already "verified".  So really, this is from the playbook of financial services providers arbitrarily not providing their service any more to their customer. I check my email every week or two.  So it would be pretty likely that the 9 day period they give for me to take this action, would not be enough, even if I was able to drop everything instantly to serve their whims.  And in any case, continuation of the service depends on email.  So much for "fintech". Nonetheless, I did go to what they call "verify my account" today, by clicking on the link in their email, and I logged in.  I was presented with a list of the main way I use my account: Notably absent was just plain paying for stuff with it as a p...

 Every time a train going thru Austria wibbles thru Bavaria, all passengers are bombarded with SMS spam from the German government.  A request: could everyone involved in enabling this kindly fuck off? This happens during a stretch between Kufstein and Salzburg, both Austrian cities.  The track does go thru Germany on this stretch, but there are no stops in Germany on this stretch.  That's one problem. The message says it's from "Die Bundesregierung", meaning the federal government.  Right Germans you know when you are accidentally terribly overbearing towards your German-speaking neighbors with their own countries (albeit small and rather stupid ones)?  Well, this train started in Zurich, and has stopped so far in Switz and Austria, and those countries also speak German, and are federations, and so have "Bundesregierung"s.  So how about instead of "THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT", it could be "The Federal Government of Germany", to distinguish i...

 There used to be a web design principle "graceful degradation".  The idea was that web sites could be made so that a richly-functioning web site, should it find itself on a user agent not supporting every aspect of the platform it wanted, still worked well, doing the best it could with the features available.  No web site was ever created that adhered to this principle.  The weak thinking behind the "principle" was representative of everybody involved in creating the edifice of shit passing for the "architecture" of the web. There followed a related design principle, "progressive enhancement".  The idea with this one was that a web site should function correctly on a minimal set of platform componenets (not that anyone would or could know what that minimal set consisted of, in general or per site).  If the user agent happened to support additional features, the web site was allowed to use these to enrich the experience. Neither design principle ...

This second-hand 6100's battery only lasted around 32 hours. Next to try this dodgy chinese replacement battery and fake charger that doesn't quite fit. Using it in the cold last week, snowboarding, the old battery only lasted a few hours.

 When someone preciously announces they are going to "fact check", they mean they are going to bullshit.  They are about to push their own agenda using cheap tricks.  This signal is 100% reliable.  No one intending to honestly communicate ever precedes their speech with an announcement they are going to "fact check". This is a brilliantly simple heuristic.  Once someone promises a "fact check", the only sensible way to interpret what follows, if you bother listening at all, is to assess the pusher's bullshit.  "this is the narrative this propoganda pusher wants to push at me", "how are they doing on the propoganda tricks, or is it just embarassingly bad", and so on. Similarly, any claim that someone "has been fact-checked", as tho this somehow takes away points from the someone being fact-checked, is merely a sign the claimer is full of shit. The term "debunk" is now tainted too, and claims using the term "d...

 I just tried to install Debian 11 from DVD on a thinkpad X220.  This previously had Debian 10 installed on it fine. On trying to boot after installation, it doesn't boot.  There is a menu of plausible-looking boot options, but selecting the one just called "debian", or selecting the device onto which we just tried to install "ATA HDD0: Samsung ...", both result in nothing much happening.  The menu goes away, and comes back after around 0.3s. There are a couple of variables.  There is BIOS UEFI / legacy at boot time, and at install time.  There is the storage scheme.  I think the old one was plaintext and all-in-one, which is simple.  The new one is encrypted LVM, so a separate /boot is required, but it's not that complicated.  And we're not even getting as far as loading GRUB.  This is a BIOS boot device list.  It was one of the handful of standard storage configs offered by the debian installer.  The other variable is the ver...

 I used to use daemontools for running servers under process supervision.  There are other similar systems like runit. Now, most current linux distributions use systemd.  This is presented as a disaster by purists, but the fact is, everyone else failed to make anything adequate while systemd crept up.  Unix has a process tree, so use it.  Instead of which, every shonky init script had its own error-prone concoction of pid files, daemon that backgrounds itself, commands like "stop" or "reload" that LOOK AT THE PID FILE and send it a signal.  As a side-whinge, most daemons automatically go thru a cargo-cult absurdity of detach and fork and background, or whatever the fuck it is.  A lot of the time, you can ask them not to do this, often with arcane options (look at apache: -DFOREGROUND -DNO_DETACH ).  It should not even be possible, let alone some default the long-suffering sysadmin has to work around, differently for each application.  The peo...

 Debian have settled into a every-two-years release pattern.  But, just as Viz was no longer funny once they had a regular publication schedule, so Debian is no longer functioning software, now that they've found a regular release schedule. The bitrot is everywhere, from basic editors and window managers to the "venerable" installer. In this instance, having been through the painful process of mostly installing from DVD Debian 11, which Debian still insist on referring to by their idiotic "codename", we are told: "Unable to install GRUM in dummy. Executing 'grub-install dummy' failed. This is a fatal error". This may have something to do with the UEFI / "legacy" boot system choice.  I haven't managed to work out any consistent rules for which setting is required in the BIOS for Debian to successfully install.  But the installer is clearly failing to detect a situation it can't handle well, or provide useful information to the ...

 Cloning disks to clone appliances is not the neatest technique, but sometimes it's expedient, especially when some edifice involving proprietary shitware has been gotten to work, and you want to make another one. For setting future alarms, this is just to note that a 250G Samsung SSD took 6h43m to clone, with one attached via internal SATA, and the other via USB 3.0 and a SATA to USB-C enclosure.