ttj - Tom Jones

When you book on a condor ferry with a vehicle, you tell its plate. When you do the drive-thru checkin, condor asks you the booking ref.  I asked if they'd looked at doing number plate recognition, so that in the common case the booking would get looked up as the car approached with no need for the customer to give the booking reference. I mentioned a campsite in oxfordshire where the entrance gate will open for any vehicle where the reg was added to the booking. So such systems seem widespread and easy these days.  Their comment: sounds like it would be too expensive for us. New idea: the person could just key in the reg to try and look up the booking. They are currently keying in the booking ref, given orally, and number plate is shorter, so less typing.

google calendar knows to have a picture of a cake when "birthday", but does not default to repeating event annually in such case. Meanwhile, 30 people are "working in ai" off the cake having been drawn.  Just about sums google up at this point. 🎂

previous article: " most fridges thrash their temperatures " [1]. I've monitored a second fridge.  This isn't that useful until I note which fridge it is.  In the meantime, I think it's either Bosch, Miele or Gorenje. Again, the range of temperature is too big.  It's going from 2 to 9 degrees. The cycle is much shorter: 1h40m, whereas the fridge from the previous article was around 5h. Again, the fridge has only one knob. [1] < https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/3352794691445397639/7027525752784497069 >

Imagine if buying something in a shop routinely led to a humiliation akin to an identity parade. In this case, trying to buy something on amazon led to trying to use (spammers) wise debit card led to running its app to see if I would be able to confirm via app led to trying to authenticate to app led to no led to logging in to web site led to being encouraged to install a third-party authenticator app led to thinking actually I'll just do the SMS thing. But no SMS arrived, and I checked and there was an old number, and I went to change it, and the workflow switched from web to email, and I clicked on the link in the email, and it asked me to take a picture of myself holding my passport. That's where "e-commerce" ended up. Is the answer to not buy things?

There's a certain space-filler article format in the British media, where Iraq Guy gets trotted out to give "opinions" on things. Here's one: Oh, iraq guy "counsels", how precious. No one cares. Iraq guy is iraq guy, and only iraq guy, and will not have chance to be other than iraq guy until the day he finally goes to hell.

Uber isn't something to try and get working just before using, and if one hasn't used it in a while, there will be a "get working". Illustration of user experience trying to get a ride with Uber, which presumes to take over taxi services worldwide. I then tried to set up a new account on the web, but it kept detecting a contact details, then linking me with old account, and, SMS code to old number i don't have, and fail.

Idea: if a person creates gratuitous first-person object identification, for example a paper bag which declares "I am a paper bag", then, for consistency, that person could tattoo themselves with "I am a marketing twat" across their face.

Iris picture, fingerprint, DNA: none of these are usable as the basis for secret keys, being fundamentally non-secret information. Any attempt to obfuscate this basic reality, including "biometric" "crypto", is a scam. Simple as that.

In investigating why I can't `mkdir /scratch` on MacOS, I came across:     With macOS Catalina, you can no longer store files or data in the read-only system volume, nor can you write to the "root" directory [...] [0] The phrase "you can no longer [..]" suggests a linear progression.  Some kind of ordering.  Comparability. If "you can no longer" in 3.5, then probably in 2.7 you can, whereas in 3.6 you can not.  Version names do not have this.  Why does everything from debian to ubuntu to, apparently, MacOS, suffer from this same bad meme?  Why does my sources.list contain "deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/bullseye main non-free contrib"?  Is that before or after that other disney character? At least Apple has resisted the temptation, apparently irresistible to others, to name their thing after irritating combinations of adjective and animal name, such as "spastic spider".  Oh, remind me, did "gay goat" come before or

I thought bourne (and thus posix) shells conventionally had a dollar sign prompt for a normal user, and c shells a percent. MacOS uses zsh, a bourne shell.  It has a percent as the default prompt.  I don't know if this is from Apple or zsh.  It's a little discombobulating.

 I logged into Barclays and tried to make a EUR payment.  I got this error: I called the number suggested, but instead of being a specific number for resolving this issue, it was a very general Barclays number.  I then got batted around several hellish voice robots before being put on hold indefinitely (I'm currently on hold). What are the odds that "we are currently experiencing technical difficulties" is an accurate description of the issue. Searching the web for barclays code 30180, I came across one hypothesis that it can be caused by pasting in an IBAN instead of typing it manually.  For the time being, it's best if I interpret this as a joke, but I will bear it in mind as a possibility. There's also the possibility that it's over some limit.  It was for 25k EUR. Note that the assumption is that the error message doesn't describe the issue, and that you have to guess in the dark about possible reasons. None of this shit works.  It really doesn't.

This radio has a microUSB (B) socket for its power input.  It comes with its own mains adapter.  But you can also power it like this: The outlet is a BG Nexus Metal, and yes the C port does PD properly.  The limits are wrote on there: 20V at 1.5A.  Works with my laptops, and many mini-PCs via eg a linkon adapter.

As the world enters silly times, it is worth thinking ahead to the kind of world we want to build next, once people finally realise they have to be sensible again. As Herodotus (tho he makes some of them up), or even Harari (and he takes it too far, of course), point out, there is a wide range of cultural setups that humans can create for themselves.  So let's allow ourselves to imagine a radically and fundamentally different human world. In this spirit, then, I propose the following idea: a world with less label remanence. Consider the following illustration:     Your first impression might be: depicted are several items, and in that sense the picture is in the same category as a still life by Michelangelo, say.  But look more closely.  Does the Michelangelo have bits of glue and damage, where a label has been removed from each piece of fruit? The reflective surface is a Simplehuman bin.  I have 4.  They all have severe label remanence. The box is by WH Smith.  There was a circula

  In "choose what level of brokenness to accept", let's accept for the moment that web sites should be sending out forms with lists of countries for users to complete, to tell the web site their address. The above is such a form, sent out by the Savoy on the Strand in London.  The top countries are "Canada", then "United States", then ... "Afghanistan".  Do they not expect lots of their customers to be British?  And WTF is fairmont?

I just tried to buy tickets from airline Aurigny. Instead of being under Aurigny.com like normal, it went to videcom.com, which I'd never heard of.  I pasted in my email and password before noticing, so may have sent them to the hacker by mistake!  The fake web site said my login had failed, even tho I put in the right password: Note that the options are "login" and "I forgot my password".  If this wasn't a fake web site, then it would be another case of the web site operator not bothering to preserve customer passwords, and then forcing password resets by email by lying to customers and telling customers that it's the customer who's forgotten the password.  This happens a lot.  I thought I had a tag for it, but can't find.  So projection_of_forgotten_password_from_web_site_to_user it is.  Ah yes, I think it's forced_bogus_account_rescue. If Aurigny are doing this deliberately, then it's obviously bad.  The domain is all the user can be e

If a shitmanteau is a shit portmanteau, then a schwitmanteau is a swiss shitmantaeu. Case: "Swisstainable" This picture is looking north over walensee to the cliffs and mountains behind, from the train.

It's always interesting to travel to Switerland and see what new scams they are operating. This time, it's a double-scan trick on a self-checkout at a busy coop: This screen is after a member of staff had corrected the "mistake". The beeps from the two scans sounded what, a half second apart or so. If it wasn't for the beeps, i may not have noticed. If the error is in your favor, you may be prosecuted. If the error is in their favor, you pay twice for the item. The swiss motto: "you pay". And, welcome to self-checkout. Isn't there a tax thing "double irish"? Okay, so this bilk is called the "double swiss". They do have nice lakes and mountains.

You can nfs-export an autofs-mounted filesystem that's on a local device. You can't export an exfat filesystem over nfs.  exportfs(8) will say "exportfs: /foo does not support NFS export". exfat is also annoying in other ways on linux.  Even if you just want the contents of the fs to be accessible to whatever it's plugged in to, and don't think you need multi-user features, it's hard to get this on linux.  With unix permissions, you can make something that anyone can read and anyone can create directories in, more or less.  With exfat on linux, it's either mounted as root or as a particular user (and group).

Running fdisk on a large drive, it creates DOS MBR and can only use 2T. Use gdisk instead, for ad-hoc interactive partitioning.

previously: https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2023/05/minimal-automounter-config-for-linux.html There are a couple of oddities around configuring a direct autofs map. To mount by label, the entry in the direct map looks like:     /wibble -fstype=auto LABEL=ythh0 If the middle field is ommitted, then it defaults to trying to treat it as NFS. The order is opposite to fstab(5), which has the device first, and then the mount point. The automounter will make the mount appear at the location whether the mount point exists as a directory or not.  This is different semantics from mount(8) / fstab(5), which require that the mount point exists. If you need to troubleshoot, you can set "logging = verbose" in the "[ autofs ]" section of /etc/autofs.conf and restart autofs.  autofs.conf is by default in debian a vast commented-out file, with about 3 lines not commented out.  Better to remove all the commented lines, and just keep the effective ones. Thus, the revised example from