ttj - Tom Jones

I never chose to make card payments depend on my phone, but card issuers, as elements in the shitfrastructure, all force this. I'm separated from my phone till I collect it from the place I left it, which is a flight away.  To book a flight, you have to make a payment, and to make a payment, the shitfrastructure requires you to use your phone. I almost failed to buy the ticket.  It went as follows: barclaycard options were SMS to lost phone, or to old uk number disconnected, or app which I don't use, but which would be on the lost phone, or pinsentry on app (note: pinsentry via actual pinsentry device NOT an option), failed halifax SMS to lost phone, only option, failed coutts debit SMS to lost phone, only option, failed HSBC debit SMS to lost phone, or bank app, which I don't use, but if I did it would be on the lost phone, failed Lloyds debit one option was call to landline, which worked, and I entered with DTMF in the phone a 4-digit code displayed on the computer screen...

My favourite label printer is the Brother PT-7600.  Newer models seem engineered to waste tape, and to waste time. The PT-7600 is still pretty good at wasting tape.   The TZ tape cartridges are taken by many Brother label printers.  They come in widths from 6mm (or 3.5mm, sort of) to 24mm.  Some machines accept up to 18mm. In 2017, in Japan, I bought a couple of Brother TZ label printers.  They wasted tape in crazy ways, like reverting to annoying defaults of wasting tape at the slightest excuse.  I should have done a detailed look, but they were annoying enough that they had to go in the electronic waste box, and on and away from there.  Every so often I buy a second-hand PT-7600 on ebay. Small offcuts of wastage are produced by the feed thing, which seems to be a limitation of the cartridge format.  You can get your label now by feeding, but then an offcut is produced before the next print.  Or you can minimise label wastage, but you d...

  I left something in a car hired from Europcar, and now I have to get it back. They have something they call "station finder".  They tried to make it so you could write in a box to search for the station.  The box had light-grey text saying what the field was for.  Whatever one's opinion on that, it is not supposed to be the actual text of the form field.  For Europcar, it is.  I clicked in the box, started writing "southampton", and after typing "south", the light grey text "Enter an address, city or postal code" had become "Enter an address, city southor postal code".   That's not meant to happen.  You are not supposed to do it like that.  Illustration: So I tried selecting a country from the list.  Except, the list is empty: And the square with the map doesn't have a map.  It's blank.  That's the box: It doesn't work.  In 3 ways. Trying another route, I got to this: Of the 9 things listed, none of them is for...

JT fibre connection to JT web server, latency 15 times higher than anything reasonable: $ ping jt.com PING jt.com (20.44.138.132) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 20.44.138.132 (20.44.138.132): icmp_seq=1 ttl=106 time=225 ms 64 bytes from 20.44.138.132 (20.44.138.132): icmp_seq=2 ttl=106 time=225 ms For both JT and Sure (wired local, then fibre) to google's 8.8.8.8, it's around 13ms, much more normal: $ ping 8.8.8.8 PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=108 time=12.4 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=108 time=13.3 ms $ ping 8.8.8.8 PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=119 time=13.6 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=119 time=13.9 ms 225ms ain't a good advert for JT's fibre service and / or JT's data centre business and / or JT's web site.

Came across this: and was reminded of this: which I think is brilliant, and contains around six preoccupations in three lines. But on the way, this search didn't work: yet this one did: so twitter searches match on the handle, but not on the person's name.  So much for freedom of speech!

As of 2023, many ISPs still do not offer ipv6.  Geektards' naming of ipv4 addresses as "legacy" is aspirational, not factual. No ISP in Guernsey offers ipv6. Static ip addresses with an ordinary internet connection only cost around 5 GBP(2023) extra, except for the Guernsey vodafone, which quoted me many times that.  For those reading from the future, this is around the price of a nice coffee. Twenty years ago, you could get a /24 from techie ISPs like aaisp or zen, for next to peanuts.  The addresses are scarce, but could better use be made of them?   Assumed here is that one wants the internet to be end-to-end, as originally designed, and thus be able to run services from, connect in to, the site with the internet connection. Let's take as a reference point the fact that one can't really run more than one HTTPS web site from a single static ip at the moment.  There are some ways, like a proxy with all the keys, and possibly some horrific pre-starttls item...

The search was simply for "time": 16:34 is correct.  But look at "People also ask" "What is the time over there in England now?".  It gives the time in several English places as Fri 5:30pm (btw today is Thursday), and promises "200 more rows". It looks like the crawler just took this snapshot, on a Friday at 17:30.  The thing about the time, though, is that a snapshot of it is not useful.  If you are going to do it, do it properly.  Or -- don't. The decline of Google's main service's quality may be related to its recent transformation into a vast bureaucracy, summarised by Scott Locklin recently in his article " Calling a bureaucrat by its name " [1] . [1] < https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2023/11/29/calling-a-bureaucrat-by-its-name/ > Most likely, the people responsible for the 5:30pms can't be located.  And to remove their output from the front page for search "time"? It's fascinating to watch go...

 One of these speeds has a sensible name: Sensibly, they called their 1 Gbps service "Gigabit". But instead of calling the 2 Gbps something like "Two Gigabit", they reverted to their previous, silly, naming convention, calling it "Hyperfast Plus". Also, who is going to buy 1.5? 

One way to guess what we will look like from the future, is from how we view cultures of the past.  It would probably amuse someone from the "Bell Beaker Culture", or "Corded Ware Culture", that their culture is named after features of their cups.  They probably thought they were up to all sorts of other things as well. How might our culture be known, in 4500 years time, if we are named after features of our cups?  My first guess was "Fally-Over Plastic Cups Culture". Hotel bathrooms now come with extremely lightweight plastic cups, wrapped in plastic.  These do not have the mass to support a toothbrush.  You put a toothbrush in, the cup falls over.  The example depicted is from the Duke of Normandy.  There is no other solution provided, for holding a toothbrush.  That's what the glass glass used to do. On second thoughts, the fally-over cups are so insubstantial, they are unlikely to stand the test of time, to be available to future archaeologist...

Around 2000, everyone realised they no longer had to go between Altavista, Excite, Yahoo Search.  Google gave good search results, fast, and wasn't bogged down by shitware. Today, in 2023, the quality of Google's answers-inline results is poor. In the above example, google declines to answer the query in the units I asked for.  Maybe kmph is a funny way of putting it.  Doesn't matter. Is anyone bothering trying to improve on it? To take a much more general obvious low-hanging fruit: the search results don't link properly to the web pages in the search results. The thing displayed on the page starts off like a URL, but isn't one.  That's the quasiURL "https://www.rmets.org > metmatters > beaufort-wind-scale" The actual link, which I just got with my browser's "Copy link" function is: "https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwj6-5iazIKDAxVlUqQEHQ_dCi0...

  During the week, I heard a recording of one of those grandstandings in Washington, with a politician asking its question, then saying "yes or no", trying by sheer force of will, to constrain answers to those alternatives.  It wasn't "have you stopped beating your wife, yes or no", but neither was it a yes or no question. The opposite of that, then, must be the question "label remanence: bad, or very bad?", because both answers are correct. Illustrated above are three examples.  The mug has gluey residue that feels grim.  The oven dish is new, and supposed to go in... the oven.  It doesn't just peel off.  Bits of it come off, with work, and glue is left.  Does this object meet the basic merchantable quality criterion for something supposed to go in the oven?

This wasn't as a result of searching.  Just of loading the front page.

I recently had a conversation structurally identical to this: Person A: Trump tortures puppies for breakfast Person B: howso, you sure? Person A: Are you a Trump supporter? For those reading from the future, it is socially acceptable to say anything untrue about trumpmanbad, whereas it is socially unacceptable to query untrue things said about trumpmanbad. Any situation can be "won" with "are you a trump supporter"? All this, in certain circles. A bizarre groupthink when observed from outside.

This is for a 4k monitor. It has 8k inputs. Scam. If you read on, carefully, on that page, you can see its actual resolution.