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Showing posts from June, 2024

world's biggest shop getting even worse at selling things

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More 500 internal server errors from amazon when trying to check out and place an order:

hobs, knobs, miele product quality

I have just failed to make myself beans on toast in my own house, because I can not operate the hobs.  It's a flat surface touch interface.  I held the on thing and a red light appeared by the key.  Does this mean it's locked?  Usually I press a touch button for the hob I want, and then gradually plus until it goes up to whatever number between 1 and 15.  Now, not.  Just the key.  Tried long presses on the key and other buttons, and short presses, and can't work out how to unlock it.  Why would anyone buy anything with a user interface this bad? Last week, I was in a kitchen showroom, and we were looking at a new kitchen for some office space.  They were showing off this whizzy one.  I tried to turn a hob on.  I genuinely tried, trying to get it to work.  I failed.  It wasn't due to induction and pan detection.  It was due to a complicated user interface.  The salesman tried to tell me how to do it, and I said please don't, if the interface isn't discoverable /

bad internet makes it hard to get anything done

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Half way thru doing something, and: This happens several times per hour, but it sometimes goes for a few days without dropping. The new house is relatively remote, but stable DSL should be possible with a good quality deployment. We don't have fibre round here yet. When it's working, the connection is 20 Mbps down and 2 up. Looking into starlink.  Have also asked JT about a second copper line, or bespoke fibre.  They said before that they can run JT fibre to anywhere on the island, it's just a question of cost, so let's see what that looks like.

hypertext may as well not have been invented

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I went to a post office and paid to redirect my post from a family member's address, who hosts my UK mail address, to my Guernsey office. I've done this maybe 4 times before since leaving the UK, and it's always worked fine.  This time, all post for the address got redirected, not just for me, even tho that's not how I filled in the form.  Royal Mail make themselves almost impossible to contact, but I completed some online "contact form".  Got no email acknowledgement.  Sent two items in the post, one should be redirected, the other delivered as addressed, wrote clear notes to this effect on the fronts of the envelopes.  Both got delivered instead of one.  Now, none of my post is being redirected, but at least the householder is receiving their post. Apparently there is a "dedicated redirection contact form".  Okay, under this dialog the page navigates to the redirection contact form.  But I was hovering over "dedicated redirection form" te

disabling voicemail on a Sure mobile: ##004# send

To disable voicemail on a Sure mobile, you call ##004# .  It's a USSD code. Gave response saying "Setting Erasure Succeeded; Voice Call Forwarding; All Conditional Calls" and then similar ones but instead of "Voice" it was Data, Fax, SMS, Sync Data Circuit, Async Data Cicuit, Packet Access, and Pad Access.

Guernsey Revenue debacle

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I moved to Guernsey in November 2022.  In 2022, I spent fewer than 90 days (nights) in Guernsey, so was expecting to be non-resident for tax purposes for the year.  I was pleased to receive this confirmation, spontaneously, from the tax department, called "Revenue Service": It states simply, albeit with a typo, that my ("[me]") "[..] residential status for tax purposes in [2022] will be 'non-resident'". Imagine my surprise when I received an "Order Imposing a Penalty" dated 2024-03-04.  "In respect of the failure to deliver a return of income for the Year of Charge 2022 within the time specified by a notice given in accordance with the provisions of section 68 of the Law".  Looking at the situation more carefully, it did seem possible that (leaving aside any issue of not having received a notice) one might be non-resident for tax purposes, but still required to submit a tax return, in a particular year. On April 10th I asked thi

bad user interfaces are denying software users the benefits of multi windowing systems

I just went to save a picture from a chromium browser. Rigbt-clicked, save. I was going to call the file after some things from the image.  It's a picture of a letter, so the date, and title, and amount of money it relates to. The "save" dialog came up, and the picture was gone.  Instead of doing the save dialog simply as a new window, chromium is instead "clever", and messes things up.  So I had to close the save dialog, write down the attributes "2024-03-04", "order_imposing_a_penalty", and "200.gbp", then save it again, and write in those things in the save dialog.  The whole point of a windowing system is to be able to have things side by side, but this is being deliberately disabled by imbecile geektards. This anti-pattern has been happening repeatedly in the previous weeks.  I haven't been taking exact notes on it (there is only so much instrumentation one can do on faults without grinding to a halt), but, from memory, a r

TVLA's enforcement character is called Ross McTaggart

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Back in 2002, we used to spend time writing detailed responses to the TVLA threat letters.  Now they just go straight in the shred queue.  But I was tickled by this touch of calling their character "Ross McTaggart".  I assume this is a theatrical alias, rather than a real employee's name. Watch out, McTaggart is on to you. Paying for one's own brainwashing under threat is a bit like when the North Koreans invoice families for execution costs.

uber finally working again

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whatever uber were doing that prevented me signing up or rescuing account, they are no longer doing. gave another try because empty taxi rank in morden. waited around 15 minutes then set up uber.