bunn

Google sent me an email this morning telling me to change my passwords

2021-01-26T17:15:07Z

It had a long list of passwords that it thought it knew and wanted me to change.

I assume that it got them from some very ancient data dump. There were a bunch of things on there I'd forgotten I ever had a password to, and of the things that I actually still use, none of the passwords was even close to being up to date. I wonder why it assumed that I was still using passwords from... idk, probably around 2010, at a guess? Maybe earlier.

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A new telephone

2020-04-24T16:33:24Z

The last time I bought a phone was 2011, I think. That was an expensive one; this is a cheap one (Nokia 2.3). So far it seems pretty good. I am hoping that it might actually be able to find a signal here, through the wonders of 4g. If it does, I might even find myself using it rather than leaving it behind.( Read more... )

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A Thoroughly Unpleasant Person

2020-01-11T18:37:45Z

The Tavistock Group of Artists is having an 'American theme' this year for their summer exhibition, in honour of the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower. This strikes me as excellent potential for a crossover with that American Diner on the A38 with the cactuses on each table that is plastered with pictures of James Dean and Coca Cola logos, but does not actually sell Coca Cola. I anticipate it being Extremely English and possibly somewhat Problematic.

Anyway, I was trying to think what to paint and started browsing Wikipedia for something Historical and encountered this horrible man, who packed off four small children onto the Mayflower as indentured servants because they were his wife's and her lovers, not his. No wonder the poor woman wanted anyone else. What a bastard.

In other news:
I painted some nude elves. I consider nudity to be simply what everyone is wearing underneath, and there is nothing particularly sexual or adult to acknowleging that under clothes lies skin. But I know there are other opinions on this matter, so I put them on my website, here.

I have not been able to read my LJ friendslist for a couple of weeks, I just kept seeing a spinning loading screen icon in Chrome. Have finally got around to trying it in Firefox. It might be just me, surely even now, LJ would notice an issue as large as 'friends lists don't work in most popular available browser'.

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Experiments with browsers etc

2019-11-04T13:51:23Z

Since I got the new laptop, I've been experimenting with using Microsoft Edge, because it's been a long time since I used a Microsoft browser, and it seemed like an idea to spread the distribution of all my personal data across two evil empires rather than just handing over the lot to Google. (I do have Firefox and Waterfox, but I use them for work, I'd been using Chrome for blogging, social media and random searches.)

Edge actually seems to be OK, although there are a couple of annoying niggles about it which keep surprising me. Bing, however, the MS searchengine, is really pants compared to Google. I'd forgotten how annoying it was to run searches and find that the engine had misunderstood you and provided results that yes, are technically about The Thing, but not in the way I wanted.

There is merit to the whole 'sell your soul to Google' thing. OK, it Knows Too Much, but on the other hand, that means that Google can work out that when I want to know when hares were considered inedible in Britain, the academia.edu paper is probably going to trump the hare recipe page.

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Laptop woes & things written.

2019-10-14T20:28:16Z

I've been off adventuring in Middle-earth last week and will post about that once I've finished writing it up & sorting the photos, but that may take a bit longer since I must face the fact that my laptop is dying.

It has long had a knackered SD card slot, and several knackered USB ports, and more recently, the N key is hanging on by a thread and you have to hit the spacebar right in the middle if you want spaces. And more recently the space bar has taken to flying off completely! But the latest thing is that the widget inside the machine that detects if you have closed the lid has decided that 'closed the lid' is now defined as 'moved the lid in any way' and it is requiring more and more persistence to persuade it that the computer is officially open again.

I was thinking about either fishing around inside OR sending it to A Bloke to see what they could fix, but thinking about the list of ailments, I'm now thinking maybe it's new laptop time. This machine is 4 and a half years old now, and the important bits are still working, so I may go for an Asus again.

Oh, and I am way behind on posting Things Written here, for some reason, but it was the Innumerable Stars reveal yesterday, so here are two things wot I wrote:
Mind's Delight : In the dwarf-city of Belegost, teenage Elrond and Elros are bored, and Maglor is not sure what to expect of half-elves.
and
Unbridled Turmoils : The vampire Thuringwethil is a servant of Sauron. Meássë is a servant of Morgoth himself... in so far as Meássë serves anyone but chaos. They're made for one another.

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