bunn

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.

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... )

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'.

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.

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.

Now, I thought this was just another mine when I came across it the other day near West Down on the river Tavy. It looks like an adit to me, though it seemed a bit odd that there was no fencing and no grill to stop unwary tourists wandering into it. (It's quite big enough to get inside, Pp almost did, as he was wearing wellies & it was a wet day he ventured in to take the photos.)

But I just looked it up on the Heritage Gateway*, and there's no mine or adit marked there.

There are a few mines a short distance away: Wheal Bedford, a nineteenth-century coppermine, Tavy Consols, across the river, the Lady Bertha Mine, Walkham United mine, and the closest, the excellently named 'Virtuous Lady Mine' apparently named in honour of Elizabeth I, which was worked from 1588 to 1807. It reopened in the 1830s before finally closing in the 1870s, and was apparently 'once famed for the siderite crystals with curved faces.' I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds brilliant.

So, possibly this is one of the undocumented adits, or possibly it's not an adit at all but some other... thing.

*I'm a bit worried about Heritage Gateway. They have so much brilliant data in there, and it must have been a huge faff to assemble, but the interface is looking very aged now, the maps are still in beta and don't work with https... I do hope it won't just fall off the web one day, that would be a great waste of so much carefully-compiled information.

And it is hot and I am eating ice lollies, although it's not so hot that I can't sit here wearing a thin fleece, which is About Right. It's a pity it's horsefly season.

I have killed my laptop mouse yet again, and am having to operate with a touchpad until the new mouse comes. I don't like it, it feels weird and unnaaaaaaaatural and horribly slow and fiddly.

Also I wrote yet another thing where people in Tol Eressea hang around after LOTR thinking 'we've run out of canon, what shall we do? Eat cake and talk about canon again? Why not?'
Even The Very Wise : 7367 words of Lalwen, Galadriel and Nerdanel chatting and eating cake. Plus a phonecall with Fëanor.

I really hate the style of form captcha where one must demonstrate that one is a human being by choosing all the photos that contain cars, or all the photos that contain street signs, for example.

I don't know how people with vision impairments get past them at all. You have nine poor quality fuzzy images, some of which show part of an item that might, or might not, be a car or a street sign. And then there is the 'is this a car / street sign?' question. I just failed a captcha because an image showed me a thing that I would call a bus. But apparently to a captcha, it's a car. And if the 'street sign' shows a different language or indeed alphabet, sometimes you can't work out exactly what it is. Or it shows you a photo with what are probably cars, but they are tiny and far away!

Aaaaaaaaaaa! Come back, mental arithmetic captchas, all is forgiven!

Phonecall from NHS: will I come in for checkup? Well, OK I say, and agree a date and time.

( Read more... )

Scrolling quickly through messages telling me which IP addresses have been autoblocked on various websites that I work on, because of dodgy-looking activity over the festive season, I notice that there is a sudden upswing in Russian and Ukrainian IP addresses. (My sites are almost all hosted in the UK, because dealing with the data wrangles of hosting outside the EU is a headache I do not need).

Normally, attempts to get into my websites come largely from the USA and (inexplicably) France. The orthodoxy, I believe, is to assume that these US attacks are not really from the US, but are from US-based machines hijacked from Eastern Europe. (I don't know about the French thing. Nobody else seems to be specially targeted by the French, so I have seen no discussion on it).

I don't know what to make of the sudden prominence of Russian IPs. Have the US authorities cracked down on the hijacked machines? Are the new attacks reported as Russian and Ukrainian, actually now coming from hijackers physically located in the USA, in a kind of weird symmetry? Is it entirely chance?

I'll probably never know. I can only feel vaguely reassured that the software is doing its thing and nobody is complaining.

Back in... 1997, I think, my grandmother died, leaving a house stuffed to the brim with a lifetime's carefully sorted junk. We all took a few bits and pieces and then a house clearance company was called in to deal with the rest of it. My father in law, who has an interest in photography, took some of my grandfather's old cameras.

Fast forward twenty-odd years, and now my in-laws have developed a newfound interest in having a loft that is not stuffed full of old junk that someone thought looked interesting...( Read more... )

I am amused by this list of randomly generated hostnames that a server has just presented to me :

orophin.clareassociates.com

spock.clareassociates.com

sneezy.clareassociates.com

osgiliath.clareassociates.com

malbeth.clareassociates.com

rohirrim.clareassociates.com

laurelindornan.clareassociates.com

sneezey.clareassociates.com

mardil.clareassociates.com

amroth.clareassociates.com

... shouldn't that be Laurelindórenan ? I can forgive the accents, but it's missing an 'e', isn't it...?

Spock looks lonely among all the Middle Earth names, and I wonder why if adding Seven Dwarves to Middle Earth (surely an idea fraught with peril?) we got two versions of Sneezy rather than say Grumpy. Or maybe one of the Sneezys is Bilbo in Laketown.

I wrote this intermittently through the day while waiting for things to transfer across the internet, half-expecting LJ to lose it, but it hasn't. It's a bit rambling.

( Read more... )

I bought a new screen for my knackered Kindle on Ebay and replaced it myself. And it all works, and I only had one screw left over!

I FEEL SO ACCOMPLISHED.

And now I don't have to make a decision about buying a replacement for it. But I do need a new 00 screwdriver head because all the tiny tiny screws knackered mine.

It looks like my ancient Kindle has finally shuffled off. The screen is frozen and will not unfreeze for any incantation or combination of buttons, even when I take the battery out. The machine itself is still working, but can only be communicated with via cable, which is no use at all.

It appears modern kindles now have touchscreens. Is this a good idea? I have a touchscreen on my current laptop and I am constantly accidentally brushing the thing and being carried off to places I don't want to go. What I want from an ebook reader is the robustness of a paperback book, with free wifi. Touchscreens do not suggest 'tough' to me. I suppose now I shall have to decide whether I really need an ebook reader anyway.

Ironically, the Kindle died halfway through a chapter about procrastination. HOW DID IT KNOW.

The server and local PC backups are automated, of course. But deleting them isn't, which causes me Issues.

One location my backup are stored at (I have three lots of backups, each on a separate server belonging to a dfferent company) is on Amazon's S3 servers, at their Ireland datacentre*. This service charges by volume of data stored. So yesterday I was sitting there staring at the pile of lovely backups from April (each one a golden second chance to avert disaster or idiocy! Who cannot love a second chance???)

And I was thinking: probably I don't need 5 complete backups of absolutely everything from April. If I delete these, I will save money, and still have May and June. BUT WHAT IF SOMETHING AWFUL HAPPENED IN MAY OR JUNE THAT I'VE NOT YET DISCOVERED???

In the end I deleted all but one of April. I also have a full backup from March, and January still lurking. This may be a form of hoarding. Or it may just be prudence. I can't tell.

( my datacentre routing angst, let me show you it )

I went to install Eudora on this new computer, to find that even Eudora OSE, the Thunderbird-driven thing which replaced Qualcomm's original Eudora software, has finally passed away.

I've been using Eudora for my email since 1995! *weeps*

I feel as I would if I had just discovered that you couldnt' buy a kettle any more.

I found this, with a little irony, in one of my email inboxes this morning : Why can't we read any more?

It doesn't say anything new, of course, but it encapsulates a problem I've had, and so have you probably. Email. Usenet. Web based forums. Lj. Twitter. Facebook. I have got a great deal out of all of it, of course, and have learned a great deal. But I have also spent way too much of my time sucked into things that don't matter, getting cross about things I can't change and focussing on things that don't leave me feeling I've achieved much.

The only thing I can't agree with in that blog is that it presents books as an alternative to this, and I don't honestly think they are. Books for me are subject to exactly the same addictive behaviour. I can remember my parents in the 70's talking about the guilty pleasure of 'committing book' - ie getting sunk into a book when you should really be getting on with something else.( Read more... )

I seem to remember complaining idly that because I have very mild asthma, I must take up time regularly at the local NHS clinic, which I am sure has better things to do with its time than assign an asthma nurse to have this conversation with me:

( Read more... )

Turns out, there is an opt-out on this now. You can fill in an online form at Superdrug, which apparently waves it past a doctor in some way, and then they post out your drugs to you. It seems somehow wrong (do people conspire to get ventolin that they don't actually need? Maybe they do) But awful convenient. :-D

Generally we only get the cheapest Google promotional gimmickry sent to us, so this does beg the question of whether out there somewhere, a big London agency has received, say, the Gift of Alstroemeria Seed*, the Gift of Unusual Basil*, or perhaps even, the Gift of Exotic Mushroom Spawn.

* a quick look at the Chiltern Seed Catalogue suggests that Alstroemeria plants and novelty basils are right up there when it comes to expensive seed. I can see why with the novelty basil, every time I grew the weird exciting ones they always got greenfly. Stick to plain old basil, is my advice.

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Page generated Jan. 1st, 2026 12:40 pm

Entries tagged with technology

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

A new telephone

A Thoroughly Unpleasant Person

Experiments with browsers etc

Laptop woes & things written.

Mystery mine of (last) week. Or possibly just a very large hole.

The sun has returned!

recaptcha

Health v system

IP's blocked

Strange old things on Ebay

'Randomly generated hostnames'

A day's intermittent wittering.

I FIXTED IT!

Bah, touchscreens

I may love my backups a little too much. I find it hard to let go.

End of the Eudora Era

Distraction

Well there's a thing

Google sends us the Gift of Cress