General ⁽¹¹⁾

Certain websites are becoming terrible these days and for no reason other, I suspect than poor or non-existent testing. I am actually trying to buy a cooker hood. I made a shortlist of 4, one poor, three ok. I went with one from a company but when I got to the ordering screen it wanted to add nearly £15 for delivery. This had not been made clear before. So, the second choice was from Amazon, free delivery. I tried to order this in Safari on the Mac but, after logging in and adding the OTP code I got a blank screen. So I tried via the DuckDuckGo browser - same thing, a blank screen. Plenty of code, pages of scripts and obfuscated stuff, just nothing rendered. I resorted to the Amazon app and this time Amazon told me the product cannot be delivered to our address. No explanation. Anyway, goodbye Amazon. Again. I actually ditched Amazon when as a Prime user paying annually they decided they were going to inject adverts into films even though I was paying for Prime. I ended up paying the delivery charge with the other company. KLM is another infuriating site. I can do everything…

Looks like I am out of action for a few days. We noticed a bulge in the kitchen ceiling which is directly under the shack. There are two pipes that run across under the floor for hot and cold water to the taps and down from the hot water cylinder to the rest of the house. Yes, you guessed it, right under my desk. So, all the radios, screens, Mac and PCs, audio stuff and all cabling out and desk out. On lifting the carpet the floorboard I needed to lift ran right across the room, and right under the test bench! So, all the equipment had to move, including the allegedly portable spectrum analyser and the teleprinter. Fortunately GB7RVB and all the network gear is on shelving attached to the wall so that can stay. And there is was, one leaking lead to copper joint. Far too late to go and get the bits to fix it… and searching for the parts by smartphone is not amusing. Grumble.

All this packet radio progressing around the place reminds me of a time long ago, pre-Internet where dial-up BBSs became the new thing in town. Back then I had a BBC Micro and a modem that ran at two speeds - I forget which now (will edit later!) and I persuaded my mum to get BT in to fit a socket rather than the hard-wired phone we had then. This let me plug the modem in. I used to use a BBS called ‘More Summer Wine’ plus one other but I forgot the name. Much of the activity back then is lost in the mist of time (or rather I just can’t remember) but sending and receiving mail was fun. BBS systems were all a part of the wider FidoNet. Mail would be routed between the various BBS systems, many of which only had the one telephone line and so would be inaccessible while that was happening. Indeed, they were mostly single user anyway, although if the sysop was there you could message them via the console of the BBS which was probably sitting in someone’s bedroom. I am reminded of the many times I would set the BBC and…

I've been a member of Facebook for many years, joining since before it became the advertising behemoth it is today. Back then I did make fairly regular use of it to interact with friends and colleagues as well as groups. But my use of it dwindled to reading group posts and posting 'happy birthday' messages. But I kept it. As hobbies changed with time and retirement I joined several new groups. Again, really all I did was read posts. At some stage during this time I also began to use Messenger. I now find that I rarely get any use out of Facebook and only have two contacts in Messenger that I do not have elsewhere. So I thought it time to get rid of Facebook. That did not go as planned! First, the Messenger app on the Mac decided it would log me out and I cannot log back in. I get as far as the 2FA challenge where it allegedly sends me a text which never arrives. Three goes at that and I just deleted the app, life is too short. Then I went into Facebook and after being bounced around between Facebook and the overarching Meta sites…

Drat, double drat and triple drat. When I moved URLs about this blog, reconstituted from the original before I briefly moved to Write Freely, was all fine. But I overlooked the fact that the Wordpress database held onto the old URLs in all the images. So all the original posts that had images now have blank space. I am working my way back through these to sort each post out. Annoyingly it is not just a straight URL swap as there were differences in the older version of Wordpress as was, so I need to remove and re-add each one. Oh well... Update: I think I found and fixed them all.