Gordy's Discourse
If you use Google Search Console you might encounter coverage problems from time-to-time. Such problems might stop your site from being indexed properly. In this article I explain how you might correct some of those problems.
Who knew toilet paper would become the dystopian unit of currency? I'd venture to suggest a man with 24+ rolls is now an upper-class elite and his kids would be a shoe-in for Eton. Strange really because, as far as I'm aware, coronavirus doesn't give you the shits.
Instead of pounds, shillings and pence we now have loo rolls, hand sanitiser and pot noodles. The useless gold in the Bank of England has been thrown away and the vault is now full of Andrex wet wipes.
The bulk panic buying (to the detriment of others) is, I fear, an accurate portrayal of much of humanity.
I'm going to try and help people determine how much space is needed for a home gym. It's not as straightforward as measuring the dimensions of the rack because there are a few other considerations you need to take into account.
Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to sue a company that created a robotic Terminator effigy of him.
Filemaker uses a strange definition of the term global in my opinion. Global database fields are not global if they're shared between Filemaker Pro and Filemaker Go, which each get their own copy of these fields. There is a workaround, though.
A pointless gadget that impresses me much.
The most astonishing thing about the BBC’s ducks and locusts article is that a duck can eat 200 locusts a day. I never would have thought them such greedy guzzlers.
China is going to send 100,000 ducks to counter the plagues of locusts in Pakistan. The ducks may be successful in their task but what will Pakistan do about the plague of ducks they’re then left with? Will China have to send 100,000 cats to cure Pakistan of its plague of ducks?
It puts me in mind of the old lady who swallowed a fly.
Baboons dislike the idea of getting the snip.
What do we know about Apple AirTags? Not much is the answer, although it seems iOS is being positioned to cope with such things. I repeat many of the rumours about AirTags in this article.
I was motivated to write this review because I’m fed up of being spammed by Wescot Credit Services Ltd. I don’t owe them or anyone they represent a penny. In fact I’ve never heard of the person they claim to be after, yet they continue to spam call me.
I was motivated to post this following a recent report about the excessive charges some ISPs levy if you move away from them but want to retain your email address.
Why did Apple make the iPad shutdown button combination the same as the screenshot button combination? Both use the volume up + power buttons, it's just a slightly longer press to shut an iPad down rather than take a screenshot. I've just deleted more than a dozen unwanted screenshots of my home screen, taken whilst attempting to shut it down over the past few weeks.
Barclays Bank's Big Brother monitoring system is booted back after a backlash from bemoaning employees.
The double-slit experiment was useful to help prove that light can be both a particle and a wave depending on how you observe it. I describe this quantum strangeness in this article.
BT's new 'flexible' TV package still requires a 24 month commitment, which doesn't sound all that flexible to me.
Musings on the plan to build a bridge from Scotland to Northern Ireland.
The universe is cold at 2.73 kelvin, which is -270.42 C (-454.76 F), but the small temperature it does have is very useful indeed. This radiation is called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and it was emitted only a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. In a universe that’s 13.8 billion years old, that’s extremely early. Over the eons the wavelength of this radiation has been stretched to the microwave end of the spectrum by the expansion of space.
Credit: ESA/Planck Collaboration.
The BBC website has published a number of articles about Universal Credit lately and a lot of them profile people who got into trouble after taking an advance on their payments. People take these advances because it’s not until five weeks after applying that a payment is made to the claimant.
The good news is that I’ve solved this problem for the government. It’s a two-step process.
Step 1. Apparently it takes seven days for a bank to transfer the government’s money to the claimant. This is ludicrous. I can transfer money between two accounts in less than two hours and I’m sure the government has more oomph with banks than me. Is the additional six days and 22 hours it takes the government to transfer their money because they route it through the remnants of Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel in Mexico in order to ‘clean’ it? The government should simply demand a modern bank account.
Step 2. Universal Credit is paid monthly, which is fine for the long-term I suppose. However, it’s clear it’s the initial wait for the first payment that’s causing a lot of people problems, so how about making the first two payments on a fortnightly schedule?
And there we are — problem solved. I’ve slashed the wait from five weeks to two by applying nothing more than common sense and I’ve assured myself a knighthood in the process.
I'm not in general all that excited about dark modes but creating one for my website seemed like an interesting learning experience. I've documented how I went about doing that in this article.
So, the BBC are having a consultation to decide whether not paying a TV licence fee should be decriminalised. For the love of God, of course it should. It’s a television, not an Uzi 9mm. Not paying something like that should be a civil offence, similar to not paying council tax, not a criminal offence.
The whole issue of whether we should pay a TV licence at all is another matter. As it stands it’s simply a tax because you have to pay it whether or not you watch the BBC. I think it should get with the times and become subscription-based. You shouldn’t have to have a licence just because you own a telly. They may as well start licensing underpants.
I’d probably still subscribe. The BBC has gone downhill in recent decades, as its Saturday evening dross demonstrates. It just seems to be emulating the commercial channels with many of its programmes and chasing ratings, and a lot of it is complete pap. That said, it does produce the best factual programmes (about things like science and nature) and many of its dramas (The Bodyguard, Killing Eve etc.) are top quality.
So, yes, throw in Radio 2 and the BBC website and I’d subscribe. And I’d give them an extra tenner if they finally do away with the formulaic dancing and singing shows, which always have three normal judges, one nasty judge, a public vote and an unerring ability to depress me. The sheer amount of televisual time Strictly commands is staggering.
Great reply from an MP to some trolls. I, for one, am glad MPs aren’t routinely banged over a wheelie bin before parliamentary sessions.
Just some instruction about how to access Working Copy repositories from iA Writer.
The iPad has turned ten and that has led to a number of articles both criticising and praising it. I think some of the criticism has been harsh even if I can see where it's coming from. Here's my take on it.
I'm struggling to understand why Ring's complementary mobile app needs to pass so much (or even any) data to third parties. It does this without user consent and also goes to great lengths to hide the data its passing on, attempting to elude analysis.
Ring is owned by Amazon and Amazon was the second company to be worth more than a trillion dollars, following hot on the heels of Apple. In the last quarter of 2019 Amazon raised $87.4 billion in revenue and made a profit of $3.3 billion. Jeff Bezos is now allegedly worth as much as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined.
So why, I have to wonder, when they're charging between £89 and £229 for doorbell with camera in it, do they also feel they need sell data from their mobile apps?
Ring already has form for data breaches and they could well be setting themselves up for another one. As the Electric Frontier Foundation — who performed this analysis — says:
This goes a step beyond that, by simply delivering sensitive data to third parties not accountable to Ring or bound by the trust placed in the customer-vendor relationship. As we’ve mentioned, this includes information about your device and carrier, unique identifiers that allow these companies to track you across apps, real-time interaction data with the app, and information about your home network. In the case of MixPanel, it even includes your name and email address. This data is given to parties either only mentioned briefly, buried on an internal page users are unlikely to ever see, or not listed at all.
This all raises a few related points.
Companies like you to install their own app instead of you doing your business via their websites in a browser. This is because browsers are getting cleverer at blocking tracking and because you can install ad-blockers in browsers. There are no such restrictions with apps: they can track you at will and advertise to you as they choose.
The thing that puzzles me, though, is why, when you're making £3.3 billion profit in a quarter, you feel the need to do this. Why not instead trade on the principle of no tracking and top class security? You'd probably sell more of your expensive doorbells in the first place if you did that.
On the back of the Cambridge Analytica debacle you'd think companies would learn but most appear to have learnt little. Greed and the lure of selling data, which is after all easy money for a company, still seem to rule supreme.
I really don't think Google should display search results for articles where, when you click through via search, you then have to have a subscription or account to see them. It's essentially advertising an article with a promise to satisfy your search criteria but then you can't view said article. Such sites are often subscription newspapers, social media pages or the woeful Medium silo.
At the very least, Google could give you an option to filter out subscription sites.
Light switches should always be down for on and up for off. This is a problem when you have two switches that operate the same light. Therefore it should be the law that dual light switches are fitted with servos of some sort that switch the other switch(es) to match when you engage one of them.
Have I just invented that? If so, it's Copyright Gordon Ansell, 2020. I'll apply for a patent whilst I'm doing so for my electric underpants puller-upper (the deluxe model will have a stack system for your briefs on the base).
I’ve tried quite a few Markdown editors but, until now, hadn’t properly investigated iA Writer. However, it now fits nicely into my workflow and in this article I explain how it does so and I present my review of iA Writer.
I don't want to get into the debate about whether we should or shouldn't have a porn block, but I do want to say something about the age-verification software companies who want £3m in 'damages' because the government didn't go ahead with it.
Remember, it's the tax-payer who'll ultimately pay those damages.
As far as I'm aware, the government never commissioned these companies to come up with age-verification software, so I can't see how they've got any right to claim anything. If it turns out they were asked or commissioned to do this then of course they deserve payment, but nothing I've read indicates that.
It's the government's job to create new laws and repeal old ones and they can do that at will. If a bunch of companies jump the gun and spend money and resources developing something that's no longer needed then that's their own look-out as far as I'm concerned.
Apparently these companies have applied for a judicial review and I hope their application gets turned down.
The Universe Splitter app allows you to make quantum decisions, spawning new universes in the process. Some quantum background to this and a brief review of the app can be found herein.
Sonos recently announced they're dropping support for their older kit, which has caused quite a stir.
I run the same Node app on two different environments and often encounter the Node Sass could not find a binding for your current environment error. Here's how I deal with that error.
I watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood last night and this is my review of it. I enjoyed it but still have some reservations I can't quite put my finger on. That's probably me just being overly fussy though.
