Paying more for less.

ROWING up in the 90s (as I often put it), coffee jars were reasonably large and full to the rim (filled to the highest point). Not anymore. Many brands leave a lot of air in the product (it’s not for any taste-related purposes) and dosages went down gradually while prices rose.

Now, in the check-out tills, I’d see them selling sachets of coffee because the stuff got so expensive that they adopt the “microfinancing” approach or “one day at a time” mindset. What next, sachets of toothpaste and shampoo?

This is not the hallmark of a society moving in a good direction. They normalise poverty and brand that as “lifestyle” or “style” (sachets are, per weight, actually very expensive).

he site of RMS (online since the 1990s) has been offline for about 3 days. We don’t know what’s taking so long for it to come back online.

To RMS, his site is like Social Control Media but a lot better. He controls everything there and it’s in plain HTML, in static files.

Read on…

Science and technology as codified in caselaw

erman media (DW) reported how Julian Assange was granted permission to appeal at the High Court, but this didn’t mean going to the Court of Appeal, which we are going to pursue this month or later (soon). This is important for future cases. It’s about precedents.

The Net is not the Web and being able to distinguish between the two is critical. There are many hundreds if not thousands of protocols on the Net. Some are for videos, some are for devices to transmit messages. Experts can explain that in simple terms, but bringing experts to hearings is not cheap (not just flight ticket and hotels).

Remember to save to disk, and do so very often

oday in the evening (or earlier tonight) I was typing up a rather long article in Techrights, where I am the main editor.

As usual, what typically happens is, strands (or trains) of thoughts quickly become streams of words, and words add up to sentences, paragraphs, then a draft of an article. Then I go through the article, which tends to be coherent as it was typed in one go (after planning, having had some time to condition myself to put together a topic to write about in the ‘correct’ sequence), I correct typos, improve the wordings, add some more links etc. (where suitable and readily available)

I do this on a remote laptop connected over the LAN with Barrier, so if there’s a network glitch it can result in lost keystrokes and long repeated keystrokes.

Not for the first time, the latter happened when I pressed “undo” (ctrl+z), so it began undoing things I edited, in effect deleting amendments made for several minutes (far worse than when it happens with backspace as the cursor goes all over the place). Typically I’d be “hands-off” when that happens, then re-do what was omitted. This time, however, two things went wrong: 1) I did not keep “hands-off”, not long enough anyway; so I could not re-do all the way. 2) I did not press ctrl+s (save) for quite some time, so reverting back to the file on disk wasn’t a possibility either. I tried, I even did so from another laptop.

Shit!

I lost some work.

On the bright side: 1) I remembered more or less 80% or more of the changes that I made and could reconstruct a lot (with slight variation, imperfect replication, maybe even better the second time around). 2) not much was lost (either words or time). 3) it was only the editing/correcting pass, not the writing pass. 4) there was a lesson or wake-up call here. I should take advantage of it.

I will probably still take the risk of writing over Barrier, but I need to save to disk more often and be vastly more prudent/careful when undoing gets ‘jammed’. There should be a way to re-do (ctrl+shift+z) everything and, failing that, there’s a file on disk that maintains a recent copy, not what’s on the screen/buffer.

My editing skills typically use past experience (incidents) to reduce chance of loss/error, so my wife was surprised that it happened to me. Writing this blog post probably takes a lot more time than the time the incident ‘cost’ me.

I wonder if other people can relate to this.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about this (over an hour already), so documenting to myself – and maybe to others too -what happened can be hopefully prove useful.

There is no perfect (error-proof) way to edit text, but there are ways to reduce the risk and the cost of mistakes/crashes.

People In Love, probably not easy to find anymore (rare).

hen musicians could play not just an instrument but several instruments and also had good vocals the melodies were more complex and therefore better, on average. Not dancing and “showing flash”.

Too much this past week

aining or catching water now that summer is over (depending on which calendar) is OK, but we really needed that water last month for agriculture, gardens etc.

It has rained a lot lately, but it does not make up for the long drought (climate collapse) which impoverished many plants and animals.

Matt Hemmings from United Utilities Group PLC says “Every Drop Counts” in corporate PR communications this week. “We wanted to get in touch to say a big thank you for helping us save water during the recent hot, dry weather, and to share an update on our water resources as we head into autumn. While we’ve seen some welcome rain recently, and there’s more in the forecast, our reservoirs still need a lot more to recover fully.”

Based on what they previously said, at no point was there a critical water shortage in Manchester area. I know some places in France virtually “ran out of water”.

When will climate action be taken seriously???

3 years pass by just like that

y laptop is just one week away now from 1,000 days of uptime:

 uptime
 12:54:06 up 993 days,  4:06,  3 users,  load average: 8.19, 8.70, 7.92

Knock on wood, “1000 days” soon!

Meanwhile, we’ve taken advantage of the holidays to do a lot of exercise and at one point I went to a gym, seeing that I can still ‘fullstack’ all the equipment there. What makes it more special than before is my age.

How time flies.