No simple fix

ough people – typically men – like to make noise to get noticed when they work out. They can groan, they can dump heavy equipment, they can even play loud music (many “modern” phones can do this without external boosters). Any of those things can get them attention from people nearby. It might even give them a thrill or a power (motivational) boost if people look at them while they exercise.

Many people, however, keep it to themselves. I’m one of these people. I’m very quiet in gyms.

Older people tend to want a quiet gym. I’m not that old. Yet I’ve always liked calm atmosphere.

Gyms are typically shared (it’s too expensive to maintain and repair one at home, especially with very advanced equipment). The gym is rented, at least the bits and pieces in it (a company is contracted to provide and update the contents). It wasn’t always like that, but times have changed. It’s the same with movies and music.

One last resort when gyms get loud is to get headphones and self-isolate, but that tends to interfere with intense exercise (wires everywhere, lack of spatial awareness) and isn’t necessarily good on the eardrum. A health hazard.

Perhaps some people manage to find noise-free gyms. Even the ones that ban the use of a mobile phone (out of concern for the peace of others) have no policy on groaning and loud weight-dropping.

Aim high

Last month: E.ON (E.ON Next) Tried to Force or Trick Me Into Talking to a Chatbot, Not Staff of E.ON

he other day (or night rather) I phoned a support line; the thing to note is, some companies outsourced to call centres overseas, some hired on the cheap domestically, some experiment with voice menus (that lead to the “right” person/department), and some try chatbots (which are offensive). If one tries hard enough, there’s a domestic team over the phone (upon escalation), but it is not available 24/7. If you can reach it, things will be resolved quickly and effectively.

If we value or strive for “full employment”, we’ll collectively do our best to reject the “cheapening” or support line and always demand local workers with ample knowledge of what they support.

This isn’t about nationalism, it’s about time savings for customers. Subpart support leads to time-wasting and frustration.

2026-09-22 at 6:01AM: Things Will Only Get Better (as We Go Backwards)

aving complained about the size or capacity of toothpaste tubes, and having recently (yesterday morning) watched a song from 1993, I decided to publish this post in Techrights.

An alternative way to write it was, focus on making it seem like each 5 years, going backwards, you “get” (back) an improvement.

Botspam

cannot believe what Ebay is doing. Now it uses bots (which it calls “hey hi”) to do things that demand users do real work, to “respond” to the bots. They also send lots of SPAM. It gets worse over time.

Someone in Gopher complained the other day: “Ebay themselves have also become increasingly annoying over the years in a whole host of ways, which I don’t have time to detail.”

Same with Evri.

Stop using bots to “save work” when in fact all those bots do is give unpaid work to your customers, whom you piss off.

Some jobs aren’t worth having

t looks like many people currently quit or quietly resign from the hired guns who misuse a contempt application to curtail criticism of themselves [1, 2].

They bullied not only me and my wife; they also bullied our representatives.

Let’s hope that some insiders there finally recognised that bullying is not a legitimate way to make a living.

The harms of mobile phones are too many to even remember

understand that based on fairly recent public statistics, about 2% of people in the UK (definitely over 1%) rightly reject skinnerbox ownership. It’s not that they’re unable to afford it and not having one can lead to problems only because of the wrong assumption everyone has one or must have one.

The other day some company was asking persons in training sessions to give input, in effect leaving feedback by scanning a code. It was making the assumption everyone has the ability to scan a QR code (barcode for skinnerboxes). By doing so, it was leaving out people who don’t want to waste their lives with a “mark of the beast” (religious term) or beacon or similar.

Please don’t be one of those companies.

Appliances have gotten worse (less safe, less reliable), even branded goods from NIMA [1, 2] because people like “cheap” and companies are cheapening the production processes, materials, quality control

wo days ago we decided to carefully try to use the underwater lights we had acquired virtually for free (for context, there’s a home project this week [1, 2, 3]). I first tried them outside the water. All OK, no problems. The next step was, try the same inside the water. Oh, no. First, it was very hard to attach the darn thing to the glass. It kept floating upwards. I tried to use the water filter to force it down (in tandem), barely managed to do so. But worse yet, after some time in use we started to see the lights flickering a bit, then bright lights if not sparks came out from the socket. In the process it caused disruption to other appliances, including Rianne’s laptop. OK then, totally not worth the risk! Took it out of the socket, let it dry up for a few days. Today, in the laundry room (away from other valuable appliances and with its own distant fuse; the fusebox splits up the rooms), I plugged the thing back again. Lights not coming back up. None at all. Hmmm… try another socket. Same outcome. Try in the kitchen. Same. Just give up.

“Come on, Roy, you cannot just force it to work…”

My guess is that the fuse blew at some point. Good. Rightly so. Fuses blow up for good reasons, they’re a protection mechanism. I won’t bother replacing the fuse (I have spare ones and know how to handle these).

Whether the lights were not functioning “OK” or the goddamn thing was no longer water-resistant… who knows, right? I’ll never know. Either way, the thing was rendered unsafe to use, either underwater or outside the water (I was prepared to let it be used exclusively as the latter).

Some things are cheap for a reason. Having said that, all the other things we acquired are very good, they just needed a lot of very stubborn cleaning.

Let’s see how long those other things can last. I’m not counting on 5 years, let alone a decade.

My trust in “modern” electronics is waning. I still use appliances older than 30 years old. They still function perfectly.