An epic fail

his rant is about Argos, a British retail giant/chain that can’t get some of the very basics right. Today I was scheduled to receive a wardrobe I had purchased a week earlier. It is a birthday gift for my wife. I paid effortlessly on their Web site (they’re good at taking money) and selected a 5-hour delivery slot 6 days in advance. Well, guess what? Nobody showed up. Then, at the very end of a 5-hour wait that kept me out of bed and out of work they have a robocaller call me to say they can’t deliver. No chance to say a thing, I could not speak to a person.

I phoned a couple of people at Argos (waste of time guaranteed), the latter said he would look into it and promised to call within an hour. Guess what? He never called back.

So I phoned Argos again. They struggled for 15 minutes in vain to just bring up the order on the screen. What a mess. They changed me, did not deliver, and now cannot even find the order by number, search on postcode, search on name, etc.

Don’t buy at Argos. They’re only good at charging people.

Y WIFE and I considered moving into a slightly more spacious apartment, but the people who were supposed to show up and present it never came. They even called in the morning to say the viewing will take place slightly earlier to avid combining us with other viewers. Nobody showed up neither at the original time nor the earlier time.

If you consider advertising a home, choose anything but Jordan Fishwick. It’s just not reliable. Like many agencies it is located at Deansgate, Manchester, but this one is no good. Waste of time.

Direct download as Ogg (00:01:39, 5.5 MB)

Summary: Richard Stallman speaks about US politics and the false notion of “wasted votes” (those going neither to Democrats nor Republicans)

Made entirely using Free/libre software, heavily compressed for performance on the Web at quality’s expense

Direct download as Ogg (00:03:08, 10.5 MB)

Summary: Richard Stallman speaks to TechBytes about ECHELON, PRISM, and other issues that relate to privacy after the NSA leaks

Made entirely using Free/libre software, heavily compressed for performance on the Web at quality’s expense

AVING spent over an hour searching the Web and asking around the Web for a way of automating suspension and continuation (SIGCONT and SIGINT) of process execution in GNU/Linux, I finally found a script from Q. Boiler, which I have modified a bit to make it simpler to use.

Sometimes the scheduler used in GNU/Linux systems is so resources-greedy that it will let a process take up all the CPU/core cycles and in some cases, as in mine, lead to overheat and system shutdown (my ventilation seems to be flawed or maybe to blame is the unusual summer weather here in the UK because this only ever happens in summer). Anyway, having struggled to find a way to nice a process sufficiently or send the process a universal system signal to help reduce its load on the system, I finally found something which can automate what I have been doing manually (CTRL+Z and fg), especially when rendering some Blender3D clips for my own use. Here is the simple script to be run:

#!/bin/bash
#    Based on a script from Q. Boiler (q.boiler@quantprinciple.com)


var0=0
LIMIT=20

PROCESSID=$1
SLEEP=30
RUN=10

pid=$PROCESSID

while [ "$var0" -lt "$LIMIT" ]
do



kill -SIGSTOP $pid
echo "Suspending $pid"

sleep $SLEEP

kill -SIGCONT $pid
echo "continuing execution $pid"

sleep $RUN

done
echo "killing $pid"
kill -SIGINT $pid

The way to use this is to save the above as a script, say script.sh, give it running permissions, e.g. chmod 755 script.sh, then call it with the process ID as the argument name, e.g. script.sh 46223. The intervals for running can be set within the script or with slight modifications be passed as arguments to the script (this is not crucial for my needs). In case someone else runs into the same problem I have decided to document this publicly.

penShot is a fantastic video editor for those — who like myself — are not video editing experts and cannot afford to spend hours just learning how to use a video editing program. OpenShot has all the basic functionality and it is coupled with the power of Blender to help achieve rather pretty effects and transitions. Having tried numerous other video editors for GNU/Linux and wasted many hours just trying to learn them (or failing to find some missing functionality), I can warmly recommend OpenShot.

here are reports right now about New Zealand residents taking action (e.g. protests) against illegal actions by their secret agencies and government, which include — quite famously — the illegal raid of a mansion. Here is a good reports about it.

Here is Kim telling his side of the story in a challenging interview.