Farcebook

Author: james

  • Power Cuts

    Currently there’s a powercut at work. This is a bit awkward considering I teach computer science. No power, no computers.

    Except it’s not so bad, everyone has a laptop. I’m writing this on my Remarkable 2, next to me is my work Surface Pro. And in my bag is my personl Chromebook. They’re all battery powered, and fully charged.

    Oh right yeah… we use MS Teams for everything, so while I can work on my own device I can’t access any of the online content because the wifi and Internet have shut down.

    My Chromebook is a Chromebook, so without access to the Google hive mind that’s no use.

    Never fear, I can teather to my mobile phone and use its data connection. Except everyone in the area is trying to do the same thing so while I have quite a strong 4G signal, there’s no data connection.

    So we’re all just sat here waiting with nothing to do. Can’t even get water because the drinking water machines are electric.

    At least the magnetic door locks fail safe and we’re not locked in. But we are sat in our separate rooms, spread across a wide area unable to find out what’s going on because everyone communicates over Teams or WhatsApp and you need a functional Internet connection for that.

    Fortunately I charge my car at home. There’s staff that use work’s chargers. I wonder if they have enough power to get to the nearest public charger about 10 miles away.

    Isn’t modern life wonderful. I’ll report back when the riots begin, not that you’ll be able to read this of course. I can’t get online to post it.

  • What a load of farmyard manure this gardening thing is.

    What a load of farmyard manure this gardening thing is.

    It’s only taken half a year, but my greenhouse is now finally ready for things to be planted in it! It has all its windows, won’t blow away and after a trip to Wickes the ground is now suitable for growing plants again.

    Can confirm the manure is real manure, from real cows, it might take a bit to get the smell out the car. The compost is some sort of weird fluffy nonsense full of sticks and a random nail. It’s not very good. I’ve used it to plant some beans and peas so they can germinate out the reaches of hungry pigeons. It’s not even pretending to be shredded wood or the other poorly composted garden waste they normally sell in bags.

    The greenhouse now stinks a bit, so I will leave the manure to rot down a bit more. I’ve dug it into the soil so hopefully the worms and things will get at it too. This is a before photo, I didn’t think to take an after one.

    Here’s the green manure I sowed the other week. It’s rained a lot recently so everything is starting to grow really well.

    There’s a small weed problem over on the bit where I am trying to grow carrots and parsnips. I can’t tell what anything is, and without picking out individual weeds this mess is just going to have to fight it out until nothing is at risk from an unexpected hoe slicing its leaves off.

  • Copilot – your unwanted everyday intrusion

    Copilot – your unwanted everyday intrusion

    After last night’s Windows update it appears I have something new to disable on my computer that was installed without my asking…

    I asked it how I could remove it, it gave me pointless generic information I could have found using Google.

    A bit more of a specific question made it get the point. It’s certainly not as “clever” as ChatGPT.

    Why do sites keep telling us to run gpedit.msc when it’s not a core part of Windows, and is only installed on the Pro versions?

    I seriously can’t wait for this current AI fad to go away, it reminds me of the voice assistant fad where everything needed a voice assistant until companies discovered nobody was using them.

  • Roku Express 4K

    Back in the mists of time I used to watch video on my TV using an XBox that I’d modded with a mod chip, running XBMC. It played videos off a Linux file server. While everyone else was playing DVDs on their telly, I was the oddball streaming video.

    Things have progressed, and after a few failed attempts at streaming my own video to various media PCs I finally discovered Jellyfin and the app for the Roku streaming media device. Also by this time I was watching quite a lot of YouTube and the Roku was a better way to watch YouTube instead of using a Chromecast. They worked fine, but needed a phone, and could only do YouTube.

    The Roku device I owned worked fine until a few years ago when it started buffering, stalling and just plain acting weird. I did a bit of investigation, found some oddities with my WiFi, fixed those but the Roku still wouldn’t play video properly and it was super irritating.

    I came to the conclusion video that we watched five years ago was probably at a lower bit rate than what we watch now. And either the 2.4ghz WiFi my Roku used couldn’t cope, or the device itself was a bit underpowered.

    Either way I finally gave in and bought the 4K version, and so far it seems to work great. No buffering, no weird black screens instead of video. I did have to force it to 1080p video only though, otherwise Netflix decided to try 4K and my TV doesn’t do 4K so all I saw was a black screen.

  • DofE 2024

    DofE 2024

    Where I probably walked more miles than the children, and everyone got very very muddy.

    Last weekend was the annual Duke of Edinburgh silver expedition, and once again I was herding children around the Yorkshire Dales. There wasn’t any snow this year, but it was raining and there was plenty of boot-sucking mud.

    Normally I spend the weekend bored, sat in a car watching kids roam the countryside using a Spot tracker in each groups’ bags.

    This year, they decided they wanted to go off-piste and discover the wilderness by themselves. And I got to do my steps stomping about trying to find them.

    Some of these miles were earned simply walking around the campsites, or trekking off from a convenient carpark to find a path junction where I’d planned to meet the kids. You can do a lot of steps if your toilet is a five minute walk away. It kind of shows how sitting still at your desk really isn’t a healthy lifestyle. You don’t need to stride off across the countryside to get some exercise, just put things out of arms reach so you have to get up and move a bit more.

    You also see some quite amusing things on your wanderings. I wonder what the story behind this road sign is…

    These lot probably know… They know everything. They’re probably reading this blog post right now.