Curry-a-go-go

Restaurant To Another World episode 2.3 delivers teens devouring burgers, and the legendary black dragon of death devouring new forms of curry. The food porn is up to snuff, and at least some of the closeup character art is well done. Happy Kuro with curry on her face is adorable.

Terminate and Stay, Resident

Logged into my Pi-hole and found it was now blocking 49% of all web requests. That was a little nuts, but all of the new traffic turned out to be Google analytics being called every 3 seconds from my new Windows 11 laptop.

The culprit (kill, kill, reboot, kill, kill) was HP’s Omen Gaming Hub. There’s no tray icon associated with this, and no hint that the application leaves shit running all the time on your system, reporting data at a quite unreasonable interval. plonk

Now, it’s possible (but unlikely; it persisted after multiple reboots) that it really only intended to report once, and was frustrated by my blocking, but even that reflects sloppy and insecure development practices; retrying a failed transaction every three seconds without any kind of backoff is a recipe for disaster when you ship something on every new computer you sell. “Ask me about taking down 1/3 of MCI’s west coast long distance service every time WebTV’s Oracle server crashed”.

Latest hilarious spam

As usual with most of the crap landing in my spam folder these days, this went to my cpan.org email address, and was sent through the spam-launderers at pobox.com:

Greetings, from The illuminati world elite empire. Bringing the poor, the needy and the talented to limelight of fame, riches, powers and security, get recognized in your business, political race, rise to the top in whatever you do, be protected spiritually and physically! All these you will achieve in a twinkle of an eye when you get initiated to the great Illuminati empire. Once you are initiated to the illuminati empire you will get numerous benefits and reward.

Yeah, because the Illuminati have always been about raising up poor and needy Perl hackers. And terrible grammar.

Interestingly, this is just an email pitch, with no embedded malware or links to sketchy web sites, just a gmail address to contact for more information.

…which doesn’t match the sender address, of course, which is in the .lu TLD.

(Komi-san is unrelated, but will finally debut on Netflix on Thursday)

Toast & Fry

I was actually enjoying the counter space freed up by the dramatic slightly-out-of-warranty failure of my DeLonghi Livenza convection toaster oven, but I did miss the ability to turn frozen pizzas and other common household objects into food, and Costco happened to have a deal on the Ninja Foodi Digital Air Fry Oven. This precise model isn’t on their web site, because the SKU is Costco-specific, but it appears to be identical to the SP101; I don’t see any difference in features. Two things about it that aren’t quite as useful as they initially appear:

1. it’s only 8 inches tall when in use.

2. it stores vertically when not in use to reclaim counter space.

The catch is that you need to leave several inches of open space behind it, especially if the outlet you’re plugging it into is directly behind, as mine is. The net result is that even in the storage position it chews up a full 11 inches of a standard 24-inch-deep kitchen counter. The old one took up space all the time, but you could at least store things on top of it. So, mixed blessing there.

First note: it’s quite loud in air-fry mode. To the point that it’s distracting from 20 feet away in the next room.

Second note: checking the table of suggested settings for frozen food, I find it interesting that they consider the Standard Unit of Pizza Rolls to be “50”. This is like the honest serving size of Fig Newtons, which is “one sleeve”. (classical reference)

Third note: it gets quite hot on top when in use. If you need a plate warmer, Ninja’s got you covered.

Does it work? So far, so good. It competently air-fried a frozen personal pan pizza in 10 minutes, which is a common task at my house. It also did a good job baking cheese-stuffed chicken breasts wrapped in bacon, so we’re two for two.

Laptop fingering

With more use, I think the difference I’m seeing with the fingerprint sensor is that Apple has programmed a slight delay into theirs, so that you can slide your fingertip into position, while the one on the Aero starts reading as soon as you touch it, and rejects the half-seen fingertip.

Also, it’s a pain in the ass to switch back and forth between Command-C/V and Control-C/V for cut-and-paste. It’s been a long time since I’ve had MacOS and Windows side-by-side on the desk; I’ve really only been using Windows for gaming for the past 15 years or so.

Retraining my Japanese text entry is going to be even harder; the input methods have basically nothing in common.

One thing I’m not going to port over directly is my command-line Japanese dictionary tool, which for historical reasons uses MongoDB as its database. In fairness, I wrote it 11.5 years ago, when I was using MongoDB at work, and just haven’t touched it since then (my laptop even had spinning disks inside it!). I made a stripped-down lookup tool using Sqlite, but that threw out a lot of the available data in order to create compact page-by-page vocabulary lists for my custom book-reading scripts.

Our Digital Future

Nope, Kannagi’s not streaming anywhere, and the DVDs are long out of print, and the only used DVD offer on Amazon is for $86. Quick, Robin, to the TorrentMobile!

…which seems to be missing an engine today, as my client struggles to connect with peers. I confess, my first response was “what did Apple break now?”.

WTF, Acronis?

Okay, I go to the Acronis web site, and what do I find? They’re pushing a conference called “Cyber Fit”, prominently featuring the co-founder of Reddit, an expert in cybering. Someone should really tell them that adding “Cyber” to everything is about as fresh and modern as advertising a Prodigy-compatible modem.

And, yes, services for individual home users is third on their list. Their primary interest is clearly selling to service providers and businesses now. It’s like they’re telling me up front that they’re not motivated to support me, with Cyber Protect Home Office playing third fiddle to Cyber Protect Cloud and Cyber Protect.

And, yes, they also sell Cyber Appliance, Cyber Backup, Cyber Disaster Recovery, and #CyberFit Tool; they really, really want to cyber with IT directors. It’s their kink.

Me, I just want reliable backup and recovery of my laptop. Everything else they want to cyber me with is something I don’t want.

Fuck it,

I’m going to try out Synology Active Backup for Business, which comes free with my NAS. It took about five seconds to install the client agent, and then I manually kicked off a full backup from the server, which quickly and successfully backed up 128 GB. The backup/restore portal looks nice, too, with an interactive browser that let me easily navigate to a specific file and download it to my Mac. If the incrementals are successful and the agent doesn’t chew up CPU and memory (always a possibility), then it’s going to work out great. If I ever travel again, I’ll have to see what ports it uses and try out remote backups.

Synology also has a free tool for backing up Microsoft 365 business accounts, which I’m considering using for one of my email domains. Mostly because it’s $30/user/year at the company store with my MS alumni discount, and I only need the one user.

---

Comments via Isso

Markdown formatting and simple HTML accepted.

Sometimes you have to double-click to enter text in the form (interaction between Isso and Bootstrap?). Tab is more reliable.

---