My goal for the next season is “catch up on older shows while hoping there’s more to watch than just Frieren”. Maybe I’ll break down and try to watch the first season of Torture Princess, since the second season of that is airing, and it has at least one thing going for it.

Kicking it old-school

One of the windows at my house has shifted so much in its frame that it can’t make contact with the alarm sensor any more. While the alarm guy was checking things out for the door replacement next week, I asked him about turning on a bypass for that window. I’d managed to do it when I first moved in, but hadn’t kept links to the specific docs page I’d found for the unit.

He didn’t know either. He called a technician who was nearby, and the method he knew didn’t work. So he brought in his laptop, pulled out a console cable, logged into it directly, and set the bypass.

That didn’t work. So he called the senior tech, and she walked him through the 25-year-old GUI to the real manual bypass button.

That worked once, and then it re-enabled itself, so he called her back and she walked him through removing it from the set of active sensors. That worked.

The next-level hack would have been completely deleting that sensor from the config, but then they’d have had to redo the config when the window gets replaced (Spring, unless something else competes for my house budget).

While he was there, he also did something that another tech skipped three years ago when I moved in: configured the remote access so they can fix things like that directly from the office. It was originally set up to use a landline to call in alerts, but I don’t have one of those, so it now has a cellular modem that’s always online. It worked for calling in alarms, but they didn’t have the serial number and access code recorded, so they couldn’t connect to it.

A stroon by any other name…

Akebono Sangyo makes a popular line of clear plastic coffee servers whose Amazon listings announce they’re made of “stroon”. Not to be confused with the musical artist Stroon or a combination strainer/spoon, this is the romanized trade name ストロン, short for ストロントライタン = “Strong Tritan”, which has started showing up a lot recently in coffee gear. Wikipedia and “helpful” AIs that scrape it insist Tritan’s not safe for hot beverages, while the manufacturer and dozens of coffee companies say it’s both dishwasher and microwave-safe, and can handle boiling water as well as being tossed off a cliff.

Nice product, totally fake pictures

When my sister was in town a while back, we took our parents out for dinner at a nice Asian Fusian restaurant, and they served our bottle of saké in one of these:

It’s a nice-looking gadget for chilling drinks without diluting them, but when you look at the “real-life” pictures in the listing, every single one of them is a clumsy cut-and-paste job that doesn’t even deserve to be called “Photoshopping”.

Another MacOS Preview quirk…

This one isn’t new, but it’s been a low-key annoyance for years. If you tell it to open a bunch of files of the same type, say open *.png, you will often get two windows, with no obvious reason some of them ended up in the second one. Close the app, type the same command again, and all the images will load in one window so you can navigate between them. It doesn’t matter how many things you’re opening; could be 2, could be 200.

The app also sorts the images by the order they appear on the command line, and when it does the two-window thing, there’s not a consistent pattern to which ones end up where.

(grown-up Misty is unrelated, but the NPC gals in the new Pokemon game are getting a lot of attention for their sex appeal…)

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