Maskhoooooole!

As I walked up to the grocery-store entrance today, I was greeted with fresh “masks required!” signs. Benito Newsom reappears after his mysterious two-week absence and suddenly the masks are back on; coincidence?

Banished to the Boonies with Boobies, episode 6

TODO

(haven't had time to watch it yet, after my plans for the week were disrupted by a VMware outage. apparently a transient disruption of one of your backing datastores confuses the entire hypervisor, leaving you with a bunch of half-up virtuals, even if they weren't using that particular datastore; fun-fun-fun!)

Still not a lot of fan-art for this one, but at least one person liked last week’s bath-elf enough to sketch her, in and out of her adventuring costume:

NSFW

Exclusive offer. Excuse me, “offer”.

Dear Bank of America, it’s great that you’re offering me $500 if I open a checking account with you. However, the strings attached to the offer make me… “less than enthusiastic”: either set up direct-deposits totalling $10,000 over 90 days (must be salary, pension, or Social Security to qualify), or deposit at least $50,000 within a month and maintain that balance for 90+ days. 60 days after meeting one of those conditions, I’d get the $500.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that if I didn’t continue to maintain one of those conditions after receiving the $500, I’d be hit with enough fees to wipe out the modest “reward”.

No thanks, I’d rather keep digging through boxes of old Magic cards, which have already sold for about 50 times as much money, even after subtracting the 28% the IRS will be taking. (yes, the long-term capital gains tax for collectibles is pretty rude)

Also, Chase (who actually has branches in the city I might move to) just sent me a similar offer for $225, and all they require is a $500 monthly direct deposit, and then they’ll pay out within 15 days. So, y’know, up your game, BoA.

(pourover-pony is unrelated)

Left hand, meet right

A month ago, Citibank sent me an offer to convert my Diamond Preferred Mastercard into a Rewards+ Mastercard, which I did. Today, I opened my mailbox and found a pre-selected offer for… another Diamond Preferred Mastercard, with a slightly higher interest rate.

Not a re-conversion, an additional credit line. Which I most emphatically do not need, because I already have more empty credit cards than I have any realistic use for. Seriously, I could buy several brand-new cars if I wanted to, and if there were any not held hostage on container ships by Democrat ineptitude.

Unrelated,

My mail also included a “print-your-own-postage-stamps” offer from stamps.com. I last purchased a sheet of 20 stamps in 2018, and haven’t used them all up yet. I don’t think I need this.

iCloud For Windows, version 13

…for anyone whose kink is getting fucked by a cloud.

(seriously, Apple has enough trouble making their applications work on their own platform; they don’t do Windows)

Fun with HP Care Packs

Remember when I ordered my new laptop and expressed some frustration when selecting from the warranty options that didn’t have useful descriptions or linked detail pages?

I’ve had it for a month now, and the warranty option I chose (3-year with accidental-damage protection and lojack) wasn’t showing up on the support site. The lojack setup and licensing was there, but not the actual warranty. Twenty minutes on the phone with HP support this morning produced the discovery that the option I selected as part of the purchase wasn’t actually compatible with the product.

Their initial response was to offer a refund so I could purchase the correct warranty, but I pointed out that it was tied to the lojack that had already been activated, and they’d have to connect the new purchase with that, and after a few minutes on hold, she got approval to just put the correct warranty on it.

So, yes, the reason that the most comprehensive option offered with the original purchase was the cheapest was that it wasn’t supposed to be on the list at all. I wouldn’t have objected to paying the difference, but the support department isn’t set up to handle that.

(the Queen of Chupacabra knows all about double-checking contracts; now, anyway)

Speaking of paying the difference

When we moved our pre-paid hotel reservations for the Japan trip, they charged us the full cost of the rooms again. When I called the main number for the chain (on Monday, because it goes to voicemail on weekends, and nobody bothers calling back), they apologized and said that I’d have to talk directly to each hotel, and connected me to the first one. At 3am in Japan.

I have to call back tonight, when their reservations desks are actually open. Sigh.

I read this wrong…

Ad on Reddit: “Explore the epic end of the universe in the new season of Doctor Who”.

I saw: “Explore the end of Doctor Who”.

Bonus: really terrible picture of Doctor Sue in a hands-up-don’t-shoot pose.

(yeah, I’m not buying it)

Converting trolls to whores

In the latest pointless (alleged) adoption of crypto, Reddit (supposedly) will convert karma points into crypto. Many of these reports have turned out to be fabricated to inflate the price of whatever funny-money is involved. In this case, they advertise it as Ethereum, before the fine print reveals that it would be a separate blockchain instance.

To drive home the message that this is complete bullshit, one of the pull quotes is:

“When we all pull this off, we would onboard 500M web2 users into web3 and then there is no going back. Let me say that again - 500 million new crypto users.”

I count four bald-faced lies in that quote. Did I miss any?

Buying a pig in a poke…

Alec Baldwin, cop-hater, now demands an off-duty cop on every set. Way to change the subject there, killer.

Warning: Graphic violence

Well, graphics-card larceny, at least. One more reason you won’t be getting a new gaming PC for Christmas…

(The witch-detective of the highlands is on the case! And the Demon Queen Pecora is on the witch!)

You don’t need Alder Lake to break Denuvo DRM

…just wait until they let a domain registration lapse.

(Raphtalia says, “never interrupt the enemy when they’re making a mistake”)

Restaurant To Another World, episode 2.6

Elf girls just want to have fun… and vegan burgers. Boys just want to have pizza… and a touch of gay subtext. The art quality is definitely inversely proportional to the number of characters on-screen, but they kept it fairly well-controlled this time, and, as usual, the food looked great.

Both stories feature returning characters, with the traveling elf chef picking up a stray kitten, and the merchant heir dragging along a chef friend to try to figure out the recipes. So far they’ve done a pretty good job of mixing the mostly-independent stories from the novels; I haven’t bothered working out the adaptation order, because there are really only a few significant plot threads, and the rest can be rearranged pretty freely.

The only downer this week is that the Crunchyroll app is basically useless on the FireTV box. On a good day, it randomly drops from HD to SD a few times an episode, but on a Friday night, it’s clear they’re bandwidth-constrained, and the app doesn’t buffer nearly enough to keep streaming at all. I ended up sitting in front of my 55-inch TV watching it on an iPad Mini.

(I could have brought over my Win11 laptop with its full-sized HDMI port, but I didn’t want to get up; it was a long day. Crunchyroll does allow downloading shows, but not with the standard paid account; you need to pay extra for it)

Stranger than satire…

For many years, there existed a sharp, funny publication with the title Journal of Irreproducible Results, now available only via The Internet Archive.

It is no longer necessary, because in recent years it has become clear that all journals are filled with irreproducible results.

Don’t mispartisan them!

People are busy arguing if the massive “infrastructure” bill is truly “bipartisan”, which just exposes their bigotry and badthink. Get with the times, sheeple! It’s transpartisan, identifying as revenue-neutral infrastructure-building inflation-reversing job-creation, and its pronoun is “suck it taxpayer!”.

(two-drink minimum is unrelated)

Pig in a poke…

After looking at a lot of houses on Zillow, I’ve reached the point that my nose twitches at certain listings, and I immediately start looking for the catch. Like the words “sold as-is to settle an estate”, or the careful framing of the pictures to hide the fact that the neighbor’s basketball court is ten feet from the master bedroom windows, or even just the eight feet of kitchen counter space that doesn’t have a single power outlet on it.

But this one is special. Only a four-minute drive from my mom’s house, with 4 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, 2,800 square feet, central heat and air, fireplace, natural gas furnace/water heater/range, 2-car attached garage, finished basement, large deck, etc, all on just over half a wooded acre. There are no interior pictures, and the description does say “needs some TLC”, so you might think that’s why it’s only $325,000: a classic fixer-upper.

No.

Not even close.

Google Maps shows that it’s next door to a church parking lot.

A seven-acre parking lot (that’s 28,000+ square meters, for y’all furriners), for a mega-church with a large concert hall.

Bathing Princess and Knight-Pharmacist, episode 5

Exposition goes down a lot better when it’s delivered by a naked elf hottie to a naked human hottie. Just sayin’.

I don’t know how I feel about the hair-based censorship, though; if they’d used steam, you could at least expect them to remove it on the Blurays, but using long hair suggests they don’t plan to upgrade to nudity.

Related, don’t hit on the emotionally-fragile Hero. Sage advice, yo.

(was I the only one who missed the assistoroid-based censorship in the AsoIku sauna scenes? It was adorable and in character, with just a hint of fourth-wall-break)

Komi Can’t Even, episode 3

Very cute. More, please.

Unicode TL/DR

So I’ve done a lot of reading about the Unicode security vulnerability I mentioned earlier. As part of explaining it to my team, I came up with what I think is a helpful visual:

That is, you embed the direction-switching markers in string literals or comments, follow them with enough characters to effectively “backspace” over the malicious code, and then cover them up with innocuous-looking code. Most common layout engines only test for the common case of rendering sensible right-to-left strings like Hebrew or Arabic names in the middle of a paragraph, and don’t try to solve the general problem of text that can go back and forth multiple times.

Fun fact: while Unicode is not (yet) Turing-complete, the BIDI codes are not just on/off switches; they’re stack-based push/pop operators that get auto-popped at the end of each paragraph. For whatever definition of “paragraph” your software implements.

Spin the cylinder, not the facts

Lawyers for the armorer involved in Alec Baldwin’s fatal shooting of Halyna Hutchins are claiming sabotage!

Every single claim quoted in this article is bullshit. The only thing that’s relevant, but not a valid excuse, is claiming that the armorer was being forced to also work as assistant props manager, “which took her away from her duties as armorer”. That provides support for other claims that the shoot was poorly-funded, short on manpower, and mismanaged, but doesn’t get her off the hook. This is a case where the phrase you had one job applies, and that job was “maintaining control over lethal weapons”.

They’re admitting it simply in the hopes of shifting the blame up the chain to people with deeper pockets, all the way back to… executive producer Alec Baldwin.

All is proceeding as foreseen…

Microsoft Metaverse will include Excel, Powerpoint.

(where do you want to go today?)

BIDI-BIDI-BIDI

The latest widespread security alert is the Unicode bi-directional text marker. The tech community has finally noticed that almost nobody is capable of correctly implementing the giant mess of committee-driven features shoehorned into the Unicode standard, with completely predictable results.

NSFBR

Emacs falls for the examples, but less, cat, and vi don’t. Apple’s Textedit.app falls for it, too, but nobody would mistake that for a code editor.

Whatever they’re selling…

In fairness, it’s magical thinking all the way down…

Little-monster report

45 kids. So, maybe a bit less than half of a typical year, but at least they were out and about without face condoms, and had no fear of socializing. I went to the trouble of reassuring media-frightened parents by pre-packing half-pound assortments into zip-lock bags, and got some thank-yous for that. Half the kids actually squeezed right past the socially-distanced candy bin and headed toward my front door like seasoned troops, though. Warmed my evil maskless heart, that did.

I might have gotten more if the neighbors at the end of the court had had lights on. The downside of being in the middle is that if a group has to pass by several unlit houses to find out if there’s any candy, they’ll often just keep going.

Next year? Well, perhaps I’ll be somewhere else.

503, Microsoft?

The US site for microsoft.com was hard down this morning. Coincidentally, I hope, Pixy commented on a large-scale brute-force login attack on their cloud accounts.

(I do not have a picture of a cloud-based minefield, so please, just think about protecting your vulnerable accounts catgirls)

“I speak QA to my Apple”

…because nobody at Apple speaks it any more, leading to bricked Macs after Monterey upgrade. There’s also a series of crippling memory leaks being reported, but that just puts the cherry on top.

(trash-fire is related)

Crisis On Infinite Housing

I chatted with my parents Sunday afternoon, and sent them my current short-list of houses in the area. My mom emailed back that she’d actually been in #6 for their estate sale, and it was quite nice. Baffling decision on the range, though; the space is clearly designed for a standard range hood, but they went with a drawdown fan and left the hood space empty with a bit of decorative framing on the opening. Also, the custom-built kitchen island has no power whatsoever.

Am I accelerating the move? Maaaybe. Not so much the moving-in part, but quite possibly the buying-and-renovating part. I’ve acquired considerable affection for my top 3 houses, and while they’ve all been listed for more than 30 days in a market where most are being snapped up in 3-4, I’d honestly hate to miss them all. Especially the top one, which just really appeals to me.

I have sufficient cash on hand to put 20% down right now and still cover closing fees, and I could double that a month from now when our stock lockout period ends, making it possible to pay on both for at least six months with no worries, with the final move in March/April. Meanwhile, my mortgage company’s current estimate of my equity exceeds the total cost of the new house, so I’d have plenty when it was all over to rebuild my reserves, and no mortgage payment at all.

(I’d be able to afford regular maid service at the new house, but regular maid-service will continue to be a blog-only feature)

Japan in the Spring?

Gosh, I hope so. We’re rebooking the not-gonna-happen-in-two-weeks trip to the matching dates in March. Which more-or-less coincides with when I’d hand over the keys to the realtors and officially move to Ohio. We’ll still be flying out of SFO, but when we get back, I’d just spend the night at an airport hotel and then fly away to my new home.

Alexa The Too-Friendly Puppy

My biggest gripe about the “classic” Mac OS was that it treated everyone as an eternal beginner. It was always right up there in your face, refusing to get out of your way and let you do the things you had become expert at. They’ve been trending back this way since the limited functionality of the i-devices began to influence their desktop environment, and Microsoft is flirting with it as well in some aspects of the Win11 UI. Both are also motivated by making you dependent on their Clown Services, of course.

The most in-your-face slobbering puppy on the block, though, is Alexa, which started out as the “AI” sage who set your alarms, turned on your lights, and answered your questions, and gradually shifted to yapping at you after every interaction and shitting on the carpet if you try to make her stop. And it’s the same canned advice every fucking time, no matter how you respond.

“by the way, did you know that you can…”
“while you’re waiting, how about…”
“to hear the rest of the album, say…”
“would you like me to…”
etc, etc.

Apparently there’s an executive at Amazon who thinks that everyone adores the experience of dealing with an attention-starved and slightly incontinent pet.

(this dog is welcome to get in my face and slobber, as long as he brings his handler…)

Restaurant To Another World, episode 2.5

Slight slip in character art, as they fill the restaurant back up for two first-timers; this week Sarah was the recurring character to get a bit wonky-eyed in a scene. First up, pretty boy gets some tail, followed by an adventurer chasing a different sort of treasure, with the latter framed by a conversation with Our Chef’s dessert supplier.

I’ve decided that I need to rip a copy of the “cuisine triumph” tune, so I can play it whenever people eat my cooking.

The simple pleasures

James Hoffmann, a man who has a strong preference for light-roasted “specialty” coffee, freshly roasted, ground right before brewing, and prepared with care, just reviewed every Nespresso-branded pod he could buy. There were a number of knee-jerk defensive reactions on the trash-fire that is Reddit (I don’t even try to look at Youtube comments), but the folks on the Nespresso Discord came away grudgingly approving of his fairness. (update: except for a few of the (actual) teenagers)

(Kumoko is unrelated)

Update: HP Aero 13.3

Still liking the new Win11 laptop, but just ran into an annoying issue: trying to copy data from an SSD connected to the right-side USB3 port threw up semaphore timeout alerts, every time (error 0x80070079). Worked fine on the left, or on the USB-C port. Searching for the specific error shows it’s a long-standing generic message for driver issues with network and storage interfaces (with some very scammy “solutions” high in the search results). So, yeah, fix yer shit, HP.

Speaking of Win11…

Tentatively, I’m using Edge as my default browser, since I needed something that I could quickly set to default to wiping all cookies and local data on exit, but preserve them for whitelisted domains. The interface isn’t as convenient or detailed as the Cookie app for the Mac, but I was able to export the list from there, reformat it in Emacs, and paste it in pretty quickly.

I’ve also imported the Rocky Linux 8.4 image that I set up with my usual shell environment, and a decent set of RPMs (which is how I found the USB issue above). It’s nice that they have official instructions for WSL-ifying Rocky. Like many other custom distros, they start with a Docker image, so you end up needing to reinstall a lot of things for general-purpose use, but that also means that you’re spared a lot of the usual Anaconda cruft.

For font management, I have a test-install of FontBase, but honestly, after all the praise they give themselves on the site, it’s pretty bare-bones. I’ve been using FontExplorer X for a long time on the Mac side (they abandoned their Windows software years ago), and this is… not remotely comparable. It is, however, completely integrated with Google Fonts, putting the entire collection a few clicks away.

This weekend I want to do some side-by-side performance comparisons for Lightroom and Photoshop, and maybe test Hugo build performance in various configurations.

(…or maybe I’ll just feed cats)

Update: Synology Active Backup for Business

So far, the nightly backup job for the new laptop has been running smoothly at 3 AM each day, as long as the lid is open so that it’s just idle or sleeping, not hibernating.

(backups are kid of like maid-service, right? close enough)

Notes:

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