In Trojan Printer I made a nearly coherent rant about crappy HP software. Well now I have a Mac, I get to rant about it all over again! Their printer driver puts an icon in the dock (which is for the Trash Can, Finder, and any APPLICATIONS the user it running or has chosen to put there, not for SYSTEM SOFTWARE). This icon jumps up and down at me when the Mac starts, and sits there as a running program for the life of my session. I can close it, but asking it not to remain in the dock, telling it not to start on log on, and removing it from startup items fail to stop the bloody thing doing that. I was reduced to uninstalling the driver, then installing it again wit ‘minimum installation’. Bloody icon is still there. Shonky shonky shonky.
Further to the theory of shiteons, I think I am going through a field of the opposite sort of thing right now. Progress just keeps on happening. Not by itself, mind, it’s taking effort. But the strange thing is, at other times I would have to spend this much effort just to stay on one channel on the telly and watch something all the way to the end, let alone to fix up an entire house, send CDs off for a salsa gig, fix my blog… There’s the example. Fixing this blog. I just went onto a themes site, got a theme, switched it on… Job’s a good’un in about 5 minutes. This has taken me gawd knows how long to get around to, and if I’d tried it at any other time apart from just then, it would have taken me 5 hours spread over 6 different evenings in a two-month period. Hurrah for productivon clouds!
Bloody careers service. We had a program for the school BBC micro in about 1987 that asked you what your subjects were and told you what you could be. Only, it always told you Telephone Engineer, no matter what else came up.
Why did this never come up as a potential career avenue? I think I would have been just the man for that job.
How was the bugs’ choir able to get on the radio so easily?
Because they had a really good ant tenor.
Do you know why I had such a wonderful bank holiday weekend? Do you know what costs £26 and gives you three days of joy and keeps giving for weeks after you return it?
Give up?
Hiring a George wet ‘n’ dry vacuum cleaner. Yes folks, the whole house is spanky clean, intimidatingly so, and the dubious stains on the seats of my second hand car are no more! And while the carpets and car were drying we managed to mow both lawns, wash the bedding, re-arrange the lounge, throw away some books and records and generally spring clean, since this is the first proper bit of warm weather we’ve had whilst not stuck in an office or booked elsewhere.
So I am definitely middle aged, but I am also happy!
The BBC Magazine Article.
The Communications Act 2003 says a “person who (a) dishonestly obtains an electronic communications service, and (b) does so with intent to avoid payment of a charge applicable to the provision of that service, is guilty of an offence”.
Well, in the case of sitting down with a laptop in range of an UNPROTECTED network, what dishonesty can there be? Except for Christians, you do not get to say “It’s dishonest because it breaks the law that says it’s illegal to do it dishonestly”.
What happens when you connect to a WiFi network?
1) the network ADVERTISES its presence and its name. As the network’s owner, you can switch this off.
2) your laptop REQUESTS to join the network. As the network’s owner, you can choose to restrict the devices that will be permitted (by MAC address). MAC addresses are supposedly unique, therefore MAC address spoofing can be construed as dishonesty, since you are having to deliberately pretend to be another device.
3) the network GRANTS a place on the network. As the network’s owner, you can secure this a number of ways. The simplest (and least secure) is by means of a WEP password. However, the password challenge is something other than granting access, so there is now some culpability on the part of the laptop user who has to guess or crack the password in order to get in. It’s extremely reasonable, if even somewhat lax, to regard a simple WEP password as the MINIMUM ACCEPTABLE security on such a connection. If your terms of service say you shouldn’t share your connection, then you should be counted as in breach if you do not set a password. If your terms of service do permit sharing, then you are permitting sharing by providing a service with no password.
In the article, someone said it’s like reading a book in the light spilled from someone’s window. That’s not quite it, because there is a reduction in the service available to the paying customer. Some degree of bandwidth is denied the paying customer for the duration of the “freeloader’s” session. It’s closer to borrowing someone’s pen. The ink is used up, and while you are borrowing the pen the pen’s owner can’t use it… but if you asked, or if you borrowed it when they weren’t using it, I don’t think there’s a court in the land that would convict you. Things might be different if you had a post-it saying “please don’t use this pen” or “this pen is evidence in a criminal case. do not touch,” or if you put the pen in a safe.
1) Bend from the knee
2) Use a palm grip
Yesterday I met Rach for lunch and we nipped into Monk’s X for a nibble. I mentioned that Mum was coming that evening, not Tues as I had thought, and she thought I looked a bit knackered. So do you know what she did? After I dropped her home and went back to work, she got a lift about 1/5 of the way to my house, walked the remaining 1.5 hours, and tidied my house pretty much from top to bottom. I actually bumped into her as I’d left work much earlier than usual in order to get home and do some tidying myself but if I hadn’t, she would have disappeared like the house-tidying pixie that she is!
Definitely a keeper.
Williamson’s Tunnels were constructed in rural Edge Hill, now in the thick of urban Liverpool, beside the university, in the early part of the 19th century by wealthy eccentric Joseph Williamson. The favourite theory about why he did so is that it kept diggers, brick layers, and brick makers in pocket, and from starvation. The vaults were immense, putting me in mind of the “Brave New World” section of the musical version of War Of The Worlds, where a minor character wants to dig out a whole underground existence. Though the tour is short in distance, it is very rich in facts, experience and atmosphere. It really brings home the scale of the works and the guide was absolutely brilliant - down to earth, passionate, knowledgeable and very clear. I heartily recommend a visit.
After a wonderful day trip to Lincoln (Lincoln was OK, the company was wonderful) I got back home and unloaded my spoils. There was shit all over the hardstanding. Suspecting the neighbour-but-one’s Jack Russell Terrier, I asked my neighbour if she’d seen the dog out and about that day. She said no but that it had been in her garden as there was poop all over her lawn, patio furniture, and even on her windscreen.
Well, I knocked at the nneighbour’s door, got no answer, went indoors to write them a letter, then went to his neighbour on the far side to see whether he’d had any trouble (he hadn’t) had a good old chinwag about the state of the neighborhood (pretty good actually, but blighted by shared driveways and unclear rights of access), knocked again at the nneighbour’s, and went home and cooked dinner.
Thinking about it today, how did the JRT get on the bonnet of my neighbour’s car?
So now we’re hypothesizing that the nneighbour asked his kid to clear the poop from their back garden, and the kid decided “out of sight, out of mind” and slung it over the fence.
At least that’s given me an inroad into discussing the matter with him…