A random thread for small computing things that don't really warrant a thread of their own

[Afasoas]

Our company is now going mobile first and de-prioritising the website for customers to service their accounts.

I have a spare phone I put some apps on - but these are mainly unimportant things that require minimal personal data - for instance, the app which works via bluetooth with my laser measuring doodad. The phone isn't used to place calls and has no contacts stored.

My proper phone is an Android - but without Google services, Play store etc.. The apps installed are open source and downloaded via F-Droid.
There's already a slew of app only banking services.

I know I'm going to be forced to conform at some point soon.

[Mr Larrington]

O hai Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia!

That device has been called “Denon AVR-X200” since time immemorial.  Today you decide it’s unavailable.  Which it is not.  I change the name to plain “Denon”.  You can play tunes to it.  I change it back to “Denon AVR-X2000”.  You can still play tunes to it.

Sort it out u muppets!

Kthxbai!

[Mrs Pingu]

My personal coder (AKA Pingu) wrote a formula for me to bung in excel to change a column of names of hydrocarbon molecules from the plural to the singular.
This, in combination with using Alt to copy columns from pdf to excel, and the belated (I don't know how belated) realisation that the software I needed to stick this information into has finally got into the 21st century and allowed copy and paste, meant that finally, FINALLY, I can enter an entire hydrocarbon composition with a few copy, paste and minor tweaks, as opposed to having to type in rows and rows of 3 decimal places and then find the inevitable errors....

I only wish I'd discovered that earlier than the last one of the 11 reports of data I had to enter today. But hey, the rest of my working life is my oyster..... <Dances vigorously>

[Pingu]

My personal coder (AKA Pingu)...

https://xkcd.com/1513/

[Pingu]

My personal coder (AKA Pingu)...

https://xkcd.com/1513/

This week I have been mostly 'tidying up' the code written for a part of the application we use written by an employee who works for the app provider so that it doesn't use the same bit of SQL three (3) times every times it runs  We're paying them 10 (ten) x my rate* to provide this shit 



*My rate is pretty puny, but still...

[Mr Larrington]

“Why is program X* so sodding huge?” asked $FORMER_THE_BOSS.  Because, Mr Larrington discovered, it had the same twenty-odd lines of code repeated about a hundred times instead of calling a subroutine.

* FORTRAN program, written in FORTRAN

[Pingu]

Loops? WTF 

[Pingu]

My personal coder (AKA Pingu) wrote a formula for me to bung in excel...

That was me telling Mrs P what to type into a cell in Excel  Confusing right and write...

[Feanor]

One of my retired coders saw everything 'differently' to most people.
Multiple negatives everywhere.
I call him the inventor of the 'dont do' loop:

While (! Not untrue) dont do
 {
    Stuff
  }

[Bledlow]

“Why is program X* so sodding huge?” asked $FORMER_THE_BOSS.  Because, Mr Larrington discovered, it had the same twenty-odd lines of code repeated about a hundred times instead of calling a subroutine.

* FORTRAN program, written in FORTRAN

In late 1998 or early 1999 I found some code in a COBOL program to check if the year was a leap year, & do some stuff differently if it was.

Alternatively, the programmer could have called a built-in subroutine, which would have saved the effort of writing his own code (both the date check & the code which it triggered to do a or b), & as a bonus, would have worked in the year 2000.

I fixed it. Well, I was being paid to. And I'd have been one of the people picking up the pieces if I hadn't.

Silly boy (whose first name & surname shared 8 letters in the same order with mine - the horror! I knew him) didn't know the "but not in years which are multiples of 400" rule.

[Canardly]

I decided to install a banking mobile app today. This app, amonst other things, generates log on codes for accessing the bank's on line banking system. Access to my accounts via the mobile app worked immediately following set up. However, the on line banking system refuses to accept any of the log on access codes generated via the mobile app. After half an hour on the phone with the bank's support I have been unable to resolve this. I am now having to revert to using a new hand held key generator which is being posted to me.

Is it me?

Probably for the best.  I get annoyed whenever I use the mobile banking app to do 2FA for the website, because it feels like they're pushing us to use mobile apps rather than proper computers for banking.  Which they are.

Another hour on the phone today which ended with them raising an IT ticket for my online banking a/c. I eventually sussed what is going on however. Because I  had previously installed the mobile app, I am no longer able to use a hard  form factor secure key, notwithstanding the support staff sending me a new one and when logging online again being asked to activate it. This confused matters greatly, particularly so as the on line failure message was the same as that for the mobile app.
I reinstalled the mobile phone app and was able to access my accounts via the phone but the on line account would still not accept phone generated access codes hence the IT ticket. However, later, whilst viewing various account numbers I received an on screen message stating that my phone time was out of sync. I checked the phone settings and discovered the auto update switch for the phone clock was not checked. I changed this and now all is well. How this auto update mech was switched off I do not know. I will now have to use the phone app to generate codes in future, which is not my preference, but there we are. Lesson learned.

Support staff should really have this particular fault added to their script/checklist.

[Mr Larrington]

O hai Zuckerbots!

I DO NOT WANT TO BUY A FUCKING GUITAR.

sort it out u muppets!

[Kim]

Ohnoes!  2D Mr Larrington has gone missing!

Rather too slowly it dawned on me that since 2D Mr Larrington's job is to hold a RFID tag with a readily identifiable EPC number encoded on it (testing, for the purposes of), it should be possible to locate him using RF voodoo SCIENCE.

Alas, after firing up Impinj and sweeping the aerial in random directions, not a 0xDEADBEEF in sight.  I assume he got blown into the shrubbery at Gravesend by the 600mph gusting crosswind, along with the LAZER DISPLAY BOARD (which is now b0rked) and half the BHPC.

Breaking news:  2D Mr Larrington has been found!

In a plan so cunning it could have been hatched by a fox that was professor of cunning at Oxford university, he was hiding - mildly crumpled - in barakta's little why-don't-women's-cothes-have-proper-pockets bag thingy.  Which has an RFID-proof anti-contactless-card-fraud lining.  The fiend.

[andyoxon]

Is it just me... or are more & more websites using text copy protection.  Kinda irritating.

[Mrs Pingu]

That feeling when your login details aren't accepted and the "we'll send you an email to reset your password" email doesn't arrive.

[barakta]

Is it just me... or are more & more websites using text copy protection.  Kinda irritating.

Which also probably doesn't work for accessibility either. I close the tab.

[Mrs Pingu]

That feeling when your login details aren't accepted and the "we'll send you an email to reset your password" email doesn't arrive.

Tried again this morning, got in via a different route. Serves me right for trying on the wrong side of a bottle of wine.
Wish they'd stop changing how you get into these pension websites.

[Wombat]

Is it just me... or are more & more websites using text copy protection.  Kinda irritating.

Hopefully not like one of my previous managers just uploaded on our corporate (well, Local Authority) website.  It was indeed, the dreaded jpg image of a shortish text document blagged off another organisation's website.  "what do you mean, its not text, I can read it, can't you?"  Yes, I can, but anyone using a text reader can't, and as the article was about inclusivity, its rather backfired.  Cue a long conversation about PDF documents that were basically the same, and what OCR software can or cannot do for you.  Thankfully, our graphics dept had top notch OCR software, and sent it to me as text, so I passed it on to said manager, who re-uploaded it.

Said nice graphics team also scanned and OCR'd for me, a 140 page document that was a 1995-ish re-type (could they not have found some sort of computer?) of a damaged and worn typed manuscript for a book, typed in 1948.  Hardly any errors, mostly over some weird punctuation in the original. 

[Kim]

"what do you mean, its not text, I can read it, can't you?"  Yes, I can, but anyone using a text reader can't, and as the article was about inclusivity, its rather backfired.  Cue a long conversation about PDF documents that were basically the same, and what OCR software can or cannot do for you.  Thankfully, our graphics dept had top notch OCR software, and sent it to me as text, so I passed it on to said manager, who re-uploaded it.

Half the problem is that now everyone's used to people sharing images of text on social media, because they've no idea how the internet is supposed to work.

[Afasoas]

"what do you mean, its not text, I can read it, can't you?"  Yes, I can, but anyone using a text reader can't, and as the article was about inclusivity, its rather backfired.  Cue a long conversation about PDF documents that were basically the same, and what OCR software can or cannot do for you.  Thankfully, our graphics dept had top notch OCR software, and sent it to me as text, so I passed it on to said manager, who re-uploaded it.

Half the problem is that now everyone's used to people sharing images of text on social media, because they've no idea how the internet is supposed to work.

Isn't that born out of people sharing Tweets before the authors go back and delete them?


About 25% of the CD collection re-ripped to FLAC. Hoping this time I can organise the music library without losing any tracks ...

[Feanor]

About 25% of the CD collection re-ripped to FLAC. Hoping this time I can organise the music library without losing any tracks ...

I had an odd issue with one CD...

It had some Bonus Tracks on it which the online database failed to match, and I didn't notice.
So the FLAC was missing some metadata, and when using the SONOS app, the tracks were missing from the album.
But I spotted them hiding way down under 'Unknown Artist'!

Had to go back and manually edit the missing metadata.

[Afasoas]

About 25% of the CD collection re-ripped to FLAC. Hoping this time I can organise the music library without losing any tracks ...

I had an odd issue with one CD...

It had some Bonus Tracks on it which the online database failed to match, and I didn't notice.
So the FLAC was missing some metadata, and when using the SONOS app, the tracks were missing from the album.
But I spotted them hiding way down under 'Unknown Artist'!

Had to go back and manually edit the missing metadata.

I've already caught a couple of instances of that.
And `Eels` versus `eels` (case sensitivity).


I needed to try and get the collection organised into:

Code: [Select]

Artist -> Album -> Disc Number -> TrackNumber - TrackName.thing
That was the recommended format for JellyFin (opensource fork of Plex media server) at the time.
I used a CLI tool to do it. And it worked, but for every album featuring second bonus CD, the extra tracks disappeared into the ether.

[Mr Larrington]

When I tried Plex it couldn’t handle albums by different artists having the same title, such as “BBC Sessions” unless you bunged the name of the band in (brackets) on the end.

And when its database hadn’t heard of one particular album it decided unilaterally to append the tracks to a different album, and didn't bother to tell me.  Those databases are generally a Rubbish.  Better to do it yourself with mp3tag.  And one of them thought this:



is Wilko Johnson.  No, database,



THIS is Wilko Johnson.

[barakta]

That feeling when your login details aren't accepted and the "we'll send you an email to reset your password" email doesn't arrive.

Tried again this morning, got in via a different route. Serves me right for trying on the wrong side of a bottle of wine.
Wish they'd stop changing how you get into these pension websites.

Yes, this! Their UIs are all horrible too!

[Mr Larrington]

Backup!  You are not supposed to run amok and leave that NAS drive with 10 MB free instead of deleting previous backups once space starts getting low.  No wonder TowersNet is all of a tizzy.