The computing stuff rant thread

[onerousdeporte]

Not really a rant, bit above a grumble.

I use Kodi on a Raspberry Pi to play music and video.

There's a radio plugin which grabs streams from radio.de, so I can listen to thousands of radio stations from aroud the world. In reality I listen to half a doze, if that. Of those, three are BBC stations, (Radio 4, 4 Extra and 6 Music).  The BBC have changed the way their streams are delivered so now I get nothing.  I contacted radio.de who tell me "Currently, some BBC channels are no longer available".   Indeed, I can't get BBC stations viathe radio.de website either.

Presumably it's part of the drive to get everyone to use BBS Sounds, which I do on my phone.  This is not the same as playing it througha Big Amplifier with Real Speakers though.

I don't know if this is useful or useless to you but the m3u streams as per here still work for me, playing them through a media player on my Linux PCs.  I understand that they're 320kbps and that that is as good as it gets for BBC radio streaming.  I have an old laptop with a USB soundcard putting an optical output to the integrated DAC on my reasonably sized amplifier with Real Speakers (though mostly I just use BBC Sounds via a web browser - which, I believe, is still 320kbps).

Thought that this was more to do with the data that BBC required to use the service.

Grumble, my chromebook has usb c and no port for headphones so I can't watch stuff on my laptop

[Kim]

I have failed to receive several emails from private domains to my gmail account. When I asked what response they had received I was told that the email had been refused by gmail for security concerns.
The hey we’re most upset when I pointed out that was their problem and not mine. Oh no they said gmail should know we are trustworthy and should have let it through.

To be fair, gmail have been one of the main perpetrators of embrace-extend-extinguish tactics through overly judicious application of spam filters. Even if you have all the SPF and DKIM stuff, they occasionally deign to chuck things in the bin, seemingly just to make life difficult for smaller server admins.

Ultimately it's your provider that's rejecting legitimate mail.  That Google have convinced you this isn't a problem is the big con.

[chopstick]

This Gmail "refusing for security reasons" - I had a similar issue with notification emails from another forum a few years back.  It turned out that they were "failing DMARC validation, because the message isn't signed by the outgoing mail server" (quoted from correspondence with other forum's technical admin).  The domain was DMARC registered but the outgoing email was signed off by a server with a different domain (the admin's server).

If you check the email header/source data, you might find that this is is the case (or you might even discover another reason).  In the case of DMARC failure, it looks something like this (some details changed to keep it anonymous)

dmarc=fail (p=QUARANTINE sp=QUARANTINE dis=QUARANTINE) header.from=anotherforum.org
Received: from host.admin.domain.com (localhost [127.0.0.1])

[chopstick]

<SNIP>
Grumble, my chromebook has usb c and no port for headphones so I can't watch stuff on my laptop

There are adaptors that have USB C male at one end and 3.5mm headphone socket at the other.  When I ever replace my phone, I dare say that this is the solution I will have to adopt because I don't want to replace my aged Sennheiser HD-25 headphones (though they're going towards Trigger's Broom status).

[rr]

At work (several thousand employee, public body) our office 365 email system suddenly decided not to send emails to @googlemail.com addresses (gmail was ok), important legal documents disappeared. Only discovered when I tried to send my pay slips home, eventually a month's worth of emails landed nationwide.

[Feanor]

Go to mxtoolbox and shove in your email domain name, and see what it has to say.

[Mr Larrington]

I think it was DMARC that caused my slightly low-key rantetto but I deleted the response from the Mega-Global Chocolate Manufactury of Mountain View, USAnia out of pique.  So…

(Goes there, does that)

Goes to outfit wot hosts domain.

“Why, yes! Yes, you can easily add DMARC to your outgoing e-mail! Just add it as a TXT record to your DNS wossname!”

This might as well be written in Aramaic.  Any further investigation will have to wait until 1 (one) trip to Newport Velodrome, two (2) TdF stages and the BRITISH Grand Prix.

[Kim]

Aramaic is slightly less confusing than all the stuff that's been shoehorned into DNS over the years.

[rafletcher]

<SNIP>
Grumble, my chromebook has usb c and no port for headphones so I can't watch stuff on my laptop

There are adaptors that have USB C male at one end and 3.5mm headphone socket at the other.  When I ever replace my phone, I dare say that this is the solution I will have to adopt because I don't want to replace my aged Sennheiser HD-25 headphones (though they're going towards Trigger's Broom status).

Indeed this is the solution we adopted for my wife’s iPhone, a lightning to 3.5mm adaptor, so she can continue to use the cheap and readily available earpieces off eBay for her nocturnal listening.

[Feanor]

“Why, yes! Yes, you can easily add DMARC to your outgoing e-mail! Just add it as a TXT record to your DNS wossname!”

This might as well be written in Aramaic.  Any further investigation will have to wait until 1 (one) trip to Newport Velodrome, two (2) TdF stages and the BRITISH Grand Prix.

In your DNS wossname, create a record of type TXT, called:

_dmarc.yourdomain.co.uk

Inside the record, enter the following text:

v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:you@yourdomain.co.uk

That's a valid starting point. The contents of the record can be tweeked if necessary.

Here's mine (slightly redacted) for reference:

dmark1 by Ron Lowe, on Flickr

[Lightning Phil]

I have failed to receive several emails from private domains to my gmail account. When I asked what response they had received I was told that the email had been refused by gmail for security concerns.
The hey we’re most upset when I pointed out that was their problem and not mine. Oh no they said gmail should know we are trustworthy and should have let it through.

Depends. There is only so much you can do with SPF, DKIM, Dmarc etc, and gmail will still reject the small domains.   Where as the original intent of email was that small groups would host their own email, not be in the hands of a few behemoths, who get to decide what’s accepted not based on evidence of spamming but opaque black box rules.

[Feanor]

I have failed to receive several emails from private domains to my gmail account. When I asked what response they had received I was told that the email had been refused by gmail for security concerns.
The hey we’re most upset when I pointed out that was their problem and not mine. Oh no they said gmail should know we are trustworthy and should have let it through.

Depends. There is only so much you can do with SPF, DKIM, Dmarc etc, and gmail will still reject the small domains.   Where as the original intent of email was that small groups would host their own email, not be in the hands of a few behemoths, who get to decide what’s accepted not based on evidence of spamming but opaque black box rules.

Hmm, I self-host my e-mail on a server here at home.
I've not had mail rejected by any of the big providers.

I'm on AAISP static addresses, which are not marked as being 'domestic - do not accept mail from these addresses'.

[Kim]

I think I've got my server forwarding to A&A's relay, which works fine (other than rejecting bounces).  To the point where I send my introductory email to BHPC n00b racers from my personal account, because the @bhpc.org.uk domain is on some sort of gmail shitlist (I think the SPF might be wrong, haven't investigated properly).

[Mr Larrington]

O hai, fondleslab!

Plz to put keyboard back at bottom of screen where it blong, not smack in the middle where I'm trying to type!

Kthxbai!

Edit: fixed it. Though how it ended up “floating” rather than “dock” is a mystery worthy of Hardy Drew And The Nancy Boys, so I'll blame Farcebok as that’s what I was using when it first doned it.

[Kim]

Hardy Drew And The Nancy Boys

I'd read that.

Actually, under Rule 34 there's a good chance that someone's already serialising it on Mastodon.

[Kim]

USB-C.  Again.   

Look, I'm a reasonably technical person.  I know more than two programming languages, and can can solder a transistor the right way round without burning my fingers and so on.  But if I have to resort to Google to make sense of every unintuitive USB behaviour (this week: Power Delivery, and why it doesn't work in the presence of Anna Daptor) what hope is there for the average user?  Especially when the molishers of usefully non-compliant accessories are vague in their specifications.

Have now, on the third attempt, obtained Anna Daptor that brings the USB-C out to a panel-mount socket without b0rking the power negotiations.  Not even if you reverse the polarity, which was where the second attempt would fail.  As a bonus, it fit the existing drillings with a minimum of additional filing and no bad swears^[1].

The lesson here is that if you ever have reason to use a USB-C extension cable for something, check the small print about Gigabeans and charging standards.


_{[1] This was reserved for the energy meter which would drop into calibration mode because I happened to be feeding it exactly the wrong number of voles and ants on bootup.}

[Mr Larrington]

Oi, Flickr! Wake up!

 

[Mr Larrington]

“Why, yes! Yes, you can easily add DMARC to your outgoing e-mail! Just add it as a TXT record to your DNS wossname!”

This might as well be written in Aramaic.  Any further investigation will have to wait until 1 (one) trip to Newport Velodrome, two (2) TdF stages and the BRITISH Grand Prix.

In your DNS wossname, create a record of type TXT, called:

_dmarc.yourdomain.co.uk

Inside the record, enter the following text:

v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:you@yourdomain.co.uk

That's a valid starting point. The contents of the record can be tweeked if necessary.

Here's mine (slightly redacted) for reference:

dmark1 by Ron Lowe, on Flickr

Tries that, discovers that gmail is complaining about SPF and/or DKIM, not DMARC.  There are slightly more comprehensible instructions for adding an SPF wossname (think German rather than Aramaic).  We will c, as the entire TdF pelican repeatedly tells us, because

Please remember that it may take up to 24 hours for your DNS changes to become active.

[Mr Larrington]

Flickr! You're doing it again, and compounding being one of the Slow Children with trying to fob me off with your wanky app.  Just load the fucking page, OK

Edit: and it is you, because you’re doing it on the Proper Computer as well.

[Pingu]

...Edit: and it is you, because you’re doing it on the Proper Computer as well.

Bad panda for me too 

[Mr Larrington]

Works on the app but [img] links don’t display in here.  iPad browser doesn’t even give Bad Panda, just blank with “loading” Swirly Thing on the browser tab.

[Mr Larrington]

O hai Handbrake!

Plz 2 not change settings after I click “Add All”, thereby removing the fucking subtitles that it took me an ages to figure out how to keep

Kthxbai

[mrcharly-YHT]

MS Office update yesterday.

Started it.

Seemed to be complete

Couldn't get Outlook to work - when it reloaded, the dialog about 'last session closed with items open' message wouldn't go away.

It took SEVEN reboots before things were working again.

While I'm ranting. That bloody stupid windows index program. Absolutely hammers my system, taking hundreds of Mb and up to 50% of CPU. Effing ridiculous.

[ian]

'Microsoft Excel is unable to save this file.'

OK, save a copy.

'Microsoft Excel is unable to save this file.'

Don't worry, it's on Sharepoint, there will be a prior version. Right?

[SoreTween]

Shitty fuck balls.

In the shite weather weekend before last there was an unusually long power cut.  My UPS ran down which triggered my server to shut down gracefully and my desktop to shut off with no grace at all.  Getting the server (serial connected to the UPS) to shut down the desktop is a job still on the todo list.  Ho hum.

This resulted in an unbootable desktop, BTRFS parent transid failure which means the disk filing system has errors in it.  Potentially a total data loss, poo.  A day of careful fettling later I had recovered the data and imaged the drive so I ran a repair which worked, phew.  Most stuff is backed up but it would have been inconvenient to lose and inconvenient to have to reinstall.

This morning the server is not responding, BTRFS parent transid failure.  No power cuts this weekend, no reason for it to have rebooted, no reason for it to have suffered corruption.  WTF?