2016 — 27 October: Thursday
It's currently still looking a bit like "Return of the Killer Colloids" out there1 so I shall delay my intended spot of supplies shopping, probably until tomorrow. I have a lunch date so that's one less meal to prep out of my diminishing store cupboard.
I'm being copied...
... on the to-and-fro emails while the custodian of Dr Frankenstein's Linux Lab across the village has been replacing his router by a dedicated little PC running a sophisticated Sophos suite of security functions, a local DNS server, some heavyweight port defences and what-have you. His decision to step into this minefield came about after his router's security logs showed some alarming penetration attempts apparently coming in from China.
The actual problem under discussion has been — in his mixed environment of Win10, a couple of flavours of Linux, and some different Androids — the temporary failure of his Kodi system (side-loaded on an Amazon Fire) still to find all paths to his NFS NAS media file shares after all these upheavals and a spot of LAN address clean-up.
It's quite relaxing following the saga at one (safe) remove. I shall doubtless learn more later today.
How shocking...
... to learn2 that politicians lie. Even those atop the greasy pole. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Just to recap, for those who understandably find this confusing: Britain's foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, campaigned for Brexit but was suspected of wobbling privately towards remain. Our leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, campaigned for remain but was suspected of wobbling privately towards leave. And our prime minister was presumably either faking it in front of the Goldman Sachs faithful, or is faking it now when she insists that hard Brexit will be a rip-roaring success, or is secretly in two minds about the most totemic issue of the day — but dammit, the British people ordered a burger, and that's what they'll get. And we wonder why people don't trust politicians.
Despite...
... occasional bursts of mild obsession, I'm glad not to be diving around inside Apple's code. (Link.)
Class warfare
Having successfully re-registered my JLP card I'm left wondering what all the fuss was about. I'd noted an initial 'warning' about the coming need to re-register on their web site a couple of weeks ago, but visit that site so rarely (less than once a month) that I only got the Round Tuit last night, in the wake of reading tales of anguish reported in an El Reg story about middle-class angst.
Since both Brian and the last guvmint's stupid social survey data told me I was now irredeemably lower-class I assumed it couldn't possibly apply to me :-)
Blimey
A well-argued piece by Sean Thomas in a "Spectator" article on 10th September likened the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the first sting of Ampulex compressa — should you happen to be blissfully unfamiliar with the reproductive life-cycle of this splendid piece of Nature's handiwork, I envy you your innocence. You may relish the thought of there being a more-recently discovered relation called Ampulex dementor.
"Oh, no, not me, sir!"
The only filter bubble I live in is entirely of my own ignorant construction:
Gardner also warned against the possible pitfalls of social-centric news diet. "More likely than not, you get your news from Facebook. 44% of U.S. adults get news on the site, and 61% of millennials get their news from Facebook. If that doesn't frighten you, you don't know enough about Facebook's algorithm," Gardner said. He was particularly worried about the issue of "filter bubbles," a phenomenon where Facebook's algorithm only shows its users what they want to see, which means they only ever read political news they agree with. "If you have a parent who's a Trump supporter, they are seeing a completely different set of news items than you are," Gardner said.
Why do you think I dip an occasional news-seeking toe into the fetid waters of stuff like "Spectator" and "Economist" and "Washington Post" and "Huffington" and "Mail Online" and "New Statesman" and "Grauniad" and (gawd forbid) even the BBC? Though, as a chap once said: "News is what they don't want you to know. Everything else is advertising."