I've built mail servers before Gmail existed that lasted long enough to get blacklisted by Gmail.
Fixing it was always pretty simple -- or at least, non-mysterious. They'd bounce some things, I'd look at the headers of the bounced messages, and therein were links to instructions there that showed how to resolve whatever issue it was this year.
Just follow the steps, implement the new thing, and stuff started flowing again in rather short order. Not so bad.
IIRC, the only time it ever cost us any money was when the RBLs started keeping track of dynamic IP pools and we needed to finally shift over to something actually-static.
I almost never shop at Target. It's not near to me, and it's not on my list of destinations when I'm away from home.
But I was in Target one day anyway, and they had a Raspberry Pi 3 kit for sale on the shelf. IIRC, it was one of the Google DIY smart speaker kits. I thought that was neat to see.
My usual source for Raspberry Pi stuff is Microcenter. That's also not near to me, but it's a viable destination that's worth a trip all on its own.
At this Microcenter, they move enough Pi hardware that they don't even have them on the shelves anymore. They're instead stocked at each checkout register, and priced at or below MSRP. They're right there alongside a wide assortment of minimally-packaged house-brand SD cards and USB keys and other geek fodder.
It's quick and easy to walk in and grab a couple of spools of printer filament, some 22AWG solid wire for breadboarding, a card of LR44 batteries for the digital calipers, and a Raspberry Pi. (Well, it can be quick. Last time I went, I got sucked into the mechanical keyboard department for an embarrassingly long time.)
Anyway, they also have NUC-shaped computers there if someone wants go that direction instead. Just pick one out, pay for it, and take it home.
That's not how I interpreted it as being in this instance, but it could certainly be that way.
I guess that'd be like keeping all correspondence in a shoe box (to be reviewed later -- or maybe never), or maybe the automated recording of my phone calls with others (which is completely legal where I am; I don't even have to tell them).
And I suppose whether I felt that would be creepy or not depends a lot upon intent, and consent.
If the intent were pure and good, and the consent both informed and granted, then I'd have no problem with any of this at all -- whether a shoebox, a tape recorder, or a bot is involved in taking the notes.
I called my parents, told them about the idea, they never even had Telegram before we started this project but they especially joined when they learnt that I was trying to build a family history. They are native Nepalese speakers therefore the system promptensured that the bot always responds to their questions and answers in Nepalese.
If that's true, then their mobile app team must be both completely separate and isolated from all communications.
Because it's really bad. And it's been bad for a really long time.
When all I want is to order a cheap cup of coffee, I get to stare at a throbbing box of fries while it tries to figure that out.
Get to the restaurant and signal my arrival? More throbbing fries.
Sometimes the fries never stop throbbing and the only way to get away from them and onto the next step is to force-close the app and start it again.
When I manage to accumulate enough points to order a free sandwich? "Sorry, something went wrong!" This leaves me with no sandwich, and no points. (I guess I was going to be disappointed no matter what -- maybe they're doing me a favor by fucking it up so bad that getting the food is impossible, since reaching the melancholy destination takes fewer steps this way.)
Over the years I've used multiple phones, from multiple manufacturers, with multiple carriers. It's not me; the app is consistently bad.
Oh. And speaking of carriers: Back when I had metered service, I used wifi where I could. The McDonald's near where I lived had free wifi, but their network had this app firewalled. It'd work anywhere but inside of the building where it was most useful.
But, yeah: The touchscreen kiosks are a bit more responsive than they initially were. It's too bad that they're gored up with finger grease and other bodily effluences, though, because they barely work with the layer of filth that covers them.
I've never once been able to use the McDonald's app over several years and multiple devices. I originally wanted to check the nutritional info of the menu. Download our app, it says. This website is better in our app, it says. The order screen constantly asks me to enter my app code. Collect points in our App! Do you have our App? I give in and finally download the App. "Something's not quite right", you didn't install our app properly (Aurora Store instead of Google Play), you didn't set up your device properly (unlocked bootloader), you did something wrong to upset the App and it will not run. Oh no, we can't let you see the number of calories in your burger with an unlocked bootloader!!! This stupid app has stricter protection than any of my banking apps and I will never be able to escape constantly being asked to use it
I have a half-serious theory that their mobile app is for price discrimination. The best deals are only available in the app, but the experience is so bad that you'll only use it if you really need to.
Here in Japan they started to forward me to the app page when ordering. So you are forced to use the app with a mobile browser. Even though the website could do it perfectly fine in the past.
I do not go often, but if I do I prefer to sit, order in the page and they bring it to your seat. I dont like the Kiosk.
Price discrimination is basically corporate speak for giving discounts to those who wouldn’t or couldn’t afford to pay full price.
And it makes perfect sense in this context - if you make $200k salary you probably don’t care enough about a $0.30 discount to fiddle with an app for 5 minutes. But if you’re living on a few dollars of food budget, you probably care a lot about that 30 cents and would fight for it. So making the app bad allows them to segment the market to get an extra 30 cents out of the person who can afford it without excluding the low-budget person.
The wealthiest person who I know well would absolutely fiddle with an app for 5 minutes to save 30 cents on a sandwich at McDonald's. He's cheap AF.
But even if he weren't that way, making the app deliberately bad to eek a few more clams out of a subset of people is perverse. Deliberately erecting barriers between the products and those who want to buy them is not how business is successfully done at this level. They aren't selling Ferraris here.
"I want to stick it to these rich guys, so I'll make the app terrible!" doesn't make sense. They're neither smart enough to do that, nor dumb enough.
The simplest explanation is that in a world of shitty software, this software is also just shit. :)
I gave up on the app completely when I placed an order via the app, was waved past the payment window, then the order window denied it was placed (and paid for). I showed them the phone with the order number still on it. They said it could be a screenshot. After arguing for a while, I drove away without food.
I eventually got a refund after digging throw their web site for an email address, and emailed them the statement showing where it has been paid. With the back and forward while they asked for evidence, it took over an hour of my time in the end to get the refund. It wasn't the money. It was the principle.
The app is by far the slowest, most unreliable way to place an order with them. Period. The next slowest (although far better) is the kiosks. They also unreliable when the printer doesn't work (which is most of the time), and you make the mistake of forgetting the receipt number. Other fast food outlets have solved this problem by getting you to enter your name. That's beyond McDonalds apparently. The fastest, and most reliable way by far is to talk to a human.
The order should be the reverse. It is beyond me how they get it so badly wrong. Maybe price discrimination is the reason. Nothing else makes much sense for an organisation of the size and resources of McDonalds.
their app has some very strange flow to it, i cant tell if it feels designed by committee or if there are just so many strange use cases that its somehow the least bad given some arbitrary constraints i cant begin to understand.
even selecting my restaurant is a constant battle. the closest restaurant to my house as the bird flies is not the closest restaurant. even the closest by miles driven involves much more complication than the one i always want to pick. it constantly battles me that i have selected a suboptimal choice. maybe learn that when i am at home, i want to default to my preferred choice, every time, unless i say otherwise.
I'm only 50/50 but I swear they have only one app for the entire globe.
Can you imagine how complex that must be vs just making like 100 different apps in each country.
But eCoNoMiEs oF sCaLe
If you're balking at makin 100 different apps, then for reference, I am pretty sure my local mcdonalds - just the one restaurant turns over >10 mill a year, so you get a sense of how much they'd want to invest in, idk, the ordering front-end of every maccas in Australia
At least in Japan on iOS, they have their own app, and it’s great.
You can find a seat first, then order directly from your seat, for delivery to your seat (helpful since some McDonald’s in Japan are really busy, and are very vertical, so you might need to climb up some two/three floors to find a seat!).
You can even order McDelivery and they’ll deliver McDonald’s to your house on McDonald’s branded mopeds.
It’s also been pretty fast, even on a slow internet connection.
The only two problems I’ve had with it are:
- Although the menu and the rest of the app is translated to English, sometimes coupons are only in Japanese, and not translated to English (I’m guessing these might be store-specific) (although it’s easy enough to translate that using your phone’s translator)
- I’ve had Apple Pay occasionally be down and fail to work, which forced me to redo my whole order, then realize that Apple Pay is still down, then do my entire order again with a different payment method. Although it’s only happened twice a few months ago, so it could be something that they’ve already fixed (or I’m quite unlucky).
Edit: Forgot to add, but no issues like what basch seems to experience with their country’s McDonald’s app. The Japanese one always gives me a sorted list/map view of my closest McDonald’s to pick from, with any favourites marked at the too.
That's how it was in the US, too. Sit down anywhere, fire up the app[1], order whatever, enter the table number and they bring it over. That part of the service was consistent and worked well.
The consistency all changed with the covid shuffle.
Now, it depends on the location and their mood at the time. Sometimes, they bring the food out on a tray. Sometimes, they just dismissively put it on the counter at the front in a paper bag and walk away from it without a word. Sometimes they fill the drink for you; sometimes there's a rack of cups and an implied expectation that you just figure it out yourself; sometimes they bring over an empty cup; sometimes you have to beg them for that empty cup. It sucks.
Same with the kiosk. They have these neat table tents with numbers; they're actually BLE beacons that work with tracking hardware inside the ceiling. They help the employees to get a good idea of where you're sitting before they even leave the kitchen. But sometimes there are no table tents to be had (even in an empty restaurant), and sometimes when they do exist nobody gives a damn about them.
As systems, these things work fine. I've seen them work. But I've observed the implementation of them in recent years to have been an unmitigated mess, and this mess is clearly the result of a geographically-diverse problem with bad local-level management.
Buying a cheeseburger and a Coke at McDonald's -- which built an empire around simplicity and efficiency -- should never be an adventure or a guessing game. It should be the most straight-forward process on Earth and completely devoid of surprises.
But it isn't.
[1]: Well, within the app's limitations. I did rant about that in another comment, above.
I have been in the situation of standing outside an after-hours pick-up only window at a McDonald’s in the UK, able to talk to the staff, but unable to order because they only accepted app orders and I only had access to the Canadian app.
I tried to log into it just now to see which McDonald's it would select for me at home and whether it would be callous about changes.
But when I touched the icon to open the app, a big M appeared on a bright red screen and then it died and returned to the home screen less than half a second later.
The US app is still laggy (even on the iPhone 17 Pro) and constantly logs you out. My theory is that they set the login timeout to a low number to make it harder to accrue points.
Man. It seems like every avenue of humidification is paved with difficulty.
Ultrasonic humidifiers (and others) that spritz water droplets out? They need fed expensive water, or they spread particulates everywhere. Health aspects aside, it's nice living in a house that isn't bathed in something that looks like chalk dust.
Evaporative methods? They're similar in their lust for pure water, and the particles tend to concentrate at the humidifier instead of everywhere else. That accumulation needs to be cleaned up periodically (or parts replaced, depending on how rent-seeking the design is).
Distilled water from the store? That's gloriously clean water, but it represents a money pit that can never be filled up.
RO water? Sounds nice (is nice), but they're expensive and inefficient (producing 1 liter of RO water wastes in the realm of 3 or 4 liters down the drain). The systems need installed, and not everyone has the capacity to wrangle their own plumbing projects.
And as an added bonus: Drinking RO water saps our precious bodily fluids of the minerals and electrolytes that people crave to stay alive, so we also seek to deliberately impurify it.
I guess that means that an ideal path to RO-oriented humidification, we end up with 3 taps at the kitchen sink, then? One that provides demineralized for the humidifier, another that provides remineralized water for drinking, and one for everything else?
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It's all ugly in some way.
Isn't there some kind of evaporative humidification method that is easy and inexpensive to clean? Something I can just feed cheap tap water into, and that I only have to deal with cleaning once a month or something? That sounds like the path of least pain for me in my neck of the woods.
When I last looked, the evaporative methods were better than others. You don't need distilled water for it, tap will work. They do need cleaning and frequent disinfecting though due to the pad constantly sitting in the water. The prices of replacement pads are a bit expensive but it was cheaper than constantly buying distilled water.
There are a few brands out there but the Philips ones seemed better than the others and the prices were not as insane. I just disliked their marketing and buzzword filled content but otherwise they seem OK. Oh and you should know a lot of their stuff now are internet connected(disabling it will make you lose some functions but otherwise the device still works) and have touch buttons and screens etc. It's unfortunate but this seems to be where every device is heading.
I do agree with you that this seems overly complex. You can pretty much do it yourself if you'd like to take on a project. A fan and a constantly wet rag has the same function but is not as compact.
Thanks. I'll check out Philips. I wonder if third-party pads exist.
I prefer dumb, but I don't mind if it's smart. Especially if I can integrate the smarts into my Home Assistant rig.
I built a humidifier once. I just used the Instant Pot that was already on the countertop. I filled it with water, set it to "Keep warm", and it slowly evaporated the water and left minerals behind.
This worked fine (it was safe, if inefficient).
But monitoring the consumption of water and the improvement in humidity showed that to actually raise the humidity to a comfortable point would and do so throughout the house would use a lot of water.
And I want to do more with my time than fill humidifiers back up. :)
Outlet testers only go so far. They can produce false assurance.
One of the things that people (well, idiots -- but idiots are also people) discover when replacing an old 2-prong outlet with a new 3-prong outlet from the big box store is that they've only got 2 wires to work with. There is no ground conductor is present.
So they do the wrong thing the wrong way, and connect the ground screw on the new outlet to the neutral wire. This satisfies them ("all of the outlet parts are wired up!"), and sometimes they even think about it hard enough to justify it as being Good Enough ("ground and neutral are connected together back at the panel anyway, so it doesn't matter!").
That's bad, mmkay? Nobody should do this. Ever. It is unsafe. But sometimes people do it anyway. It's a real problem that exists in the real world.
This problem is made worse because an outlet tester won't detect this fault -- at all.
And the badness doesn't stop there, but instead compounds: The tester doesn't just fail to detect the fault. Instead, the tester will (must) cheerfully report this condition as being perfectly cromulent and safe. That false assurance is problematic in and of itself.
So, yeah: Everyone should have an outlet tester. But everyone should also be aware that they aren't idiot-proof -- their results can be poisoned by idiots from the past.
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Anyway, code. NEC 406.4(D)(2) allows replacing an ungrounded outlet with a GFCI outlet (with the ground screw disconnected and doing nothing at all). The outlet must be marked (that's why GFCI outlets include a sheet of stickers in the box that say "NO EQUIPMENT GROUND"), but it's code-compliant to do this.
So even if one pushes a landlord about an ungrounded 3-prong outlet on the wall, that doesn't mean that they're going to send someone out and tear into things to install a ground wire. It might instead mean that they put a GFCI outlet in, put a sticker on it, and call that good enough.
And, safety-wise: A GFCI used in this way actually is good enough.
But even though safe, it doesn't help at all with EMI/RFI/static issues and electronics, which the landlord doesn't have to care about. That part isn't their problem. :)
(406.4 also allows replacing existing 2-prong outlets with new 2-prong outlets, which are still being made in factories every day.)
Right. I've seen unconnected grounds. And I still have a 220V dryer grounded via the neutral. Hasn't been code for new installations since 1996, but is grandfathered.
And yes, I know about GFCIs with no ground and the warning. Had one of those once.
Still, an outlet tester will find the common case. I suspect that the situation here is that everything is on 2-wire external power supplies and there is no path to ground anywhere. But by plugging in an external monitor, the user created more external EMI exposure, by bringing his floating ground out of the laptop and monitor. Standalone laptops are tested for EMI compatibility (emissions in the US, emissions and sensitivity in the EU), but that doesn't cover being cabled up to random external devices.
And last I knew you ALSO can put in a GFCI circuit breaker (instead of outlet), swap in normal three prong outlets with ground not connected and use those stickers on the outlets.
Ferrite beads are awesome, and I agree that everyone involved with computing and electronical things should have an assortment of them nearby. They can fix problems.
And yeah, we're pretty close to the limits. We always have been, though: At all points on the timeline of digital electronics, we've been pushing speeds to be as fast as we can manage today. But tomorrow (and the next day, and the day after that), we'll solve more of the problems and yet-again make it even faster.
Which brings us back to...ferrite beads, and problems.
I got introduced to Monoprice back when HDMI was still new and somewhat finicky, when stores like Best Buy were fond of selling $180 HDMI cables (and even Wal-Mart wanted something like $60). In that crazy world, Monoprice was the place to buy inexpensive cables that worked.
And it was clear that HDMI was the future, so I placed an order for a half-dozen or so different-colored HDMI cables with ferrites pre-installed near each end.
They showed up, and... they barely worked. They were glitchy, touchy, and intermittent. I was frustrated, and I felt like I'd made a poor decision that cost me money instead of saved me money. In fact, I was rather pissed off by all of this.
With nothing to lose, I used a knife to cut away the plastic overmolding on the ferrites on one of the cables that was being particularly problematic. And then I smashed those ferrites with a hammer.
With the ferrites thus-removed, the cable immediately began working perfectly. It was glitch-free. I couldn't get it to misbehave even if I tried. I repeated this with all of the other cables from that order and they all started working perfectly, too.
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So, ferrites. Their presence adds a little bit of series-mode inductance. And that's something that can be useful. It slows down the edge of things like transient voltage spikes. And since the spikes are transient, slowing their rise-time in this way reduces their bandwidth and peak amplitude. Adding a snap-on ferrite bead can be enough to turn a problematic data bus into a well-behaved data bus.
But! They're just dumb hunks of minerals. They're indiscriminate. They can't distinguish betwixt the bad signals and the good signals -- everything is affected. So while ferrites can be useful in a fight against unwanted noise, they can also be destructive of the signals that we're trying to use.
They're good to have available, but they're also not necessarily something that someone should go forth and attach to every cable they find. If there's no problem that needs solved, then there's no solving to be done.
(These I days I make it a point to actively avoid buying cables that have ferrites pre-installed, both professionally and at home. But I've got a stash of snap-on ferrites in the top drawer of the toolbox just in case; it's good to have options.)
Since the introduction of the OG Raspberry Pi, 14 years ago, there's been an ongoing cognitive problem wherein people look at the price of a brand new, never used SBC that can purchased from a reliable retail company.
Then they also look at the price of a used corpo PC (that is bigger, and noisier) that some rando in Iowa is selling on eBay.
And then they boldly compare the prices of the two things as if these details just don't exist.
But the details do exist. The details show that the two things are not the same. They can never be the same.
One is a shiny fresh apple that is free of blemishes, and the other is a bruised old grapefruit that someone has already started eating. They're both fruit, but they're very different things.
I got invited to see a NIN show recently, which was very kind of them.
The process of actually getting in, post-invite, was a bit of a weird experience: Waiting around at the front of the venue, meeting some of his PR folks, walking all the way around the outside to go in the back door to get escorted in. At one point we were given some armbands so we could do what we wanted as if we were regular concert-goers and they turned us loose.
Anyway, as we were walking around that huge place and chatting, one of them (Marcus?) asked me how I got interested in Nine Inch Nails.
And the first thing that came that came out of my mouth was "It is entirely possible that I banned Trent Reznor from IRC 30 years ago."
The response was immediate: "Never tell him that."
Anyhow, the crew that I met were all a bunch of great folks. Wonderful positivity, fun to talk to. 10/10.
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(Now, you might be wondering why I banned Trent from #nin. That's easy: We banned everyone in that channel who said they were Trent Reznor. There's only one Trent, and these imposters showed up all the time so we did the right thing and got rid of them.
Except... I read an interview with him way back then, where he was asked specifically about IRC. His response was something like "Yeah, I tried IRC once and they banned me right away. Those guys are a bunch of dicks."
I mostly wrote a story about a concert. It was an amazing concert. I also wrote a missive about banning Trent Reznor from IRC three decades ago.
At the show, the music was good (of course it was -- I like NIN and have for decades), but the musicality of its performance was also very good. They all played it both with expert precision, and a great deal of passion. The endurance was staggering. And the technicals -- the management of different spaces (3 stages!), the PA, the lights, effects, video projections -- they all combined to alter my perspective of what is possible in a temporary, physical performance space.
I love going to concerts, big and small. This was my 4th NIN show. I've never been to any concert like that before.
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Anyway, you've already elected to change channels. So let's change channels.
You think Pretty Hate Machine was the embodiment of everything that Trent Reznor ever learned, or performed?
How does Broken fit into that picture? (It's very different, to me.)
How does the period-correct Purest Feeling fit into it? (It's very similar, but the horns are a bit much.)
How do the various Ghosts albums fit in there?
How do the rest of them?
What fits together, and what falls apart?
Please elaborate. While I'm not a musician and I don't have the background to dissect it myself, I do appreciate the elaborations of technical makeups of music when those who can take it apart elect to do so.
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The dude, Trent Reznor, has been publishing recorded music since 1989. I find the claim that it's all the same to be pretty extraordinary. I think that satisfaction of that claim would require extraordinary proof. (And I welcome that proof.)
I watched a backup of a [480p24] DVD movie with a (hacked) Wii quite a long time ago, as a fallback after the PS3 I was using got tripped up on that film's Cinavia[1] watermarks.
The Wii worked OK-ish, but it was evident that it was barely keeping up with decoding the MPEG 2 video from the disc and putting it on the screen. Perhaps there is or was better software for that job, but there were some glitches and brief hangs.
Fixing it was always pretty simple -- or at least, non-mysterious. They'd bounce some things, I'd look at the headers of the bounced messages, and therein were links to instructions there that showed how to resolve whatever issue it was this year.
Just follow the steps, implement the new thing, and stuff started flowing again in rather short order. Not so bad.
IIRC, the only time it ever cost us any money was when the RBLs started keeping track of dynamic IP pools and we needed to finally shift over to something actually-static.
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