Unrelated Posts

Passing clouds of inconsequential observations

  • Jettisoning Jetpack

    So farewell Jetpack. I subscribed from the early days when you offered some useful tools at a reasonable price. Over the years the price increased and the tools became less useful. So some of this blog will probably stop working. On departing you warn that I will no longer be able to use WordAds – whatever they are 🤷‍♂️.

    I am sure it will be a great loss to both of us. Who does not enjoy websites littered with junk advertising? I know I do. But it is indicative of how the mercantile has subsumed the personal on the web these days. Having no need for an audience and no desire to build one I shall continue, regardless, with what interests/amuses/educates me.

    Similarly I have closed my Bandcamp account. They seem to have become the type of people I try to avoid. I should also cancel my Apple Music subscription since they deemed Taylor Swift to be their artist of the year and their general uselessness…. but I have yet to find anything better and do not want to return to collecting records. It seems to be a service for people who neither like nor have any interest in music. In the days of yore if I ventured in to a record shop and was confronted by a Classical department filled with the non-classical titles available in Apple’s Classical app I would walk out as they clearly had no idea what they are doing. But on the other hand it does pass the Memphis Minnie test – if the record shop had something by Memphis Minnie that was easily findable it may be worth my time perusing their racks.

    Similar artists to Edward Elgar???

  • From Towrags to sideburns

    After the towrag nonsense, in a piece about the Jacobite uprising of 1745, the BBC spews forth this:

    We can give you Flash in the pan and Half cocked but Sideburns did not appear until almost 100 years later when they arrived from America; derived from General Ambrose Burnside who sported a fine pair of side whiskers – as they were previously known.

  • Background image not appearing on mobile devices

    Spent some time trying to figure out why the background image on my site’s home page was not being displayed on mobile devices although it was appearing in a desktop browser. There are, of course, endless solutions that may or may not have worked for someone in the past. They suggested tweaking your CSS coding or adjusting the size of the image or some other voodoo. None of these worked for me.

    What worked for me was simply ensuring that the image’s colour profile was set to sRGB. Once that was changed everything worked as expected.

  • Artificial nonsense

    As if navigating the nonsense produced by the erroneously named Artificial Intelligence, which spews out all manner of silliness and even scarier stuff, was not tricky enough we should not neglect the human generated nonsense.

    On a recent visit to HMS Victory a guide informed Martine that after evacuating their bowels sailors would pull up a rope that was being towed in the water on the end of which was attached a rag with which they could clean their rear ends. The rag would then be draped back into the sea to be cleaned as it was towed along – hence the term Tow Rag. It makes for a good story but is utter nonsense. And yet…. it has now become a thing. An actual thing. There are even videos with actual tow rags

    a man on board a ship pulling a tow rag on a rope from the water.

    If such a thing was used at all why would they call it a tow rag? Would they not have a more colourful name for it?

    The OED has no Tow Rag and Chambers suggests you may have meant Toe Rag – which of course you did because that is an actual thing – hence the popular view of Boris Johnson…

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