The problem I encountered setting up a gallery subdomain was due to the DNS thingy pointing to an old SmugMug account. According to 1 Password that account was set up in 2011. I guess I used it with a gallery subdomain which was probably deleted about ten tears ago and yet the DNS record hung around awaiting for a new gallery to connect with.
Internet
So farewell WordPress
Like so much of the web these days WordPress has ceased to be fun/interesting having become evermore skewed towards the money makers it offers little for the non-developer/techy individual. I gave up with their JetPack nonsense last year and have now moved the whole thing to ClassicPress which reverts the everything back to when it was fun/interesting. This provides for the opportunity to endlessly tweak this and that until, inevitably, the whole thing breaks and you have to start again.
The conversion process was well thought out, informative and easy to follow. Not all themes and plugins are supported but there are more than enough for my simple needs. As yet I have not found where to change the colour of the blog’s title but it must be in here somewhere….
Bing Bong
Intrigued by the variation in search results from Google and Bing/DuckDuckGo I created a very specific page about the building of the breakwater at Rhos on Sea in 1983.
Sure enough searching for some combination of those words with Google my page will be at, or near, the top. Take that UK Gov!
Alas Bing does not find it at all. Even after jumping through the BingSiteAuth.xml hoops.
Copilot offered to help:
Perhaps a more general enquiry:
It is called Duncan Moran dot Net. It should not be that hard to find. Perhaps if I was on LinkedIn….
As Molly White recently quipped we are witnessing what many of us think about as “the web” rotting right in front of our eyes. 
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
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…
Who said that?
A while ago I started following a blog after they posted some interesting music stuff but it transpired that the guy was one of those strange American conservative types who bemoan the intolerance of other people whilst displaying an equal degree of intolerance to anyone who may hold a differing view to his – which is probably most normal people. I continue to follow it somewhat fascinated.
To support his belief system he will often share some quote that someone else has cut and pasted across the Internet. More often than not these are fictions created on a whim and then attached to a famous name to give it some credibility or are an actual quote misattributed. So we may have a quote claiming to be from Solzhenitsyn that he did not actually write or say and probably never thought about either but it roughly aligns with what the blogger thinks so he cuts and pastes it anyway.
As is usually the case with such cherry picking the quotes are provided with neither a source nor any context. But in these information rich times one can spend a pleasant few minutes with a mug of coffee debunking the nonsense.
Today we had a quote by the Canadian born author Saul Bellow:
which was an interesting one. It is widely attributed to Bellow across the Interweb and Bellow does indeed use these words in a novel about a Jewish homosexual about to die from AIDS (a traditional right wing conservative theme) – Ravelstein but he is quoting:
The rule for the dead is that they should be forgotten. After burial there is a universal gradual progress toward oblivion. But with Ravelstein this didn’t altogether work. He claimed and filled a more conspicuous space in Rosamund’s life as well as mine. She remembered a text from her schooldays that went “Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.”
To Ravelstein this would have been the usual high-minded high-school kabibble.
Ravelstein – Saul Bellow – Viking Press – April 2000
The actual quote comes from the Scottish born philosopher Thomas Davidson. It can be found in a letter to his students collected in the book The education of the wage-earners; a contribution toward the solution of the educational problem of democracy. (Boston, Ginn 1904). It is number five in a list of twenty aphorisms.
Thomas Davidson the philosopher should not be confused with another Thomas Davidson such as the painter, or the poet or the palaeontologist as one academic writer does:
The “Rely upon your own energies, and so do not wait for, or depend on other people.” part is from the first aphorism with an erroneous “so”. Cut and paste. Cut and paste.
The Vanquis App Disaster
It is not clear what has happened with the Vanquis app and they are certainly not going to admit to anything untoward. I have an image of a disgruntled employee handing in their notice and hitting the delete button on the way out. Whatever it is it is amusing to sit back and watch; but I have a zero balance – it will be considerably less amusing and more frustrating for users who actually need to use the app to make payments etc.
The average banking type app gets four or five reviews a day. The Vanquis app gets around fifty five star reviews every day. These are clearly fake reviews and are there to drown out the one star reviews from frustrated users. Several of the one star actual users have commented on the fake reviews and ask that they be reported to Apple. I have done so but what Apple could or would do remains to be seen. Who would not take time out of their day to say something was “Easy to use”?
Well Mr Christopher Johnson (or the less than BrillentAJ) for one and anyone else who was not be paid to do so. Of course there will be the inevitable glitch and user 260446 failed to read the instructions and gave their “Easy to use” review a one star rating.
Although the app (and web site) was broken before the recent update to iOS 16 many users noticed it after updating and so attributed the malfunctioning to the iOS update but there is a wave of frustrated users on Android devices too which suggests the problem is systemic at the Vanquis end rather than on individual devices.
But, let us whisper it, the Internet was not designed to do any of this stuff and so you have layers of complexity added to it to give the illusion of usability and security when a peak behind the curtain reveals the whole thing is cobbled together with bits of string and blu-tack and can start to fall apart at any moment. That message from your bank about their online services not being available overnight due to important maintenance should say “we have found yet another hole large enough to drive a bus through and are frantically trying to patch it before anyone notices”.
At least it is not as bad as all the crypto/web 3 nonsense. Even Safe Hands Sunak could not resist joining the imbecilic gold rush.
Call me an ageing cynic but…
When most banking/credit card apps get four or five reviews a day one might raise a querying eyebrow when the Vanquis app gains 40 5 star reviews in one day.
Apparently it is very easy to use. Of course these reviews are definitely not an attempt to bury all the one star reviews from actual users after the developers messed up. 
Installation fun
Attempting to update TidalCycles only managed to break everything. Everything seemed to be in the right place but nothing was aware of anything else. Apparently it is a common problem. Perhaps it was the multiple versions of ghc…
or the changes to cabal, or the Mac’s recent switch from bash to zsh. After wrestling with it for a couple of days I gave up and deleted random .ghc and .ghcup directories and did a complete fresh install which seemed to sort things out.
Far simpler was Nextcloud which just involved uploading a php file which when executed checks that the required components are available and then installs and sets up everything for you. Their iOS app gives access to your Personal cloud from anywhere.
Yadit #100DaysToOffload
Freebies and the decline of civilisation.
It is a full time job trying to keep up with all of the stuff being made freely available, or at a goodly discount, to help people through their locked-down existence. For example Sound On Sound are maintaining a list of software deals available on noisy stuff. One such deal was from Heavyocity who produced a #StayHome instrument for Kontakt.
https://youtu.be/4gdTUZFL96Y
They asked for a $10 donation for UNICEF et al or it was available for free. Who can resist things that so delightfully bleep and bonk?
So I fill in their form to make an account – because how can you possibly buy anything without setting up an account and providing all your personal details these days? I am then sent off to PayPal to make the purchase/donation. I log in to my PayPal account but my money is rejected and I am sent back to Heavyocity with red text on my details. Red text is never a good thing. Apparently the email address I use for my PayPal account does not match the email address I used for my Heavyocity account. Who knew that was a thing? I can think of five domains I own and can use for email (there are probably more) and for most of them I will use a multitude of addresses as befits my needs. So I am a little peeved that Heavyocity has taken it upon themselves to specify which email address I should use.
Not to worry I shall just use my bank debit card. I am sent back to PayPal where I am now a guest. Before I can make my purchase/donation PayPal demands that I provide my phone number. I have had a PayPal account for many years and have never given them my phone number – which suggests that they do not really need it and so I never will. So declining to give them my phone number I return to the Heavyocity site to see if we can resolve this problem. Alas there Get In Touch and Contact Us links just take you to their Zendesk support pages with no obvious way to actually get in touch and contact them. As I do not do the whole TweetyBook thing that was not an option either.
So I just gave up and downloaded it for free. Â It is very good.
But don’t get me started on PayPal:
A promo code you say? Â Let me just type that in…..