Interweb

Background image not appearing on mobile devices

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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

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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…

Word guessing

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The annual subscription to the i news app is mostly due to their excellent puzzle section. There are interesting variations on Sudoku puzzles and some groan inducing crossword clues:

cryptic crossword clue

But the recent addition of a Wordle style GuessWord has fascinated more for the flaws than the puzzle. Apparently today’s five letter word has two Es, two Os, two Ts and two Ls. 🤔

word puzzle grid

It works as expected on the web site:

Site GuessWord

My email to the editor will also complain about the name, although similar to many such puzzles, one is not guessing random words but deducing the correct word from the clues provided.

Dear Web Developers

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I am not you. I do not live your life. Just because something is perfectly normal to you and everyone you know please do not assume that it is so for everyone.

Just because you skipped that boring lecture on parsing regular expressions please do not tell me that my email address is undeliverable:

Pop up window claiming email address is undeliverable with blurred address

I would guess this email address was deliverable when you were still in nappies.

I, along with eight million other people across England and Wales, do not have a passport so please avoid requirements such as…

Web form requesting a name as it appears in your passport

Whilst fairly trivial but annoying examples they are symptomatic of a trend which is resulting in people not getting housing or employment because they do not fit neatly into some arbitrary but erroneous requirements…. Dear Estate Agents, I can live perfectly comfortably on one third of the income you assume I need to rent a property.

Worryingly such problems reach right to the top; a Tory MP in today’s Times complaining about the “hordes of twentysomethings with an Excel spreadsheet”.

A Clipping from The Times

From there it is but a few steps to the bonfire of red tape madness.

Update:

It transpires that the undeliverable email problem was caused by the company using some bodgers, rather than developers, to create their site and they are paying for the loqate verification services – which clearly do not work.

The Vanquis App Disaster

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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”?

Fake five star reviews of the Vanquis app

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.

Mostly real one star reviews of the Vanquis app.

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.

Android reviews of the Vanquis app

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.

Linkage

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The links from the daily web thing always provide a diversion or two to some interesting corners of the web. So it came as something of a surprise to find myself listed today. Having neglected my own humble dusty corner for the past few weeks there is likely to now be a flurry of postings just in case anyone happens to stray through here.

Freebies and the decline of civilisation.

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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.  It is very good.

 

But don’t get me started on PayPal:

A promo code you say?  Let me just type that in…..