< Notes...

The epic saga that started over a month ago has finally concluded, and Martin is now in possession of his The New York Times’ “The Deluxe Birthday Edition” book. That post has seeing more of the world than all of us combined. 😅

The saga that we started remains ongoing—as in, not finished yet—as you can see below (last status at the top). First, and last time, we send a post to the Netherlands. If this happens with every international post, I truly pity the Dutch.

Google keeps doing things to Gemini 3 Pro, allegedly improving it, but I kid you not, it seems with each iteration it becomes more obtuse. Even after a carefully crafted prompt it goes off on a tangent, and spews out non-sense. I was going to try Gemini CLI, but the little trust I had has diminished. Hey, at least it is free, and I sure am getting what I paid for!

This is the most visible—and perhaps only—reason why I dislike Cloudflare. From all angles, how does this helps someone trying to access the site? Oh, “Cloudflare is doing great, the server hosting the site I want to reach isn’t. I feel much better now”, said no one.

AT&T is offering us, for a bargain price of $25 in addition to what we already pay, to upgrade to their “most advanced Wi-Fi package”, which is pretty much a device upgrade to one that supports Wi-Fi 7. The thing is, we don’t use their Wi-Fi, we have our own router, and access point, and almost none of our devices supports Wi-Fi 7 yet. I wonder how many will bite on that offer not knowing any better.

“You were specially selected to receive a GO2bank offer because you’ve used one of our banking products in the past OR you opted in to receive marketing from one of our trusted third-party partners. No credit check was performed, no one filled out an application on your behalf and no account was opened in your name. The card sent to you is not active and has no value until you choose to activate it and deposit money into your account.”

Kid received not one, but two of these offers on the mail today. Both have a full blown plastic, RFID chip, debit card in it. When someone wonder how, or why, the bank went belly up, remember this.

Unlike The New York Times gift articles, for which you do not need an account to read them, The Washington Post gift articles require the creation of a “free” account in order to “redeem” them, like so. So, not free.

Receiving an SMS alledgedly from Bank of America in the middle of the night, asking whether or not we authorise a check for a specific amount, on a certain account, and directing us to follow a link to confirm the depositor’s name, and view the check image seemed like the perfect phishing, just like some Redditors thought it could be. Can we be blamed, after all?

I called BofA and, yes, it was valid. But so many wrongs on this one. The short code number they used is not listed anywhere, so that we can verify it really came from BofA. The link on it, instead of simply telling us to use their mobile app, or to login at the bank portal, and the Bank of America image they added to the SMS. It is as if they are training us to fall for phishing.

The problem I have with feeds (not feed readers) is that most will only give us a small summary—if we are lucky! RSS/Atom/JSON feeds with next to no content are simply, and unequivocably, worthless.

CPAP machine company calls me to see how I am doing with it, and to ask a few questions. I say “I have not been able to get used to it, I will have to return it”. They ask me for my date of birth, and email address. I tell them “I didn’t call you, you did. You should have all the information on file, I see no reason to provide it to you now”. After exchanging pleasantries we discontinue the call.

I then call back, and ask for the steps to return the machine. I am asked for my full name, date of birth, and email address, to pull up my account. They say an RMA number, and a prepaid label for its return will be sent to me. I offer to save them money by returning it to the same place I picked it up. I can’t, they tell me. That place only dishes out new machines, and doesn’t take used ones back. OK then!

SharePoint, or OneDrive, or whatever name they are giving these days to Microsoft’s enterprise storage (part of their “Office 365”), just gobbled up the many changes collaborators made on a document I shared. Incredibly enough, I saw the changes as they were happening yesterday, yet today they are no longer. Infuriating, to say the least.

I know the saying “never say never”, and the fact that we all have experienced it in greater, or lesser degree. So, I may be shooting myself in the foot but… I really, really, really dislike AI generated imagery. That’s the note.

The highlight of the mornings I am forced to come to the office was that trance-like flickering light at the corner Walgreens. I always looked forward to seeing it as it had an amazing, calming, effect on me. Now is gone; someone had the bad idea to “fix” what wasn’t truly broken.

It is next to impossible to get an account on Hetzner. I have tried twice in the past, and just when I thought I was home free, the account gets locked, and/or extra ridiculous¹ documentation is requested (which I refuse to furnish). Great prices they have, innaccessible they are for the rest of us.

Once again, organised religion is getting in my way. My very sacred Sunday morning with Mum and Ông, and our holy coffee time, has been excommunicated by the visit of “the priests”, as she wrote to me. Maybe I am a curmudgeon, but having someone visiting uninvited, and impromptu, doesn’t fly with me unless they are very close. I doubt these “fathers” are.

Just sent Martin his birthday gift to the Netherlands, for which we paid $85.20 on postage. Not too bad. The real surprise, though, came to be the extra fee he will need to pay upon delivery: $40. When I asked why, and if I could pay for it in advance here, I was told that it was Netherlands-specific charge, and that there was nothing I could do about it. Ugh, TIL.

Every Wednesday our manager brings bagels for everyone to enjoy. I haven’t counted them, but easily three dozens, plus a few cream cheese pots—including “fancy” flavoured ones. We are all very, very thankful to him. Thank you, Jim!

What brings me here, though, is someone doing ala “The Muffin Tops”, just with bagel tops. I mean, what kind of a psychopath will take the top of a bagel, and leave the bottom behind? That’s it, that’s the note.

Does it makes sense to you that, after holding off for so long towards achieving a goal worth achieving, a few democrats decide to “cross lines” thus making all their efforts, and pains, worthless?

I had to wait around 30 minutes, and finally provide aid, in order to get $40 “digital gift card” for the Horsie, while opening a Costco membership for the first time throught a reseller. I will tell you this much: I would have, gladly, given away $40 not to go through that. 😅

“Notarize your macOS software to give users more confidence that the Developer ID-signed software you distribute has been checked by Apple for malicious components. Notarization of macOS software is not App Review. The Apple notary service is an automated system that scans your software for malicious content, checks for code-signing issues, and returns the results to you quickly.”

Apple’s notarisation service is good for the user, and developers—the last need to pay $99 a year for it. Yet, there are some that believe the Apple’s notarisation blocks software “freedom”.

➝ Via Hacker News.

Having implemented BIMI for my most commonly used email domain (because I saw it on the emails I get from The New York Times), I briefly considered getting a VMC, just to realise it is all, but a racket. A huge racket.

“Tesla announced Thursday that shareholders had voted to approve the biggest pay package in corporate history for CEO Elon Musk, in a deal worth up to $1 trillion over 10 years if the company meets a list of benchmarks such as selling 1 million humanoid robots.”

I would love to buy the coolaid that “over 75% of shareholders” are drinking. Hmm, ay ay ay!

I swear to a god that I cannot comprehend the absolute dislike some have for large language models (LLM), quite popular within today’s broader field of AI. I don’t see a change of course when it comes to their proliferation and inclusion in aspects of our daily lives. Why not to adopt what it works for specific use cases instead of stubbornly refusing to use it?

It seems that Hacker News is now running a direct advertising of some sorts. This is the first time I see this, and thought it is text, and tech related, and one can hide it, it sets a precedent with a bad outcome potential.

Today, after much thought and deliberation, I re-subscribed to The New York Times. It was hard to pass their $50/year offer, as I have been consuming it more and more through archive.today. One of the first things I did was to install their iOS application, and from it comes my first complaint: the amount of ads on it is distasteful. So much that I will probably mostly use the web version, as I can eliminate them fully that way.

Just a little note to record that my first night with the CPAP/APAP machine was horrible. It reminded me when I had the sleep study, all wired up. Well, no wires this time, but so very uncomfortable! I am sure this will not be the last I will note on this.

Yeah… no. Call me skeptic, cynic, hopeless, non-believer, whatever you want, but I don’t think this is how is going to pan out.

“With trillions of digital workers and robots entering the economy, a tenfold increase in GDP represents a very conservative estimate of how much full automation could increase economic output. If this modest increase were reflected proportionally in US tax revenues, we could resolve all current Social Security funding shortfalls, lower the retirement age to 18, and increase the average payout to over $150,000 per adult per year.”

➝ Via Hacker News.

I told person A that I will be signing the papers later today but that, before I did so, wanted to know why two seemingly identical emails were sent to me by person B. The answer? “Person B accidently hit the send button twice.” What in the world?! How do you do that?

Ugh? Well, this is the drop that overflows the cup. GM ditching Apple Carplay will stop us from buying any GM vehicles in the future. Oh, wait, we never buy GM. 🤣

The corner radius alignment—or lack thereof—on macOS 26 has been bothering me from day one. Specifically for the two applications I run maximised at all times, Safari and Terminal. Will Apple fix it (my hope)? Is it behaving as intended (my biggest fear)?

Last year we placed a bowl full on candies, and left the porch light on, as an indication that Halloween was “happening”. Not a single kid, or adult, showed up. All candies were donated to work. This year there will be no candies, and light will remain off. Halloween is off.

So far having a fairly bad experience while trying to get a PAP machine ordered after having gone through a sleep study. I received an email from them stating the order was sent, while neglecting to send it. At square one now, a month after receiving the email. Ugh!

It is 2025, and most Linux distributions do not ship exclusively i386 ISOs. Yet, people get their amd64 machines, and straight they go to install packages—and their libraries—within the i386 architecture. Currently adding around 1TiB of i386 to our mirrors. 🤦‍♂️

I have a notification on GitHub that I can’t clear out. Someone mentioned me on a repository for which I have no access, or it has since been deleted, or something else. The only “solution” that I have found involves installing and using gh. Why? I don’t want to!

I want to go back to start using email more, like I used to. I am looking into participating more on mailing lists, and overall using email more for communication for which I have been using non-asynchronous apps. I prefer to use the apps provided by the OS, as I have mentioned it before. The thing is, macOS mail app has a couple of things that the “email perfectionist” in me dislikes. A lot. I am one of those, yes. Let’s see:

• No strict threading, that is, using in-reply-to and message-id to properly create threads. It seems that the iOS/macOS Mail app will not exclusively use those, often using subjects to group emails.
• No way to set quoted text to start with the venerable > Internet “standard”. Apple Mail insists on using their colored |.

So, that’s the pickle, my pickle. Will I dust off mutt, or Thunderbird? Ugh, I don’t want to, but…

My most used, and only, filters on the Fediverse are “#wordle” and “wordle”. They work great. I cannot begin to describe how much I dislike those silly “bragging” squares people post, over and over. Ugh!

I remember reading that Jesus said: “Fear everyone, expel the stranger, blame the poor, feed the rich, ignore the sick, sacrifice the young, love only thyself, trust only Caesar, throw lots of stones.” Right? 🙄

With the release of iOS 26, it is iOS 7 all over again. It is also Mac OS X, “the re-run”, with the release of macOS 26. Complain we must, it matters not.

“The new iOS 7 is horrible. It looks like something grade schoolers designed. The colors are too bright. It is very distracting when you have to squint looking at different apps due to the harshness […]. There is no point in keeping something that is so horrible to use.”

“Just “up"graded my iPhone to iOS 26 and I absolutely hate it. It’s visually the ugliest iOS Apple has ever produced […]. It’s so ugly I’m thinking of cancelling my iPhone Air order and looking at Samsung options.”

I cannot stand Steam. Their webpage is shoddy, just as is their app. The games you “own” in their platform you really don’t. I made the mistake of “buying” Diablo IV and Last Epoch for desktop computers because they entised me with a great price, but never, ever, again. You get what you pay for.

I really cannot stress this enough. Please, don’t say “I have a question”, just ask the question. From “No Hello, here are some examples:

• “Hey man, what’s up? also, any idea when that thing’s due?”
• “Hi there! Hope you’re well. I’m after the latest deck, when you get a sec :)”
• “Hey, if you’re not busy, could you update those NFRs?”
• “Etc.”