Weekend Scrapes

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Notice how I’ve left off the Number scale on the side

I’m not the kind of person who obsesses over their blog traffic (or am I?) but I’ve noticed over the last few weeks that I get peaks in traffic over the weekend. Very strange. I don’t think it is people going “At last-it’s the end of the week and I can spend my leisure time catching up with Rob”. I think it is more likely that the net might be a bit quieter during the weekend and so that’s when systems go out and scrape it for words to train their large language models. My blog contains quite a few words, so I get a lot of hits on my pages.

This does mean, of course, that my writings are all being stolen without my knowledge or permission, and they will be incorporated into random systems to make them appear ever so slightly more human. Or, at least more Rob. I don’t mind this too much though, if this means that my gift to posterity is devices that sound a bit like me, then I’m OK with that. And, what that in mind, here’s my latest grate thort:

I’ve started wearing high-visibility clothing because my wardrobe is very dark inside.

Insights from Octopus

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You don’t say

We had our gas and electricity meters replaced yesterday with new smart ones. The process was quick and efficient. Although it felt strange to be in a house where nothing worked for the hour or so it took to swap the electricity one. The data feeds seem to be working now, although it might take a bit of time for the insights to catch up.

I was looking forward to getting a gadget to put in the kitchen to monitor my energy usage, but these aren’t given away anymore. Apparently nobody uses them and they end up in the back of a drawer. Everything can be done via the app. I’m tempted to see if I can’t make something to provide a display.

We did have a brief go with Agile Octopus a while back but we gave up when the prices reached the point where it was impossible to do things economically for long periods of the day. Perhaps we’ll take a look at some of the more adventurous tariffs in the future. I’m just looking forward to not having to submit meter readings every month.

Given the pip

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When is a dishwasher not a dishwasher? In our house it’s around half past three in the afternoon when you open the thing and find lots of plates still with food still attached. Very much a first world problem, but still a bit irritating.

Today I thought I’d have a go at fixing it, just in time for Christmas next year. Or something. I took off the “spinny things that spray water” - I’m sure that’s their proper name - and had a look a them. Turned out that one had filled itself up with lemon pips. These had escaped from gin and tonic glasses and found their way into the pipework, ending up in a position to block the water flow into the jets which clean the plates.

There’s a pro-tip here. If your dishwasher isn’t a dishwasher, make sure that nothing is blocking the flow. In theory there are filters to stop this kind of thing happening but as we all know, theory and reality are not always the same thing.

Sticky Keys

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Here’s a lifestyle tip for all (both) my readers. Don’t use a key to slice through the tape on a package and then immediately try to use the same key to open the door. Slicing through tape can deposit a bunch of sticky stuff onto the key which then ends up in the lock.

I spotted the gluey residue just in time. No damage was done. Second lifestyle tip is to rub a lead pencil up and down the business end of a key a few times. This deposits a layer of graphite on the key which will find its way into the lock mechanism and make it work much more smoothly. Make sure your pencil is a lead one though, this doesn’t work with crayons.

In the Money?

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I got a strange email this evening from a bunch of lawyers. It’s about the Anthropic Copyright Settlement. This is a class action brought on behalf of authors whose work allegedly appeared in a couple of allegedly pirate datasets that were allegedly used by Anthropic to train their AI systems. Allegedly. Anyhoo, I searched their database and 7 of my books were identified…

The settlement amount was 1.5 Billion dollars, but individual authors only get a tiny percentage of this. It’s nice to see some action being taken on behalf of creatives who have had their work used in this way but I reckon we still have a long way to go. Or at least, we should have. Now I get to fill in a form and wait until the end of April next year for the next phase of the process. I just hope I get enough to buy a camera…..

Holey Stupid

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I’ve got a new desk. Gone are the bright red Ikea ones that weighed substantially less than the things we put on them. Now I have a big strong counter which hopefully won’t move much when I strap a steering wheel to it.

Anyhoo, I wanted some holes for cables to go through. And I also fancied the device above, which sets a rather useful mains socket and some powered usb ports into the desk. I discovered that these are 80mm diameter. So I asked for some holes which were 80mm diameter. Big mistake. Turns out that two things which are exactly the same size don’t fit together properly. The result you see above is the result of a bunch of frantic extra sanding on my part…

Out of date spam

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Does anyone know how I can delete all the emails from a particular sender on Gmail using the web client? You would think that this would be easy. There would be some way of specifying the sender and then a convenient button that you could press to delete everything.

If there is such a button, I’ve not been able to find it. All I can do is work my way through pages of mails, deleting everything in each page. It’s almost as if Google want to make it hard for you to get rid of dross so that your email fills up and you have to pay them for extra storage….