Modern Vespa

just had one when posting a comment. refresh and accepting the do resubmit prompt worked. it didn't double post.

Gah! I wasn't SSH'd into the server when this happened, so I missed any debug output.

Yeah, those are there, too. For the scratch offs. But there's also a rack on the counter and the rest of the Mega Millions and Powerball stuff as well.

Because the discussion about lotteries came up, Florida introduced a lottery around forty years ago.

It got a lot of attention, and I bought a few tickets for a couple of years until I came to this observation.

The odds of winning a big lottery prize are about the same whether you buy a ticket or not.

Bill

The only way you can win is if your deity of choice deems you worthy. And why wouldn't they choose you over some other idiot? In which case buying the minimum value ticket is the way to go.

Hotel pillows are pissing me off.

Yeah, yeah, first world problem, I know, but in the line of my job, I have to stay in hotels whenever I'm sent on an overnight trip, which can be almost weekly at this time of year.

For the past year or two, it seems that hotels have ALL transitioned to those small, super-squishy (presumed 'luxurious'?) nothing-pads that are like fabric and foam quicksand.

There's usually five of the damned things arranged on the bed, and even if you stack three of them on top of each other, your head will instantly sink through them all the way to the mattress, and provide exactly zero support for your head, and I usually end up with an aching neck in the morning.

I am also starting to believe that these disturbingly foo-foo mush-pads may present a potentially dangerous suffocation hazard as well.

If one stacks three or four of these pillows and lays on them when sleeping on one's side, as your head sinks to the bottom of this fluffy pile, the sides of the pillows billow up on each side and threaten to cut off your air, so it's definitely best to sleep flat on your back if at all possible and, hopefully, keep your vital airways open.

These are the nasty fu#@ers I'm talking about...

You think you can bring a pillow from home? You know, when your bus isn't filled with old tires?

Take your own with you! Mrs jimc does.

Book places with a pillow menu. What is this, the dark ages?

I have the opposite problem with hotel pillows.

As a stomach sleeper, I need a flat pillow. All the hotels I have stayed in have thick, stiff pillows that bend my neck in a very uncomfortable angle.

Since I regularly get four pillows in a bed, why can't hotels provide a mix of thick and thin pillows?

Some of them actually do. It may not be just thickness, but a mixture of down and synthetic fill.

'Smart things' that only run on 2.4ghz wifi. I'l looking at you Treager and garage door opener!

I should not require a computer science degree, nor have a deep understanding of computer networking just to make a door go up and down... with my phone.

I'm with you on this one. I have two Logitech Circle View cameras -- one of them a plain camera, and one of them a doorbell/camera combo. The doorbell is great -- highly recommended. The plain camera only runs on 2.4ghz, which presents some genuine obstacles to getting it to work in a lot of circumstances.

Having worked at the NSA (and affiliated locations) for 16 of my 21 years in the .mil.....I'm not smart-homing anything


Just got word a local distillery is closing, which sucks hard because the owner/master distiller is a friend and not only was he recently celebrating a contract to distill for Pusser's, he makes some damn good rum under his own label too.

Harumph. Guess we're stocking up before we head to Venice.

Agreed that the so-called IoT "Internet of Things" would be more accurately called the "Internet of Shit".

Disagree that the security of a smart home is an unsolvable problem.

They could have a pillow bar in the lobby.

Pillow fights in the Gym.

It's not a friggin' moped!

https://news.sky.com/story/an-industrial-scale-of-theft-met-police-seizes-1-000-stolen-phones-and-arrests-230-people-in-crackdown-13303630

Going to be a long day.

Our samsung TV picks 5ghz and the soundbar picks 2.4ghz. Theres no way on our router to configure them both to be the same.

True but if you just don't do it then the security holes don't exist in the first place.

More free time for ice cream and strippers.

Search for a 'Band Steering' tab in the GUI. Every modern router has the option for a unified WiFi...

I'll take a look. I did a bit of googling on it a while ago when i was trying to fix it. Its a BT home hub 5? i cant remember the model but i think the version before you could create the second ssid for 2.5 but on this one you can't

Fair.

I can't read the whole story here (it's an exclusive to the Washington Post, and I don't have a subscription) but on the face of it, this is really, really bad.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/07/apple-encryption-backdoor-uk/

Bloody hell. The fuckers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20g288yldko

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/07/uk-confronts-apple-with-demand-for-cloud-backdoor-to-users-encrypted-data

What a stupid unwinnable fight.

Thanks for the links.

One quote stands out to underscore how incredibly stupid this is: No. That's not how international law works. That's not how any of this works. The UK has no legal right to access my data, no matter how much they insist they do.

I hope the UK likes the taste of an entire country without iPhones, because that's the direction this is headed.

Android and iphone have each hovered around 50% of the UK market - so a sizeable chunk.

Neither politicians nor reporters tend to have any clue how this stuff works anyway.

That Superbowl Saturday isn't a thing 😴

Less of an issue for those of us who don't continue worshiping an organization that protects rapists over and over again because money. /shrug

It's an incredibly difficult balancing act for a Government to tackle Kiddie Fiddlers, Drug and People Smugglers, Terrorists etc and not come over as trouncing on Free Speech and Human Rights.

True (because said govies are usually benefitting at least indirectly from allowing it to continue, i.e. Epstein), but a football player who thinks being a football player means he can SA licensed massage therapists (who are NOT SWs) to the point he's been banned from several establishments and the local police, team, and NFL itself deliberately keep it quiet because football, is a bit different.

... Confused? You won't be, after this week's episode of ... What's Pissing you off Today?

Indeed, I presume our friends across the pond understand though?

Having to be so often repairing and improving on Piaggio's designs.

This is wear that's 2.5mm deep on the underside of the 3.5mm-ish thick pet carrier.

Obviously it will eventually make it all the way through.

What kind of animal are you keeping in that pet carrier?!!

#Bruno3121

That pretty much explains it....

and again. editing a comment.

So this isn't actually a message from the (actual) MV server. This is a message from the CloudFront gateway, indicating it can't reach the server, and I'm not entirely sure why.

Which is all to say that nothing in my logs is going to shed any light on this particular problem.

I'll have to do some digging, but I am not optimistic I will be able to come up with an answer.