Archive: 2023-11
Microsoft recommends eating human brains
There has always been a certain amount of garbage on the internet, but I feel like there was a time, not so long ago, that giant tech companies would have shied away from suggesting that we eat human brains.
Week 151: Still not smart
On Monday night, we had dinner with my parents, who were in London for an event on Tuesday. We met near London Bridge, so I was able to take a relaxed evening walk along the Thames to get there.
Week 150: Round numbers
Happy new decigigasecond! The Unix timestamp ticked over from 1,699,999,999 to 1,700,000,000 on Tuesday evening. That’s 1.7 Gs since 1 January 1970 in UTC. As far as I’m aware, decigigasecond isn’t a word. It is now.
A quick fix for ChromeDriver incompatibilities on Linux
If you have some tests that use ChromeDriver to run in a browser environment, and you’re seeing errors like
This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 114, and you’d rather do some useful work than waste time fixing stuff that worked last week, here’s a quick fix that worked for me on Linux. Something similar might work on Mac OS. I’ve no idea about Windows.Week 149: Mission to Uranus
I underwent a gastroscopy and colonoscopy on Wednesday, but the procedure wasn’t actually the bad part. That would be the preparation.
Remapping mouse buttons in Wayland
For reasons that I won’t go into here, I switched my desktop computer from an X.Org session to Wayland. One thing that didn’t work was my customised trackball button mapping. That was never particularly user-friendly under X.org, but under Wayland it’s not supported at all. Or rather, it’s delegated to the desktop environment, and as I’m using Gnome, there’s scant customisation available.
But that doesn’t mean we’re out of luck.
Week 148: A refund appears
When we decided to give up on the obviously failing London Solar Together scheme last year, I’d written off the £150 deposit/survey fee that was all we’d paid. The sketchy company that was doing (or, mostly, not doing) the installations has followed its inevitable course into failure, like many of the directors’ previous companies: dissolved after going into administration; same again; this one too; and this one; currently in liquidation; also in liquidation. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. The result, however, is that Solar Together have given us the deposit back, so in the end we haven’t lost anything at all.