Just in case you're looking for open source or free software for this and that occasionally, there's a list at beyondsoftware.info with programmes that might be of interest - ranging from an ad-free, privacy-focused email app for Android to a driver updater for Windows, and many things inbetween.

There was a little website work done today, and then I realised that I had one of the extensions that were currently found out to have a vulnerability on the site. So after a little bit of hectic checking, verifying, and so (as you do), it should now be completely fixed (at least the part in question has been deactivated and will be completely removed once I have installed and tweaked the replacement). 

Moral of the story: Check your things. And, yes, be lucky sometimes so you catch stuff like that before something really awkward, or annoying, happens...

The heatwave, for now, is broken (at least back to a manageable level), which is very nice, because the Little Cat is feeling well enough to hang out on my desk while I work, and that means a warm, furry, purring cat on my arm and against my body. Which is lovely, don't get me wrong, but it will get a little warm after a while.

Otherwise, there's lots and lots of the boring stuff happening now that the summer break is slowly coming nearer, and the exciting hose project is finished: Taxes, book-keeping (the second quarter is over, so yay, filing stuff), and finally sending stuff long promised and reading things that had also long been promised to be read.  

I've also done a few more tweaks to the website in preparation of the update, and I am hoping to manage some clean-up and housekeeping while I'm at this stuff. The current template that everything runs on is a third-party one, and while I'm not unhappy with it in general, it's also getting a little outdated... so I'm more or less decided now to use the core template in the future.

Which, however, means a good amount of poking and prodding so it looks similar to the thing I have, or, option b, decide how I would like it to look even better. As option a is possibly more tweaking work but less thinking work, I am currently tending to that.

But, lovely readers of this blog and users of this site, now is your chance to let me know what you love, hate, or miss on these pages! It would really help me to have feedback (even if I can't promise that I can follow through on everything).

By pure chance, I realised two days ago that the mobile menu in my homepage does not behave as it should anymore... which inspired me to do what I thought of as a quick little fix to get it from "extend submenu items on click", which did not work, to "have items permanently open" which is not ideal, but better than having most of the pages inaccessible.

The whole thing resulted in me being unable to access the page. That was... unexpected. It also took me way, waaay too long to realise the error was something out of my reach to fix. So I contacted my hoster (who I still maintain is the utter and absolute best, and if you need someone to host you, I do recommend Schwarzkünstler, who has always helped me fix the things that I usually caused myself by bumbling around and doing something stupid). He let me know that this error was only limited to my own IP address (phew!) and fixed it (double phew! and to my grand appreciation in the evening way after normal work hours). 

I'm still not sure how I managed to kick myself out, but, well. I learned stuff (always good!), the issue is hopefully fixed now, I sort of have a plan on what to do with the rest that I should have taken care of an unholy time ago, and I can go back to the things that were actually on the list to do yesterday, and which all have deadlines as well. Um. 

(You can imagine, I think, that the website issue induced panic meant about nothing of the other stuff happened. Sigh.)

That said - if you run into any issues on the page, whether shop, blog, or main pages, please please do let me know. I am trying to look things over and give them a check after every change or update, but the pages are that large these days that chances are very high I will miss stuff. Especially since it also depends on browsers and stuff.

On the plus side, I did put in some extra "Aaaaaaaaaargh" time yesterday evening puzzling over the Alpirsbach hose again, and trying to find out where things went askew (literally, as there's way too much twist in the legs). Good news: I have pinpointed the issue, with the kind thinking help of the Most Patient Husband of Them All. Bad news: To fix it, I'll have to undo the whole test piece. Which I will not do right now, but instead try a second version and try to do that correctly this time around. And then... the Real Thing (TM). Wish me luck.

...that my computer was not broken.

I had trouble getting it to turn back on from sleep mode after lunch, and re-starting didn't help either, so I ended up calling one of the computer shops in town - actually I called two. The first one told me "you'll have to come in and bring it so we can have a look" and then the second one called back (he didn't answer on my first attempt) and told me that in 50% of such cases, it's a hang-up in the BIOS and I could try to fix it myself by taking out the battery, doing a few longer power button presses, and then powering it back up.

To my very, very great relief, it did work! Because buying a new computer and getting everything settled with the new machine was really quite low on my list of things I'd currently love to do. It did bring the bonus insight that the battery is old and starting to turn into a more rounded shape, so a new battery is now on its way. (Via said computer guy - so he's at least getting a little bit of profit from helping out.)

So now I can do the printing that was not possible after lunch, and get stuff ready to go into the post tomorrow (instead of today). Whew.

I have received a mail today that my phone will not be receiving further updates. Meh. Big meh.

To be fair, I've had it for more than six years now. Fairphone, the manufacturer, originally promised support for five years after launch, and that was two years ago, so there was an extra two years bonus afterwards. I'm still rather miffed, as the phone is still fine and I am very much not looking forward to getting a new one ever. (The camera is iffy, but I've gotten used to that, and also I really dislike phone changes.)

To be fair even further, I've done some reading on it and apparently it's not just the laziness of the fairphone folks but also the fact that the chip manufacturers stop their support at some time, and voilà, there you go, everything gets harder. 

For now, though, things will still work for a while. After that I will have to see whether I need to switch to LineageOS, and if yes if my bank apps will still work on that. In any case, it's very much a case of meh, and I'm a little disappointed and a little sad. 

So much for my plan to watch a presentation that was available online after the fact - in contrast to the announcement, it was not recorded after all, and is thus not available. It would have been something on backstrap weaving, but due to time differences, the real thing would have been at three o'clock in the night hereabouts. My love for textiles runs deep, but my love for sleep is at least as profound, so I would have passed even if I had known that it will not be recorded. 

Still, funnily, it makes a difference somehow to be disappointed because it's in the middle of the night and one will not join in, or to be disappointed because it was announced to be recorded and then be told it was not, after all. Not that the outcome is any different. 

I am not complaining, by the way - something may have happened, technical or otherwise, to have things turn out like that. What I'd rather complain about (well, among many other things that are of a more political or social nature, but I am planning to do other things this evening as well and will thus not even get started) is how much AI has made searching for stuff on the 'Net harder than before. Back a few years ago, when I was looking for something, there was the occasional thing that was repeated on a few websites. Mostly it was easier to identify and thus fairly quick to sort out - but now, searching is much more cumbersome just due to the sheer amount of copy-and-paste stuff, and repetitions of things quite clearly written by AI. Add that to the fact that some things are hard to search for anyways ("spindle" can mean way too many things, for instance, and some other terms are, well, not advisable due to NSFW reasons) and it gets unpleasant.

Unfortunately, that does not look like a problem that will go away any time soon. This AI stuff is here for a while, and will most probably continue to spew shitty hallucinated texts all over the 'Net, and then gobble them up again to feed itself with the basis for even more, even wilder hallucinations.

You can clearly tell that I'm no fan of the AI boom. Yes, I know that there are some use cases where it's a real help, and I am using AI assistance for those as well. Such as translation help, so you don't have to look up every second word in the dictionary, and yes, I am old enough and old-fashioned enough that there were texts in my life that I had to tackle like this if I wanted to read them. Or programming assistance when it's a common software and a problem that you can very clearly describe, and very clearly describe how you want to solve it. My guideline these days is that if I could find the solution written out by someone (someone real, human, breathing and thinking) on the 'Net somewhere, it's something that may be solveable by AI. If not... nope. With a little nope cherry on top. It's basically a very, very large cross-language dictionary, and that is, in my opinion, all that it's good for, and all that it will be good for. It also has the desire to please you, so chances are high you won't get any solid or sensible advice. Which means... it's a large dictionary with a bias.

In addition, all that "free" use of AI comes at quite a cost - because these servers don't run themselves, and there is a considerable amount of energy and logistics going into them these days. Especially the image generation eats up quite a lot of resources, and with a lot of that being, more or less, utter crap, and also a lot of it being just for fun... well. Meh.

So. Rant over. For now. I'll now go and have a nice, analogue, non-AI (maybe even non-intelligent) evening.