Rick's b.log - entry 2025/03/28

Should I just give up on PlingStore?

No reply, and three months later to the day and it's still rejecting uploads.

I understand that one cannot expect the moon on a stick for a free service, but given that it's "the other" RISC OS packaging service, and the one that most tries to be like an "app store" (PackMan doesn't support paid-for products), it is a shame to see it seemingly stuck in some sort of limbo.

God knows, the RISC OS world is chock-full of old partial bits of things - for a good demonstration, how many copies of Samba are floating around (and do any of them work on ARMv8?) and how many copies of WebJames. Oh, and good luck trying to get buildable sources of these to make your own... I did at one time get most of the source to WebJames but gave up when it failed to build due to a missing third-party library, of which I found three and none of those were the right one.

So, from now on and until I receive word otherwise regarding PlingStore, you'll find updates of my stuff here on this blog. Don't worry - you don't need to read loads of stuff or search to find what you're looking for. Just go to any blog entry. If you are using a mobile device, switch to desktop mode. Then look on the right-hand panel under where it says "Geekery" and my programs are listed there with version numbers. It is all listed mostly-alphabetically these days.

It might be an idea for software to check when you start it to see if there is an update, and if so to pop up a notification. It's something to think about, but I have no plans at the moment.

Tea v0.20

Be persistent. Today, during testing, I had it take seven or eight attempts to load one day, and just a few minutes later I was able to load up all eight days that Tea offers without problem. I...have no idea...

Oh, and just to clarify, this is not a fault in my application. The server has a bizarre habit of not having longer-term (this is "next Friday") programme data for the BBC channels.

I guess there's nothing on BBC tonight.

Bye bye W H Smith

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since I've been in the UK so I don't know what became of W H Smith in the online era and how they have changed/adapted in the past two decades, but this saddens me as pretty much my first stop when going out would have been a WHS (Camberley, Fleet, Woking, and Aldershot in particular) and some times the reason for going out would be to go to WHS.

Actually, it's one of the things I miss here in France - a decent bookstore that also sells magazines and such. Leclerc came close with their various "Espace Culturel" many of which seem to have either vanished or greatly downsized from what they were back in 2019(ish).
Don't get me wrong, there are bookstores in places like Rennes and Nantes, I visited one when I went to Rennes for my little Brexit-permission-card. But France doesn't have the concept of a "high street" in the same way as the UK so bookshops in the smaller towns are not unlike somebody stuck some shelving in their living room and stocked a peciliar selection of books that even managed to confuse mom as to what target demographic they were hoping for, and she used to read loads (in English, French, and Spanish).

McNuggets!

Today was a completely different story. Grey, light drizzle, and struggled to be a two-digit temperature. So I went shopping to get some stuff for work, mostly. Yup. My little holiday is over. Already. Yikes, that went quickly.

I got some actual real vegetables.

Veggies on the conveyor belt.

This is for a stew that I'll make maybe tomorrow; I want it tomorrow, but if I do it on Sunday I can put the excess into a tupperware to take to work for my lunch.
On the left is seven euros worth of beef bits. In the paper bag are carrots. There's an onion, a leek, and that bag at the back that says UUUU are decent sized potatoes.
And, yes, I bought a shallot. Stuff the thing saying there's a minimum acceptable weight. I only wanted one shallot. I'm not using a bag for it, so what's the problem?

I then stopped at McDonald's to get some chicken nuggets. I blew a few of my holiday cheques getting sixty nuggets. It's expensive, but I at least know that these are actual chicken pieces.
I got myself a burger at the same time, and the chips were an insult. Really, what the hell is this miserable excuse? Some management prick probably rubs their hands in glee at the centimes saved by cheaping out on the quantity of chips, and by not tossing them when they are old enough to be chewy. Well, this is just another reminder of why I rarely patronise the big M these days. For a little under twice the list price of these chips, I can get myself 1.6kg of McCain chips. Ten to fifteen minutes in the air fryer and they're hot and fresh and plentiful. So saving centimes is losing euros. Maybe you might want to rethink that strategy? Especially when you're a very prominent American brand and, well, let's just say "politics" and leave it at that.

Cold, old, and barely visible; this is downright offensive.

I did, however, get exactly sixty nuggets. I wasn't anal enough to specifically count them, it was because I was merging the three boxes into two boxes in order to take less room in the freezer.

Sixty McNuggets.

I put them in the cold box (the "one star freezer" but that's being optimistic) in the fridge to bring the temperature down quickly, and then put them into the freezer-freezer. So now I can do nuggets and chips. Or maybe nuggets and rice and tikka sauce?

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C Ferris, 28th March 2025, 20:50

Hey Rick! I noticed today that !Manga is failing to load anything, it does pull the library and organises it but it fails to fetch for viewing (HTTP 403). I have no idea if you’re still developing this app but is great and it would be nice to have it working again.    Thanks    Msg from RiscOS Open

A tree-dwelling mammal, 28th March 2025, 21:00

20+ years ago, there was a massive WH Smith at 'The Mall' (Cribbs Causeway) in Bristol. It had a huge entertainment section, CDs, DVDs etc.    Then a few years later, after Early Learning Centre went to the wall, the formerly massive branch downsized and took over half of the ELC shop unit (ELC had a double-sized unit). They stopped selling entertainment, and basically don't really sell much.    It's only really worth popping in there to get a bottle of soft drink (and then only worthwhile if you buy two, the individual prices are somewhat high but the '2 for X' offer is generally ok). Other than that, they sell newspapers (which nobody buys), magazines (which nobody buys) and overpriced tat.    No wonder they're closing down.

Rick, 28th March 2025, 21:24

Colin: Please see the entry of 2022/12/25.    Tree rodent: I had a horrible feeling that they might have suffered in the age of Amazon. That's a shame. There used to be a huge one in Reading as well.    Just walked around Google Maps. Was the one in Woking always there? I thought it was more in the big multi level shopping centre. The one in Aldershot is "temporarily closed". The one in Fleet is next to the supermarket, tiny, and seemingly sells more food than books (is that even useful next to a Waitrose? Though it now called itself a "Little Waitrose", does that mean it is smaller than I remember?). And the one in Bridgwater? Gone.  Jeez... if I ever go back to the UK there'll be nothing to go back for... 😭

C Ferris, 28th March 2025, 23:24

The Post Office is somehow tied up with some WH Smiths shops.

A tree-dwelling mammal, 29th March 2025, 15:00

Things have got worse at Cribbs. The management at The Mall refused to renew HMV's lease, so now there's a huge shopping centre with nowhere that sells entertainment products.    There is still an HMV in Bristol city centre, but thanks to the Clean Air Zone [1], extortionate parking charges and a proliferation of crackheads that loiter around Broadmead, nobody really goes to the city centre any more.    The last time I went to HMV in the centre they were disappointed that they had to close the Cribbs branch. Apparently they're in negotiations to re-open if a unit becomes available.    [1] The CAZ is one of those brain-dead ideas that somehow got implemented. Basically in order to drive into the city centre, you have to pay the extortionists at the City Council ten of your English pounds, unless you have a petrol-engined car registered from 1st Jan 2006 onwards, or a diesel registered from 1st Jan 2016 onwards. Which means my 2014 diesel, despite complying with the emissions on the numbers, is not exempt. If I had an identical model that had been registered 18 months later, it would be exempt. And all the politicians are complaining that the city centre is dying and turning into one huge crack den.

Rick, 29th March 2025, 16:52

I never understood the logic of "we're going to not renew the lease and/or inflate the rent because we're greedy" when it so often leads to empty units and decline. Aldershot had a shiny new extension to the shopping centre and they got some shops in, then the prices went up, then the shops left. Loss of jobs, loss of prestige, the town centre suffered because people went to other places (like Guildford or Woking) where the shops *were*.    Yes, I think the blanket date rule for engines is stupid. Because Felicity (my first car, the white one) was registered in 1997 or somesuch it didn't need to undergo an emission test. My last car, the red one, did. Both used *exactly* the same engine. It wasn't until 2015 or so that Aixam changed to using a Euro5 diesel instead of Euro2. Don't know what the technical difference is, they look and sound alike...    Rennes has a low emission zone, but they only enforce it when air pollution is bad. That's what the Crit'Air sticker is about. Good cars can go any time, bad cars can't go, and those in the middle can go on alternate days. They tried reducing the speed on the ring road, but X amount of emission from a fast car is roughly the same as Y amount of emission from a slower car. Yes the slower car will emit less, but it is there for longer, so it kind of balances out. 🤦🏻‍♀️  Not that the rocade isn't a massive catastrophy every rush hour when nothing moves for extended periods...

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