Rick's b.log - entry 2025/06/03

Central locking doesn't

The car will lock but it will not unlock. Except sometimes when it will unlock but not lock. The doors lock themselves when I go more than 10km/h (anti carjacking, though arguably nobody would be dumb enough to want to steal a car that half the mopeds around here can overtake). When I get to my destination and turn the key to off, it's fifty-fifty as to whether or not the doors will unlock themselves. If they do, then they can unlock but not lock. You can understand that this might be a problem when I'm not at home. So far turning the car back on and off again then pushing lock makes them able to lock. This is important as my doors do not have manual levers for the locks. It's all fancy automatic stuff.

If the unlock works, the dashboard button to open the boot works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. There's also a button to toggle the lock state. That doesn't work at all.

On two occasions I have had the unit get itself so confused that it just blinked the indicators like it does when unlocking, but continually. I had to turn the car on and off a couple of times to stop it doing that. As I'm sure you can imagine, one just can't drive when it's doing that.

It's this thing, which appears to be custom-made for Aixam.

The central locking controller.

I don't know if the box is defective, or if some sort of bad input is throwing the thing into a race condition due to lousy programming. What I know is that this is a new car that I have had for just under a year, thus I expect this to be fixed under guarantee (for free, of course!).
I have sent an email to the mechanic. I'll let you know how it goes, and if that doesn't seem to get anywhere, I'll get in touch with Aixam themselves. I wobbled the connector there just in case it was something loose there, beyond that isn't my problem.

I had an ulterior motive for locating this box. If it gives me too much grief about not locking, or if it does the blinky-lights thing again, I'll unplug the thing and tell them why I did that. It's simply unacceptable to be driving around with rapidly blinking hazards on - I would imagine there are even laws about that sort of thing. It's lucky that I heard it, because it controls the blinkers directly so there wasn't anything visible on the dashboard to show this was happening.

As for the boot? Well there is a little thing to pull hidden by one of the rear lights but it's a catch 22 that you need to get into the boot in order to open the boot. I faffed around enough to get it to be able to open the boot, then I wrapped some string around the thing to pull and took that up front just behind my seat. This isn't a problem, it's not that unlike how I used to open the boot on my last two cars.

I Blue-Petered something to open the boot.

I'll want this fixed. For free of course. But in terms of faults it's more an annoyance than anything else. It's not as if the motor controller has blown a transistor or a wheel fell off. But it doesn't indicate a particularly good build quality, which isn't really acceptable given the list price of these vehicles.

My happy word

About halfway along, she asked for us to imagine a word that makes us happy and say it to ourselves in our heads...yes, it's a bit pseudo-sciencey but I guess it's like meditation for people who don't know how to meditate. It's often done with schoolchildren here in France, though I can't help but think that getting rid of their phones and social media would do a lot more for their well-being than learning how to breathe more peacefully.

I noticed, along the way, that I was stimming pretty much the entire time. And she thinks I'm going to be able to clear my mind. Uh-huh, good luck with that. I fail at meditation because I'm asked to "picture nothing" and I then try to imagine what nothing really is, and does it have an event horizon, like is there something beyond the nothing, and what would be the boundary between nothing and something, what would it look like? And, I suppose, more to the point, is it actually even possible for "nothing" to exist. In the universe there's a lot of crud floating around in the emptiness, and there's invisible gunk that has some sort of gravitational behaviour that we call "dark matter" or "dark energy" which demonstrates that even in the massive emptiness there is something there even if we don't currently seem capable of observing it (we can, however, observe the effect that it has). And you can, no doubt, spot my problem with meditation.
Even worse, this dumb bargain-bin-reject brain of mine does the exact same sort of thing when I'm trying to fall asleep. I wouldn't mind if I had brilliant ideas that made me enough cash that I didn't have to worry about daft things like faulty locking units, but no, it's a brain full of barely-coherent gibberish. I would say that I'm really fed up with my brain, but it's my brain writing that it is fed up with itself and that's just a bit too meta for this time of the evening.

Anyway - that one word. The word that brings me happiness. Put your ideas in the comments below. I'll give you a hint and a half. The hint is that it doesn't have to do with something electronic. And the half-hint, to stop the snarky responses, is that it doesn't have anything to do with procreation.

Doctor Who

The BBC link announcer said it best when he said "What? What.".
What, indeed.

Piper was Rose Tyler, the companion of Christopher Eccleston back when the show was revived twenty years ago (!), and David Tennant, but she gets herself stuck in a parallel universe.
People have noted that, unlike in the past, she was not introduced as a Doctor in the end credits. But that's a kind of minor detail to a visually impressive but rather half-arse story that seemed to throw everything at the wall in case something sticks. The Rani, the big bad, manages to revive the Omega, some sort of original godlike creature that made Time Lords or something. She quickly gets eaten. Mrs Flood flits away (presumably to turn up again) while the Doctor grabs a conveniently hidden-in-plain-sight weapon and kicks Omega back to whatever hellhole he crawled out of.
This was totally something the Rani would do, and she just gets eaten. The potential mythology of the Omega, especially if that's what created the Time Lords, could have filled an episode by itself. But we get a lame attempt at an Eldritch Abomination that looks far too much like an oversized Buffy vampire for about three minutes, and half of that is it getting its arse kicked by a guy with a guitar. Okay, it was not a guitar but surely I'm not the only person that really wanted Ncuti to windmill his arm to belt out some power chords?
Big moment? But this wasn't the end. No. Having basically squandered Belinda for the entire episode by having her locked into a time proof box that UNIT was able to throw together in about an hour, her daughter was safe. The imaginary daughter, that is. Only the dream ended and she didn't because she was safely in that box. Belinda and the Doctor go back to the TARDIS along with Ruby Sunday feeling very much like a spare wheel as those two talked about the adventures that they would go on. A rather inventive scene had the two of them (Belinda and the Doctor) passing the daughter's jacket to each other who would fold it in half and hand it over. They kept talking about the things they would do with the fabric getting smaller and smaller, not lost on Ruby, until the fabric basically ceased to exist.
As did the little girl.
This led to some brilliant acting by Millie Gibson (Ruby) as the only person alive that remembered the child. So she has to endure everybody thinking she's a bit nuts while managing to convince the Doctor that she really existed so that he could go rescue her and then half of Belinda's scenes were blatantly retconned to bring this girl into existence.

Oh, and about halfway through UNIT had to fight off giant skeleton monsters. Logic might say they had a big gun of some sort on the roof. No, that would be too logical. What actually happened was the upper half of the skyscraper rotated, complete with a big ship's wheel for doing the rotations. What the hell?
Oh, and it was nice to see Anita back, but her duty was basically to hold open the door between UNIT and the Time Hotel so that reality could leak in. Yes, she was a living doorstop.

Given how many ideas were thrown about in this episode, and how many concepts squandered, I don't suppose that we ought to be too shocked that the Doctor regenerates into one of his former companions.
There's nothing wrong with a female Doctor, I just hope if it is Rose and not some timey-wimey excuse like "he was just trying on the face", they bless her with better material than Jodie Whittaker was stuck with. Leave social commentary to Casualty and just give us a slightly mad dude(ette) handing jelly babies to aliens right before handing them their arses. That's what Doctor Who should be about.

At this time, there is no information on a series renewal. With low ratings despite a lot of influence from, what was it, Disney+ or something (which you could see in the amount of effects), it might be that the Beeb has put the show on hiatus for a while. Well, it wouldn't be the first time.
Maybe when they bring it back, they will force the showrunner to watch City of Death and tell them "make it like that".

Two Time Lords, a female dressed like a schoolgirl and a male with a huge scarf, taking the Paris Métro.
© 1979 BBC

Stranger Things

This series is a bit over the place. I don't imagine I'm the only person who finds Eleven to be annoying. But this is more than made up for by the ensemble cast, who each have their own personalities and problems, and the long-format of the episodes mean that we can spend some time with each of them. Whether it be clueless parents fighting monsters or a feminist trying to educate an idiot (easier said than done in the '80s) or... let's just say Eddie and leave it at that. He wasn't even a major character, more like some throwaway backup character who somehow managed to not only match the principle cast, but also ended up with the most epic scene of the entire series (and this was a massive episode full of iconic moments).

Most Metal Ever.
© 2022 Netflix

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Zerosquare, 3rd June 2025, 22:58

I'm betting that one word is "tea".

A tree-dwelling mammal, 3rd June 2025, 23:08

In reverse order...    Why did they bring back Billie Piper? "Because we want to, because we want to!"    My word of the day is "cockwomble". Mostly directed at NHS admin staff. Not the medical people, they're amazing; it's the admin side. I've developed a potentially serious medical condition and one hospital department won't refer 'sideways' to another, it has to go back to my GP then back to the correct hospital department. I then discover that the GP hasn't made the referral as they haven't received the endoscopy report back from the hospital yet (which was prepared and emailed by the consultant on the same day as I had a camera shoved into an intimate spot). So yes, "cockwomble" is the word of the day for admin staff.    Automatic central locking... I first encountered that in a 2003-model Mercedes C-class. Audi implemented it on the A4 from 2005 onwards (if you had a B6, 2000-2004 model, it had the function but it was disabled, you could enable it with a laptop and the correct cable).    I personally think it's a good idea. Especially if the door latches are designed to work with it. In my current (B8 2014) and previous (B7 2007) A4s, pulling the internal door handle would unlock the door as it opened. On the one before that (B6 2003) if you turned on the automatic door locks you had to pull the handle once to unlock and a second time to open the door. Caught out a few passengers!    The other thing I really like is selective door unlocking. Press the unlock button on the key once to unlock only the driver's door, press a second time to unlock all the doors. Again, standard from the B7 series onwards (2005+), the B6 series had it but it wasn't enabled by default. A really good idea as it stops some little scally from getting in the passenger door and nicking valuables when you're busy on the driver's side.    I really don't like keyless entry. Remote, yes. Automatic keyless, no. If I was buying a new car I'd actually be prepared to pay extra NOT to have keyless entry and to have to press a button on the key to unlock the car.    Living near Liverpool for a couple of years made me quite security conscious!

jgh, 4th June 2025, 16:33

Recent Dr Who has struck me as like a child encountering a DTP package. Oooo, it's got 400 fonts, I'VE GOT TO USE ALL OF THEM. And circular text! And star crops! And rotates photos! And colour gradients! And flying skellingtons! And dinosaurs! And Flash Gordon's flying bicycle! THE DOCTOR'S ALIVE!!!!!

SteveP, 8th June 2025, 14:36

"I've developed a potentially serious medical condition and one hospital department won't refer 'sideways' to another, it has to go back to my GP then back to the correct hospital department"    Weird, we've had patients traverse the hospital with different specialists taking their turn

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