Rick's b.log - entry 2025/11/30

Tea!

Afterwards I went for a walk around a shop called "Noz" which sells a random and haphazard selection of junk and end-of-line stuff. It's a magical mystery tour. You never know what junk will be there, the prices are completely haphazard, and they have a real problem with people stealing stuff and leaving behind empty or partially complete boxes.

I rarely look at the food area, because I don't tend to trust food that looks like it was made to look like it fell off the back of a lorry. But I did because I was bored and that's when I came across this:

160 nice cups of tea right here.

I paid €3,50. The list price according to Waitrose is £5.30 which according to DDG's AI arch assistant is about €6,06.

The thing with PG Tips is that it makes a nice rounded cup of tea, often with a slightly sharper taste than Tetley. But the caveat is that you can't leave the bag in the mug. When I'm making my morning brew I tend to just leave the bag in there, and the one I take to work has the bag resting in the plastic beaker for the twenty minute journey (plus five minutes preparation/getting ready). So, say, half an hour of teabag in mug. It's a lovely strong Tetley.
PG Tips cannot do that. More than four or five minutes and it starts to get bitter. But take the bag out after a minute, and it's a perfectly serviceable cuppa.

Since it's a Noz end-of-line, the tea is "best before end" December 2025. Challenge accepted!

Final mow of the year?

Mowing in the cold.

...discovered that the grass was very much not dry. But raising the cut slightly allowed the mower to munch its way through, to help keep the Western Wilderness under control. I also gave the Picnic Lawn (the eastern part) a quick cut, but I didn't bother with the rest as it was pretty much only the western part that was starting to look like trouble. That's often the case.
This time, thankfully, no more deck damage due to the mole. I don't know if he's been less active - it can be hard to see mole excavations in taller grass - or if the higher cut simply went over the stones that he pushes out of the ground. Either way, nothing to worry about. Although I did discover that the headlights are rather useless and light up the sides around the front more than anything ahead.
I think I ought to replace the two incandescent bulbs with LEDs which should lower the current consumption enough that I can patch in the LED light bar that is currently installed on the old mower. You can see it in action here.

The hardship is over

Making bread

In four hours this will be bread.

Funny thing is, I have a collection of old breadmakers in the shed in varying states of disservice. The reason I got the Lidl one was not only for a clean new cooking tub, but also because I never really managed to get good bread. Far too often, even following the instructions on the pack exactly, I got a rather hard bread that tasted unpleasantly yeasty.

So it just goes to show you, making good bread automatically is harder than motor plus heat equals results. There is a real technique to it, and clearly some devices are just not as good as others.
If I ever want to branch out, there are eight programmes (Normal white bread (basic), Whole wheat, French, Italian, Sandwich, Pizza dough, Gluten free, and Bake only). The Normal and Whole wheat programmes have the ability to bake, bake rapid, bake with raisins, make dough only, or make dough with raisins. The French option can bake or make dough. The Italian, Sandwich, and Gluten free only bake (with no options), while obviously the dough makes dough.
Normal and Whole wheat baking permit a size option (medium, large, extra large) while the Normal and Gluten free have a crust option (Light, Medium, Dark). All of the baking options, except Rapid and Bake only, can have a timer set - for up to 13 hours (timer duration is for when the bread will be ready, not when it starts).

Normal bread takes four hours (30m-1h rest, 15-30m knead, 1h50-2h20 rise, 50m bake). The longest programme is French which takes a whopping six hours. The shortest (that actually bakes) is Gluten free which takes a mere 1h20, which is even faster than Rapid's 1h55.

Unfortunately, the dispenser cannot be used for chocolate chips or cheese, which may either melt in the dispenser, or otherwise stick to the dispenser door upon which bad things would ensue during the heat of baking. It is only intended for nuts, cereals, dried fruits...
...of course one could cheat and set the raison option, and when you hear the flap open, raise the exterior lid and drop in the ingredients by hand.

As I am writing this, it has stopped doing the thumping-crashing of kneading the dough and is now doing it really slowly with rapid short pulses to the motor. Now it is pulsing longer for a harder knead. As I said, there is an actual technique to this, and I can't help be impressed that a small rotating paddle can do such a good job of kneading dough.

The only deviation from the recipe printed on the back of the packet is that I put in 7g of salt instead of 8g (as 8g seems like a lot), and I add an equal amount (7g) of sugar (since it is organic cane sugar, that's not a lot) just to give it a touch of sweetness. I also, assuming I recently made tea (assuming...haha...) I add a touch of warm to the water as it says to use cold water but in the winter the water, from bottles, can be very cold.
Otherwise, everything else is measured to the gram. 300g/300ml water, 500g flour mix, 1 pack of dried yeast (6g), and 10g of vegetable oil.

Freshly made bread!

I let it cool slightly, then cut off rough chunks about an inch thick, added a layer of marge that melted nicely, and... well... the loaf might be half the size it was when it came out of the pan. I did mean to measure it but... oh well, I guess I'll have to bake another loaf next weekend. Maybe this time I'll do some soup to dip it into? I didn't today as I couldn't be arsed to wash the pile of dishes (which I have just done, but too late for soup).

Fun with SCSI

SCSI was frequently a pain in the arse to get functioning, in anything, RISC PC or MS PC.
Two 'identical' discs in two 'identical' machines and with 'identical' connections and terminations would behave differently.

I can attest to this. My old A5000 from way back when had a 1GB SCSI harddisc (as two 500MB partitions) and a tape streamer. Originally ~125MB, later ~650MB. I think. It's been forever since.
Anyway, what I do remember is that setting the SCSI bus up correctly failed.

It was a Morley SCSI card, with onboard passive terminators (resistor packs). A 50 way ribbon cable (it was old-school SCSI) ran about a metre to the harddisc in a different box. It then made a further ~20cm hop to the tape streamer which was the final device and the end of the cable. Logically one would mount the passive terminators into the tape streamer. But when this was done, I would frequently see errors. If I recall, "Target Sense 06" or some gibberish like that.
Removing the terminators made it worse, in that often one or both devices would fail to even be seen.
Moving the terminators to the harddisc, the middle device in the chain, magically made everything work. And since it was a cached Morley SCSI card, giving as much of the available memory slot as possible to the tape streamer software (was it written by Hugo Fiennes?) made it absolutely fly. As fast as it could using the ancient podule interface. But certainly SCSI harddisc to SCSI streamer could utterly wipe the floor with the internal IDE harddisc that... let's just say that I don't think Acorn ever managed to make a nippy IDE bus despite using PC-style combi-I/O chips in everything as of the A4/A5000. I can only guess that ADFS must have been running the things in PIO mode or something.
But, whatever, the terminators had to be in the middle. The place everybody told me was wrong and that my SCSI bus would fail.

You see, the thing is, when you invoke a SCSI bus you are assigned a custom demon that oversees it. And these demons, that come from the netherworld, are like bureaucrats. They understand the basic rules but they have their own preferred implementation of how those rules are to be interpreted. Failure to perform the rituals according to your device's personal demon will lead to failure. I don't care how many copies of the ISO specification you purchase and hit your SCSI device with, the spec says what is supposed to happen while the demon says what has to happen.
But look at it from the demon's point of view. You spend hundreds of years torturing bad humans and training cats and suddenly poof! you get reassigned to some hapless person's SCSI chain. Your task is now to oversee some bloody electronic junk. Yeah, admit it, if that was your lot in life, you'd troll the owners too. And teach cats to use that thick cable as their scratching post.

Another security camera

The app on mobile is pretty much the same.

The software I am using is at https://github.com/sr99622/libonvif/. You should probably use the app installer as the one in the apt repository is woefully out of date (as is depressingly common for Ubuntu/Mint). On the Github page, go to Install Onvif GUI &rtarr; Linux &rtarr; General Purpose Script Installation and follow the instructions there. Don't worry if it seems to freeze for a few minutes at a time, it is busy and, well, not great at keeping notifications up to date.
The Onvif app installer sets up a Python environment and downloads loads of libraries. I think it takes around 1.7GB in all. So I moved all of this to the SD card (formatted ext) and set up a symlink from ~/.local/share/onvif-gui-env to point to it and yay! it works.

If a camera should break down (noting that the one out front looking down no longer has functional IR night illumination), I now have a camera that I can replace the faulty one with. Maybe with my next pay I'll pick up a proper spare?
Still, I have remotely viewable coverage of what happens around the place, with event recording (a little sensitive so records a lot) and can see if/when anybody should happen to pass by.
Including frolicking pigeons...

Coo! Coo! Coo! Coo!

This sort of thing drives me batty.

A cat walking her human.

Lidl condemned for deceptive advertising

This is an automated translation:

The Paris Court of Appeal, by judgment dated July 4, 2025, orders SNC Lidl to publish the following text:
DECLARES admissible the application concerning the protection of SNC Lidl's trade secrets,
ORDERS that access to document no. 29, produced by SNC Lidl, corresponding to the auditor's certificate concerning net television advertising expenses for the period from January 1, 2017, to May 31, 2021, submitted to the Paris Commercial Court as part of a post-hearing brief, shall be restricted to the Court in its confidential version,
SETS ASIDE the judgment in its provisions submitted to the Court,
RULING AGAIN,
ADDING THERETO,
DECLARES that SNC Lidl has incurred civil liability towards SASU ITM Alimentaire International due to acts of competition unfair competition,
ORDERS Lidl SNC to pay ITM Alimentaire International SASU the sum of €43,364,409 in compensation for its damages,
ORDERS Lidl SNC to refrain from broadcasting television advertisements for products with a price tag without guaranteeing their availability for a period of fifteen weeks in all of its stores,
ORDERS that this prohibition will be subject to a penalty of €10,000 per violation, defined as the broadcast on any television channel during a single day of an advertisement that does not comply with this prohibition, within fifteen days of service of this judgment,
ORDERS, at Lidl SNC's expense, the publication of the operative part of this judgment:
- on the website www.LIDL.fr, on the homepage of the LIDL.fr website, visible upon arrival on the site in ARIAL 12 font for a period of two months,
- on the pages published by Lidl France on the social networks Facebook https://www.facebook.com/LIDLfrance, X https://x.com/lidlfrance?lang=en and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/LIDLfrance/?hl=fr, visible upon arrival on said pages in ARIAL 12 font for a period of two months,
ORDERS SNC Lidl to pay the costs of the proceedings at first instance and on appeal,
ORDERS SNC Lidl to pay SASU ITM Alimentaire International the sum of €100,000 pursuant to Article 700 of the Code of Civil Procedure,
Dismisses the remainder of the claims of SASU ITM Alimentaire International.

This has arisen because, for years Lidl has been advertising products in its stores without guaranteeing their availability for a period of 15 weeks as required by law. Quite often, when Lidl provides some special deal, there may be a dozen "items" and when they're sold they're sold. Lidl made 374 adverts between 2017 and 2023, which prominently displayed the pro and an attractive price. Because of the logistics of providing a product for 15 weeks at all 1,500 (roughly) stores in France, they instead said in small text that a list of supermarkets concerned was on lidl.fr; this being spoken as a voice over as if 2021.
The court found that it was small, not prominent, could be confusing as to what it actually meant, and doing it at all highlighted the intentional nature of the offence of not assuring the availability of a product as required by law.
The award of €43M is because Intermarché was unable to compete with matching advertising because, well, it was unlawful. And practices like those can affect consumer loyalty, people may choose to go to another shop for a promo and be less upset if the item is no longer available but may look for alternatives bargains, etc etc.
They have also been banned from making adverts for products not available in all stores for a period of 15 days, with a €10K penalty per infraction.

Lidl, who has actually lost money in France for the past two years, is separately battling Intermarché in court over the slogan "Producers and retailers" and the implication that that the brand works without intermediaries, thus misleading consumers. So this tat-for-tat legal thing seems to be a game of ping pong between the two companies.

For my part, I wasn't actually aware that special offers had to be available for a specific length of time. I guess it makes sense, but this suggests that Lidl is going to have to radically rethink its strategy. That is to say, I think when Lidl runs a promotion, like their "Mr Cuisine" (a device not unlike a Cookeo), I think they allocate a certain number per store - perhaps defined by a metric of how large a population the store serves. The one I visit tends to have maybe a dozen of a 'thing'. If it is popular, it gets sold out quickly. I have, on occasion, gone to get something after work (about 5pm) and nothing is left. When I went to get my chainsaw, I got up early to pop it at 8.30am before work to be sure of getting one. If availability has to be guaranteed, I don't see how they're going to be able to make that work?

Fire and tower blocks

• That it was stupidly hot even in late November
• Sunset happened really quickly
• It was full of Scottish pensioners

Did you know I used to speak a little bit of Spanish? It was mom's second language, she always felt like Spain was like returning home (an interesting perspective for somebody born in the US!), and when I spent a year in Catonsville as a... what was I, four? Five? I watched the very trippy Sesame Street that often features segments teaching Spanish words to English speaking children.
A few years older, in the UK, mom got a set of flashcards and taped them to the relevant things. Frigorífico on the fridge, puerta on the door, ventana on the window, and so on.
So it was quite a surprise when mom said she got a place in France. France? As in French? As in I did three years of French at school and can barely say hello France? You know, I had always figured we'd probably have ended up someplace like Galicia. Warm, rainy, without the awful heat of the summer in the south. Well, I guess here is like Galicia with lower temperatures and a language I'm never going to pronounce correctly.

Anyway, I wasn't keen on the building. It was... an apartment block of about 12 storeys not unlike the billions of others up and down the Spanish coast. But I worried about what would happen in the case of fire. We were on the 7th floor. The elevator was a dinky metal box with no door - you could literally see the wall going by between floors. Between the two elevators was an open spiral staircase. It was quite pretty, the floor design was nice, but it was open in a way that I worried could be a fire funnel as well as being the only way out.

The apartment building, the actual apartment highlighted.
(image from Google Streetview)

"Just jump into the pool" was the advice.

Okay. So let's do this. We were on the 7th floor, but it was really the 8th floor as on that side the 'basement' had something weird like an insurance broker. Floor height on the other side of the building was one floor up, but on the pool side, one floor extra. Which, yes, meant that people used to looking at numbers also got to see wrinkled boobies, which I'm sure made their day.
Given the average height of a storey, I'd estimate a drop of about 30 metres. A fall that would take about two and a half seconds and have you moving at about 50 mph upon impact. There will be minor variations due to size and weight, but less than you might think because the two tend to cancel out (a heavier person also has a larger volume thus more air drag). That's why human terminal velocity is more or less the same value for everybody.

From that height you will die. You will die for one of four reasons:

• If you miss, you hit solid ground at 50mph/80kph. That is not survivable.
• Water is non-compressible, it deplaces on impact. This means it is softer than solid ground, but not by as much as you'd hope for if you were jumping from high up. There's a darkly snarky reason cliff jumping is called tombstoning. If you hit the water at an awkward angle the shock will very likely knock you out, as well as risking shattering bones. It is technically survivable, but given the chaos of a building on fire and the damage your body would sustain, there is a very good chance you'll drown.
• The "survivable" way to enter water at those sorts of speeds is feet first, arms rigid by sides. The problem is the average pool is not deep enough to provide the required amount of deceleration. Meaning - depending on what side of the pool you land in, there will be a medium or large splatter that used to be parts of your body. Probably fatal by drowning if not fatal by shock and blood loss.
• Assuming you pull it off and somehow, against the rather sizeable odds, can make your way to the side of the pool, you need to be aware that somebody else's body may attempt a forceful merger with your body. There will be very little you can do to prevent this as their fall will be the same two or three seconds as yours (depending on floor jumped from) and people just can't move in water fast enough to get out of the way. But, at least, if they splatter your head first it'll be over before you know it.

As I'm sure you can imagine, some of the "just jump" supporters were none too pleased to have science brought into the discussion.

How to calculate this. It's a little bit backwards, but the formula is:

To explain, the 9.8 is the earth's gravity (in metres per second). The 2.5 × 2.5 is the number of seconds fallen squared. And the 0.5 is because the real value is half of the calculation. If you perform the above calculation, the result is 30.625 which is the distance in metres. It's a little over, you can plug in other values to get bang on 30 metres (it'll be about 2.475) but since the height was an estimate the 2.5 will suffice.

So this means we fall 30 metres by gravity in two and a half seconds. To calculate the velocity, you simply multiply gravity by time. So 9.8 × 2.5 is 24.5. That value is metres per second, which translates into about 54mph, I've called it 50 here as it's easier to work with. Plus, the pure calculations don't take into account wind resistance, so it may well be closer to 50 than 54. Additionally, there is a thing called terminal speed where the gravity acceleration and wind resistance cancel out. It's about 120mph for a belly down fall, or about 30-40mph faster for a more slimline head down fall. It takes about twelve seconds to reach terminal velocity.

So now you know.

At any rate, I didn't like the idea of living up high, and sadly I don't think mom got to enjoy the place as she had been hoping because reasons.

At any rate, I feel like a cup of tea after spending all day on this. And what better Rick's blog article than one bookended by tea? ☺

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C Ferris, 30th November 2025, 21:42

There was a Hongkong Vet prog - a pussy fell a great distance from a high rise - and survived:-)

Rick, 30th November 2025, 22:29

That isn't a great surprise. Cats are smaller, lighter, and quite furry, plus they are smart enough to extend limbs while falling, can right themselves, and their body design allows for spreading impacts. A cat's terminal velocity is about 60 mph and it *is* survivable (but depends on cat weight, landing surface, and the health of the cat).  Fall survival rate from twenty metres is around 90%. Fall without injury rate is around 50%.  For humans, the same fall would have a survival rate of around 3%, and a no-injury rate of 0%.  In other words, falling 20 metres onto a hard surface will probably kill us, while a cat will most likely get up and go look for consolation crunchies.

Rick, 1st December 2025, 08:45

I forgot to add:    There used to be three postal rates: France, EU, rest of world. About a decade ago La Poste did away with the EU rate so now there's only France and international.  So now UK or Australia, costs the same...

jgh, 1st December 2025, 15:51

When I lived in Hong Kong for the last six months I lived in a tower block just like the ones on the news in Tai Po. They were built in 1984, mine in 1989. I never felt comfortable there, not just the inescapable-fire risk, but a lingering worry my subcouncious would like my body to sit on an external window cill. Most of my time in Hong Kong I lived in an upstairs flat in a proper two-storey house in a proper village with shops and neighbours and outside bits 'n' stuff.    Some of my work involved site visits in Tai Po, and I recognised the tower blocks, they're just behind the train station where I'd transfer to a bus.

jgh, 1st December 2025, 15:53

Do an image search for Miami Towers Tuen Mun and shudder at what Hong Kong people frantically scramble to live in.

C Ferris, 1st December 2025, 16:26

Luckily there not many of these High Rise err problems - a large sheet and rope and out the window ahhh

C Ferris, 1st December 2025, 16:30

Bit like aeroplanes - they spend time with lifejackets - what about the bit between 30000 ft and sea level:-/

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