Rick's b.log - entry 2026/04/08

The swallows have arrived!

Today? As I went to feed Anna this morning, two nearly flew into me as they were too busy getting it on in a Marvin Gaye kind of mood to notice the awkwardly placed meatsack that appeared from nowhere.

This afternoon, a photo. It's not a good photo, but the thing about swallows is they are pretty nippy in flight. They could probably outrun my car in a heartbeat... but then so could an e-scooter if it's not paying attention to the law.

An unladen swallow in flight.

Heat!

Today it touched 26°C. Yes, as we've just crossed over from the first week of April. That's crazy. I didn't even open the windows today as it felt a little too hot out there. Though, maybe mowing while wearing black (my habitual colour) might have affected that opinion?
Saturday and Sunday are forecast to be 13°C and rainy, it'll be like an entirely different season.

JD Vance is an arsehole

Now, I get some of the strings that Viktor Orbán might like to pull on. Closer ties to Russia could allow for importing Russian oil (it's not like Orbán ever gave much of a crap about what the EU wanted in the past) which would neatly alleviate the problem that the Americans just made for much of the rest of the world.
And, of course, we know that this particular Russian, sorry, I meant American administration is disturbingly pro-Russia. It's as if we're in an alternate reality where McCarthyism and the Cold War never happened.

But the thing is, who wants to cosy up to the Americans right now? JD Vance might think that he is lending the support of The United States behind a right wing despot (as per stated US foreign policy)...but one must also be acutely aware that only yesterday his boss, the President of the United States, threatened to wipe out a whole civilisation.

This is what Trump, the deal maker, the peacemaker, the guy that wanted a Nobel Peace Prize... wrote on his social media - and I quote: "A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will."

Luckily with the aid of Pakistan, I believe, a temporary ceasefire has been negotiated and ships will be allowed to pass. I wonder if Pakistan simply pointed out something uncomfortable: Trump has already shown himself willing to attack Iran at Israel's request. With the escalation and the attacks on civilian infrastructure, can we trust him not to try something even worse?
There would be no coming back from such a thing. Maybe that's what the former Army Chief of Staff General Randy George said which led to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shitcanning him (by forcing him to retire immediately).

Even so, is this what the United States represents? Is this the ideals that the country now wishes to share with the world? "Do what we say (after we attacked you) or we'll wipe out your entire civilisation"?
I mean... where do you go from such a proclamation? The hope that the more rational citizens of the country will toss the guy into the madhouse where he belongs? The problem is, I don't see Vance as being any better. Or Hegseth.
Honestly, we are witnessing now what happens when the Christofascists get in control and, you know, you'd have thought if even just one of these people actually bothered to read The Bible instead of wielding it as a weapon against people they don't like, they might not be such awful excuses of humanity.

An AI generated image of Trump beginning his supervillain arc.

Tea v0.28

Currently, as of Monday, none of the "4" channels (C4, e4, More4, Film4, etc) have any programme data available on the FreeSat site that I'm pinching my data from. These sorts of glitches aren't unheard of, but it's unusual for such a glitch to go beyond a weekend. But here we are on Wednesday and we're still missing the data.

Tea, however, wasn't expecting it to be missed in the way that it was, so it would put the programmes of the next channel (in my case, Talking Pictures TV) into Film4 and report that TPTV had no programmes. Oops!
That has been fixed. It now specifically traps this.

I noticed that, for a while, the URL fetcher/AcornSSL was failing to fetch any of the programme images. It seems to be working now, and I suspect there's a problem with AcornSSL because it worked with wget and with NetSurf. Now, the problem may well have been something wrong with the SSL certificate of the site serving up the images, all I know is that using a combination of URL and AcornSSL simply failed to connect - the connection would be "in progress" until it timed out and was automatically aborted. That's... actually a really poor show. If there's a problem then this should be reported back (possibly with an option to override). Apparently AcornSSL has the ability to open a window or something asking you what you'd like to do, but I have never seen such a thing in my entire time of using and developing with the URL/AcornSSL setup.

Of course, since this is RISC OS we're talking about, as I was writing the version notes the mouse pointer froze. As did everything else. Sometimes this happens and I have no idea why. Is it a rarely hit bug in Zap? The WiFi driver choking on a dud packet? MessageTrans sulking again? All I know is that if I don't use RISC OS it's fine. But if I do, and things do point to some sort of rare bug in Zap, then there's a chance that the entire OS will just die. This probably shouldn't be a surprise to anybody given that the architecture is to have loads of third party modules that are entered in privileged mode (usually SVC, sometimes IRQ) with the kernel stack active. All it takes is one tiny little thing pushing three registers and popping two and the kernel will instantly keel over dead with no hope of recovery; because that silly little omission has just destroyed the integrity of the kernel stack, and if the kernel tries to pull an address to know how to extricate itself from the mess, well, it can't. Where's the address? Does it need to unwind anything (reentrant calls)? If so, how? What's on the stack no longer makes sense. I could go on a long historical rant about why this situation arose (and it's partly because the original ARM only had four modes: user, kernel, and two sorts of interrupt) but I won't bother as it's nothing that hasn't been said before, something that can be summed up as "made sense in 1997, makes no sense nearly forty years later".

Of course, this sort of thing only serves to remind me why my daily driver is now Linux. Granted, neither Xed nor Gedit are as flexible as Zap, and it is quite infuriating that Gedit seems completely incapable of buffering keypresses whilst it takes a moment to save the file (and even if the Gedit event handler is not running for a moment, why doesn't the UI queue unhandled keypresses for the active app?). In some ways it seems as if as basic as RISC OS was, it did manage to get some UI things right waaaaay back in the early '90s.

Anyway, because of the SSL fetch bug, the image stuff can be conditionally built. If such a thing should happen again, then I ought to be able to fairly rapidly put together a build where whether or not automatically fetching programme images is done.
And, if you're wondering why "Give Us A Clue" is being shown on Film4, well, that bug has been fixed.

Now, if you'll excuse me, there was a crash outside. My cat's desire to be fed has just raised a Non-Maskable Interrupt and this must be serviced immediately or there is a risk of further peripheral failure. We all know that if an edge exists, a cat will push something off of it. Let's not give Anna reasons, eh?

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jgh, 8th April 2026, 23:33

Similar things happen to me with Firefox. Sometimes things just........ stop. For no reason. It seems to be correlated with crap websites such as Google StreetView, but it's gradually spreading.

C Ferris, 9th April 2026, 14:16

There is supposed to be RPEmu versions that have debug options - perhaps this can be used to pinpoint where the problems lie.

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