Rick's b.log - entry 2024/11/23

The snowstorm

In the forest it was crazy. Huge flakes tossing themselves at the windscreen. It was like that infamous Windows screensaver taken up to twelve.

Snow on the way to work.

It doesn't look so bad in a still photo. The problem was the ferocity of the snow meant it was less like falling flakes and more like visual static trying to attack. The hard part wasn't anything on the road, it was trying to make sense of the scene in front of me.

When I got to work, it was starting to stick to the road, and by sunrise (an hour later) there was maybe an inch of snow. When I went to the toilet I looked at my cameras because maybe a pretty winter photo. But, nope. There was the odd bit of white lurking in the grass, otherwise it was just cold and wet.

By noon, snow had turned to rain and it was all gone. Would be hell if it froze, but luckily the strong wind had dried most of the roads that I use.

It is supposed to be 18°C tomorrow. I give up, this makes no sense...

Headlights

Inconsiderate arsehole.

This car flicked the main beams to tell me to turn down. I flicked mine to say I wasn't on mains (and come on, it's not like I have those halogen bulbs or anything). So being a typical French driver, he (and I will bet actual money that it was a he) turned on his mains and left them there. I didn't bother to respond, other than to mumble to myself that he should go perform a lewd act with a vacuum cleaner. Of course I said it in French because eff you mate...

If it's warm enough tonight, I'll take my car onto the tarmac and fiddle the headlights down a little. I can't help but feel that if the car is that liable to changes in position due to putting stuff in the boot, there maybe ought to be a knob inside, not this "reach up under the wheel arch" nonsense.

Later: Done. Went for a little test drive. I might have overcompensated slightly, I'll have to see how it is on Monday going to work.

Green stuff

Dinner last night.

It isn't bad photography. It's cold in the living room, so there was plenty of steam rising from the meal.

I made the pie because I noticed when putting something in the larder that it actually expired in September. Well, it will be beyond its "best" (although, granted, "best" is liable to be subjective) but it's not like it suddenly turns mouldy and deadly in October. It's not a "Use by" date, it's a "Best before" date. The actual expiry is... years. As long as the tin is intact and not bulging and it smells like it should when opened, it'll be okay. I have another that expired in September, I think that'll be my Yule meal, and I suspect it'll look exactly like this meal, with the same green stuff.

Funny thing is that I dislike cauliflower (it's awful and bitter). Mom was the other way around, she said the same thing about brocolli but liked cauli. So when eating, including eating out, if there was an assortment of veg that had broc and cauli, we'd swap accordingly. The only one we disagreed on was what we called "fractal brocolli" (romanescu?). We both liked that.

A close-up of peas and brocolli just because.

Another stew

The interesting thing, for me, is that I could still go out and hoike some spuds out of the ground. I extracted this lot using my friendly pickaxe because it was cold and I was not inclined to unlock the barn door to get the pitchfork.
Now, I know that some time the potatoes will begin to rot, especially since they're sitting in damp soil, but it's quite interesting that they were ready in mid-August and I'm getting perfectly good potatoes out of the ground in mid-November, three months later.
Last year when I harvested them and put them into a dark box, they started sprouting after a month and degrading after two. I probably don't have "the technique", but the experiment this time was to just leave 'em in the ground and so far that seems to be working. Of course, I'll need to have them all out by springtime or they'll start to grow again. I'll also need to decide if I want to try to put potatoes somewhere else (which means turning new ground), or if I should buy from the store and grow something different next year.

Keeping an eye on my stew thanks to an ESP32.

That ESP32 is running my original (modified) ESP32Cam firmware, as I haven't had success getting the more recent code running... though I've not tried since the last time I mentioned this. I bought myself another ESP32, this one with a little serial interface board, but haven't had the time to try it.

HP 4222e weirdness

Ran a cleaning cycle. A test report was immediately printed. Well, I can see the problem with the cyan and magenta nozzles. So I'll give it a Level 2 clean that'll take about three minutes.
Only it didn't. It spat out a test report immediately.
Level 3 clean is supposed to take about five minutes. Guess what...

The next day I got in touch with HP. The first person that answered was a woman who realised that I was British (what gave it away?) and she literally had no interest in even attempting to help. She took several minutes to find the number of an English-speaking helpline that was eleven digits long. I queried that it was eleven digits and she said yes. Phone numbers in France are ten digit. Accordingly, it didn't work. I tried omitting various digits but, alas, nothing I tried was a valid phone number.
I called back, with minutes to go before the helpline closed thanks to that woman's incompetance. I spoke to a man who understood me, but he was adament that it was a problem with the cartridge. This seems quite bizarre to me - what possible problem could happen that the cartridges work in all ways (it printed fine, only with streaks due to the clogged nozzles) but refuses to perform a cleaning cycle? That's just weird.
Either way, he verified my details and said he'd send me replacement cartridges and they'll be here on Friday. I didn't hold out much hope as the "they've been dispatched" notification was given to me on Thursday and they usually take about a week coming from Germany.
It arrived this morning.

A complete ink replacement kit.

As it happens, I resolved the problem myself. I gave the printer a factory reset in case there was some duff information remembered. That didn't fix it, and it was a real pain getting the printer to be set up again with the HP Smart app when the app already knew about the printer, and you could hide a known printer but not delete it. It spat out a page telling me that an HP+ printer must be set up with the HP Smart app... you know, like I was going.
Eventually I threw my magic runes correctly and it configured the printer correctly (using the hidden Bluetooth interface) and it started to work.
But more important to me was the observation that when restarting for the first time following a factory reset, it would give a quick clean of the print heads. So I simply did a bunch of factory resets one after the other. By the time I had done that, and managed to throw the magic runes correctly a second time, I had the printer back on the network, reassociated with me, and printing properly.

All of which could have been avoided if the dumb thing would just clean its damn print heads when it was asked to.

Thankfully I have Instant Ink. I'd be considerably less amused if I'd just dropped enough cash to mortgage a small house to by myself a set of XL cartridges and it did this. But it makes me wonder... if it is the cartridge that is somehow faulty, what happened to HP's quality control? And if it is a problem with the printer, do I have to either factory reset a bunch of times or call HP for new cartridges every time?
I'm not going to put the replacement cartridges in until the print quality degrades. I mean, it's working right now. It'll be interesting to see if cleaning then works.

Oh, and HP's so-called guarantee still says that my one year guarantee started in June. There was no reply whatsoever to my dispute. Well, whatever. If it breaks down, I'll just take it back to the supermarket for my legally mandated TWO year guarantee. Enough with companies thinking that the American bare-minimum applies everywhere.

Live Aid

The thing that struck me most, though, was that it is reported that the Live Aid concert raised around £40M (which is about £100M in todays money), and in the four decades since then has raised around £140M, though published figures vary.

Compare and contrast with BBC's Children In Need that annually raises between €40-60M. Now, you might think "awww, but cute white children", to which I'd reply that it's an annual event on a television channel of a country of around 75 million people, as opposed to a 16 hour multi-country global television event watched by around 1.9 billion people in 150 nations (it is estimated that around 40% of the world population watched). It was, at the time, the largest broadcast event ever held. So you would have thought that Geldof's baby might have had rather more international reach than the BBC's yearly outing for the big yellow bear.

All of this being said, it is interesting to watch the advertising that runs on less mainstream channels such as Talking Pictures TV. Donate to bring a child happiness, donate to save a donkey, donate to bring a tiny village water, donate to the Sally Army, donate... It is quite the onslaught, really.

The Visitor

Interestingly, throwing the text at various on-line checking tools, I get between 6% and 47% "this was written by AI". Uh, thanks?
It's also interesting to note that Grammarly reports "Significant plagarism found" but won't say what until I have created a free-and-easy account; while Dupli Checker and Plagarism Detector both report zero plagarism. I suspect Grammarly is either using tiny sentence fragments so plenty of things match, or they are - how shall I put this? Telling porkies in order to get signups?

Actually, that's not entirely true. Plagarism Detector reported the line "The sun was just starting to rise over the forest" had been plagarised from something I'd never heard of before. So I removed the word "just" and concatenated the following sentence, and then it no longer matched anything. It should be noted that in the example given, my complete sentence was only a part of the one that was "plagarised", and really, it's not as if the example given was in any way special. The sun was rising. It was a winter morning so it was just rising rather than higher in the sky. And it was rising over the forest that had already been mentioned. Pretty normal descriptive stuff for a writer...but, alas, this is why we can't have nice things, right?

Anyway, here's the "we can't really tell if a human or bot wrote this" officially non-plagarised text of my story. Written by me. In the style of some stuff I've been reading recently. For 925 words on a blog that most of the world doesn't even know exists, I suspect that I might just be overthinking this a little...

The Visitor
Copyright © 2024 Richard Murray
All rights reserved. For private and personal use only. Do not copy.

It was a moonless night in late October. Edward Smythe, a retired schoolteacher, sat by the hearth of his chilly old farmhouse in the forested countryside far away from civilisation. His days were solitary, his closest neighbour miles away, and the locals viewed him with a mixture of pity and distrust. Rumours swirled of a family curse, of strange happenings that plagued the Smythes for generations. Of obsessions with astrology and ancient manuscripts. Of complex rites performed in the dead of night. Edward dismissed these as small-town chatter, the superstitions of people with little else to occupy their lives. However, he could not entirely banish an unease that had lingered since childhood.

The old loose shutters of the house gently tapped the walls as the gusts of wind pushed upon them. The cluttered room was dimly illuminated by the flickering shadows of the hearth's feeble fire. Tendrils of smoke drifting across the ceiling. Outside, the forest seemed alive with whispers, though Edward rationalised these as the rustling of the skeletal branches as the last of their leaves detached and tumbled to the ground. He was accustomed to the isolation, to the sound of nothingness. Yet, somehow, tonight felt different.

Shortly after midnight, as the clock on the mantlepiece habitually struck twelve a couple of minutes late, Edward heard it: a low, resonant, rhythmic hum, as if the air itself vibrated with an unnatural frequency. It came from the woods, distant at first, but steadily growing louder. He froze, his cup of tea trembling in his hand, and his ears strained to catch every nuance of the unexpected sound. It was no animal cry, no shifting wind. It was something altogether foreign.

A sudden knock at the door shattered the oppressive loneliness. Edward's heart raced. He lived too far for unannounced visitors, especially at this ungodly hour. Reaching for his lantern, he hesitated before opening the door, his mind racing with images of thieves, vagrants, or wandering proselytists.

The sight that met him, however, was neither human nor entirely of this Earth. Standing in the faint glow of the lantern was an unnaturally tall figure cloaked in garments that seemed to shimmer like oil on water. Its face — or what passed for one — was obscured by a veil of writhing mist with two pinpricks of deep red light where its eyes should have been.

"Edward Smythe", the being intoned in a voice that seemed as though it was speaking in a language older than time itself. "You are the last".

"The last...of what?", Edward stammered, his voice barely audible. His mind was struggling to comprehend the figure before him. Struggling to comprehend how it knew him.

"The last thread of a covenant made in ignorance", it replied. "Your blood carries the weight of promises broken long before you were ever conceived."

Edward's mind span out of control like a windmill in a hurricane. The incoherent gibberish that was his mother's frantic whispered warnings, his father's mumbled prayers to every god he knew the name of, and the fragmented tales of forebears meddling with things they should have left well alone. All of these childhood stories came rushing back in a new light now that this...thing...was standing in front of him.

"I know nothing of this", Edward protested. His voice cracked with desperation. "I've lived a quiet life. I've harmed nobody."

The being tilted its head, as if considering this. "And yet, the debt remains. Blood must answer to blood."

Before Edward could respond, the entity raised a hand, if it could be called that, and the air grew thick, heavy with an unseen pressure. The shadows around the hand writhed, stretching and twisting into grotesque forms that grew larger and larger. Edward tried to move, to speak, but found himself paralysed as the figure's luminous eyes bored into him.

The world seemed to dissolve into a cascade of visions: vast ancient cities of irregular rock beneath blackened skies, geometrically impossible spires clawing at the heavens, and an endless void teeming with shapes that defied comprehension, a churning chaotic mess that pulsed with malevolence, and Edward saw himself standing at the center of it all, tiny and alone.

Edward awoke with a start, surprised to find himself lying in his bed. The sun was starting to rise over the forest, casting an anaemic light over the farmhouse and its lands. The front door stood ajar, the lock splintered, and the air smelled faintly of burnt ozone. Edward's memories of the night were fragmented, like the shards of a broken mirror. Yet one truth remained clear: he was no longer alone. Something had been left behind, a presence he could feel lurking in the shadows of his home, whispering in a language he could not understand.

From that day on, Edward Smythe was different. The villagers noticed his gaunt appearance, the vacant look in his eyes, and the way he shunned company even more than before. He stopped tending to the flowers in his garden, stopped repairing the sagging roof of his home. On stormy nights, the neighbours claimed they could hear strange sounds coming from the direction of the Smythe property: irregular hums, guttural chants, and once, a piercing shriek that echoed throughout the forest and across the valley beyond.

Edward knew the visitation was only the beginning. The debt was not paid, and the ones that had come for him were patient. As the days grew shorter and the nights colder, he awaited their return, knowing that when they came, there would be no escape.

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Rick, 23rd November 2024, 20:31

Couldn't have been better timed.    After uploading this I wandered over to The Guardian to look at the sorry state of reality and... "Revealed: Saudi Arabia accused of modifying official Cop29 negotiating text".    I rest my case.

C Ferris, 23rd November 2024, 20:59

Your cats a good writer :-)

David Pilling, 23rd November 2024, 23:33

The thing is, people do copy stuff, if they didn't no one would understand anyone else. Common phrases. "after uploading this" <ding> you're not the first person to say that. Could you not have coined another version.  You might copy larger concepts. Like a book for children based around a school. What sort of copying matters.  Anyway interesting to hear they flag it up, but you have to pay to find out the specifics.  Must be worrying if you write an essay yourself and then it gets flagged as AI generated. Probly you check yourself and then start tinkering to avoid the AI warnings. Add some chaff to every thing you write - like they do with spam emails.

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