Rick's b.log - entry 2024/11/30

Preparing for the coming war...

Actually, there is an argument to be made that younger people think oldies are a bit soft and out of touch, precisely because the younger lot not only never experienced the horrors of war, they're likely far enough removed that all this Armistice Day stuff seems like some peculiar anachronism of the past.

Now, to be fair, very few people that aren't Russian want war. But now that the UK and US have given missiles to Ukraine, which Ukraine have fired into Russia, that's the excuse that the delusional halfwit needs to escalate things. I would imagine that the only reason things haven't already escalated is because the mighty Red Army is so piss-poor that they're having to go to North Korea for support.

However, Ukraine as a sovereign country has an absolute right to defend itself against a hostile aggressor. So this conflict is likely to continue because I don't see Ukraine backing down (having made it so far without being overthrown) and as a matter of pride I don't see Russia walking away from this either. And I think it will become ever more of a European problem because, well, the incoming POTUS is barely more than a puppet for Putin so I think we know how that is going to go. Sure, Russia will agree to cease hostilities with Ukraine if Ukraine is willing to cede everything east of L'viv. Obviously nobody is going to want to agree to something like that, so round and around we go.

Which means, therefore, that it could be prudent to have sufficient stocks at home to be able to isolate and hunker down.

The first thing likely to go down is electricity. This is the weak link in the 21^st century as we are all so dependent upon electricity and I'd imagine few of us have generators and fuel around.
Clearly my car won't be going anywhere in a hurry. I'll want to keep whatever charge is in it in case I need to leave. I'll be okay for light and cooking as I already have provisions here.

Gas appliances.

I have a flat camping stove (not pictured) along with several gas bottles for it, plus two gas lamps and two cannister-top cooking implements.

Underneath the candle are two battery packs for the phones, should some form of communications network be working or, at least, if I want to take photos nobody will ever get to see.

USB power banks.

Of course, I also have various battery lamps, but candles may be preferable as they will likely last longer than AA cells. Take the candelabra for instance, I don't need to light all six candles, I can do three and three (or two, two, and two?) to extend the duration of available illumination (especially now it is winter).

The next thing to consider is either a failure of the water supply (no electricity or sabotage) or contaminated water. This is not a problem for me as I know my water will immediately fail due to it being drawn up by an electric pump. Additionally, because it comes from a well and I live down from a pig farm, I consider it contaminated as a matter of course. That's not to say it's brown and full of pig slurry (usually...), just that it only gets used for washing (me, clothes, dishes) and nil by mouth. Which means that I use bottled water. There's some water stocked in the kitchen for ease of access, with more out back.

Bottled water.

The Evian is for tea. The cheap stuff is for sterilising dishes/cookware before use and for boiling stuff like pasta and rice. Yes, there is considerably more Evian than cheap stuff. You've met me (virtually, at least), right?

Now, the obvious, food. Well, here's a composite shot of the stuff in the freezer.

Stuff in the freezer.

Now, clearly the freezer isn't going to work when the power goes down, however a freezer ought to be able to keep food for around 48h (depending on freezer model and frequency of door opening). I have a temperature probe and things will be good to cook and eat as long as they're less than 4°C. At any rate, the first few days I'll be able to eat quite well - prioritising the meat/fish products.
As a tip - if it ever looked like something bad was actually liable to happen here, I'd put some water in a small paper cup and freeze it. Then I'd pop a few single centime coins on top and leave that in the middle of the freezer. The state of that will tell me the state of the food.

Asides from the things kept cold, I have a larder of lesser-perishable goods...

My larder.

And over on the countertop, the pasta selection...

Lots of pasta.

I am aware, however, that standard ways of cooking pasta is water and energy intensive. There is a method that involves less water, bringing it to the boil, then covering the pan and turning the heat off and leaving it much longer, until the pasta is edible. Might require a second burst of heat as it's winter and cold.

Of note is the white stuff on the bottom right. This is powdered milk. Normally for making hot chocolate, however it will also be pressed into use in tea in the absence of cold fresh milk.

The medicine cabinet has, well, paracetamol (and some Spasfon my doctor gave me when my intestines were falling apart following the cursed burger). I am in two minds about iodine tablets. I can't help but think if it comes to that, we're screwed enough that one might want to pity those who survive. But then I don't see even Putin dropping nukes on France given the response would be both predictable and definitive in the sense that everybody loses - play noughts and crosses instead.

Given that it is winter, heating may be a problem. Luckily I pretty much don't. No, not even in the winter. I'm sitting in the living room to write this. It's about 11°C in here (was about 9 but I put the heater on for a short while this morning). I have a blanket and heated blanket on my lap. If I felt colder, I'd put a coat on.
No, this isn't a finance situation. It's just how I am and what I'm used to. There used to be some ex-pats in the next town over who had a dinky little house smaller than the pig barn opposite and they'd have the two wood burners (one in the living room, one in the kitchen) going full blast, literally glowing through the glass pane like there was a piece of sun inside. They could walk around in their home in the winter in flip-flops and t-shirts. Granted, there probably wasn't any dampness in that house, but I found it absolutely intolerable. Temperatures like that are uncomfortable to me in summer. In the winter? That's just silly.
Anyway, the failure of heating would be a minor inconvenience. It doesn't tend to get that cold here, and I can always wear a padded coat in bed with a couple of blankets on top if it gets really cold...

Now the one that often doesn't get mentioned much is other people. After a couple of days, when others run out of food and/or resources, they'll be looking for replacements. They are not friends, no matter what they say. It's a zero-sum game. A benefit to them will be a loss to you. So having a noisy generator, smoke rising from chimneys in the daytime, or lots of lights (by whatever means) at night will draw intruders like moths to a flame. For this reason, it may be useful - if you have the possibility - so split up resources like food and water and hide some of it, so if you get raided they won't get away with everything. Additionally, don't put too much effort into defending what is yours unless you know exactly how many of them there are and what weapons they are using. It's utterly pointless to charge outside with a rake and solid frying pan if it's five guys with hunting rifles and a bootfull of ammunition. And don't waste time trying to reason. They aren't your neighbour trying a meet cute over a bowl of sugar. If they've come, they want. If you have, they'll take, unless you're better armed and willing to defend.

Perhaps the funniest thing about all of this is that I am not a survivalist. I don't have flares or a crossbow or a gun or potassium permanganate or...

I'm simply an introvert that would rather stay home with tea and a good book, or tea and writing this crap, rather than mixing with people any more than necessary. So having food stocks means I need to go shopping less frequently. Given my remote rural location, gas lamps and candles are logical. The power supply is actually pretty reliable (save for the frequent short brownouts as agricultural equipment kicks in at milking time, etc - my Pi machines don't notice, but the Livebox and satellite receiver certainly do), however it only takes one gust of wind in the wrong place to change that. Or as happened a few years ago, a bird to spread its wings across the power lines and kebabify itself.

This practice was both useful and refined during Covid, where I could deal with the lockdowns. Actually, truth be told, the lockdowns barely affected me as I had a permission slip from my employer stating that my presence was necessary so asides from empty roads and a total of three police checks (in the entire time of all of the lockdowns) the only thing that changed was that I couldn't go shopping in Big Town because it was across a département/region boundary...which was a bit pointless as people from Big Town were permitted to cross that boundary to go to work.

Anyway, while this sort of thing is quasi-normal for me, you might want to rummage around in your kitchen and check that you have essentials to see you through for a few days if it should be necessary. Not just for stupid Russians, but we've had how many storms recently?

Oh, and if you can't handle the idea of another war in Europe, than that's okay. Just be prepared for the coming zombie apocalypse. There's little difference in the end.

Now, I have drinkable water. I have sugar. I have powdered milk. And I have this. So my priorities are sorted.

Hundreds of teabags (Tetley, of course!).

Fighting the washing machine

A quick wash and heat, allegedly to 20°C but I doubt it bothered. The water was drained. It didn't spin, it went directly to rinse. That's how it does the wash so rapidly, and also why I didn't put the detergent into the machine.
Rinse done, time for the big spin. Only it refused. As the drum was turning, I could hear "thunk thunk thunk" so the towel was throwing it out of balance.
I stopped the machine. While waiting for the door unlock, I took some clothes from the drying rack and soaked them in water in a bucket. Then I added them to the washing machine and restarted it.
Thunk thunk thunk.
On the third try it did the slow initial spin to get the easy to extract water out, but it was clearly poorly balanced and it didn't try again.
So I stopped the machine. I extracted everything, passing it through water in a bucket. Then I put some more stuff into the bucket, and when wet, added it to the machine.

It was happy. It went through the spin cycle, kicked it up to 1000rpm. Twice, because I had to stop the Chrono programme and switch over to Spin-only, and that does a more intense spin than the Chrono which is "just enough but no more".

An hour and a quarter later, my shirt had been washed and was dry enough to drape over the oil radiator, and everything that had dried since I washed it last weekend...was wet all over again. Hmmm...

Electricity bill

That being said, paying an extra twenty-ish euros across two months is still less than the diesel that I would have needed otherwise.
As for the freezer? Well, I used to go shopping on Wednesday and spend maybe €40-50 and a larger shop on Friday and spend around €60 (everything is so expensive these days!).
Now I am only going on Friday and spending around €80 or so plus I am eating much better. Like Thursday night I had cod and chips. Pretty damn easy to do in the air fryer. I put the cod in, and leave it cooking while I go and feed Anna. When I return I flip the cod over and tip in however many chips I want. I can then simply shake the basket every three(ish) minutes until I feel that the chips are done. About 12 minutes depending on how many there are.
Serve, add Sarsons, and some Heinz and job done.

Thankfully we will not be having yet another rise in the tax on electricity bills. Groups on both sides of the political spectrum threatened to bring the government down if that happened. It still may come to that. Barnier is not liked. Macron, who started with such promise, may go down as the most hated president in the Fifth Republic. I mean, when the left and right who are ideologically opposed on everything are in agreement that resignations should be offered, that's when you have to consider reading the writing on the wall. Not that Macron has a history of ever listening to anybody else...

The problem is that the Socialists are hated from Hollande's term (consider how long it is taking the UK's LibDems to recover from their ill-fated coalition with the Tory scum all those years ago). En Marche is also hated because, well, that's Macron's lot (even if they're trying to distance themselves). So it is quite likely that the next government will be from one of the extremes. It just remains to be seen which... but the one calling all the shots and who Macron is trying to appease in some delusional attempt to take the wind out of their sails but is instead more legitimising them is the national front. Well, they call themselves the National Rally (RN, Rassemblement National) these days but it's still the usual far right populism, only much less hate-spewing than in the old days. Marine Le Pen did a fairly effective job in cleaning up the party and taking it mainstream. Everybody knew crap just got real when she censured and then expelled her father, who founded the party back in the mid '70s.
Plus, as much support as there is in France for various left leaning parties, it's a vote split across a bunch of squabbling rabble that find extreme difficulty in uniting to face down the right. This is not helped by the presence of a politician called Mélanchon who is possibly more devisive and hated than anybody in the national front. His opposite hated-rival is probably a guy called Zemmour who is far far to the right of the national front and quite an outspoken proponent of the Great Replacement Theory and has written books with titles like "Le Suicide Français".

So who will be running the country soon? Who knows. It's a pretty open race, and to be honest, I don't imagine any of them are going to be any use. France has a long history of electing governments that are despised and hated after a month or two. Expect to see more protests and CGT banners. It's in their DNA...

FindIPP 0.03

The way you are supposed to detect IPPE/AirPrint devices is to send out and mDNS request, see what answers, then extract the "rp" field which will give the correct path to use. Current versions of RISC OS doesn't have an mDNS handler. I think Gerph's one does, and probably nemo's. I'm not sure if this was a part of Select/Adjust or if it's something they've added themselves along the way. Anyway, Dave is running into problems with mDNS (nothing is replying so work still to do there). My application, instead, simply reads the address of the local network (like 192.168.1.X) and then cycles X from 1 to 254 sending IPP requests to see if anything answers. It doesn't try to parse the data to build a printer definition file, but it will report a fair amount of information if it finds printers.

Dave's printing tools actually come as four parts.

1. There's the non-working mDNS scanner to find printers.

2. There's a tool to interrogate the printer and build a printer definition file (like what the supported resolutions are, and so on). This is used to associate the printer with !Printers and also when sending data to the printer using #4.

3. The third part is the actual printer driver. This works with the printing system to create bitmaps to send to the printer. There are actually two. One creates URF bitmaps (for older AirPrint devices) while the more capable one (due to being an open spec) is the IPP Everywhere PWG bitmap.

4. Finally, there is a transport app which takes the generated bitmap and sends it to the printer, because the RISC OS printing system is too old to know how to interact with a modern printer in a sort of two-way communication. Printers comes from an era where there was barely any feedback from a printer. Technically a parallel port printer would have ERROR, PAPER END, and BUSY but in the Acorn A310, for example, only BUSY was wired up. It wasn't until the likes of the combi-I/O chip (A5000, etc) that PAPER END was wired up, but ERROR would have to wait until the RiscPC...

The tool to examine the printer to create the definition file is a little bit fiddly to use as there is some degree of guesswork involved in locating the printer. This is where my FindIPP may help by scanning for the printers so you can scan for printers and spot lines like:
uri : printer-uri-supported = "ipp://192.168.1.22/ipp/print"
which is most of what needs to be given to Dave's tool to interrogate the printer.

Now, if you're wondering what the point of all of this is, it's easy to explain. Many years ago, printing was an absolute mess. Every printer had its own specific way of doing things. Which meant that every major piece of software needed to have its own printer drivers for all of this.

Choosing a printer in WordPerfect 5.1.

Now something very important happened, and that important thing was the iPad/iPhone. This popularised the use of small form factor devices, and in order to make them more useful, Apple developed something called AirPrint which is an undocumented closed-source way of talking to printers. What we know about AirPrint has come from people trying to work out how it works. Apple could get away with this for two reasons. The first being that Apple is Apple and they can. The second reason is that they didn't want to clutter up devices with limited amounts of storage with all the rubbish that comes with printer drivers, all of which tend to look and act slightly differently.
So the idea that they implemented was to have a standardised way of sending information to the printer, and the printer supports that. Immediately every device that supports AirPrint is able to print to every printer that supports AirPrint.

IPP Everywhere is an published and open specification for doing pretty much the same thing. But since it is open it can be properly supported rather than by using guesswork. The is why the RISC OS PWG/IPPE driver will always be better than the AirPrint/URF one - such as the work in progress of supporting duplex - it is open and available. No guesswork required.

Thanks to Dave's work, RISC OS is gaining the ability to use these methods to be able to print to modern printers. Because these are intended to be "driverless" setups, the printer driver doesn't need to know much about the printer other than what resolution to output. It creates an appropriate bitmap, then the transport application sends it to the printer. And, well, that's about it.

Along with Dave, I did extensive testing with my old HP3630, and more recently I have printed things from OvationPro on RISC OS to my new HP4222e. It's a little more fiddly to get going than traditional Printers, but once it is all set up, one can just press the Print key and, well, then the magic happens. ☺

Here's my FindIPP, version 0.03.
What has been added in this release:

• Now also looks for IPPE/PWG support.
• You can press SPACE to end the scan early.
• Some tweaks to the output.
• You now get the source (licenced CDDL).

Note that for source, you get only the source, no MakeFile. This is because it was being built as a part of something else. This version has been changed so it should have no dependencies other than those present within the DDE. Note that you'll need to include the TCP/IP libraries.

If you want to look at Dave's stuff, pop over Dave's website and a screenful or so down you'll see the info for IPP printing. It's all in there.

Have fun!

Your comments:

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David Pilling, 30th November 2024, 22:56

You're lucky to have the car as a source of electricity - decanting the car into power banks will be lengthy - as would be the opposite process.    I'm sort of hoping for not WW3, sounds like a lot of bother and I am not prepared. Unlike... government, who before lobbing missiles into Russia presumably got their ducks in order in case anything comes back.    There are those videos on YouTube, "If Johnny Ruskie starts anything, this is how the first 24 hours will go". I've not watched them, but I presume NATO air power triumphs quickly. Err 10 bob drone can knock out several million dollars of plane you say.    Quite a lot of US opinion is of the view that Ukraine is losing, going to lose and has had the best NATO can provide and so it will be a NATO loss and the world will see that NATO can be beaten. Big loss of face. Disaster.    "The UK will not be sending troops to Ukraine "at this time", following a news report that the UK and France are discussing the option.    French outlet Le Monde said the two countries were not ruling out sending troops and private defence companies to Ukraine, citing unnamed sources.  "    Would anyone notice if they did?    Looks like things are moving to a deal where Russia keeps what it holds, with guarantees for the rest. Although they've done this before and after a pause things start again. USA won't be sending troops. NATO membership - probly not. Perhaps stationing UK/EU peacekeepers on the new border.      "France has a long history of electing governments that are despised and hated after a month or two."    Just like UK.    Does France allow people to set up petitions(?)

David Pilling, 30th November 2024, 23:12

Unidentified Drones Spotted Over US Secret Military Bases In The UK    ???    Traditional pre-Christmas entertainment.

A tree-dwelling mammal, 1st December 2024, 19:57

Not sure it's quite going to be WWIII, but you never know. I'm making sure I keep a full tank of go-juice in the car, and enough tinned stuff in the cupboard that I can survive an extended power cut.    The only thing that concerns me... Russia has nukes. America has nukes. Trump was willy-waving with North Korea last time he was in office (our big red button is bigger and shinier than yours, etc etc).    A zombie apocalypse I could deal with. Just get a chainsaw or two. Ever seen Shaun Of The Dead?

Rick, 1st December 2024, 20:19

I think you'll find chainsaws to be less than practical.  Need to get the thing running, keep holding it at shoulder height, then need to get pretty close to the zombies in order to decapitate them.   Assuming that does the trick, movies might be bogus - maybe the infection is carried in blood and, well, nothing says insane splatter quite like a chainsaw.    If they're zippy zombies we're screwed. But if they're Romero shufflers, I'd probably start with a can of deodorant and a lighter until I could lay my hands on a decent rifle (and figure out how to use it). The neighbour is a hunter, but he's old, just a matter of time until I can pop over and take what's left...  I have a sharpened katana, but I'd only use that to poke the eyes out and blind the thing. Slicing heads off is movie fantasy. One would be liable to get bitten/eaten attempting that with a real katana, so trying it with a sharpened fake one would be stupid.  And, then, of course, there's always mom's car. Might need a bit of TLC to get it going, but it's a lot solider than mine and more powerful. Run the bastards over.    Given the Norks are getting cosy with the Russians, I don't think The Orange Twat will be too antagonistic this time around. His Red Bestie wouldn't approve.

A tree-dwelling mammal, 2nd December 2024, 17:15

In Shaun Of The Dead they eliminated the zombies by chopping their heads off.    Resident Evil? It's been a while since I saw that.    Of course it also depends on the specific type of zombie. If it's one where they'll regenerate (ie chop them in half and both regenerate) then my plan of firing a few rounds from an RPG launcher is probably a bad idea.

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