Rick's b.log - entry 2024/12/28

The parcel arrives

Just after noon on the 23^rd, the parcel was resent, with one cake mix less to bring it under the 2kg limit (which still cost £15.40!). It arrived here in France on the 24^th, I paid the import fees on the 25^th (€7), and it arrived here by applied magic today. Why do I say "applied magic"? It's because I was sitting here in the living room with the shutters open (which didn't help keep the room warm) and I never saw the post van arrive. Yet, at quarter to twelve, in what must be the last yellow post van on the road, a replacement woman placed the parcel in the letterbox. I can only assume I was making tea or something at that exact moment.

As to why I had to pay to receive this? Well, given that it was a parcel that was a gift between two individuals which was under the limit of €45, I should not have had to pay the "Frais de gestion" (import fees). However, as you can clearly see in the customs sticker here, while it says "GIFT" in big letters, blue so it stands out, the little box for "Gift" has not been ticked.
Yes, they can be that mind-mumbingly literal. Especially since it's Christmas, there are lots of people sending stuff, and it gives La Poste a perfect opportunity to scam everybody for the receipt of their parcels. This is one of the reasons why I now actively do not order from any Amazon seller (or other company) that ships from the UK...

Still, here we are, there's a pack of carrot cake mix and a pack of rainbow cake mix and a lemon cake mix - that one is quite nice, it's what's in the freezer. I haven't made rainbow/carrot cake yet. I'm going to put these in a zip-seal freezer bag and then in the larder for later on. No point baking now, I have plenty of stuff frozen.

What a palaver this was!

Doctor Whaaaa!

This is beyond a joke. This, the trans-dimensional alien Time Lord with his own time machine, has quite possibly cried more in one series than all of his companions including Clara.

And, yes, I understand grief and joy and all of those sorts of emotions... but given the eccentricities of the character, and the fact that his emotional distance is supposed to be a signpost to his otherworldy nature... he's fast turning into SpongeBob with all the crying.

What next? Will he wet himself the next time a Dalek turns up "because ssccaarryy!!"? It's perfectly acceptable for us mere little humans to pee at the sight of Daleks (though we don't because there are rules about that sort of thing on prime time TV) but him? The Doctor? The correct response is to ridicule it while offering it a jellybaby. Anything else just wouldn't be canon.

Maybe somebody should put out a call to Chuck Norris to be the next doctor. That'll fix this crying nonsense (plus really annoy the Little Englanders with the Texan accent - WIN!).

PTZ app hack

Time to ressurect that horrifically insecure tilt'n'turn camera. It was put onto the LAN and the Livebox instructed to block any and all access to and from the internet to that device.

Then it was a simple matter of looking at where I documented the control protocol and hacking a copy of my ESP32Cam software to talk to this thing instead. The brightness/contrast/flip controls are not yet supported but IR on/off, QVGA/VGA, and movement is supported.

So now I can look at the state of the washing machine.

It's whinging that it wants a drink.

Lucy's Lousy Light

This isn't supposed to happen.

There is some sort of race condition where opening/closing doors in some particular manner too quickly seems to cause the interior light to get blocked in the 'on' position rather than fading to off. I'm not sure what causes this, but it happens quite a lot and it's annoying.

Thankfully, as you might be able to guess from the icky blue hue, it's a white LED so it didn't heat up nor did it put any appreciable drain on the battery. It's been on since 3pm yesterday when I took the rubbish up the lane, so about 26h.

Centralised repositories

Well, there are three principle repositories for RISC OS software:

• riscos.info
  This is the main repository for PackMan and while it currently works, the rest of the site doesn't appear to. Notably the wiki has vanished.
  You can see what's available using a browser by clicking here.
• ROOL
  The home of RISC OS itself hosts not only parts of the OS and support materials, but also some third-party apps in a manner that can be integrated into PackMan.
  The RISC OS content and the third-party content.
• !Store
  This is a completely different custom app store managed by R-Comp. It has currently been suffering technical problems, and they are not yet resolved.
  There is currently no way to access the data, app list, versions, etc outside of the Store application.
  More about Store.

And, for good measure...

• JASPP
  The home of many RISC OS games, this is Jon Abbott's site. The home, also, of ADFFS.
  There isn't a nice easy-to-read list of available software, the packages directory redirects to the forum. If you want to have a crack at directly reading the package file, click here (but using PackMan is much less bother).

In recent times, riscos.info has been down, and currently PlingStore is refusing uploads. Earlier today I tried to update Tea to version 0.18 and while the software information has been updated, it is offering the previous (v0.15) archive rather than the updated archive.
I also tried to create the new app SimpleSeq and while it is now in the database, any upload attempts (executable or example images) are simply dropped on the floor. I tried numerous times and, nope. Even worse, the site doesn't provide any sort of status or feedback if it actually worked (or failed). I believe the host changed something that caused stuff to break and, well, it's better (the site responds) but not there yet.

Now we can't be too harsh on any of these because the RISC OS world doesn't have the resources or cashflow of the big app stores (like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Debian, etc) nor does it have the users. The hosting for all of this comes out of somebody's pocket. In the case of ROOL, it could perhaps be funded by the donations - the RISC OS General (2024) bounty is currently £4,000.68. What about the others?

The problem is that having everything all together forms a weak link when something interrupts the service providing the software. There is no easy solution, but maybe the idea of burying software on unknown websites isn't dead yet. One just needs to find a way to publicise the existence of this software so others can find it...

Cold

Météo France is giving a more logical 4°C/1°C forecast, with tomorrow being about the same. In fact, it's not going to "improve" (14°C, windy, rainy) until the 2^nd of January. Guess what day I go back to work. It's a blip anyway. When what I presume will be yet another storm has passed through, temperatures will go back down again. After all, it is the middle of winter.

So I think I'm going to upload this and then get into bed with the heated blanket and see if there's anything that takes my fancy on Netflix. There's a new Matrix movie, though it's 2½ hours long and, well, Morpheus isn't Morpheus, Smith isn't Smith, and it only gets 5.6 on IMDb. I might start, dunno how far I'll get...

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Rick, 28th December 2024, 18:27

Can you imagine the First Doctor (William Hartnell) *crying*? His default setting was exasperated with a side-order of flustered.

Rick, 28th December 2024, 20:44

I gave up after an hour. It was...excruciating, almost as if the script was written by a fanboy of the first movie that didn't actually understand it, but wanted a ton of exposition anyway.    Actually, given the rather jarring name drop of WB in the beginning and the commentary on making the next installment of the video game (makes sense in context) with or without the original creator's involvement, I rather suspect this is a deliberate explanation of what happened in reality with this movie. The trilogy was made, the story was complete, and all this time later the studio wanted another and were going to do it however, so this was made to be intentional suck.  Well, that's my theory but with an hour and a half still to go, maybe the real Morpheus kicks open a door and guns down Bugs Bunny (I'm talking here about the cartoon, not the character in this movie called Bugs - can you see why I think this was a big screw you to WB?). Anyway, I guess I'll never know because when I start looking at unrelated stuff on TV Tropes as I'm supposed to be watching the movie is when I know it's time to abort and go find a fuzzy weird Korean drama to enjoy. Did I ever start watching season two of The Uncanny Counter? Maybe I ought to begin right now and just pretend that Matrix 4 never happened.  Well, actually, it can go on the pile of "all of those sequels". There is only one Highlander, and there is only one Matrix. The end.

Rick, 28th December 2024, 21:57

A lack of attention and I poked the wrong icon, ended up watching "Café Minamdang", which is suitably weird AF. Only eighteen hours (and 17 episodes) to go. 😂

Rob, 29th December 2024, 14:43

It's a while since I was involved, and things might have changed, but the XBMC community published plugins via a useful mechanism, that might be applicable here. Anybody could set up a repository, which was little more than allowing apache to publish a directory listing. These could be added to your installation by importing a small file that contained the URL and some metadata, such as description. These could themselves be hosted in other repositories, or linked direct. It meant people could monitor whichever locations provided the plugins they were interested in, but allowed for distributing and adding as many more as they wanted. I'm sure a similar system would be pretty simple to implement, maybe just by adding the functionality to share and maintain a list of repositories to packman.

David Pilling, 30th December 2024, 00:19

I'd like there to be a mirror. Sign up your web site and it keeps a copy. At some point I will get fed up paying the bill and all my stuff will vanish.

David Pilling, 30th December 2024, 00:21

I use Evri. No complaints so far. I suspect it is very popular and the old thing about complaints being proportional to number of customers comes into play.

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