This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
It’s the Fifteenth of Bleptember, and our young doggo has never looked so inelegant as when she lies on her back on the sofa with a dorky tongueful grin on her face.
This week, I spent two days on a shoestring Internet connection, and it was pretty shit.
As you might anticipate, we run a complicated network at our house, and so when my connection dropped a quarter of an hour into the beginning of three and a half hours of scheduled meetings on a busy afternoon, my first thought was to check that everything was working locally. Internal traffic all seemed to be going the right way, so then I checked the primary router and discovered that the problem was further upstream. I checked our fibre terminator, and sure enough: it said it wasn’t getting a signal.
I checked the status page for our ISP – no reported problems. So I called them up. I was pleased that (after I relayed what tests I’d done so far) they treated me like a network specialist rather than somebody who needed hand-holding and we skipped over the usual “have you tried turning it off and on again” and got straight to some diagnosis and scheduling an engineer for the next day. That’d do.
The end of a workday being ruined was a bit of a drag, but for Ruth it was definitely worse, as she was overseeing a major project the following morning (from 5am!) and so needed to arrange for emergency out-of-hours access to her office for the next day to be able to make it work. As for me: I figured I’d be back online by lunchtime, and working a little into the evening would give me a rare opportunity for an increased overlap with my team – many of which are on the Pacific coast of the US – so it’d all work out.
The engineer arrived the next morning, just as a storm hit. He traced the problem, waited for the rain to ease off, then stomped off up the street to get it fixed. Only a matter of time now, I thought.
But nope: he came back to say that wherever the fault had occurred was found somewhere under the road that he couldn’t access by himself: it’d need a team of two engineers to get down there and fix it, and they wouldn’t be able to come… until tomorrow.
So I went up to the attic to work, which is just about the only place in the house where – by balancing my phone against a window – I can consistently tether at 4G/5G. Well… semi-consistently. Inconsistently enough to be immensely frustrating.
There’s this thing, I find: no Internet access is annoying, but tolerable.
Slow Internet access is similar.
But intermittent Internet access is, somehow, a nightmare. Applications hang or fail in unpredictable ways, their developers not having planned for the possibility that the
connection they detected for when they were opened might come and go at random. Shitty modern “web applications” that expect to download multiple megabytes of JavaScript before they
work show skeleton loaders and dehydrated <div>s that might one day grow up to be something approximating a button, link, or image. It’s just generally a pretty crap
experience.
It’s funny how we got so dependent upon the Internet. 26+ years ago, I used to write most of my Web-destined PHP and Perl code “offline”! I’d dial-up to the Internet to download documentation or upload code, then work from my memory, from books, and what I’d saved from the Web. Can you imagine asking a junior Web developer to do that today?
In a second ironic twist, a parcel arrived for me during our downtime which contained new network hardware with which I planned to eliminate a couple of WiFi weak spots at the edges of our house. The new hardware worked perfectly and provided a wonderful improvement to signal strength between our computers… but of course not to computers outside of the network.
There’s another interesting thing that’s changed over the decades. When I first started installing (bus!) networks, there was no assumption that the network would necessarily provide Internet access. The principal purpose of the network was to connect the computers within the LAN to one another. This meant that staff could access one another’s files more easily and make use of a shared printer without walking around carrying floppy disks, for example… or could frag one another at Doom and Quake at the LAN parties that I’d sometimes run from my mum’s living room!
But nowadays, if you connect to a network (whether wired or wireless) there’s an expectation that it’ll provide Internet access. So much so, that if you join a wireless network using your mobile phone and it doesn’t provide Internet access, your phone probably won’t route any traffic across it unless you specifically say that it should. That’s a reasonable default, these days, but it’s an annoyance when – for example – I wanted my phone to continue using Syncthing to back up my photos to my NAS even though the network that my NAS was on would no longer provide Internet access to my phone!
The second team of engineers quickly found and repaired a break in the fibre – apparently it was easier than the first engineer had expected – and normalcy returned to our household.
But for a couple of days, there, I was forcibly (and unpleasantly) reminded about how the world has changed since the time that “being on a network” wasn’t assumed to be synonymous with “has Internet access”.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
A lazy Sunday morning this Fourtheenth of Bleptember provides the perfect opportunity to dogpile onto a convenient nearby human… and gradually dampen their trouser leg with your blep.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Terence Eden raises some valid points:
…
I’ve tried to be pragmatic, but there’s something of a dilemma here.
- Users should be free to run whatever code they like.
- Vulnerable members of society should be protected from scams.
Do we accept that a megacorporation should keep everyone safe at the expense of a few pesky nerds wanting to run some janky code?
Do we say that the right to run free software is more important than granny being protected from scammers?
Do we pour billions into educating users not to click “yes” to every prompt they see?
Do we try and build a super-secure Operating System which, somehow, gives users complete freedom without exposing them to risk?
Do we hope that Google won’t suddenly start extorting developers, users, and society as a whole?
Do we chase down and punish everyone who releases a scam app?
Do we stick an AI on every phone to detect scam apps and refuse to run them if they’re dodgy?
I don’t know the answers to any of these questions and – if I’m honest – I don’t like asking them.
Google’s gradual locking-down of Android bothers me, too. I’ve rooted many of my phones
in order to unlock features that I benefit from (as a developer… and as a nerd!), and it’s bugged me on the occasions where I’ve been unable to run had to use complicated
workarounds to trick e.g. a bank’s app. Having gone to the effort to root a phone – which remains outside of the reach of most regular users – I’d be happy to accept an appropriate
share of the liability if my mistake, y’know, let a scammer steal all of my money.
That’s the risk you take with any device on which you have root, and it’s why we make it hard to the point of being discouraging. Because you can’t just put up a warning and hope that users will read and understand it, because they won’t. They’ll just click whatever button looks like it’ll get them to the next step without even glancing at the danger signs1.
I’m glad to have been increasingly decoupling myself from Google’s ecosystem, because I’ve been burned by it too. Like Terence, I’ve been hit by “real name” policies that discriminate against people with unusual names or who might be at risk of impersonation2. But I’m not convinced that there’s a good alternative for me to running Android on my mobile devices, at the moment: I really enjoyed Maemo back in the day; what’s the status of Sailfish nowadays?
I get that we need to protect people from dangerous scammy apps. But I’d like to think there’s a middle-ground somewhere between Doctrowian “it’s your device, you’re responsible for what runs on it” and the growing Apple/Google thinking of “if we don’t have the targetting coordinates of the developer that wrote the code, our OS won’t let you run it”. I’m ready to concede that user education alone hasn’t worked, but there’s got to be a better solution than this, Google.
1 Incidentally, I don’t blame users for this behaviour. Users have absolutely been conditioned, and continue to be conditioned, to click-without-reading. Cookie and privacy banners with dark patterns, EULAs and legal small print are notoriously (and often unnecessarily) long and convoluted, and companies routinely try to blur the line between “serious thing you should really read but we want you not to” and “trivial thing that you don’t need to read; it’s just a formality that we have to say it”.
2 Right now, my biggest fight with Google has come from the fact that lately, it seems like every time I upload a Three Rings demo video to YouTube it gets deleted under their harassment policy for doxxing people… people like “Alan Fakename” from Somewhereville, “Betty Notaperson” from Otherplace, and their friend “Chris McMadeup” who lives at 123 Imaginary Street. The appeals process turns out to be that you click a button to appeal, but don’t get to provide any further information (e.g. to explain that these are clearly-fake people who won’t mind being doxxed on account of the fact that they don’t exist), and then a few hours later you get an email to say “nah, we’re keeping it deleted”. I almost expect the YouTube version of my recent video demonstrating FreeDeedPoll.org.uk will be next to be targetted by this policy for showing me scribbling the purported signature Sam McRealName, formerly known as Jo Genuine-Person.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
It’s the Thirteenth of Bleptember, and the bleppy young pupper is watching television. She enjoys the shows with dogs, of course, but also the ones with other animals whose silhouettes stand out against the background, like birds in flight. All Creatures Great and Small is a particular favourite.
Photo with thanks to the older child.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
It’s the Twelfth of Bleptember, and our little blepper has tucked herself away tidily, wrapped up in her snuggly warm jumper, to hide from the torrential rain that’s beating down across Oxfordshire. Oh, and her tongue’s sticking out, of course.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
When our doggo carries around her chew toy like this, I always think she looks a little like Winston Churchill with his cigar. If Churchill also wasn’t able to stop blepping, that is!
Happy Eleventh of Bleptember! (This one’s not going out on Mastodon, at least not immediately, because I’m having some Internet difficulties at home right now!)
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
It’s the Tenth of Bleptember, and this doggo is desperately trying to stay awake in case the postman comes back or something else equally interesting happens, but I reckon she’s going to nod off any… second… now…
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
Sometimes, you just need a Long Nap and a Big Blep.
Happy Ninth of Bleptember, Internet!
Found the younger child not-in-bed but dancing around his room, using his pyjamas as perhaps some kind of streamers or flags.
Me: “Why aren’t you in bed?”
Him: “I’m sorry; I got distracted by how amazing I am.”
Hard to argue with that.
I relaunched FreeDeedPoll.org.uk at the weekend, after a frustrating server failure took it down. But as I was relaunching it anyway, I took the opportunity to make some changes to the site that I’d been meaning to anyway1.
And while I was re-making it anyway, I figured I’d throw together one of those one-minute tutorial videos that the young people use, these days:
It’s also on YouTube, of course, where I also made one of those “shorts” videos…2
1 Things that weren’t technically-feasible back when I created the site in 2011 like making the PDF generation happen in the browser, so no personal information ever has to leave your computer, for example
2 Y’know, those things for people who can’t even be bothered to turn their phone into the same orientation as virtually every television, cinema screen, and computer monitor that’s ever been made (not that the owners of those larger screens can always turn them to portrait orientation!). Turns out I have strong feelings about portrait video! But if that’s the way to reach out and help the widest diversity of people, I guess that’s what I’ve got to do…
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
Suddenly, there was the noise of somebody walking on our driveway. The doggo woke up and stood, alert, ready to defend the house from intruders. Unfortunately in her haste she forgot to put her tongue away.
Happy Eighth of Bleptember.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
It’s the Seventh of Bleptember, and our dorky doggo has decided that this is somehow a comfortable position in which to take a nap.
This checkin to GCBC09Z A Riverside Walk reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
FTF after a delightful walk and a surprisingly challenging hunt!
When I woke this morning and saw a new semi-local cache, about when I ought to be getting myself and the geopup up anyway, I was intrigued. Bed called me back for a Sunday morning lie-in, but eventually I escaped its clutches and the geohound and I set out on our adventure.
Parking in Bladon was a challenge but we were fortune enough to find a residential road with a few spots up towards St. Martin’s Church. After that, and working out how to open the gate to the Community Footpath, we were on our way.
Passing the world’s most pointless gate and a heron finding his breakfast (both pictured), the doggo and I enjoyed our riverside stroll in relative peace and quiet, excepting the occasional jogger or dog walker that would come the other way. Eventually we found the bridge, stopped to enjoy the view a little, and then began the hunt.
Even with the hint and a strong idea of what I was looking for, this was a challenging search. I’ll bet my kids would’ve found the cache much faster than my ~15-20 minute search, but eventually I caught a glimpse of it, worked my way to it, and retrieved the log. Seeing it still blank, I claimed my FTF, and then had a brief panic when I discovered that I could no longer see it’s hiding place! A brief re-search and I’d found it again, but for a while there I was kicking myself for taking the time to return to the wall of the bridge to write my log!
Returned as found. TFTC, and for the lovely walk!
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
I am Doggle. See me Blep.
Happy Sixth of Bleptember from this sofa-loving pupper.
