Like many others1, MEEK’s Fabulous has been stuck on-loop in my head for most of this year. What a fucking banger of a track,
amirite?
And yet… somehow, today was the first time I figured I’d watch the music video. If you’ve not seen it (or perhaps not even heard the song), go do that now; I’ll wait.
The outdoor shots start about 20 seconds in, and… they’re instantly-recognisable by what they aren’t.
They aren’t London, where singer-songwriter Georgia Meek hails from, that’s for sure.
You don’t get this level of deprivation in the South. Also, I’m pretty sure the director must’ve deliberately flung the tail-end scratchings from a crisp packet into the road to get
those seagulls to play ball.
You probably know from the title of this blog post, but the filming location MEEK and her team chose is… Blackpool!
The music video winds its way around a few streets in the town centre: this one’s distinctively-badly paved-over cobblestones makes it clear it’s the East end of Pier Street. Oh; and I gather that the guy with the
dog was just a random passer-by who Meek collared and got to sign a release and just recruited for the video, then and there. Badass.
The music video goes indoors, continuing – nay, increasing – how fabulously queer-and-glam it is, through a theatre and arcade/bingo hall3. Eventually, it hits and a series of fast food
establishments cumulating in Feast About.
It’s easy enough to line up the tower with The Strand to find this location, even if the named shops didn’t give it away. We’re
on the opposite corner of the block from Ma Kelly’s now, and just around the corner from Garlands (if you’re looking for a cheap drink
and a drag show) and The Flying Handbag (where my 18th birthday party‘s pub
crawl began).
Then there’s some faster and blurrier videography, but it’s clearly the Golden Mile, where she’s heading South and… hey, wait… is this music video actually shot in a
geographically-sound order? So far, she seems to have moderately-consistently been moving South through the roads about one or two streets back from the Promenade, from a little
North of the North Pier down towards the Central Pier…
Half-way down the Golden Mile, this carnival game looks distinctly like the Camel Derby at Coral Island: you can see it photographed from a definitive angle in this review post!
Anyway; after her party night out, she finds her way to a late-night chippy, as you do.
She’s still heading South… which makes me think that the ruined steps she’s seen sitting on for literally three seconds might be somewhere between Coral Island and the Crispy Cod.
Anybody know?
Anyway, the bottom line is that this music video was – surprisingly but delightfully – set in the area of… what might be the gayest pub crawl in the UK. Which, on top of this already
awesome song, leaves me… feeling fucking fabulous.
Footnotes
1 Especially those in queer or adjacent spaces, obvs.
2 Pier Street and York Street Car Park’s are a comfortable walk from Ma Kelly’s Cabaret Bar, which – and I’m less-certain about this one – might be the host of some of the interior shots from the music video.
Anyway, if you go around the corner in Google Street View you’ll find Higgitts Arcade and Burger Bar, which – just trust me and go look at it – is the most-Blackpool thing imaginable.
3 I’m almost-certain the arcade is the Higgitts, which I mentioned previously because of
its proximity to an earlier shot!
Apparently, zero of the imagineers building this Disneyland Paris cafe conceived that “Chuck Wagon” sounds like what a cowboy would call a wheeled vomit trough. 😂
Fuck Paris. The only way to buy a metro ticket is to download an app. Fair enough. But, after downloading the app it tells you to install another app!
What the actual fuck? A convoluted, messy, and frustrating situation which has resulted in awful reviews for them.
Trains and metro travel require separate tickets at different prices. You can’t easily hop from one to another. You need to think carefully about the route you’re taking. A more
convoluted route may be significantly cheaper because it doesn’t involve swapping between services.
This absolutely parallels my experience of hopping around the Paris’s metro area, last time I was there.
If I’ve got to navigate my way through Paris’s public transport network… I’m going to need a drink first.
From the sounds of things, this is clearly designed as a convenience for visitors to the city, not regulars and locals:
Dès le 30 juin 2026, les touristes et les voyageurs hyperoccasionnels pourront opter pour valider leur titre en sortie de l’aéroport d’Orly sur la
ligne 14 avec la carte bancaire.2
Paris’s relationship with tourists is different from London’s
Les prix des titres de transport via les bornes d’achat sont les suivants :
Bus/tram/funiculaire : 2,55 € (soit + 0,50 € sur le prix classique) ;
Métro/train/RER : 3,35 € (soit + 0,80 € sur le prix classique) ;
Aéroports : 14,80 € (soit + 0,80 € sur le prix classique).
Buying transport tickets in Paris using a contactless card… costs 0.50 € to 0.80 € more. Paris will charge you for the convenience of tapping in and
out with your carte bancaire.
Tap in, tap out. Unless you’re eligible for discounted travel, you probably might as well use your debit card to get around London. Photo by Luca Sammarco.
Contactless is clearly more-convenient for city visitors, but I think the difference between London and Paris’s attitude to it says something about the relationship both cities have
with their tourists. In London, most travellers can use whatever bank card and mobile wallet they’ve already got… and they’ll get as good a deal as possible. But in Paris,
doing the same will invariably cost more than a conventional ticket would. You pay a convenience-tax.
Both cities get tens of millions of annual visitors and extract billions of euros worth of financial benefit from their tourist economies. Paris doing slightly better overall, but
they’re closely-comparable enough that differences like this probably mean something.
Tap in, pay a premium for the privilege. Thanks, Paris! Photo by Candelario Benítez.
I’m not saying that London loves tourists and Paris hates them! It’s not so simple as that. But I think perhaps the cites try to present themselves in a different way.
London’s public transport says: we’ll work around you. You can learn the rules as you go; you don’t have to “learn London” to get around. Just use your usual
contactless card wherever you go; we’ll work out the details, and your daily cost will get capped just the same as if you chose to pick up an Oyster card. Visiting the city as a tourist
is an ordinary use-case for the transport network.
Paris’s public transport says: you should learn the rules. You’re welcome to visit, but you either need to do the work to be a “temporary Parisian”… or you can
just use your usual contactless card but we’ll charge you a premium for the convenience. Visiting the city as a tourist is a special case that the transport
network sees differently from being a local.
Neither approach is “wrong”… but I think it’s interesting. And now I’m wondering what the approach is like across other European cities.
Footnotes
1 I’ll almost-certainly have to tackle the current-generation of Paris’s public transport
at some point before then, but I’ll look forward to the improved version once it rolls-out.
2 “From 30 June 2026, tourists and hyper-ocassional travellers will be
able to pay by bank card on Line 14 out of Orly Airport.” Emphasis mine.
So if you see a reference to Count Duckula, or hear me exclaim “Accrington Stanley!”, or even blush as I describe an utter wanker – please take it as a sign that the
hegemony is not universal and some people exist in a cultural milieu different to your own.
I feel like this is an even-more specific dialect than en-GB. What is this, en-GB-1980s? 🤣
The campsite provided our large group with an entire field to ourselves, including spaces for socialising, a fire pit (at which the
kids enjoyed toasting marshmallows), and a wood-fired hot tub.
The entire weekend would have surely been a memorable experience already, but one particular event will probably stick in the minds of everybody in attendance: the
fire.
The fire
The UK’s in its unprecedented third heatwave of the year: the grass is all dying and everything is tinder dry. And so it was that, on Friday night as the kids and I slept in our
glamping “dome”, I was woken by the distant beep-beep-beep of a domestic smoke alarm. A few seconds later, I heard a second such alarm with a different tone, and it became clear that
this wasn’t just somebody’s toast on fire.
Not recorded: the sound of the occupant of this static caravan/cabin – having jumped through the window to safety as the front door was blocked by flames – on the phone to the fire
brigade.
I went back into the dome to check on the children, which is when Penny knocked on my door to ensure I was aware of what was going on. The kids were sound asleep, so I ran out to the
car park to move the car (which was parked in such a position that embers were raining down on it!) and to check on the situation.
The fire intensity of the fire grew particularly intense as the sound of fire engine sirens began to be heard from the valley below. Photo copyright Rory Prior.
I returned to the dome and got the children dressed. We evacuated to a safer distance and watched as the firefighters arrived and began to tackle the blaze. Short of water, they had one
pump dousing the flaming building while two others relayed water from the nearest fire hydrant, way down the hill.
There was a brief faux pas when one of the Abnib kids exclaimed “this is so cool“… without realising that he was standing right next to the people whose
home was being destroyed in front of us.
Eventually the situation came under control and we were all able to return to bed.
The battery pack
I spoke to Mike, whose holiday home was the building that was destroyed. He’d managed to escape with some shorts and his mobile phone, but little else: in particular, his car keys
remained inside and were probably destroyed, which rendered him unable to drive back to his regular home.
The firefighters worked quickly, but it still took over three hours before they were able to finish spreading out and drenching everything that had caught light. We watched from a
distance, and sheltered all the children (including those of a non-Abnib family on-site) in one of our tents.
Mike had been turning his phone on only in bursts in order to conserve battery for all of the essential calls he’d have to make (e.g. his bank, to extract some money without his cards,
and a locksmith, to get him back into his car). His phone charger – an awkward USB-B-Micro one – hadn’t survived the fire.
But conveniently… I happened to have such a cable in my bag. Plus a fully-charged battery pack. So I lent both to Mike, in the hope that it’d make it easier for him to do all of the
necessary administration1.
It’s got to be a pretty-devastating thing to happen to your holiday home and everything in it. Mike was surprisingly chill about it when I spoke to him, taking soft-of an attitude of
“well, there’s no point fretting about it after the fact!”
“You saved my life!”
Anyway: on Saturday night, shortly after the kids and I had turned-in, there was a knock on the door. It was Mike, come to return the battery pack I’d lent him.
The kids didn’t know who he was, so I explained: “This is Mike; he’s the fella who lived in the home that burned down last night.”
Mike handed over the battery pack and charging cable and, grateful for them, used a metaphor that. “Thanks,” he said, passing the hardware to me, “You saved my life!”
I hadn’t told Mike which glamping pod was ours, and just figured I’d see him around. Or else if I didn’t get my battery pack back, that’d be fine: it’ll have been more-useful to him
than to me in the days to come! But there we were, in our pyjamas, when he appeared at our door.
He turned and left, and both kids sprung out of bed and exclaimed “You saved the life of the guy whose house burned down‽”
I’m sure they had in their minds the idea that, during the period between the fire starting and me waking and evacuating them, I’d singlehandedly dragged this dude out of a burning
building. Y’know, instead of just lending him a phone charger after-the-fact.
I only let them hold the misapprehension for a few minutes, but for a moment it lightened the mood.
Footnotes
1 I was already using my phone to call our insurance company before our flood, earlier this year, had finished. I can only imagine how inconvenient it is to suffer a disaster and lose your communications lifeline at the
same time!
An unexpected start to the kids’ and I’s glamping weekend last night when the static caravan behind our dome burned to the ground. We spent most of our night half way down a field
watching the fire crews tackle the blaze.
(Nobody was injured; the residents were able to escape out of a window.)
Well: today I received my second hashcard (and tenth “postcard from the Internet”)! This one came from GeorgDerReisende, whose 800+ expeditions are more than a little intimidating! He’d spent his 13th hashiversary on an expedition to a location outside
Frankfurt earlier this month, where he narrowly failed to reach the hashpoint because it was just slightly too far into somebody’s private property.
But at least he was able to claim the hashcard achievement (although not for the first time)! Well done,
GeorgDerReisende!
This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.
…
Those .ini files seemed unimportant to a child, but they are configuration files used by several applications, including the operating system. While the Windows
Registry did exist in Windows 95, .ini files were still commonly used. When I deleted them, any application or process that relied on them failed to load and simply
crashed.
Anyone who had anything of importance on that computer lost it. Everyone except my father, who carefully kept copies of his documents on floppy disks. He knew I was up to no good.
Throughout my career, I’ve seen many people make this same mistake. When something doesn’t look important to them, they delete it. Whether it’s a programmer deleting a function that “looks stupid,” or a DBA dropping a table or a single field they assume no one will miss. It’s
all the result of the same mindset: “I don’t think this is important.”
…
Not the same thing at all, but once, early in my career, I needed to use a colleague’s computer because mine was tied-up doing something-or-other. He was off for his lunch, so I asked
if I could borrow his and carry on testing the system I’d been developing from there.
My tests involved making a ton of CSV files, uploading them into a tool, getting the mutated results back, and comparing them. Dull stuff, and it made a load of temporary files. So I
dutifully dumped all the mess I made into the Recycle Bin and, when I was finished and returned to my own desk, I emptied the Recycle Bin.
My colleague returned and he was furious. “Did you empty my Recycle Bin?” he fumed.
“Yes,” I said, “Sorry; was that a problem?”
“I was keeping all kinds of important documents in there!” he replied.
Turns out that the software he was using to measure how much disk space he had left didn’t include the Recycle Bin in its count; after all, that could be freed-up in a moment! And so,
to “save space”, he’d taken to storing large (but important) files… in the Recycle Bin so that they didn’t take up space (at least, according to the tool he was using: obviously they
were taking up space in reality).
This guy wasn’t 10 years old. He was over twice that, a recent university graduate with a software engineering degree.
I’ve got an upcoming trip to France: I’ll be driving there through the Channel Tunnel, via LeShuttle. But owing to a quirk in our family travel
arrangements, we’ve have a slightly different set of passengers in the car for the outbound leg than for the return journey.
You’d think that to specify different passengers for the return leg, all I’d have to do is uncheck that checkbox, right? Wrong!
I was able to provide all of the personal and passport details of everybody on the outbound leg, but un-checking the “Return passenger information is the same” checkbox did… nothing. In
fact, when saving the form and logging in again, the checkbox would be automatically re-checked.1
This is the point at which a normal person would either:
Add the details of all passengers, both outbound and returning, to the form, and just hope they can sort out the confusion at the terminal, or,
Try to get hold of a human Help Centre/Contact Us system (good luck!) who can sort it out.
Fortunately, I am not a normal person. I… am a software security engineer.
API reverse-engineering
My browser debug tools quickly indicated how this entire process works, and gave a clue as to what was broken in LeShuttle’s systems.
When you log in, it makes a POST request to https://nextus-api-prod.leshuttle.com/b2c-api/GuestApi/Read?bookRef=...&surname=..., including your booking
reference and surname (which acts as your password) in the relevant parameters.
This returns all of your details in a JSON document. Prettified, and with all of the actual data replaced with explanatory comments, it looks something like this:
{
"loginDetails":{
/* credentials you used and other metadata */},
"bookingDetails":{
"outboundTravelDetails":{
/* details about your outbound train and vehicle */},
"returnTravelDetails":{
/* details about your return train and vehicle */},
"leadName":{
/* details of the person who booked the trip */},
"outboundPaxDetails":{
/* For the outbound journey: */"paxLine":[
/* First passenger: */{
"paxDets":{
/* - name, nationality, gender, DOB */},
"docDets":{
/* - passort number, expiry, issuing country */}
},
/* Second passenger: */{
/* ... and so on .... */},
],
/* Total number of passengers: */"noOfPax":"4"},
"returnPaxDetails":{
/* For the return journey: */"paxLine":[
/* ... each passenger: same format as outbound... */],
/* Total number of passengers: */"noOfPax":"5"},
"storedPaxDetails":{
/* Pre-saved details? All blank for me */},
/* More metadata */},
"status":{
/* Yet more metadata */},
/* Even more metadata */
}
Once you’ve made some changes, you press “Save”. This triggers a POST request to https://nextus-api-prod.leshuttle.com/b2c-api/GuestApi/Save with
Content-Type: application/json and the entire JSON document from before, with your modifications, passed back.2
If you’re a programmer, you’re probably already making a guess as to what the underlying problem is. And you’re probably right:
The “Return passenger information is the same” checkbox value is not stored in the data that gets passed back and forth.
Instead, it’s derived by looking at the outbound and return passenger information. If it matches, it gets checked.
If it’s initially checked… the form doesn’t bother loading the UI that allows return passenger details to be modified.
But… this means that it never loads that UI:
the first time you visit the page the passenger list is empty both ways, which matches: anything you enter will necessarily be recorded into both the outbound and return fields,
so
the next time you visit, it also matches… so it still doesn’t load the fields,
Knowing how the API worked, I was able to simply take the JSON document from the /Read endpoint, modify it so that the outboundPaxDetails and
returnPaxDetails each contained the correct details for that leg of the journey (being sure also to update the total number of passengers noOfPax, which is for
some reason a stored value rather than a derived one), and then submit it back via the /Save endpoint.
Having done this, I hit the /Read endpoint again to confirm that the data had, indeed, retained the data I submitted. When logging in again to the Web interface, I noticed
that the checkbox now doesn’t automatically check itself. The correct data gets passed back and forth4.
Obviously LeShuttle need to fix their damn site. But at least – thanks to a little API reverse-engineering – I was able to submit the details they wanted from us.
Footnotes
1 Before anybody asks: yes, I tried all of the obvious things like using different
browsers, clearing caches, disabling plugins, etc. I even had another passenger, using a different computer and operating system, give it a go. This one’s definitely a bug in
LeShuttle’s systems.
2 I choose to assume that they’re doing some kind of server-side validation to ensure that
a customer can’t, for example, modify details they’re not permitted to without a charge, such as which train they’re booked onto or the registration plate of the vehicle they’re
bringing. But obviously I haven’t tested this, because it’s not among the information that I’m authorised to modify. Ethical hackers get permission before they poke
at things they’re not sure whether they’re supposed to… especially if it’s a travel-related system and they’re somebody who has an unusual name that routinely
gets them stopped and questioned at the UK border in general. 🤭
3 It occurs to me that possibly LeShuttle provide access to the relevant form only after
the outbound journey has been made? Which would be a terrible design for the system and would represent terrible UI (why provide the checkbox if it doesn’t do anything?). I decided
not to chance that this could be the expected approach, though, and just “fixed” the data up-front.
4 I haven’t tried modifying any of the outbound details to see if this re-breaks the
return details. I suspect it would be fine, based on my analysis that the bug exists only in the front-end. But I can’t be sure without testing, and proper testing is something that
LeShuttle’s own techies are getting paid to do. I don’t care enough about their website to do it for free!
I made the flaming digits using a stock effect in Corel Photo-Paint; this is an attempt to replicate the “feel” of them.
Hit counters are pretty dumb for a variety of reasons. Counting “hits” was never a terribly-representative reflection of the popularity of your pages. But also: because they’re
a public representation of your popularity, there was every incentive to “game” them… even just by hitting refresh a couple of times. Making them untrustworthy and pointless.
1998 —
2006: Webalizer
Who can forget The Webalizer? Those Microsoft Excel ’97-grade barcharts!
Back in the day, “proper” web stats was something you did on your log files. Take log files, pump them through a program, get amalgamated output. And the king of these tools was
The Webalizer.3
On a few of my websites – and some that I helped host for my friends – I’d have The Webalizer run daily, collating an archive of monthly stats plus “month-so-far” for the
current month.
The Webalizer attempted to differentiate “hits” from “visitors”. And it tried to distinguish between browsers, and isolated bots, and tracked pulled referrer-data, and could
even try to geolocate IP addresses. It was pretty magical for its time.
2006 —
2016 Google Analytics
I was an early adopter of Google Analytics: my site ID (“UA code”) was only five digits long!
Those graphs were slick for the Web technology of the day. A product of that period in the mid-naughties when Google made products that actually impressed users
and didn’t just make them roll their eyes?
Google Analytics works via a JavaScript snippet which collects a variety of information about the visitor and sends it to Google’s mothership.
A third-party cookie that connected all Google Analytics-powered sites, plus everybody’s activity on other Google products, provided a wealth of data that you
couldn’t get any other way. Want a gender breakdown of your visitors or their interests? Google can “help” you with that… and all the while, “helping” themselves to copies of all the
data too.
If your website runs Google Analytics, it’s part of Google’s massive data-harvesting machine, monitoring people as they move around the Web. Webmasters trading away their visitors’
identities for some pretty charts seems pretty disgusting to me; it saddens me that I was ever “part of the problem”.
2015 —
2023 Piwik
Since around 2010, I’d been actively blocking Google Analytics, which made me feel a bit like a hypocrite to be inflicting it upon others. I looked for an alternative and found it in
Piwik (now Matomo), an open-source and self-hosted analytics tool.
A self-hosted Piwik/Matomo installation provides almost the same level of useful depth as Google Analytics, but you get to keep your soul.
I ran Google Analytics and Piwik side-by-side to validate the latter, and found it to be excellent. Not only was it collecting data
in a much more-ethical and respectful way, but it was also producing more-accurate results for my readership who, leaning somewhat “techie”, would sometimes block Google
Analytics outright for all of the same reasons I did.
It was pretty good, but…
2023 — …
(Almost) nothing?
…I don’t like the kind of blogger I am when I’m collecting stats!
It’s like… being a teenager again and having that hit counter, and getting excited when it goes up. So what if a number went up? What does
“popularity” mean? Isn’t the impact more important than the number of eyeballs?4
So in 2023, after winding my analytics down by instalments for many years, I just… stopped.5
I realised that so long as I was able to easily “watch the stats”, I’d be temped to write for the stats. To treat it as a score. To make the hit counter go up.6
That, in essence, is why I don’t really “do” any webstats any more. Analytics don’t serve me and the blogger I want to be, and they didn’t represent anything that I would
consider a useful metric of success.
If somebody’s moved by what I do, that’s great: but a hit counter going up by one doesn’t tell me that; and it never did. Now if they leave a comment or drop me an email or even
send me a postcard, that’s how I know that I made a difference!
Exception to the rule: GoAccess!
While I don’t actively watch the stats any more, I suppose I can still generate them, from my webserver logs, Webalizer-style. Except nowadays I’d probably
use GoAccess:
There’s a bit of a “hump” where last week’s blog post about apps started trending on Bubbles, HackerNews, Lobste.rs and the like. But I knew that already because people sent
me lots of comments!
There’s a script that I’m able to run, if I feel like it, to parse the most-recent of my Caddy logfiles. It takes about one minute to run per day
of logs to process, and outputs a perfectly attractive self-contained HTML file.
It’s not clever. It’s not sophisticated. It doesn’t use cookies or JavaScript or, indeed, anything other than what my webserver gives me for free.
I barely use it: maybe once every 18 months or so (today was the first time in well over a year). It’s there if I need it. And it’s inconvenient-enough to use that I’m not tempted to.
2 By “blog stats”, here, I mean statistics about visitors to my blog, not
stats about my blogging (which I track and share in excruciating detail).
3 Did you know that the last point release of The Webalizer was in 2013 and
the last feature release was in 2010: much later than I thought was the case!
4 Also, how do we even count “eyeballs”. Right now, about a fifth to a quarter of my
visitors are bots. Amazonbotalone accounts for over 2% of my traffic. (I should probably tighten my
robots.txt.)
5 Nowadays, there’s no tracking scripts whatsoever on my site. I
don’t set a cookie unless you ask me to (and then it’s “transparent”: you can see exactly what it contains and what it’s for), I don’t try to fingerprint you in any way, I don’t even
keep server logs longer than 60 days! Back when I used Jetpack I actively nerfed its stats-collection “features”. I don’t want your personal data!
A hundred and fifty one days since we were flooded out of our house, and I needed to visit to meet a contractor. The garden’s starting to get a little wild, this summer: we’ve been
periodically visiting to mow the lawn, but our hedge seems to have decided that this could be the year that it will consume the gate once and for all…
Aside from their predictable subject lines and verbiage, there’s also one other thing that these [recent, AI generated] spam emails have in common: 99.9% come from GMail accounts.
Once in a blue moon one will come from yahoo or aol or some other general mail service, but they are a rarity. Almost all of them are GMail. One one hand, congrats to Google, I
suppose, for cornering the stand-alone email market so completely that even scammers are impressed with its ease of use. Surely that is some sort of sign of success.
On the other hand, if you are a person who relies on GMail as your primary email, this means that if you are trying to send me mail, you now run a much higher chance of being
deposited into my spam folder. So much of the email I get from GMail accounts at this point is spam that an actual Gmail email, from an actual person, is statistically
relatively rare. To be fair, if you write that email to me yourself with your own little fingers, your chances of hitting my actual inbox are pretty decent. But if you used GMail’s
onboard “AI” to “help” you write that email, you are likely going directly to the spam folder. The GMail spam filter is now trained to recognize “AI” slop sentences, even those
written by GMail itself. Yes, there is probably irony there.
…
GMail’s been going gradually downhill for many years. It’s been a slow decline, compared to many enshittified services, but it’s still very-clearly happening. Aside from the
long-established privacy/big data concerns – especially if you use any other Google services, or fail to block their Web trackers – they’ve just devolved into a service that doesn’t
“wow” like it did when it was launched. It’s slow, it’s clunky, and it increasingly shovels AI down your throat, whether you want it or not.
If you own a domain name, you should already be using that as the domain of your email address, of course. This detaches your email address from any specific provider, which makes
it much easier to change your email provider whenever you like: it puts the power in your hands. You can do this whether you’re using GMail or any other
provider.
(If you don’t own a domain name, then perhaps you should.)
But beyond that: if you’re using GMail as your primary personal email service, you should shop around. Don’t let the weight of the inertia of your inbox stop you: there are plenty of
ways to back that up, move it around, or just retain it as an archive in-place if you have no other choice.
I switched to Proton about ten or eleven years ago and I haven’t looked back. Are they perfect? No. Are they better than GMail? Absolutely; for me at
least. But there are plenty of other options available for those for whom Proton is, perhaps, too-security-conscious. And switching to almost any of them reduces the risk
that your messages start going to your recipients’ spam folders, as more and more spammers move to GMail for its AI features, which produce junk mail faster than ever before.
If the chatbot can do the job, and if the chatbot costs less than the worker who does the job today, then the chatbot company can profitably sell services more cheaply than anyone
who presently employs that worker, because the chatbot company already owns the chatbot. If you were really on a glide path to creating an all-powerful deity and just
needed cash to keep the venture going until the cancer-curing word-guesser awoke from its long slumber, then wouldn’t you want as much cash as possible?
…
An excellent counterpoint for anybody who claims that AI will become profitable eventually, and agrees with the hype assertion that the things that it’s capable
of automating always represent better value than human workers doing the same tasks.
Why sell picks and shovels if you’ve already struck gold?
But of course you already know the answer. The big AI companies are currently funded by moving-money-around. They do not have a clear path to profitability, and it’s not certain whether or not they ever will. So selling their service, rather than competing with their customers,
allows them to hedge their bets for as long as possible.
Maybe in that time they’ll find a way to bring their costs down. Maybe they won’t. But they’re clearly not confident enough that they will that they’ll bet on their own long-term
future.
At the weekend, I became briefly obsessed with the cover of the manual for GoScript Plus, a 1990 software tool for
converting PostScript output into a format that’s compatible with a wider array of IBM-compatible printers.
I’ve never used this piece of software. I can’t even remember how I found my way to archive.org’s copy of its documentation. Just one of those mysteries.
Anyway: here’s what it looks like:
I can see why, if you were making software like this, you’d want to show off the number of typefaces your tool could support. And look: we can print text at wonky angles! Buy this and
you can too!
The design is very much a product of its era. That two-colour print, the strange angles, those smallcaps, the excessive use of title case, and the use of “ink jet” as two words rather
than one.
Anyway: I decided I’d attempt to re-create the cover in pure HTML + CSS. No SVGs; no images. Here’s what I came up with:
Somehow mine looks slightly less-dated? But still very “90s”.
I’m not entirely happy with the fonts: in the short while I was working on this, I couldn’t find anything that was quite “right” for the main title, with its stencil-style Rs and Ps,
super-rounded Os and Cs, and narrow Ss. In the end I just used Ubuntu Sans almost everywhere.
The white “stripe” with font samples is all just system fonts from your computer! So that’s not accurate either. But my aim was to capture the feel of the manual rather than
necessarily make a 100% faithful recreation of it, so I guess it’s okay.
I was quite pleased with the LaserGo logo in the top left. The main “striped circle with one corner a different color” was implemented like this:
/* The <address> element contains the text "LaserGo, Inc" */address{
/* Before AND after it are two virtual elements: */&:before,&:after{
content:'';
display:block;
position:absolute;
/* Both are offset to where I want the "circle" to be. *//* (note use of container query units for responsive sizing!) */top:-8cqw;
left:3cqw;
width:8cqw;
height:8cqw;
/* Make it circular: */border-radius:50%;
/* The background is striped, with a color specified in --logo-color: */background:repeating-linear-gradient(var(--logo-color)0cqw,transparent0.2cqw,transparent0.3cqw);
/* Then that gets masked; two variables control which part is shown: */mask-image:conic-gradient(var(--logo-corner-mask)0deg,var(--logo-corner-mask)90deg,var(--logo-remainder-mask)90deg,var(--logo-remainder-mask)360deg);
}
&:before{
/* The "before" circle uses white stripes: */--logo-color:var(--white);
/* And masks so that three-quarters of the circle is shown: */--logo-corner-mask:transparent;
--logo-remainder-mask:black;
}
&:after{
/* The "after" circle uses black stripes: */--logo-color:var(--black);
/* And masks so that one-quarter of the circle is shown: */--logo-corner-mask:black;
--logo-remainder-mask:transparent;
}
}
I was pleased to be able to share 90% of the CSS code between the white-striped three-quarters-circle and the black-striped one-quarter-circle. All that remained after this was to
“bite” a corner out of it with a background-coloured overlay.
Anyway; there’s probably nothing more to say about this, apart from a reminder than HTML + CSS is absolutely a an art medium. Take a look at the source code of my fake book cover, if
you like (or inspect its DOM, if you prefer): it’s all self-contained and should be reasonably readable.
