East Midlands Railway’s Delay Repay portal. Takes several attempts to upload an image of a ticket, fails to submit said image, no payout as a result.
Not that that is much of an problem. I dodged a fare to a value worth more than that I would have got back anyway, so I suppose that balances it out overall.
Note: since writing this, the webshite now runs on WordPress which has commenting built in. Nobody used the IntenseDebate system anyway!
I’ve finally pulled my finger out and got a comment section set up on trial. Just click onto a post’s own page (if you’re on the home listing) then look for the ‘Comments (#)’ link at the bottom of each page to pop up the comment box. The system is powered by Automattic’s IntenseDebate which is delightfully old school but appears to do what I need it to in a competent manner, in contrast to the half-baked home-spun Grav-specific offerings.
No login is required to post, but there is an option to login with an IntenseDebate or a WordPress account should you prefer. Posts won’t appear straight away as I’m initially moderating all comments to ascertain what the spam bot level is like.
Somebody seems to have attended the Jimmy Carr school of marketing.
The Pinebook has died again, but fortunately I managed to make a backup of the webshite files before it conked out. I’ll probably reflash the eMMC and then sell it on as it’s not reliable enough for my use case.
I’ve taken the opportunity to install Python and Pelican on the little Lenovo so I can use that instead to deal with this page. I’ll catch up with the previous two months happenings shortly, depending on how much I shit out it may be one big post or two little ones.
Finally back to bar service at the pub. I happened to be on the bar on the Monday it all restarted, so had to endure an evening of gawking idiots doing the whole “YERRR FRWEEDUM DAYY!!!!!1!” nonsense. Shit idea of freedom to be honest if there are a metric fucktonne of restrictions still in place.
The accumulation of cash came to some use this month as some bits were bought through necessity and some bits bought through want. I had to drop a couple of hundred on a pair of tyres for the Grannywagon after one of them developed a slow puncture. Subsequent inspection found another was worn past the stop block so they got changed. They also came with some free sunglasses for no real apparent reason – presumably for some free marketing where I can show off which particular brand of tyre I purchased. They can live in the glovebox for use on the rare occasions there is blindingly low sunlight when driving.
I also splashed out on a laptop. I’d been after a refurb/used X-series Thinkpad for a carry-about unit in place of the Pinebook which, although slightly more stable using Twister/Armbian, still has some drawbacks. The boot issue still occasionally occurs, but nowhere near as often as under Manjaro, and the weird architecture combination of aarch64 and rockchip means some everyday bits of software I use are not compatible with it, which is a bit of a deal breaker. I’d been after an X200 but these were a bit thin on the ground – Vikings are having a site rebuild, whilst Gluglug/MiniFree/RetroFreedom/Whatever-We’re-Named-This Week seem to have paused trading again. I ended up going for an X230 from Morgan’s after a bit of hunting. It came with Windoze as standard, so I ended up sorting out a dual boot setup with Fedora for the time being. It’s running very well after bit of fettling; even the battery holds a decent level of charge for a refurb unit, going for around three hours from full. I may get an additional battery anyway as a spare for longer trips out. Not sure whether I’ll keep or flog the Pinebook, I’ll see how my use case for it evolves.
I broke my beer break on a day out to Newark with Rich. I was more sensible this time and didn’t get absolutely plastered, which was a plus. Although I enjoyed being social and all that, at the end of the day I didn’t really enjoy the beer and I haven’t had any more since. I must have lost the taste for it. And no, it’s not a pox symptom as everything else tastes fine!
The hedge got its first trim of the year. I didn’t shear through the trimmer cord this time. After I’d packed away, I noticed a stray stalk sticking out the top that I’d missed. I couldn’t be bothered unpacking the tools again to remove it so I can have a stay of execution for the time being.
Bit of a heatwave as well, so the house did its usual trick of being relatively cool and pleasant downstairs and ridiculously warm and stuffy upstairs. Great for trying to sleep!
Having a bit of a fiddle with the domain setup as I’m migrating my various email setups onto one provider and took the time to sort out email properly for the deyes.im domain As a result, the Mastodon and Pixelfed instances are down for now as I’m binning off the VPS. They could return in the future, but neither saw much effort or attention whilst they were live to make it particularly worthwhile.
I’ve carried on spending money on frivolous items, including:
Roberts came around to assist with some DIY. The outhouse doors had swollen over the winter, so one wouldn’t open and one wouldn’t close. We ended up taking around 8mm off them so that they would fit in the frames. I just neeed to repaint them now to hide the evidence. Hopefully they won’t shrink over the summer. Continuing the theme of woodwork, the following weekend I was around at his assisting in the construction of a wood shed.
I had the interview alluded to in the previous episode. Didn’t get the job.
The first set of relaxations occurred, so the official ‘Stay at Home’ line became ‘Stay Local’. A walking trip in the peaks was arranged with Dickie P, although some miscommunication occurred as he went to Strines, South Yorkshire whereas I headed to Strines, Cheshire. A quick re-arrangement and a drive over the Snake Pass saw us converge on Ladybower Reservoir instead. Nice weather, so it was fairly busy at the lower levels but the higher ground was quieter. Even up the hills, the noise of boy racers and souped up sports cars was noticeable. What some folks do to be noticed.
Spring is very much approaching. It’s pleasing to be going to the office and returning home in daylight. I’ll have to mow the grass soon.
Twister OS Armbian is working rather competently on the Pinebook. In fact, I’m using it now to type this up. There’s a couple of tweaks I need to do to make it more complete, but it is more than usable for my shitposting needs.
I had another go at Twitter, to see whether it had got any less annoying since my last effort. It hadn’t – installed the app on the fondleslab on Thursday, removed it by Sunday. I’ll continue with my previous proven setup of FetchRSS scraping the feeds into Inoreader, although that unfortunately won’t work for the couple of protected accounts that I follow.
Mop Head has announced a re-opening plan for the country. Some trips away have been tentatively booked for later in the year, including a wedding (not mine), a conference and a show.
Walking has been the main non-work activity of late:
In annoying news, Natwest Group (and therefore Royal Bank of Scotland t/a Childs) are migrating over to Mastercard. I’d opened the curent account on the basis that I like to keep both systems on hand in case of outages and I already had enough Mastercards, both debit and credit. My existing Visa cards with HSBC were shortly going to migrate to Mastercard (well, when they were not letting them expire and closing them down), so the move to RBS kept that avenue open. I’m not going to change account again, so I’ll probably give it a few months and open a Barclaycard to keep the Visa route open.
I sent the Pinephone to a good home. I’m told that the replacement screen is now fitted and functioning fine. I was contemplating offloading the Pinebook due to its separate ongoing issues, but I’ve noticed another OS distribution that may or may not have less faults, so I’ll give that a go at some point.
Not much else to say really. Work, offy and bed have been the routine for far too long now.
