Context: the update to #HomeAssistant Core that came out *yesterday* immediately broke the connection to my Lutron Caséta smart switches.

As is usually the case when something breaks, I rebooted the machine HA is running on.

When it came back up, there was a *new* update available that had been released 40 minutes before.

JFC, #HomeAssistant …

So, then this got me wondering; the Brother printer has been working ok, but it developed a really annoying habit: it's duplex (prints on both sides of the paper), but even when printing a single page, it would print, then pull back the paper, and print nothing on the other side. So every page would take twice as long.

I 'removed' the Brother printer, downloaded the driver-only file from Brother, and did another manual install. Lo and behold, it now prints one page as one page. The test print also started printing the heading and the printer logo in black, instead of a shade of gray that I think must correspond to the blue that comes out on the Phaser's test page.

So, print a test page, and if the "Printer Model" is "Microsoft IPP Class Driver", instead of something with the manufacturer's name in it, there's Microsoft fuckery at work that is probably giving you a less than satisfactory experience.

So, I wanted to print a stupid little gift tag, that had to be a specific size to fit, and I wanted it in a nice font and in color, so I opened Word 365 and created a text box with the exact dimensions and filled in the text, and set the font and the color, and printed to my Xerox Phaser color laser printer.

A blank piece of paper came out.
So I searched for "text boxes don't print", and checked some settings that are in a differently named place than the Internet says, because of course, Microsoft moved and renamed things.

And the page still came out blank.

So I sent it to my old B&W Brother laser printer, and it came out fine, just in B&W.

Somewhere along the line, I had used the Add a Printer button in Win 11, and it had installed an annoying Xerox print utility and a driver, I guess, because it doesn't tell you what it's actually doing, and that used to work. But I did install some Windows Updates since the last time I printed to the Phaser, and there's an option called Windows Ready Print, which apparently lets Windows query your printer and install whatever the fuck it wants to. Which I switched off.

I 'removed' the printer, and downloaded a Global Printer Driver from Xerox, and chose the Add Printer/Manual Install method, and clicked the "Have Disk" button which has been around since, I dunno, WinNT?, and pointed it at the .INF I downloaded, named the printer, reopened Word, and now I have a cute little paper gift tag with purple printing.

Only took two hours.

Karma Comes For Bob Kraft

Friday, Sept. 25, 10:45 a.m.

Ed Sheeran's Friday and Saturday night concerts at Gillette Stadium have been canceled due to the nor'easter.

TRAVEL NOTES

The Samsung Tizen One UI Television OS is unfit for any purpose, but especially as a hotel TV.

And Susan, Carl, and Alan, I logged you out of the various streamers you were using in Room 111, you're welcome.

That's the Lunchables Effect.

#Bluesky as a leading economic indicator:

My Bluesky feed, which I created to stake my username, and rarely use, is currently saturated with GoFundMe and similar requests for financial aid. Like 5:1.

It's a K-shaped Depression.

Websites:

If you're going to request a 2FA code, please be sure to put the focus on the code entry field.

Otherwise you're just lazy fucks.

Hey, would someone at the #NBA Championship game of the #Knicks vs the #Spurs please post the obscenities the crowd is yelling? #ABC keeps killing the audio.

So, it's gotten quite warm here the last few days, and the downstairs neighbors installed a Wirecutter-approved Midea window air conditioner yesterday.

Spouse's phone (a 5-year old Samsung Galaxy Note 20, which was discontinued at the end of 2021) started throwing pop-ups about a new Matter device, and would they like to add it to SmartThings?

Every. Five. Minutes.

The popup had two choices: Add and Close. No "Ignore". No "It's not mine". No "Don't ask me again".

Searching Settings, there's a #SmartThings category, but selecting it just prompts to *install the SmartThings app*.

But the Note 20 absolutely couldn't help but scan for new devices, the setting for which is only about five layers down. In a completely different category.

SmartThings is, of course, owned by Samsung.

My relatively SOA Google Pixel 9a, which I use to drive #HomeAssistant in our quite wired apartment ignored all this.

Now, as I understand it, Matter devices are supposed to stop actively advertising after 15 minutes if not paired. But this AC is still blaring on Bluetooth 24 hours later.

Walled gardens are full of weeds.

Per my Pi-Hole logs, my #Mysa thermostat is contacting (well, querying DNS, anyway) time.nist.gov every 15 seconds, 24/7.

I mentioned it to their support, they replied that's normal, and just the way it works. Note that there's no schedule running on the device itself, I do that via #HomeAssistant

I guess they figured it was easier to depend on billions of dollars of infrastructure rather than an 89¢ real-time clock.

Going to see what happens if I block it from accessing NIST…

Wordle 1,772 4/6

⬛🟩⬛⬛⬛
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🟩🟩🟩⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
My lips are sealed, #Wordle

Mark Zuckerberg BSODs on the courthouse steps:

I'm too angry to click the button. Not with the service, just the survey.

Google/Android just started popping up "Translate to English" whenever I opened a #Signal group chat (which is in English), which means Android is reading, or trying to read, my chats, and is obviously phishing for more training data...

Turned off "live translation" in my phone's settings, but how can this be prevented?

So on Sunday I was out gathering for Wednesgiving*, and realized at my third stop that I had lost a hearing aid.

So spouse and I backtracked to the winter market we had been to. I even parked in the same space.

I opened the app for my HAs, which connects to each via Bluetooth, and it showed the battery level for the one I was still wearing, and a spinner for the one that was lost.

I walked back the same route, and as I got within 15 feet of the entrance, the app connected, and I spotted the HA lying on the ground a few feet to the side of the entrance, where I had stopped on my way in the first time to put on my N95 mask.

I must have hooked the strap and flipped the HA off. Fortunately, it hadn't been stepped on or soaked, and is working fine.

Now I'm trying to figure out if there's a BT app that can alarm if an HA goes out of range, or if the native app has a mode for that…
There's a 'find my HA' option, but it turns on location tracking to the manufacturer, even when the app is closed, so I'm not too keen on using it.

*Our kid historically has to work on Thanksgiving, so we simply make our feast on the Wednesday before…

Raisinettes have deteriorated to being a raisin coated in tasteless brown wax. Any hint of actual chocolate is completely gone.

#Enshittification

(They Long to Be) Closed to You

#closingtimeasongorpoem
#HashTagGames

Here's my AI challenge that I think a machine should be good at, and would benefit humankind:

I submit a reasonably hi-res set of photos of the bookcase full of unsorted music CDs at my local Goodwill, and the thing returns an alphabetized list of every album and its location ("Third row from the top, 50 cm from the left").