This "Home Connect" thing ...

So we've got a new kitchen, and I've connected up the appliances just out of curiosity, to see what they do. Really interesting information, such as power used, is missing - good start, eh.

One thing it does do is send you a notification when, say, your oven has reached the desired temperature. ***BUT*** it has no concept of *who* is doing the cooking today! - I don't need to receive notifications that the oven is now hot enough for someone else to put the food in!

[Probably the most useful information is that you can see the serial numbers etc in the app. Which you can't see on the appliances, as the rating plates are hidden in inaccessible places.]

The "High Street" again. I wasn't really expecting the little local shop to still exist, despite the vestigial web presence, but I cycled into town anyway (the exercise is good for me) to find that indeed it did not exist any more.

So I will be ordering online from a national organisation.

As usual.

So the USA are going into government-sponsored livestreamed snuff movies.

Do they not have the remotest clue what that looks like to the rest of the world?

A win for Iran. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmwyve191dlko

A Chrome window on the left. The same page in Firefox on the right.

I used to do some things in Chrome, some in Firefox. I guess I can use Firefox for everything instead.

WTF? Chrome updated itself an hour or so ago, and just now everything that used to be white (except for the background of the hamburger menu, which remains white) has gone pale yellow???

And sometimes equally pointless when you *do* know what you've bought.

Such as a book you bought a couple of days ago and cannot possibly be expected to have read yet.

You buy various things from a retailer, then you get an email inviting you to give a review.

Without saying which of your several, completely different, purchases they want reviewed.

Pointless. How on earth anyone managed to "design" such a process ...

UK to join in Trump's war - what could possibly go wrong?? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqlykpe4dk0yo

"called on Congress to provide more cash to update the system"

The US airport system is socialised is it? I'd somehow assumed that in The Land Of The Free it would all be private enterprise.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c6j9xpgl8pzwt

So I've found out why one of my automations dealing with an Octopus Saving Session hasn't been doing what I expected, when it worked fine last winter.

This'll be due to Saving Sessions now occurring in the summer, not just the winter, and my code having a time zone bug ...

#HomeAssistant #OctopusEnergy

Looks like it was a bog standard multithreading bug and not a Russian attack this time.

https://www.nats.aero/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/NATS-Preliminary-Investigation-Report-into-NAS-Incident-on-08-Sept-2026-Issued-16-Sept-2026.pdf

I have only just learned that Arthur C Clarke invented (as well as communications satellites and his many other inventions) modern LLM text generators.

The story is The Steam-powered Word Processor, 1986, and includes:

A vicar bored with writing sermons, which he realised consisted of subsets of the same text rearranged in slightly different ways each week "... conceived a machine which would automatically reassemble massed of text in any desired order ...".

And to train it?

"Before the machine could be used, [he] was faced with the laborious task of punching not only the Bible but the whole of Cruden's Concordance on to Jaquard cards ..."

Let me see if I've remembered this right. It *is* Travelodge, isn't it, who

* charge extra for wi-fi
* which doesn't work
* and won't refund at the hotel
* instead insisting on you doing months of hoop-jumping to get the money back from head office?

RE: https://mastodonapp.uk/@bytebro/117196840681821760

#snake

Should my web site block access by user agent "feroxbuster", on the grounds that it's not a real person wanting to do something real, and then blacklist the IP address to block the follow-up probes for weird files with a different user agent, or isn't it worth the effort because they'll soon fix their user agent string?

What's with probing for <valid URL>/.env anyway?

Oh look, a new prime minister who promised devolution is actually delivering centralisation.

As expected.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy8m0gxexl4o

OK, so it's taken me a while to work out the motivation for the American anti-vaxxer movement - the American health "care" industry makes far more money from treating a person with a disease than from just selling them a dose of vaccine.

Which has let me to wonder: are there other areas of preventative medicine which the American health "care" industry fights against, because cure (or, indeed, failed attempt to cure) makes more money than prevention? Is it for example the health "care" industry which is behind the drive to reduce food safety?

There must be something I'm missing here.

If you've got a stocks and shares ISA and you keep a few pounds, or even tens of pounds, in cash, perhaps from recent dividends, perhaps so that fees can be paid without selling anything, then you'll get a few pence interest each month.

And the ISA provider will have to write new systems to pay a penny or two of that to HMRC. And HMRC has to write new systems to accept these odd pennies.

The whole costing, surely to goodness, several times what it will raise in this "charge" (which isn't a "tax").

What am I missing? Or is it really as bonkers as it sounds?

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fiscal-events-2026-factsheets/isa-reform-2027-anti-circumvention-rules-factsheet

"Misconduct in public office" isn't charged very often, and is, I think, quite a big deal?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly8mpp9r8no