Posts by Marjolica 33 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2019
We should have had these improvements in Building Regulations years ago, They were planned and have been postponed by Tory government's ever since.
The only people who have benefitted are the major house builders who are noticeable big donors to the Tory party.
New houses are typically B rated not D.
The additional cost, on a new house typically costing £250k, not £100k would typically be less than £10k (with current HP subsidy) and would soon pay for itself. Retrofitting the same would cost £30k.
And it is alway open to the government to choose to subsidise more: infrastruture investment is capital spend and is allowed under the fiscal rules.
At the moment most hydrogen is made from gas for when it's needed as a chemical intermediate to eg make ammonia for fertiliser.
Hydrogen made this way is more expensive than gas if just used as fuel because of the losses in conversion while the carbon stripped from the gas (CH4+O2 - > CO2 +H4) will result in even more CO2 is emitted unless you can expensively pump it underground.
In the future we may have green hydrogen from electrolysis (or other innovative processes that are electrically powered) once we have so much renewables that we start to want to store it as hydrogen - at the moment we simply pay the wind turbines to stop turning when we have too much generation.
But even then there are better uses for hydrogen, which would sensibly be used on site at ammonia plants or to displace coke for steel production.
What needs to change is how we calculate the price of electricity vs. gas as the relative prhce incentives for consumers are all wrong.
At the moment gas is usually the marginal energy source for electricity generation on an hour be hour basis so this also sets the price that renewable sources receive. So they make lots of profit some of which the government may claw back if they are on Contracts for difference or there is a government claw back on those with ROCs. All the profits are going to the suppliers or the government not to us consumers.
The electricity price for consumers should be set equal to the long run marginal cost of supply (including a sensible mark up for the suppliers) , which will be mostly renewables and it would be then much cheaper to run heat pumps than gas central heating and we would all have lower energy prices.
Darlington is surprise, surprise, where Capita offices running the TPS are currently located.
I expect (initially at least) the staff will just get to change employer, probably running the same software.
But obviously as it's a cheaper bid no doubt there will be savings to be made.
Teslas on autopilot are programmed to ignore stationary objects - so they run into parked emergency vehicles or barriers between the carriageway and a slip road if the lane marking are worn.
If a police car were to get in front and then slow down then it might work - OR the Tesla might just pull out to overtake.
For those of us who want a bit more stability Firefox /do/ provide Firefox-esr, so the monthly updates are just security fixes and they only screw over the interfaces etc. once a year.
Available on all platforms, not just Linux.
I use K9 as my mail client on android on my phone and tablet.
I use evolution as my mail client on my PC. It's footprint is much smaller than Thunderbird and offers contacts and calendar integration with google, which I use on android. So K9-Thunderbird integration isn't of much interest to me.
All three devices sync incoming mail perfectly but then I run my own postfix mail server.
I also don't have any issues with the 2021 K9 update: I still have a unified inbox over my 3 mail accounts, though it tends to be a bit slow to refresh, and, of course, I can still see all three individual IMAP accounts.
The only major features I miss in K9 is an ability to print emails, that I have to dig in the headers to view sender email addresses rather than just sender names and that I can't just swipe to mark any spam that gets through my server spam filters as spam (and update my Bayesian classifier).
There is already an extension available for most browsers, CookieBlock (see https://karelkubicek.github.io/post/cookieblock and https://www.ghacks.net/2022/03/24/cookie-block-corrects-gdpr-violations-in-the-browser/), that uses ML to try and eliminate non-essential cookies.
Rather than simulate clicks it bypasses that stage and just deletes the non-GDPR compliant cookies you don't want.
To make it work you do also have to use something else to auto click through the consent dialogue (e.g. uBlock Origin / Dashboard / Filter lists / Custom / Import ADD : https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/).
This extension is also developed by academic researchers but without Google involvement.
Anyone else tried it?
" Updated to add at 16:00 on April 18, 2022
A HMRC spokesperson told us the system is back online: "Following an outage last week, we have successfully made changes to the HMRC network to allow availability of the Goods Vehicle Movement Service (GVMS).
"Contingencies will remain in place over the weekend to continue to ensure the movement of goods and allow continued testing. From Monday midday, Goods Movement References will be required for all movements using GVMS.""
That's quick : 10 day notice that it will be fixed.
We are even more dependent on electricity than you think:
Gas boilers - won't work very well without electric ignition and pumps.
Gas cookers have a electrically powered safety thermocouple that failsafe to off so matches are not an answer.
I expect the gas grid uses electric pumps too.
No electric power - you're stuffed.
I'm a bit puzzled by Apple's claim that they need to adjust their active calorie calculation if you use an e-bike. The full press release statement says that:
"Apple Watch can more accurately measure active calories when riding an e-bike, with an updated cycling workout algorithm that evaluates GPS and heart rate to better determine when users are riding with pedal-assist versus leg power alone".
If you don't have a power meter, most bike computer/app calculations just use your heart rate and have correlated that to power used and hence energy expended. I am somewhat unconvinced by the experiments these are based on: they are, in my opinion, poorly calibrated adjustment for age and gender and my Wahoo Element estimates less than half the calories that Ride with GPS does on the same information.
However I find I don't work any less hard, and raise my heart rate by a similar amount, when I use my e-bike as I average about 1/3 faster at a higher cadence than riding my unassisted one. Not sure how Apple can claim to improve on that by using GPS and presumably AI to infer I'm on using electrical assist.
Authentication was also problematic yesterday evening: I don't use gmail but send two messages to friends' gmail accounts around 23:00 and got:
I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients.
...
<redacted@gmail.com>: host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[173.194.69.26] said:
550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please
try 550-5.1.1 double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or
550-5.1.1 unnecessary spaces. Learn more at 550 5.1.1
https://support.google.com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser cw4si6981ejb.196 - gsmtp (in
reply to RCPT TO command)
"Dive" is also pertinent here. "waterproof to 2m" implies at static pressure, if you dive into water then the effective pressure is much higher, ditto, but to a lesser extent if you are swimming with it. If you ever look at the info about waterproof watches you are usually wanting a 50m or 100m rating if you intend to swim wearing your watch.
Doesn't mean that Apple's advertising isn't misleading.
I got the email at 7:41 Sunday. I already had the app installed. On most phone's it's possible to set a 'do not disturb' so it doesn't wake you up with a nocturnal notification. Needless to say mine turns back on at 7:30, as that is also when my wake-up alarm goes off. Normally I make a cup of tea and check for any overnight emails and texts then so for my use case it would make more sense than later in the day as I don't live with my phone except when I'm out and about.
The QR encoded information is for the organisation and the postal address. It could easily have been organisation + what3words locale.
In our case (a rowing club hut, located at the back of a pub car park) we've 'borrowed' their postal address. The organisation name is what makes it unique. A What3words address wouldactually locate it more accurately.
"I've created a qr code for my home to mitigate the false data"
Does that actually work and log you out of the previous QR-ed location?
I was expecting to be able to see the lost of places an times that I had logged but it seems to be hidden.
My suggestion is that checkout could be done transparently, if approximately, using GPS: read the QR code, let the app record your location; Move 50-100m away and you get logged out; the GPS data doesn't need to leave your phone.
One difference is that if you' press-and-hold' the browser back button you get to choose from the entire in-browser back history, so from 'here' (Comments) back-and-hold you can go direct to the Register front page. Also it won't close your browser if there's no more history to go back to,
I agree 'forward' is also useful and not duplicated in the Android 'thee buttons'.
Firefox did flash me a notification - in advance - yesterday (maybe because I have an account?) and I had already seen mention of this elsewhere so had disabled play store auto updates and I've removed my Master Password for now, just so my passwords don't get blitzed.
I could probably live with the new version - I use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger to block ads and trackers and they are available in the new version (though I'd be unsurprised if Badger needed to relearn all the trackers it blocks.
However the lack of back/forward buttons (if true) would be a complete bummer - how else do you get back to the Register home page from here?.
I also understand that they haven't enabled about:config which would mean I have no control over my DNS (amongst other things): I do use DoH (via Nebulo) but avoid Cloudflare (the company whose Chief Security Officer was previously sacked by Uber).
On my PC's Firefox-esr (LTS) I have three months overlap of the old and the new version, so I don't get bumped into upgrading. On Android, not only do they stop supporting the old version for security immediately they hit you with an automatic upgrade.
For now I'm sitting fast on the old version. Any suggestions for a good alternative mobile browser? Don't say Chrome.
Devuan user here. System did an unattended-upgrades at 9:45 this morning (that installs security fixes) and provided a new grub-common (grub-common_2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u1_amd64.deb).
However just did a hibernate (that restarts the machine and reloads grub) and everything is still working OK.
Ubuntu is Debian based, as is Ubuntu, so seems like you have a specific problem. If you don't reboot that often then all sorts of other changes you made since last reboot might be triggering it.
Ironically I got my first smishing text on Saturday: allegedly from Three. Said there were problems processing my bill payment and go and provide details by clicking through a bit.ly link. I didn't click the link, went to the Three website instead to check my account details. Going to login I was first redirected to a http address, which threw up the usual stop/warning from HTTPS Everywhere. I had to click through that (!) to get a redirect to a proper https page to login. Needless to say no problems with my account as bill still being prepared and I pay by Direct Debit anyway.
When I checked where the bit.ly link pointed (no, I didn't click it) it went nowhere, so presumably by then it had been taken down.
Along with today's faux-pas must say I'm not that impressed by Three's security at the moment.
I enabled the Firefox/Cloudflare DoH on my Firefox-esr (v60.7.2) a few days ago and all was working OK. Thawed my computer this morning and Firefox started to crash. I had a lot of tabs open and lost them. Started to re-enter the ones I use regularly (eg. El Reg), when I got to google calendar it crashed again. Crashes re-occured on other google sites., Repeated attempts led to repeated crashes, each more severe than the last to the extent that the browser wouldn't stay open unless I disconnected the WiFi. Firefox on Android, that I hadn't enabled for DoH, was still working.
Disabled the DoH (network.trr.mode=0) while offline and now I'm happily sending this. So is it a bug, problems at the Cloudflare doH or are BT injecting something malicious into my DNS?
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