mtbc: maze K (white-green)
[personal profile] mtbc
I finally got around to watching the Japanese anime The Colors Within (2024). It's a gentle, sweet drama about teenagers finding each other.

I watch various rubbish so this is a low bar, and it's not the first movie I've liked that scores unremarkably on IMDb, but I'd say it's actually the best movie that I've seen for a while. It's not puzzling or challenging or anything, it's just nicely done and it made me happy.
mtbc: maze I (white-red)
[personal profile] mtbc
Having accidentally started group chats a few times, I've discovered WhatsApp's awful swipe up to talk. It's really annoying, given that one also swipes up simply to get to the latest in the conversation. I don't yet know if this worked but I've tried removing general microphone permission for the app, in case that restrains this feature.

Previously, working in cryptocurrency I had to have a Telegram account. It's mostly good for scammers and spammers. Recently, I kept finding myself being added to people's groups for random dodgy work tasks. I've now found some invites setting under privacy and security, which I have tried adjusting in the hope of ending this particular annoyance.

It would be nice if I could find such fixes for Gmail's web interface, which I use at work. Among other things, it's too easy to accidentally do things then too hard to undo them, and it's one of these interfaces that pops some control up right under your mouse pointer after you've moved it so you end up clicking on something that wasn't there a moment before.
mtbc: maze J (red-white)
[personal profile] mtbc
I have been frustrated that I am not yet more rapidly productive at work. Yesterday was another example but my legs started off achy and, as the day wore on, it became clearer that I was coming down with some kind of a cold, and that my throat was not feeling good. Then, I didn't feel sleepy last night and stayed up late.

In the end, I slept. This morning, I woke up feeling quite rotten, especially my head, so I got out of bed in search of medicines and drinks. Having rested, I now feel a little better. I have even taken a bath and now feel up to actually dressing instead of lying around in my pyjamas.

At least we didn't have grand plans for this weekend. I expect to be feeling somewhat improved by Monday.
mtbc: maze I (white-red)
[personal profile] mtbc
I had mentioned how my work Mac, plugged in at home, was applying the wrong keymap for my external keyboard and imposing some godawful acceleration on my scroll-wheel. Now I have adequate solutions for both:

  • I installed an open-source utility named DiscreteScroll, which fixes macOS's unnecessary scroll wheel acceleration, making the scroll-wheel behave rather more manageably.

  • It turns out that Apple's idea of a UK-layout keyboard is not the typical one, it's kind of halfway to a US one. As the Mac doesn't understand the typical UK layout, I realized that I can just buy a US-layout keyboard, which I am used to anyway. Having despaired of making sense of the differences among the dazzling range of Keychron keyboards, I indulged in a nice, loud Unicomp.

In another keyboard victory, a couple of my UK keyboards had dodgy keys. I can be slow to realize things but, eventually, I had the useful idea of transplanting a keycap (using my pry an old Kindle open at the seams levers) to make one fully able keyboard from the two problem ones.

Admittedly, although working with Mac OS X instead of GNU/Linux usually slows me down some, for my day job I am finding the Mac not to be much of a hindrance.

Investing in a pension

9 Aug 2025 14:40
mtbc: maze L (green-white)
[personal profile] mtbc
I had an interesting chat with a pensions guy. He pointed out that the historic performance of even relatively conservative pension funds exceeds the APR on my mortgage. So, given that my paid mortgage interest is tax-deductible on my US taxes, and that I have the tax efficiency of being a higher-rate taxpayer who can pay pre-tax salary into their pension, indeed it probably makes sense to direct any spare money (e.g., annual bonus) into pension instead of mortgage. I have other debt too that I shall prioritize but it is nice to have that bigger picture.

Frankly, I think that I should take some risk in pursuit of faster growth. My pension savings are inadequate at the moment. My suspicion is that gentle, conservative pension investing would leave me still without much of a pension. I would like to think that I have another good couple of decades' of full-time work in me; perhaps that duration, plus not soon rebalancing toward blue-chip bonds and suchlike, might mean that I actually receive a reasonable pension in the end, we'll see.
mtbc: maze N (blue-white)
[personal profile] mtbc
After the EU passed the General Data Protection Regulation, many smaller US organizations took the simple option of blocking the EU from their websites. It's for that reason I have a US-based web proxy in my back pocket for checking US news from local sources.

Now, the UK's passed the Online Safety Act which seems to be at least as onerous. I was chatting with a creative British person today. There is some website (I didn't ask which) that hosts their writing and art, and it's become inaccessible to them. So, like so many other British people in recent days, they've now subscribed to a VPN service.

The OSA seems to be a deleteriously blunt instrument. Children now seem to be barred (by easily bypassed means) from seeing all kinds of information that, frankly, it's good if they can see.

I am curious to know how this got so far without being stopped. It certainly says something poor about the powers that be, that pressure to do something resulted in pushing through legislation that had been widely warned about by many. It's not at all unique, we even had the Clinton administration trying to push the Clipper chip, but this example seems to be turning out unusually badly.

The Labour government had already burned up its honeymoon period but they still make unforced errors that the Conservatives make hay from. Amid all this, we also get to watch the Chancellor square the circle they've painted themselves into (with the Conservatives' help). An outbreak of political competence would make a welcome change.

Update: Very shortly after posting this, I read of moves in the EU to resurrect efforts to prevent communications from being wholly private.

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karmicdragonfly

August 2025

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"O seguro morreu de velho, mas o desconfiado ainda está vivo." -- "The safe one died of old age, but the suspicious one is still living."