Tootfinder

So farewell then Pinetime Watch 🪦.
It isn't showing any signs of charging. even after a completely-flat battery reset. Last hope gone.
Now nobody at all is running my custom software I think, and I have no way to fix the bugs.
Could replace it, but I'm not really paying any attention to the things it measures anyway. Heartrate is too unreliable to be useful and steps seems likely to be counting my leg-jiggles since I tend to hit 10,000 most days without trying or leaving the flat.
The software which tracks my time and mood is probably better running on the phone really. Easier to add notes and detail. Can't really input text from a watch. Location data can be added in ways the watch couldn't.
So back to not wearing a watch at all I think. Who needs it now we all carry pocket watches with internet and telephony.
#pineTime #smartWatch

Make that 2nd in the entire world at Black Magic Hard Reckless Hell. 🤘
Was looking at my other favourite level "Boomtown". It seems to have only ever even been completed once in Hard Reckless Hell at all ever.
It's certainly very challenging. Barely get through the first minute. Hales and hales of bullets.

Hummm. My #pineTime has stopped charging 😦
Seems like there's voltage across the charger pins, but the watch shows no sign of being attached to it when it's attached.
Damn. That's annoying. Seems like it happens to some people now and then but nobody on Reddit has proposed a solution.

Remember everyone, when your grand-kids are using secret encrypted communications technology that you can't understand or read or control, it'll be because you banned them from the simple easy internet and left them no choice.
#onlineSafetyBill

Down to 37% battery now, and won't charge so probably when the battery is flat that's the end of it's life :(
Quite sad seeing it count it's last steps.

Been out today trying to get my phone battery replaced.
Three phone repair places said they couldn't do it today and would have to order the battery in, and the last made a call and said they'd have a battery this evening if I came back.
So I did come back and they did have the battery. Went to the pub for half an hour while they changed it only to come back and find them apologizing that their heat-plate is apparently broken since yesterday so they can't soften the glue to open the screen.
Annoying how sealed-in batteries are these days. Could change it myself if I had a heat plate to soften the glue and open the screen.
Oh well. They'll call me back when the heat plate is fixed next week.
Given how hot the battery gets now and how hot the weather is, it's a bit surprising the glue isn't softened all on it's own 😆

I see Starmer is once again taking to the national stage to tell everyone that Reform are correct, that Reform have accurately described the source of the problems of British people.
Telling everyone that migrants are a problem, that migrants are causing trouble, that migrants need to be cracked down upon.
And then he somehow thinks this will make people more likely to vote Labour?
It's basically a massive country wide national advertising campaign for Reform.
Well done Labour. When you lose it will be your own fault.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/may/11/english-test-among-range-of-labour-measures-to-control-immigration

Been playing Pistol Whip again. Such a great game. The Black Magic "hard" level, with Reckless and Hell options is ridiculously hard. Finishing at all is a feat.
Was wondering how the hell the top players managed to score so highly. I was in like 4th place thinking I was playing a practically perfect game.
But it turns out only with 188 hits. The top three, I noticed, has 189 hits! There's a secret dude!?
Found him, flying around in the sky mid level on the right.
Nice. That's me 3rd in the global leaderboard for Black Magic Hard Reckless Hell now then.
Maybe I shouldn't be giving the game away. If someone learns of the secret dude from this post and then beats me into 4th place I'll be miffed.
#vr #games #pistolWhip

Age verification via uploading ID or face-scan or credit-card coming to UK Bluesky users.
I will be doing none of these things, obviously.
Apparently they're gonna block DMs and "adult" content somehow for people who nope out of such things. Interesting that they think that will be okay by the law.
#onlineSafetyAct #bluesky #IdentifyAllHumans

Presumably Twitter will have to do likewise, and Facebook. And indeed everybody.
Interesting to see who, if anyone, refuses.

This month's newsletter/digest is on it's way to the email box of all the amazing friendly good people who asked for it.
The rest of you bitchy vicious augmentative people in public spats can read it here:
#newsletter #digest

Twenty years since London Bomb attacks they reckon. Seems both a short time and a long time. I wasn't in town and the first I heard of it was being woken up by messages asking if I was okay. Thought they were concerned I'd been taken away on the saucers on X-Day. 😆
Some say it was the biggest act of terrorism seen on these shores since the war!
But then 20 terrorists were arrested for terrorism this week! They were flagrantly and terrifyingly holding up signs saying "I support Palestine action", the terrorizing monsters. An action that's just as much terrorism under the law these days as blowing up trains and busses.
#terrorism #ukpol

The NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory on Cerro Pachón in Chile has started to repeatedly scan the sky.
Some of it's first images are available at #astronomy #galaxies #rubins

oBrien spending at least two hours doing a retrospective about 20 year old bomb and has spent zero hours talking about the banning of a peaceful campaign group under terrorism legislation.
I turned it off. 🥱

This month's newsletter/digest is on it's way to all the amazing lovely peaceful protestors who want it in the email box.
The rest of your terrorist sympathizers who should be arrested can read it here:
#newsletter #digest

The fediverse is often full of drama with admins falling out with each other and defederations, and threats and tears.
Now, with the public spat between the Twitter admin and the TruthSocial admin, the rest of the world gets to enjoy a similar spectacle!
They can't defederate of course, because Twitter never became open enough and TruthSocial was already defederated by everyone as soon as it existed.
Only on Fedi can you get the full experience of a public spat and defederation, because only on Fedi can the admins really at-mention and and directly reply and take the final dramatic action of a flouce-defederation.
Trump fans who are Twitter users can't port their followers over to TruthSocial, and Turther Musk fans can't just migrate their account to Twitter.
They're stuck.
So you see Fedi really is the best when it comes to massive public spats between admins and this current admin-drama is only getting more attention because it's between two of the worst people in the world.
#fediverse #interInstanceDrama #adminFight

I have deconstructed the temporary half arsed shoddy micro-campervan conversion.
Emptied it out, ready for the professionals to do the fully arsed non-shoddy permanent conversion over the next couple of weeks.
The fridge and the chair remain in the back but not tied down at all.
The chair I might leave at my mums as a better sofa-bed for me to sleep on when there, and maybe spend the night with them before dropping the van off. They live much closer than me to the drop off point.
He said he might be able to use the fridge.
My job was so shoddy it was already starting to fall apart so will be good to have it done properly.

Performed in an improv show in Shoreditch.
Good times.
Everyone seemed to think the show went well, and it featured repeated themes of fish taking over the entire world in a giant conspira-sea.
The venue downstairs at Shoreditch Balls is tight and dark and small but so were our audience. Thanks for coming everyone. 😆
Where does the group go from here? Dunno. Hard to find a venue for rehearsal in London really. Everywhere is either booked up or closed down. Makes you wonder why the closed down ones had to close given the apparent demand.
Fingers crossed we find somewhere 🤞
#london #improv #liveShow

Kein Wunder, dass Boing die Flugzeuge jetzt in die arabischen Regionen verkauft. Da ist es ja warm und dann ist es nicht so schlimm, dass die Türen rausfallen😇🤣
#boing #flugzeuge #aviation

The Python library "YFinance" decided to force an upgrade. They did this by making the old version report a rate-limit error on every request.
Confusing.
Would have been better if they reported a "old version not supported" error or something instead. So that wasted some time.
That upgrade had dependencies which have dependencies upon a newer version of Python, so needed a whole OS upgrade really.
Which failed. Bricking the Rasp PI it was running on.
Oh well, complete rebuild of the whole machine and software it runs from scratch then.
That took all day yesterday. At the end I notice that the touch-screen doesn't touch. Needs drivers.
The drivers haven't been upgraded in six years. They brick the machine again when trying to install them on Debian Trixie.
Luckily, I kept good notes and could rebuild it all again much faster with no mistakes and knowing what to do and all the required custom software changes already made and saved.
So now I spent a whole day on annoying upgrade work because a single Python library decided to break the old version, and my Rasp Pi has no touch-screen. Which isn't ideal for a machine mostly operating as a fancy light switch for all the LED strips in the house.
This happens all the time in software. Millions of man hours wasted, so much hardware dumped because the drivers get abandoned.

In other news: Microsoft abandons Windows 10 any day now. Good luck to everyone faced with doing that lap on the upgrade treadmill.
I still have more work to do to bring up this RaspPi's software to where it was, but it'll have to wait, other things to do. At least it's back to sending me the nightly finance report and controlling the LED strips. If without a touch screen now.
#software #upgradeTredmil #python #microsoft

They're just trying to distract you from FediForum. Don't let them!

I dunno who needs to hear this but that's not #gravy and those aren't #biscuits

Went to Small World Festival. Mostly dry and occasionally sunny.
Small World has such a nice friendly hippy vibe, lots of deadlocks and goths and pirates and beautiful face paints.
Bands all energetic and talented and mostly have been playing here together for 20 years in one form or another. All of 'em doing it for the love of it. Pony doing a great job of organizing the team to put it together.
One dude seemed pretty new, making up synth songs with his repeats and beeps and rapping from audience suggestions. Failed to photograph him well though. There's another 4 bands mentioned in the photo descriptions here.
Medically necessitated more or less total sobriety at the moment, so different whole thing. Those I knew well there mostly working, so lots of time alone dancing soberly and reading. Wish I was better at talking to strangers.
Still good times.
#smallWorldFestival #music #live

If I chant "Death to the IMF", it doesn't mean I want to kill all bankers!
Maybe I do, maybe I don't, but that statement doesn't resolve it.
😆

The media focus on this one criticism is insane, just massive focus on ensuring everybody is quoted as being against Bob's chant.
The manufacturing of consent in plain view. No support of Bob allowed to be quoted, only condemnation. No focus at all on the horrors committed by the army itself, just condemnation and contrition from all corners.
And all so much louder than the coverage of death and hunger and destruction and genocide being committed by that army.
Our media environment is so focused and in lock-step, even though it's in theory free. Yet not a single newspaper saying, you know, the Vylan character has a point! Maybe we should disband a criminal army!
Got confused about the date in the show here, but the reading's about right. The bandwagon rolls on because it's a victory for everyone. The media gets to condemn someone, and they don't have to condemn Israel.
https://wordcloudtarot.com/readings/2025-07-01-gazaandglastonbury/

Do you want to see me perform in an Improv show?
You can you know. You can do it in Shoreditch in London in the UK on Sunday.
Dunno what the show will be about, obviously. Some short games, couple of longer stories. But we need YOU there to tell us what it's about.
What else in London is free? Nothing, that's what.
#improv #liveShow #london

And a bonus selfie where I could be in almost any field really.

Look at the crowds shadows there under the yellow spotlight, and the flare off the stage spot, and the reflections off of the floor and catwalk.
It never looked this good in 4.0
Well done #blender3d , I dunno what you did between V4.0 and V4.4 but it looks great.

Aw, Keir Starmer got his name chanted at Glasto this year after all! And he thought they'd never chant his name like they did Jeremy Corbyn's name.
Wait....
👂 👈
I'm hearing they weren't chanting "Oh, Keir Starmer", but instead some profanity!
How rude!
Not wrong, just rude.

Humm, some downsides to that new lighting render as well as the upsides. Need to adjust where the spotlights shine slightly for the next one I guess. Comes out overall darker, with less ambient light, some shots here far too dark.
#blender3d

I support Palestine Action more than I support this terrible genocide-enabling so-called "labour" government.
Does that mean I'm going to go to jail? Will I have to hand myself in?
#ukPol

Oh, interesting. After two days and two nights powered down in the cradle, on the third day it is risen!
Strange.
Maybe whatever controls the charging can drain from the battery even when it's at zero until even that bit of battery is also at zero and then that forces the firmware controlling the charging to reset?
Anyway. It seems to be alive again and now starts charging when put in the cradle properly.
So I guess it's back!

#pineTime #smartWatch

Update on the watch that wouldn't charge and then came back from the dead 3 days later like Jesus.
I guess it's in heaven now. Charging worked for about 2 days then stopped working again and now it's been flat and dead in the cradle for quite a few more days.
☹️
Oh well.

Done some more work with the VR animation engine today.
Seems to now be working that I can lay in the path that the character will walk, and then puppet their limbs as they walk it.
Done more work to standardize how all the slapdash episode structure is so now there's also a #wip #starshipsd #gamedev

Interesting thing about tomorrow's tarot show, rendering now, is that I upgraded from Blender 4.0 to blender 4.4 and it's quite a bit nicer to look at the timeline editor.
Was sad to find that the render time was up though. From about 3 seconds per frame usually to more like 12!?
Trying it with an old version I see that the lights and textures look way better with 4.4 than 4.0 though. A substantial step up in the way the show looks without me even doing anything other than waiting four times longer per frame.
Seems to be heavily dependent upon lighting now. The slow frames are like 12 seconds but the fast frames with minimal lighting and close up on the video are more like 2.
Looks too beautiful now to go back though. Upgraded my cloud-remote render machines too. We will render on four machines tonight. FOUR! The power of it all.
g3.4xlarge is no faster than g3.large but g6.xlarge seems to be twice the speed.
But hard to be sure really coz of the massive variance in time depending on the lighting.
Anyway, great show coming tomorrow. Sometimes I wonder what the hell I'm trying to do with it but tomorrow's show is the answer. Hide the angry bitter political rant behind a strange CGI tarot show. When the rant comes together well I like it.
https://wordcloudtarot.com/@wordcloudtarot/statuses/01JYFF0GQV1680Z0VG0YTFZDTP

"How to get the most out of tech while freeing ourselves from the lunatics in Silicon Valley"
Says Ian Dunt in his article on a corporate Substack page linked from his block-chain owned Bluesky account.
He does so without using the words "Fedi" "blog", "decentralize" "open source", "free software", or "mastodon", and while calling Facebook and Instagram "seemingly more benign".
There must be a form of moderate tech disinvestment, which allows us the things we benefit from while removing the things which harm us.
He pleads, admitting
I have no answers for this
Yeah, no kidding.
But he has stopped using Amazon so much and buys more DVDs now, and tries to use a tablet more than a phone!?
Well done I guess.

I believe I have managed to prove my ID in order to comply with the new laws that say I have to prove my ID to own the business I own that I'm sure already asked me to prove my ID when I registered it.
First we tried the on-web version, but that apparently relies upon the corporates having managed to profile and track me, because it told me they had no questions upon which to base identification. Good I guess? My avoid-tracking systems must be working at least a bit?
Next we tried the android app, but apparently the phone I tried that with is too old and the app won't install.
So next option is turning up at a post office with a printed letter. I don't own a printer though, so had to have them post that to me.
Took the letter and a driving licence up to the post office today and "It's not going through" they said, pointing to a stalled progress bar on an android app on a tablet.
Um. Okay. So?
Just wait longer apparently. About ten minutes and it finally proceeded and the post office man took a photograph of me after asking me to disrobe of my robe, strip down to a teeshirt and jeans.
Not sure in what sense this has proven my ID any more than it was already proven to get the driving licence or company registration in the first place?
Apparently I now have government logins for "One Login" and for "government gateway" and they are not the same thing? But sort of are the same thing?
Can't say I really understand it. Expect they'll introduce a third government login when they do these Digital ID cards they're talking about.
God knows how I'm supposed to know which to use when the company tax records need updating in a few months.
#id #government #oneLogin

Huh, so the American "No Kings Day" is happening on the same day as the Commonwealth's "Kings Official Summer Birthday".
Strange coincidence.
I think there should be no kings and no king's birthday celebrations FWIW. Power passed down the genetic line like a mutation is ridiculous, and anyway no power should be concentrated in one person like that in the first place.
Have a happy holiday, whichever you are celebrating/protesting.
#kingsBirthday #noKingsDay

Meridith is so cool. It's unfathomable that so many people prefer Zuckerberg's surveillance software.
Here the Signal president talks about privacy and ai and data sovereignty.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AyH7zoP-JOg

Hummm.
Goto social "profile" page doesn't show boosts. Doesn't appear it can even be configured to do so.
Annoying. Was hoping to be able to write devlogs here and boost them from the @… account and have 'em show up on the website.

Hey Netflix, I'm never going to install a mobile phone game from an advert on your header. Never. I never install ANY mobile phone games. They are all trash.
Fed up with it all. Added block-rules for the headers of the netflix page.
Now it's just a black empty background.
This is on you Netflix.

Had a nice time in Greenwich park with friends though. That view of the city from the hill there is magnificent. Lovely park, great observatory.

Read "What went wrong with capitalism" by Ruchir Sharma.
A mildly interesting description of the major events in world an US economics in the last 50 years. Might
be a fair summary for anyone who didn't live through it or has a poor memory.
In short he thinks what went wrong was government bailing out failure leading to massive debts and increa
sed inequality.
Governments took over all the things instead of letting capitalism sort them out, he reckons, and wheneve
r a big industry or company fails you just get socialism for the rich and a bail-out from new printed money.
Easy cheap money, constant bail-outs, government intervention, leading to zombie companies racking up every larger debt to exist, billionaires who can't fail due to government support, and a stock market that's up-only bringing a flood of inefficiently-allocated capital.
Is he right? I mean, maybe, sort of. But when an industry really can't be allowed to fail, say water supply and waterway management, allowing private capital to extract maximum resources from it isn't the best method to manage it in the first place. No wonder they need bail-outs. Capitalism fails here because capitalism isn't the right solution here. We need publicly owned national services, not robber barons without
bailouts.
So, you know, half right. Perhaps these are some of the reasons why capitalism fails, but also we shouldn't even be trying to apply capitalism to every single thing in the first place.
#reading #capitalism #economics #RuchirSharma

I read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch.
Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain.
It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind"
And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures.
Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections.
Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons.
All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception.
That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality.
But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom.
Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason.
You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow.
Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with.
People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain.
Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom.
"Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself.
But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe.
Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong.
#reading #books #consciousness #thenIAmMyselfTheWorld

Drove through the Blackwall Tunnel to Greenwich and back to Islington yesterday.
South of the river it's all 30MPH speed limits and everything feels too fast and scary compared to the sedate and pedestrian-friendly 20MPH limits in the north.
Since I last went through it, it seems the Blackwall tunnel has added a toll.
The TFL website for setting up to pay the tolls is absolutely awful. Failed in Librewolf, Failed in Firefox. Failed because VPN. Took me four attempts in three different browsers to get it to take payment card details.
Demands *no* special characters in the password?!? And doesn't even tell you what the specific problem with the password is, just "doesn't meet the rules above"
Uses awful validation questions like "mothers maiden name". Bad enough practice to use them at all, but the "memorable date" question restricts to ddmmyy format so you can't even put in a date from outside this century.
For some reason asks for a PIN and and Password both!? Pointless. Then actually refuses the login form if you supply both!?

Setting up the auto-payment doesn't seem to have covered the charges added to the registration plate yesterday, so had to do the payment-details entering yet again to deal with yesterday's charges.
Email validation message contains the link only in the HTML of the email, not the text version, so viewed in Mutt it has no link.
And this all seems to be separate from the Dartford Crossing charge, which had a less crappy but still pretty crappy signup.
Good god council programmers suck at web-dev.
#driving #london #tfl #blackwallTunnel #greenwich