Tootfinder

The amount of pointless, useless, overly-complex indirection I see in so many well-established, popular projects makes me very sad.
Except when I am trying to debug it; then it makes me very angry.
#PHP #Programming

Still rocking this for my #WristCheck. I actually really like this one.
On the one hand there is a lot going on on that dial bit it remains readable and everything present serves a purpose. No extraneous text* or logos, so while it is busy, it's also clean.
* Ok, ok maybe the tiny "JAPAN MOVT" at the bottom is pointless but it's so small it's almost not r…

new book about medicine history, "droplets" theory etc
"Science writer Carl Zimmer’s latest book is a brilliant history of medicine that takes us from Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of the 19th century to present day. Along the way, it offers an anthropological study of medical culture — a culture capable of ignoring science when it wants to. ...
"If COVID-19 spread in droplets, then it was worthwhile to keep people two metres apart, to put up plexiglas barriers around checkout stands, and make supermarket aisles one-way. Sanitizing countertops could break the chain of infection.
"But if COVID-19 was airborne, all those measures were pointless."
Bit of an exaggeration in that part of the article. The 2m distance does put you outside the densest clouds of exhaled breath, and sanitising countertops helps against other diseases. But yeah. A lot of effort wrongly expended due to the prevailing myth.
#CovidIsAirborne #books #history

2/4 Perfect for scenarios where certain errors like "user not found" shouldn't waste infrastructure resources on pointless retries, while still allowing retries for transient network issues like #API timeouts or connection problems.

I was curious to see what streaming news media would do today, after three straight weeks of nonstop, utterly pointless coverage of the Pope. Would they finally get back to talking about the ongoing destruction of the American democratic state and the urgent matters piling up?
Naaaaah. Every single network (including, sadly, BBC and Sky News) chose to air the thoroughly disgusting spectacle of TFG and MBS making deals in KSA.
And then: Show trials! Kardashian! Mendezez! Diddy!

For some reason, this does not strike as a rational act by ICE. Who do they think are responsible for getting food from the farm to the markets? (Critiquing on woke values is pointless, so I'm appealing to the self interest of those who think food comes from the supermarket)

ICE agents chase after farmworkers as they flee fields during latest raid in Ventura County | abc7.com
Immigration%20and%20Customs%20Enforcement%20(ICE)%20targeted%20workers%20on%20produce%20farms%20in%20Ventura%20County%20Tuesday%20morning%20in%20one%20of%20the%20latest%20raids.

For some reason, this does not strike as a rational act by ICE. Who do they think are responsible for getting food from the farm to the markets? (Critiquing on woke values is pointless, so I'm appealing to the self interest of those who think food comes from the supermarket)

ICE agents chase after farmworkers as they flee fields during latest raid in Ventura County | abc7.com
Immigration%20and%20Customs%20Enforcement%20(ICE)%20targeted%20workers%20on%20produce%20farms%20in%20Ventura%20County%20Tuesday%20morning%20in%20one%20of%20the%20latest%20raids.

masks at protests / demographics 2/n
I wonder about the influence of employment, as well. If you're at risk every work day, I could well imagine it seeming pointless to start being careful the rest of the time, and maybe just too cognitively dissonant to consider.
I remember in 2020, someone I knew was working at Waterstones, and they were forbidden to mask up at work - even though 2020 was before the whole "covid is over" thing.
I also remember reading about someone - maybe a nurse? that _kind_ of job, anyway - who'd started wearing a fitted mask while the default in their workplace was baggy blues, and iirc was formally rebuked. It wasn't allowed.
If for whatever reason you're unable to hold down a typical job, you might not have much cash for _getting_ things like masks, but you're also not under that same kind of economic pressure to put yourself at risk.
#masks #work #CovidIsntOver

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