I've had my iMac for about 10 months now and I can safely say that it's a purchase I don't regret. While I'm still not convinced by the hype and nonsense that's normally associated with Apple products -- I've had plenty of moments where the damn thing really hasn't "just worked" -- I really do like the iMac as a Unix workstation.

Recently I've had the need to consider buying a small laptop that I can use on train journeys. While I have a very capable Windows laptop it's a little too large to pull out and use on the tray you get on the back of a train seat. I also have a much-loved Chromebook but it would generally fail me on the train unless I always pay for the WiFi. So the ideal machine for me would be fairly small (no more than 12" or so), be capable of doing things locally, and would also need a pretty good battery life (while the trains I travel on do provide sockets they seem to provide no power as often as they do).

I did start to think about going with some sort of Macbook but, every time I looked at them, I ended up deciding they were too expensive.

Until yesterday. Yesterday I found that the local computer store had the 13" Macbook Air on sale -- £150 off the usual price plus another £50 off if I got there and bought it before 5pm.

So I had to go and look.

Having looked I came away with one.

So far I'm very pleased with it. While the one I have is the lower spec version (just 128GB of SSD and 4GB of memory) it seems to work well for my needs.

As for what my needs are? I want to be able to work on web projects locally, hack on JavaScript and HTML, that sort of thing. As well as that I want to be able to run Git and, when I do have a net connection, sync to GitHub and browse the web, do email, faff around on reddit, etc.

For this it's perfect. I'm finding it more than fast enough for what I want (I'd even go so far as to say that it's faster than the iMac). The keyboard is just the right size, the trackpad is perfect (and works just like the Magic Trackpad I use on my iMac), the screen is very readable. So far I'm struggling to find any real fault with it.

Okay, sure, there are some obvious downsides, the main one being that, for what I paid for this, I could probably have got a lower-end gaming Windows laptop with plenty of drive space, memory and a good graphics card. But that's not what I was after. A machine that big and that powerful would sit in the laptop bag and not get used. I wanted a machine that was easy to drag out, open up and use.

And that's what's happening with the Air. In fact, it's being used on the train right now; that's where I'm waffling on about this, to kill time, somewhere north of Newcastle, with the sea to my right and the snow coming down.

Now and again Google seem to actually listen. While they do generally have a bad habit of removing things from things and saying it's for everyone's good (because options are bad and they can't maintain them, apparently) it seems they can do the odd turnaround now and again.

One thing they removed from Android recently was the "until next alarm"" option when putting a device in "do not disturb" mode.

Seems they've added that back in 6.0.1:

It's a small thing, but it makes so much more sense and makes things so much easier (even if it's a trivial thing).

Nice one Google. More of this please.

Until I moved about a year ago I'd always used Demon Internet as my ISP. I stated with them during the old tenner-a-month days when there were only a handful of points-of-presence to be called. I stuck with them through them getting full local POP coverage, through having an ISDN line and then finally ADSL.

When I moved though I decided it might be easier to just go with BT; for the most part this hasn't actually been a bad decision. This week though I suffered my first proper outage with them and it was rather frustrating.

It kicked off at around 2015-11-16 21:00. I noticed that Google Drive (in Chrome) was complaining that it was offline. I then noticed that gmail and a couple of other tabs in Chrome were complaining about the same thing. I did a couple of local network checks and found nothing, checked the router and it was connected and reporting just fine, so then I rebooted the router and things appeared to improve.

For a short while anyway. Then I started to notice other problems; mostly that some sites would time out, others not. Initially I was getting a lot of DNS timeouts and, while I normally use Google's DNS servers (BT's have long had lots of problems¹), I tried switching back to BT's own and that appeared to improve matters. For a while anyway.

I mentioned the issues on twitter and got a handful of replies from different people running into similar issues. It was clear that this wasn't just me. I then went looking for BT's broadband status page but hilariously was unable to load it because of the problem.

This is my first bit of real frustration with them. Here's how the page looks inside a desktop browser:

Now compare it as seen inside Android Chrome on my Nexus 6:

Apparently they have decided that I'd never want to be able to check why my broadband might be down, from a mobile device. Yes, sure, there's the option to put my phone number in -- perhaps it tells me after I've done that -- but I don't even know my land line number; I don't use it as a phone most of the time and so never bother remembering it. The main point here is why the hell wouldn't they include the same useful information as the desktop view? Or perhaps use geolocation of the phone to narrow things down if they feel the need.

Anyway, I gave up and went to bed. In the morning things were no better but, after another router reboot, I did manage to get a view of the status:

Finally! Acknowledgement of the problem. Worryingly though it was dated almost 12 hours after I first noticed the problem. From what I can see that date and time isn't the date and time the status was last updated, it's the date and time it was first added. That suggest that they really hadn't noticed the problem all night. It's not like it was a problem that was hard to notice, at least from a customer's point of view. Check this graph from a down detector site:

You'd think that a company as big as BT would have something in place that could catch network problems, especially ones that are able to be caught with a simple crowdsourcing "press this button if you have a problem" approach.

But... nope. Appears not. O_o

Anyway, a couple or so hours later the problem was finally fixed:

(Notice how the date and time is the same as earlier; so 100% not an update time but a first-added time) I mentioned this on twitter:

Looks like BT broadband problems are resolved. Everything working that I can see, and this... pic.twitter.com/m5Mo7vm5Yu

— Dave Pearson (@davepdotorg) November 17, 2015

and I even got a reply (which I'd not gone looking for, so that was nice):

@davepdotorg Yes Dave we have the problem fixed, if you still notice a few issues then reset the hub and try again. ^Chris

— BT (@BTCare) November 17, 2015

Curious as to why it'd take almost 12 hours from the problem appearing to it being acknowledged on their status, I thought I'd ask:

@BTCare All looking good. Any reason why it took 12 hours to acknowledge?

— Dave Pearson (@davepdotorg) November 17, 2015

which got this reply:

@davepdotorg Sorry it took so long, identifing the source of the problems would have taken some time. ^Shane

— BT (@BTCare) November 17, 2015

which doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. Sure, you to spend time identifying the source of a problem to fix it, but you don't need to do that to notice and acknowledge that there's a problem. I've asked again but haven't received any sort of reply as of the time of writing (I'm not expecting one really).

What I take from all of this is that BT are shockingly bad at keeping people informed of problems with their service when there's a large outage. I find that kind of annoying. I don't mind that there are problems, I do mind when a company can't take the time to clearly and quickly state "yup, it's us, it's not you, we're looking into it..."

Earlier on today I needed a copy of wget on my iMac. It's not "native" to it so I got to wondering how you go about getting something like that onto it. Sure, I could have just grabbed the source and built myself, but really it's a lot nicer to use some sort of package manager.

A quick search lead me to Homebrew and I was then up and running in no time.

This in turn got me to thinking about how it might be fun to get some of the software I used to use on my GNU/Linux machine up and running again. The first one that came to mind was slrn. Sure enough slrn is available via Homebrew and installing it was dead simple.

But then I was faced with a problem: I needed an NNTP server. Way back I used to run a local one in my office that fed from and to my ISP's. Back then my ISP was Demon Internet; these days I'm with BT. A quick search lead me to an article or two that BT had a NNTP server, of sorts, provided by a third party. So I did a quick check:

Yay! This looked good.

After that I fired up slrn and.... problems. It kept asking me to log in, to provide a user name and password. The only problem was that I'd read in more than one place that a user name and password weren't needed for BT's server; all that was required was you be on a BT IP address. Checking the slrn docs I found force_authentication but ensuring that was off made no difference.

At this point I removed slrn and gave up.

Later, thinking it might be an issue with just slrn and perhaps it was worth trying a native NNTP client, I grabbed Unison (which is no longer supported but seems to work fine). I got that set up and ran into the same issue: it wanted login details.

Finally, after a bit more digging, I stumbled on the reason why I was struggling to make any of this work: BT had closed support for the server back in December last year!

A quick search around the web and I stumbled on Eternal September. Given all I was interested in was the good old text groups this looked perfect. I quickly registered an account, ran up Unison again and plugged in my details and....

Now that's all sorted I should try again with slrn. At which point I'll need to drag out and tidy up post.el (the version that was being maintained by some other people seems to have gone very stale, sadly).

I actually can't remember when the change was now, it was either Android 5.0 or one of the 5.x point releases, but I can recall the frustration of Google having changed how you make an Android device silent, or not. The idea seemed clever enough but it was a real pain to switch to and use. Previously there'd simply been this neat system of setting he volume to either be some non-off value, vibrate or totally silent. I even had a neat little widget on the home screen of my phone to allow me to toggle between these 3 states.

It was simple, and worked well.

The new system though.... ugh. It was confusing and so much more long-winded to work with.

At some point though they added one big redeeming feature: "Until next alarm". When I got into bed I could tell my tablet to go totally silent until my alarm went off in the morning, and then it would all work as normal. That was an utterly brilliant idea.

So it made sense that if they changed anything about this in Marshmallow they'd keep that in and make it even more awesome, right? Right?!?

Well fuck!

Why? Just..... why?!? I actually prefer how the new one works. They've more or less solved the problem of how it was more faff to deal with, they've solved the problem of having to cock about with the volume rocker to get at the settings and then set the settings. I like all that.

But taking "Until next alarm" away? That's just nuts.

Sometimes I really get the impression that the Android developers are like the Chrome OS developers: they're having a ton of fun improving and onward developing the system but they have little connection to how people actually use this stuff.

It's been quite a while since I used voiced search on my Nexus 6. Ever since I got the Moto 360 I've not really had a need to say "OK Google" to my phone because I could simply say it to my wrist. Today though, because I wanted to quickly look something up and my phone was to hand, I spoke to it and got this:

Brilliant.

I've been here before. I had exactly this sort of problem with my Xperia Z at one point. The problem appeared to go away eventually (actually, it sort of came and went a few times over a matter of weeks, if I recall correctly), although I never really got to the bottom of the cause.

I've tried rebooting the phone and that hasn't helped at all. While it's more of a vague annoyance than anything else (like I say above, my Android Wear device is my goto tool for talking to Google these days) it does frustrate a little when fairly expensive tools don't "just work".

This just turned up in email a little earlier:

What's of particular interest is the email address this was sent to. It was one that I only ever (to my knowledge) used for posts to Usenet. While my gmail spam folder is filled with emails to that and other addresses I used for Usenet over the years this is the first bit of "proper" spam I've had to it in a long time.

It's signficant that it's some sort of Xbase-related thing too. I think the Usenet group I posted to more than any other will have been comp.lang.clipper. Unless I had some lapse of judgement at some point in the late 1990s or early 2000s (I think I only got the davep.org domain in 1999, now I think about it) the address this was sent to was used nowhere else.

I've also never been a "Visual Objects and/or Vulcan.NET user". While I did once own a copy of Visual Objects (two copies actually -- a beta and then a final release) it wasn't in a way that I'd have been on some mailing list and even if I had the address in question wouldn't have been the one used.

So, yeah, great way to impress me with a new product: make your first contact with me look exactly like some old Usenet spam.

Edit to add: I've since had it confrimed by the sender of the email that my address was indeed pulled from comp.lang.clipper.

A little earlier today I decided it was time that I read up a little more about the abilities of OS X's Spotlight facility. I use it a little -- it's a handy tool to get at some often-used applications that I don't really need laying around in the dock -- but I was starting to wonder if I could get more out of it.

The obvious first place to look was in the HelpViewer; all the information I'm ever going to need will be on the local machine, right?

So I open the HelpViewer, from the Spotlight bar, and type in that I want information about Spotlight. The page comes up blank. The page was pretty small so, while I pondered why it might be blank, I resized it and it disappeared! I tried to open it again and.... nothing. Nothing I did would make the HelpViewer show again.

I then tried following the advice on this page but none of that appeared to help. I then looked for the HelpViewer in the Activity Monitor and killed it with that.

Running it again after that got me back to where I started. I tried the while process again and, sure enough, trying to resize the window made it disappear. I can make it happen every single time:

So it looks like another fine example of the Apple "it just works" thing. For "doesn't always just work" values of "just works".

As much as I like my iMac, and as much as I am generally impressed with OS X the more I use it, I'm constantly frustrated by the little issues I run into that make life so much more interesting and which fly in the face of the "it just works with Apple" fandom thing. The more I use the iMac, the more I appreciate that Macs and OS X are just as "fun" as anything running Windows.

A little earlier was a good example. I wanted to share part of the iMac's filesystem using SMB. This seemed easy enough, the instructions on how to do it were clear and, after following them, it utterly failed.

Brilliant.

So I Googled the issue a bit and ran into this handy forum post. Apparently you can't actually connect with SMB if the account you're going to be using to connect with is using iCloud login rather than a separate login.

Brilliant.

Not an obvious thing. Nothing said this was the case. According to the forum post even Apple couldn't help the person who'd been trying to make it work. But at least there was a workaround. All I'd need to do is split the password, have a login for the machine that wasn't the iCloud login and I'd be all good.

I did it, it worked. I could browse the iMac's filesystem from my Windows machine and all was good (I'd been able to do this the other way around for ages and with no problems whatsoever).

Then I got curious.

What would happen if, once I had this set up, I "unsplit" the password and went back to using the iCloud password to log in? That's when it got really fun.

To do this it asks you for the current password and also your iCloud password. I entered both and...

Yup. It refuses, every single time, to accept that the iCloud password I'm entering is valid. Trust me, it is. I'm entering the correct password. I can log in to the iCloud website with it just fine. But when I use it to try and "unsplit" my password.... nope.

Brilliant.

I've even tried disabling SMB sharing for my account, and even turning off SMB sharing altogether. This doesn't seem to make any difference. Right now, as far as I can see, now that I've split the password I can't go back despite the fact that there's a method of doing it made available.

Brilliant.

I have too many Microsoft accounts. Far too many. And they still confuse the hell out of me.

I found out over the weekend that the office was closing down the old internal email server. Everything moving to Office365. I use Gmail for my email (I have a freebie Google Apps account that I use as the front end for it -- when it comes to things like email I'm Gmail all the way). So, as of today, I have a new work-oriented Microsoft account.

Problem is, I already had a work-oriented Microsoft account because that's how I use MSDN and download stuff from that.

I also have a personal outlook.com account for reasons I can't remember now.

And then there's the Windows gaming login, which might or might not be related the the one above.

And then there's the old Xbox live account that I think has nothing to do with the above.

And then...

The problem I have is that I never seem to be able to log in with an existing MS account any time something new crops up, and so I somehow seem to end up having to make a new one. And now I have too many and there's no obvious way to merge them or kill them off without losing some service I don't even know I need to use any more.

And then there's my two Skype accounts (personal and work)...

Make it stop! Please! And give me a merge facility!