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!

I woke up this morning to see this being retweeted by a few people I follow:

Even if I was to let my usual net-cynic side take over and decide there's a good chance it's a made-up story there's no getting away from the fact that this is a story that isn't in isolation. I hear this sort of thing time and again; especially from people who have to deal with the fallout from this first hand.

This is something that is happening, in 2015, in the country I live in.

I wish it wasn't.

This is why I find Labour's accusation of lying so damn annoying and frustrating. For a short while I simply decided that that was that. They're as corrupt as the rest of them and only in it for the money. This was made even more clear by how often they kept trumpeting the new member numbers. It's all about the numbers -- all about the money.

But then I saw this video:

and got to thinking that perhaps, just perhaps, some change for the better is actually happening inside Labour. Perhaps I should give the organisation the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps, if I contacted the membership team and asked why they'd decided I was lying, they'd give me the information and I could sort things out.

So I did. I wrote to them. I sent this to them, via the form on their website, on 2015-09-28:

On September 5th 2015 I received an email from you accusing me of having lied when I sought to become a supporter, with a view to applying to be a member after seeing the results of the leadership election. This was a rather hurtful event and one I wrote about here: http://blog.davep.org/2015/09/07/labour-said-no-thanks-to-my-support.html

Having watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYNPzJgV8TI I find myself in the odd position of liking the message of a party that, at the same time, accused me of something without evidence.

Given this I'd like to get to the bottom of what happened, hopefully find out what evidence was used to make the accusation and, perhaps, get an apology so that I can seriously consider joining and supporting what is happening.

I look forward to your reply.

I, of course, gave all my full details -- the email address I'd used, my home address, my full name, etc. All the information that I'd given when I signed up as a supporter. From what I could tell they had everything they needed to be able to check and give an adequate reply.

It took a while but I finally got a reply. This email came through on 2015-10-06:

So that seems pretty clear: a non-answer to my question and they're asking for another £10 on top of the £3 they already have off me to find out what evidence they have that meant it was okay for them to take my £3 and then accuse me of lying.

What's the betting that I'll spend that £10 and get a non-answer?

What's even more infuriating is that I'm not actually asking for information they have on file about me, I'm asking for clarification for something they've already told me.

It's really hard not to view this as a simple bait and switch.

So now I'm left wondering what to do next; trying to decide if I just give it up as a bad job and accept that, really, nothing has changed and they're as bad as ever. Corbyn might well be talking a good game but, under that cover, it's still just another money-grabbing organisation that wants power and very little change.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a creature of habit. Once I get used to something I find it hard to change. In many areas of my life there has to be really compelling reasons to change something. I've found that this is the case with my Android Wear watch.

When I first got it it took me a couple or so days to find a face that I was happy with and, in the end, I went with Pujie Black, along with a colour scheme I set up myself (called RGB, for obvious reasons).

Today though I stumbled on Krona Sunlight. This face really got my interest. Part of the reason is that, while what I'm wearing is normally called a "watch", I don't see it as a watch (just like my phone isn't really a phone). It's a wearable Android device that gives me handy info at a glance and lets me set reminders and things without even having to reach for my phone, tablet, Chromebook or desktop machine.

This face fits perfectly into that.

While it lacks the battery information (edit to add: it doesn't lack battery information, it's just an option that is off by default), and second time display, that Pujie Black has, it more than makes up for it with the rather fantastic display of weather and sunrise/set information -- especially how it displays temperature.

This was enough to not only have me buy a copy, but also to switch to it. I'm going to be sticking with it for the next couple of days to see how I feel about it and see if I miss any of the other information.

This might be a little bit of change I can cope with.

Apparently that famous Apple obsession with design doesn't apply to the time display on the OS X login screen (the wake-from-sleep password confirmation one anyway):

I've never noticed it before. I'm not sure if this came about with the upgrade to El Capitan or not. But now I've seen it I can't unsee it.