The Computer And General Tech Thread - Software, Hardware, Questions, etc.

[Raphael]

A bit OT, but: Perhaps due to Star Trek, "scan" always sounds very science-fictional to me and feels jarring when I read it in, say, a fantasy context, e.g. "The thief descended the stairs into the inn's common room and scanned the crowd for potential targets".

Even more OT, but somewhat related to your comment: when I see news reports from the USA about something involving, let's say, the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles or Las Vegas, I get a similar jarring feeling, because the concept of an "archdiocese" feels a bit like something from the fantasy genre to me, while the concept of "Los Angeles" or "Las Vegas" feels a bit like something from the science fiction genre.

[Raphael]

I've noticed that on the website of my city region's public transport association (https://www.hvv.de), when I'm using the connection finder UI to look for connections between specific stations at specific times (https://geofox.hvv.de/web/de/connection ... anguage=de), the results show me two different times for each connection: one on the general list of connections, and, if I click on a specific connection, one in the details for that connections. The times are different by one hour. It looks like this:

1houroff.jpg (104.04 KiB) Viewed 3080 times

Now, what little I know about computers and related technology makes me suspect that what's going on might be that somewhere in the inner workings of either their server or my computer, the time is shown in UTC in one context and in out local time, which, at this time of the year, is one hour ahead of UTC, in another context. But that's just speculation.

I don't know for sure what the "correct" time is, which makes that UI kind of useless for me.

I used their contact form to tell them about the problem on Sunday evening. Today, I got an email from them telling me that after checking the matter, they had forwarded my report to their "partner", who- or whatever that may be.

[Man in Space]

Does the issue persist on other machines?

[Raphael]

Does the issue persist on other machines?

Good question. I haven't tried it there yet. It doesn't happen in the organisation's mobile app, but of course that's a completely different matter.

[Travis B.]

I have written 'Bricks', a Breakout clone, for zeptoforth on the PicoCalc with the RP2350. You can get it from https://github.com/tabemann/zeptoforth/ ... _bricks.fs .

You control it with the left and right arrow keys, and 'q' to exit. It does not have any concept of 'lives' or 'score' -- it just continues ad infinitum until you get bored and decide to exit; when the ball exits the bottom of the screen the ball and the player are merely reset. Note that at the start of the game and each time the ball and player are reset you have to press a key to continue.

BRICKS1.PNG (1.63 KiB) Viewed 2890 times

[alice]

(weeps) You're doing almost everything I wanted to do with electronics but had to give up for boring reasons.

[Travis B.]

(weeps) You're doing almost everything I wanted to do with electronics but had to give up for boring reasons.

It's okay ─ I spent many years not doing anything really outside of work and hating myself for it, mostly because either I didn't have the energy (mostly on account of not exactly being sane at the time) to spend any effort outside of work, or because I thought everything worth doing was either already done or out of my reach.

[Travis B.]

I've been playing around with FUZIX, a Unix-like system for small computers (descended from UZI and its various forks), on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2. It's fun to play with even though it is by no means practical.

[Raphael]

Does the issue persist on other machines?

For the record, no matter the machine, it seems to be browser-dependent. Some browsers have the problem, others don't. So I guess I'll only use that function with browsers that can handle it fine from now on.

[Travis B.]

Does the issue persist on other machines?

For the record, no matter the machine, it seems to be browser-dependent. Some browsers have the problem, others don't. So I guess I'll only use that function with browsers that can handle it fine from now on.

Stupid question (forgive me for asking this), but have you tried deleting cookies and other browser-local persistent storage for the site on any of the misbehaving browsers?

[Raphael]

Does the issue persist on other machines?

For the record, no matter the machine, it seems to be browser-dependent. Some browsers have the problem, others don't. So I guess I'll only use that function with browsers that can handle it fine from now on.

Stupid question (forgive me for asking this), but have you tried deleting cookies and other browser-local persistent storage for the site on any of the misbehaving browsers?

I generally set my browsers to auto-delete everything whenever I close them, so if that would be the problem, closing browsers and re-launching should solve it. It doesn't.

[Man in Space]

I have written 'Bricks', a Breakout clone, for zeptoforth on the PicoCalc with the RP2350. You can get it from https://github.com/tabemann/zeptoforth/ ... _bricks.fs .

You control it with the left and right arrow keys, and 'q' to exit. It does not have any concept of 'lives' or 'score' -- it just continues ad infinitum until you get bored and decide to exit; when the ball exits the bottom of the screen the ball and the player are merely reset. Note that at the start of the game and each time the ball and player are reset you have to press a key to continue.


BRICKS1.PNG

[Man in Space]

For the record, no matter the machine, it seems to be browser-dependent. Some browsers have the problem, others don't. So I guess I'll only use that function with browsers that can handle it fine from now on.

Stupid question (forgive me for asking this), but have you tried deleting cookies and other browser-local persistent storage for the site on any of the misbehaving browsers?

I generally set my browsers to auto-delete everything whenever I close them, so if that would be the problem, closing browsers and re-launching should solve it. It doesn't.

What browser(s) have you used, and which one(s) do/don't experience the issue? And what OS?

[Raphael]

What browser(s) have you used, and which one(s) do/don't experience the issue? And what OS?

Linux. My main browser is something called "Librewolf", which is a Firefox fork with a supposed focus on better privacy protection and a certain amount of independence from the people behind Firefox. That's the browser that has the problem. It doesn't appear in Firefox itself.

[Man in Space]

What browser(s) have you used, and which one(s) do/don't experience the issue? And what OS?

Linux. My main browser is something called "Librewolf", which is a Firefox fork with a supposed focus on better privacy protection and a certain amount of independence from the people behind Firefox. That's the browser that has the problem. It doesn't appear in Firefox itself.

My uneducated guess is that it’s those very privacy protections that are causing the issue (anonymity impacting the time settings).

[Raphael]

My uneducated guess is that it’s those very privacy protections that are causing the issue (anonymity impacting the time settings).

Likely to be true.

[Raphael]

Does anyone know of a free automatic translation software that's not connected to any big tech companies?

[Raphael]

In somewhat more upbeat news, I've gotten my computer to the point where it apparently no longer forgets the printer exists every time the printer goes into stand-by. Or at least I can now get it to notice the printer without having to reboot first. That means I can now print things without having to reboot first.

[alice]

Speaking of printers, I have an oldish but perfectly decent printer which has now decided it would like to choose its own IP address rather than use the one the router's DHCP gives it, and there seems to be no way to stop it.

[Travis B.]

I have implemented and gotten working Multicast DNS for both zeptoIPv4 and zeptoIPv6, with support for both resolving names over Multicast DNS and assigning a name to a host via Multicast DNS. Note that this is not in the master branch yet; it will be when I make a release including this.