All posts by stymaster

My blogging and website-bodging alter-ego. Not that much of an alter-ego. Apparently it's 'Absolutely obvious it's you'.
cats, Pubs

Catalogue of Errors

You might have noticed that I quite like pubs and that I also quite like cats.

I also quite like Black Country Ales, the local pubco that do a fantastic job of traditional, real-ale biased pubs that are the kind of place I like to drink.

Which made this story all the more disappointing:

Save our cats poster from The Wellington
Save our cats poster from The Wellington

Report from the BBC here

Blog from The Sandwell Skidder here

The Wellington is one of the older BCA pubs and something of an institution, with the typically 16 handpumps, the TV screens that display beer, not sport, and the pubcats.

Previously, there was Welly, the pubcat, now there’s Malt and Hops– but basically, there is a long, long tradition of cats at The Wellington.

The reason for their proposed eviction isn’t clear, but there is speculation that it relates to this review:

Screenshotted review from tripadvisor
Screenshotted review from tripadvisor

It is unclear what possession belonging to cats the pub is for 😉 , or is that just me being a grammar nazi?

Black Country Ales aren’t commenting, or responding to emails, and it’s now right across social media, the news, and the web. It’s not a good look lads, the Internet loves cats. Lots of pub goers love cats, and it’s not unknown for cats to be a prominent feature.

[edit 2024-07-25]

From Black Country Ales’ Facebook:

We at Black Country Ales would like to thank all who have expressed interest regarding the rehoming of The Wellington’s cats, Malt and Hops. We assure everyone that the welfare of the cats is uppermost in our own thinking, and that of the licensee whom we met today and who is in agreement with the plan.
In readiness for an extensive refurbishment and correction of significant building issues, the cats will be permanently rehomed in a safer and more fitting environment. Whilst we understand that many people enjoy the independent nature of cats, which do exactly as they please, it does mean that their confinement indoors has raised challenges in maintaining good hygiene and tidiness. And, of course, many people do not want the unsolicited company of a cat with their pint or sandwich.
We hope that this clarifies what will be happening at the pub and reassures everyone of our commitment to a happy and safe rehoming for Malt and Hops, and a comfortable, newly renovated pub for all our customers.

Screenshot from Black Country Ales' Facebook- text is above
Screenshot from Black Country Ales’ Facebook

The post originally read like this, as can be seen in the edit history:

We at Black Country Ales would like to thank all who have expressed interest regarding the rehoming of The Wellington’s cats, Malt and Hops. We assure everyone that the welfare of the cats is uppermost in our own thinking, and that of the licensee whom we met today and who is in agreement with the plan.
The licensee’s original three kittens arrived during Covid, and after the sad death of one of them outside the pub, the remaining two have since been confined indoors 24/7. In readiness for an extensive refurbishment and correction of significant building issues, the cats will be permanently rehomed in a safer and more fitting environment. Whilst we understand that many people enjoy the independent nature of cats, which do exactly as they please, it does mean that their confinement indoors has raised challenges in maintaining good hygiene and tidiness. And, of course, many people do not want the unsolicited company of a cat with their pint or sandwich.
We hope that this clarifies what will be happening at the pub and reassures everyone of our commitment to a happy and safe rehoming for Malt and Hops, and a comfortable, newly renovated pub for all our customers.

Original post
Original post

This is untrue. The cats were present in 2019- my blog linked above mentions them, and other Facebook posters state that the third kitten, Chip, lived happily at The Woodman until its closure and is alive and well.

music

Minority Appeal

I’m listening to Deadtime Stories by the Lovelorn Dolls
Deadtime Stories Cover
a maybe slightly obscure Darkwave band that grabbed my attention via Alfa Matrix, a Belgian label.

Being Belgian, direct shipping into the UK is a bit pricey (bringing total price up to £27), especially since the collective mind-loss of 2016, so while the album was launched in May, and turned up on Amazon soon after, the price was shocking (currently over £24). I’d hoped for proper UK Amazon stock, but it hasn’t happened yet.

I could have bought the digital download: Bandcamp offers digital download (that you can re-download) in FLAC, and I’ve used that at times, but I like to have CDs.

Eventually, Ebay turned up a new copy for £13! I don’t know what the path to me was, but it was a UK seller. Goes to show that while Amazon is convenient, it’s not always cheapest.

The CD arrived, and, somewhat perversely, the first thing is to get it ripped: FLACs for phone and house, MP3 for car.

This is where buying less well-known music creates a bit more work: There are online databases of music that catalogue both digital downloads and CDs- Musicbrainz being the best these days, largely replacing freedb, but they didn’t hold a record for the CD, which is why I found myself (again) creating records in Musicbrainz, using the digital download metadata for some bits, scanning the CD covers, and submitting the CD ID and uploading images so I could then rip and have the track titles: the side benefit being now if others rip the CD, they don’t have to, because I did it :-). Co-operatively, we all win. I could have just typed the tracks in and uploaded the image, but for a tiny bit more work. others benefit too. This experience of missing data is probably a symptom of the music being a bit more niche, and that CD is less popular these days.

So, what of the music? It’s Darkwave, so like an 80s/Synth/Goth mashup. If that sound like your thing, all good.

Politics, Rants, Technology, The stupid it hurts

Cash is King

2 Comments

As the rise of cashless payments continues, the memes against it with certain types continue.

They’re all pretty much of a muchness, and the only valid point any of them make is “what do you do if the payment networks fail”.

Cash is king, they say, which I can’t help but agree with. There’s much in common with insisting on cash and having a monarch:

* It annoys some people
* It causes inconvenience
* It costs money, and the costs are largely hidden from you
* It’s an example of tax avoidance
* It’s an anachronism

I’m not suggesting we eliminate cash (yet?), but I would like to pick apart some of the myths that surround this cash is king idea.

One image doing the rounds on Facebook recently is a blackboard that says:

PLEASE USE CASH IF YOU CAN LAST WEEK OUR CARD MACHINE CHARGES WERE EQUAL TO A DAY’S WAGES FOR A MEMBER OF OUR TEAM.

So, let’s assume they only pay minimum wage. UK minimum wage, currently, costs the employer £102 per day, including all legally required employer costs, assuming a 40 hour week.

A relatively expensive pay-as-you-go card transaction deal- with someone like SumUp- takes 1.6% fees, with no other charges. A really good merchant account will have a rental charge for a machine, but much lower percentage fees.

My arithmetic isn’t that good, so you’re welcome to correct me, but if I have this right, to run up £102 in card payment charges you’d have to take around £6000 in card payments alone. Every day, which seems like a pretty good turnover.

The biggest error, of course, is the assumption that cash is free to handle. This is an assumption many make, because the charges for card fees are visible, but the costs of handling cash are largely hidden.

we pay commission fees on every card sale,lowering profits. No commission on cash

as one poster said.

If you take cash, you have to maintain a float (with change). You have to count and bag the cash, take it to a bank, and pay it in- paying a fee to do so, risking getting mugged, and spending time, and probably fuel/parking to do so.

The exception, of course, is if all your outgoings are cash, which I’m told is very convenient for minimising your tax burden, as they say, but obviously no-one would wish to avoid declaring income, huh?

There’s also the ones that say

The government and banks can track what you’re spending your money on

and while there’s truth here, seeing as how this government are just so incompetent, the chance of them competently tracking my purchases and finding anything worthwhile are pretty fucking minimal, even if they have access to the point-of-sale data from my local convenience store (because if they don’t, all they know is how much I spent, at what time).

Oh look- this guy has bought 4 cans of lager, a bottle of wine, and an Indian takeaway. Best we keep an eye on him.

A loosely connected bit of bullshit is this one:

First and foremost, using cash is a great way to support local businesses. When you pay with a banknote, that money stays within the community and can be used by others for a wide variety of purposes. For example, imagine you have a £50 banknote in your pocket that you use to pay for dinner at a local restaurant. The owner of the restaurant can then use that same note to pay for laundry services, and so on. After multiple transactions, the banknote will still retain its original £50 value, benefiting everyone who has used it as payment.

Which is the biggest load of toss. Unless every single transaction remains as cash and none of the businesses use a bank or a credit account, or have a mortgage or bank loan, it isn’t true. Obviously, the note retains value- but at the point it re-enters the banking system, someone is paying for it to be deposited, and often far more than 1.6%. As to the local business angle, people will either use local ones or not, and the cash isn’t simply a factor.

The only valid reason to insist on cash is to hide transactions: i.e: to avoid tax. And you’ll be turning away customers who can’t be arsed going to an ATM.

By all means accept cash. Hell, don’t take card payments if you like, but don’t kid yourself it’s saving money, helping local commerce, or is a great statement of freedom.

Life

Familiar

We went away again, and yet again, it was Morecambe. It was, even, the same property as before: at the time we needed to book, various events detailed here just meant we couldn’t be bothered with effort: this was available and we liked it.

So, once more, we were off up the M6. 2h 16 min of uneventful driving, 54mpg and we pull in to the driveway, dump the car, and as is traditional, head for lunch.

What else did we get up to? Well, we rode on historic buses again

Historic bus on display at Morecambe FC ground.
Historic bus on display at Morecambe FC ground.

and we dropped into the Winter Gardens to be impressed by the progress made since last time (when it resembled a building site) and grab some lunch.

Inside Morecambe Winter Gardens
Inside Morecambe Winter Gardens

We also had an important task to do. Mark‘s last holiday away was at Arnside, so we scattered some of his ashes off the pier there, checking the wind direction first ;-).

Arnside, from the pier
Arnside, from the pier

Other than that? Some R&R, some pubs, a very nice meal or two.

Even the journey back (2hr 33min, 58mpg) wasn’t bad: back to our darling kittehs.

Technology

TV Freedom

Following on from the Internet and phone move to A&A, we just lost Virgin’s TV service when the cancellation period expired. This was the one bit I wondered about: A&A’s Internet offering is definitely an improvement, with few drops (and if it does drop, they tell you, rather than you having to guess), and latency and speed way improved (this really showing up in work Zoom meetings), and a router placement that works better for us now.

The phone, too, is good. We don’t use the “landline” much these days, but having had it for over 30 years, i wasn’t ready to drop it. Having it in SIP adds flexibility- I can have it present on my mobile if I want, and the cost is trivial.

Back to the TV though. We now realise just how many of the channels Virgin offered were just crap- noise in the TV guide- almost too much choice, and terrestrial Freeview combined with the free streaming services actually fill our requirements pretty well. A bit of fiddling with my 14 year old Onkyo AV amp and ARC settings and we can get surround too, and one less remote. Our TV can stream the common services as standard, and the fact the router is closer means it’s never going to struggle for bandwidth.

The only thing we’re missing so far is the ability to pause or rewind live TV, but if we really, can’t live without it, we can buy a Humax box with the savings from just 1 month’s subscription.

Computers

Loss of Virginity

Since before this blog existed, I’d been a customer of Virgin Media or its predeccesor, Telewest/Blueyonder. Back when i took it out, in around 2001, it was the only option for broadband here, with no ADSL service, and I can still remember the blistering speed of 512Kbit/sec (that’s 0.5M, kids) that, actually did seem blistering compared to the 30-something K a so-called 56k dial-up could deliver.

We had TV too, with the demise of OnDigital, but not the phone: that came later with a package upgrade courtesy of a colleague’s sister that worked for VM at some point.

So, all in all, about 23 years of custom. The speeds have risen, and the price crept up, but overall, it’s been a reliable service.

Late last year, though, it wasn’t, and I started looking around. The relatively high cost, recently announced 8.8% price rise, and the arrival of fibre on the BT Openretch poles in the street convinced me it was time.

I’d heard great things of Andrews and Arnold: a small, UK-based, techie-friendly ISP who aim to be up front, simple, and clear. so i enquired, and got a real answer from a real human refreshingly free of marketing. They could also port my landline, an anachronism I’m not ready to lose yet, over to SIP with very cheap line rental and reasonable charges. I explained what my knowledge level was and what I wanted, they told me what to order and advised me against giving notice until the phone line port completed, as that can fail if a service is due to be ceased.

At the point of writing, the new connection is to be installed, but the phone port has happened- and thanks to a borrowed ATA, a config guide on A&A’s website, and prior experience with SIP means that the phone is working over the VM connection at the first attempt, despite the fact that SIP and NAT can be problematic, having ported in the timeframe given with no fuss whatsoever. Having the line in SIP with a tech-friendly provider means flexibility and features at no extra cost now, too. The end of POTS in the UK means all phones will move to IP in time, but moving to a more conventional ISP would leave me with less control and being forced to use their router if I wanted the landline phone. This gives me flexibility, at the cost of having to handle some tech myself.

Now the port is complete, I’ve told VM that I’m off. They did, of course offer to improve my package, but I have the same approach here as with car insurance: if you can offer me better, you should have done that, not waited for me to call and say I’m off. I now have a few weeks to play about with the new connection, while the old one still works. I have an ISP-supplied router and at least one alternative to try. The new connection will give me about 3 times the speed.

As to TV, we found that a lot of our watching was either Freeview, streaming from free-to-use services like All4, or a bit of Amazon prime, so the cost of VM’s TV seems excessive: we will try Freeview and consider other services if needed.

Life

Cut Out

It seems that the operation was a success, and I should be free of the tumour that was confirmed as cancerous, but has a very low risk of spread or recurrence. There will be a scan later this year to confirm that, but thankfully my kidney function is normal and I appear to have no side effects. Something of a relief.

Computers, Technology

Flat Out

2 Comments

Warning: DNS/Email nerdery below.

For my sins, one of the things I had to do recently was complete DNS domain authentication, DKIM, and DMARC for some email domains at work in Mailchimp. Mailchimp is the spamming engine mass email system of choice, and to be fair, they’re responsible and force compliance with good practice. They also try to increase the chances of your spam legitimate mass email being deliverable, which is where this comes in.

The big email providers such as Yahoo, Hotmail/Outlook, and Gmail now insist that if you send over a certain threshold, you:

* Send from a domain you own
* Configure DKIM, SPF, and DMARC
* Don’t send shitloads of actual spam
* include a one-click unsubscribe

This is all part of the spam arms race: electronic means to detect spam are less effective, so this is an attempt to stop the problem at source by making sure the email is coming from where it claims to: spoofing email is trivial, so this effectively adds a signature.

Well, we already had the domain, and SPF, we don’t actually spam people, and Mailchimp handles the unsubscribe, so that left DKIM and DMARC. This actually isn’t that hard, just involving publishing a few records in DNS that match up with the email servers. The DMARC is little more than a published policy of what people should do if the mail seems to be unathenticated- and “take no action” is acceptable. The actual authentication is done by DKIM, where you publish a public key in DNS, and the email is signed by your outgoing server with a corresponding private key. If the encryption key matches, the mail is deemed as being legitimate.

So, I went ahead and did all this for our own infrastructure, as it seems silly to set it all up only for the mass mailing. Pretty simple, too, in the end.

Now, obviously, if someone (Mailchimp) is sending mail for you, you need to publish their key for DKIM. The logical way to do this is for them to publish it, and then for you to alias an entry in your DNS (with what is called a CNAME record). That way, if they change the key, it keeps working without changes to your DNS.
Continue reading Flat Out →

audio, music

On Video

My recent obsession with Tristania led me to purchase some music from their last lead singer, Mariangela Demurtas, specifically Dark Ability. I really wanted a physical CD, because physical media, but the shipping was shockingly expensive, so I got a digital download.

Very good it is too: a download in WAV and MP3, and I’ve encoded the WAV to FLAC. Great music, atmospheric and powerfful but relaxing, and different to Tristania but great, nicely recorded, too.

One thing did strike me though: the recordings were 24 bit depth, 48kHz, which is a commonly used standard, but less common for releases, which usually adhere to 16-bit/44.1 kHz (Red Book CD).

This sent me down a bit of a hole: why 44.1, an oddly non-round number? Why, then, 48, a rounder number but suspiciously close to 44.1, so close that in all practical terms, it shouldn’t make any difference?

The answer is video. In the early days of digital audio- in the 70s- the only practical way to record digital audio was on to U-Matic professional video tape, because nothing else had the bandwidth for it, so Sony produced PCM encoders and modified U-Matic video tape transports for this reason. Both 44.1 and 48kHaz are chosen as being (a) above the Nyquist frequency for human hearing and (b) not be too inconvenient to encode into TV frames, and both have been engineering standards since. 48 is more commonly used for matching to video as the rates line up with both PAL and NTSC video frame rates without trickery.

Rants

Directionless

This is a minor whinge, but I’m sat with nothing else to do and it’s something that bugs me.

Ahead of my surgery, I had a pre-op check. All very normal, so they can evaluate how fucked you are beforehand and what will be required to minimise risk before and after.

I look at the map and enter at the main entrance of Zone A- note that this isn’t the hospital main entrance (any more?) which is now way over in Zone D.

I now note that A18, what I was after, is actually missing from the map, which is point number 1, but, logically, it must be nearby. So I continue in, follow the signs, and come to a dead end at A18 with a printed bit of A4 paper, with a photo of another building and “A18 has moved to the old swab area, next to the old A&E” (forgive meif this is innacurate, this is from memory, but you get the idea).

In what way is this useful to anyone who has never visited this part of the hospital before?

I stopped a passing member of staff.

Oh, yes, it’s moved. Go out of that entrance behind you, turn right, it’s very nearby, it’s a glass box that sticks out from the building.

Those were good, clear directions.

Why couldn’t that have been on the A4? Why are some people so bad at giving directions, and why, in particular, is the NHS so good at failing to update signage, or leave big gaps in it? This is the 4th or 5th time at New Cross I’ve just thought “OK, where now?”. I’m singling out New Cross here, but Heartlands, with miles of corridors, is also challenging at times, and the less we say of Good Hope the better. Some of this is the nature of hospitals of course, huge, sprawling sites that have organically grown and changed over time.

The key start is that people assume you know the landmarks they refer to. It’s not just the NHS, to be fair; I once had problems finding an ex-colleague’s house:

But it’s easy, you just go to Edgbaston Cricket Ground and turn [direction]

That’s all well, if you actually know where that place is. I didn’t, because I have no interest in it.

I’m fairly regularly asked directions to Walsall Wood Football club- we live near to it (sadly, when they choose to play their shit music over a PA). This situation would be like me saying “Yeah it’s easy, it’s just past that house where someone drove into the wall”. I know where that is, the person asking hasn’t a clue.

For directions to be useful, they have to define an unambiguous starting point, and have a clear direction. Unlike this post.