Category: learning curve

Day 739 – How to start an obituary

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I sat down this evening, full of good intentions to write a blog post from scratch, probably about some recent political development or news item, lending you – the dear reader – some profound insight into the important matter in question.

And then I saw The Times’ obituary for actress June Brown.

Well, some of it. I couldn’t read the whole lot because it’s paywalled and I don’t do paywalls.

But what I saw was quite enough:

I’ll be quite honest here: this was not the opening sentence or paragraph that I was expecting when documenting the life of a 95 year old woman who had a career spanning over 30 years in one of the UK’s biggest and most popular soap operas.

I don’t have an issue with her amateur (I’m guessing/hoping it was amateur) slice and dice hobby, I just think it’s a really weird thing to start an actress’ obituary with. And it’s quite a 180 from the warm and cosy lines just ahead of it, n’est pas? I can only guess that she had an otherwise unremarkable childhood and that the bunny hacking was the only thing of interest.

But even so… Wow.

Day 735 – Bye bye, Leonard

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Remember my excitement at these photos?

They were the ones I took of Comet Leonard during our New Year visit to Cape Agulhas. There are more on the original post above, along with a full explanation.

Well, there’s bad news for Comet Leonard and its fans today, I’m afraid:

Looks like I got there just in time, having got my shots on 29th December. And, as you can read in my post above, while they might not have been the most amazing images that were captured of Leonard, I had no specialised equipment (literally: a tripod and a camera), and couldn’t even see the damn thing with my aging naked eyes. I was chuffed enough.

Bring on the next comet, and I’ll have another go.

Day 734 – Fixing my new phone

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Or: How to enable WiFi Calling on the POCO F3. Solved.
tl;dr? – scroll to the bottom of this post.

The cell phone signal is awful here Chez 6000… so I wanted (needed?) to get a phone which supported WiFi Calling, so that I could hook onto the (very good) internet here to make calls.

The Poco F3 does have WiFi Calling, but could I find a way of getting it to work?
No, I couldn’t.

Pages of online instruction booklets, forums, subreddits and Youtube videos were no help. My cellular provider was no help. With the evidence of WiFi Calling being available on the Poco F3 right in front of him, the guy even told me that the Poco F3 probably didn’t have it.
He opened a support request ticket. I have never heard back from them.
Which cellular provider was this? It doesn’t matter: they’re all equally useless.

But then I found this video:

Which told me a lot of the same stuff that I had seen before, but added an extra step.

Suffice to say, my WiFi Calling is now enabled. What a relief.

So, you can watch the video if you want (and it’s brilliantly and clearly explained), but if it’s a case of tl;dw, and for all the search engines out there:

How to enable WiFi Calling on the POCO F3. Solved.
Go to dialer on your phone.
Dial *#*#86583#*#*
Wait for “carrier check disabled” message.
Dial *#*#869434#*#*
Wait for “carrier check disabled” message.
Go to Settings > SIM cards and Mobile Networks > SIM 1
Click “Use VoLTE” and “Make calls using WiFi” switches to on.
Change “Network Preferences” to “Prefer WiFi”.

You are done. Bob can like to be your uncle.

Day 732 – Is this even a real blog…?

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Is this even a real blog if I don’t submit some sort of thoughtpiece regarding the biggest news item to hit the world in the last few years, that being the… [checks notes] Chris Rock/Will Smith incident at the Oscars last night?

Amazingly, I might have pre-empted the whole thing anyway, because if I don’t share some wise words upon the “toxic masculinity” (ugh) or the “poor taste” humour (ugh) on display, then perhaps yesterday’s post comes into play.
And if I do mention either of them, but don’t somehow manage to get a tie-in to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, then I’m doing something very wrong.

Indeed, thank goodness that this little fracas has finally removed the story of the scary temperature anomalies at the North and South Poles from all our front pages this week, am I right?

(As an scientist, I can report that it is never, ever good news when you see a graph like that.)

Anyway, I wonder which celebrity is going to be nasty to one of their peers tomorrow? After all, there’s not much time to get all that vitriol into the news cycle before Armageddon.

Day 729 – Minor panic averted

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I tried to add a post onto this here blog a little earlier and got a Cloudflare Origin 1016 DNS Error.

Ah yes, that old chestnut.

The blog is run on servers many, many more then 6000 miles… from here. And those servers are remarkably stable. Older readers may recall that there were issues with the local servers I used to use, and that’s why 6000.co.za ended up heading overseas.

I’m all for supporting local businesses, but they must actually work.

This overseas option does exactly that. Well, except when I tried to add a post a little earlier.

I will admit that a moment of panic set in. There’s that record to preserve, and I have a lot of plans for the rest of the day, many of which do not involve being near a computer or even an internet connection.
As mentioned, my “new” solution is extremely reliable, and so any error could hint at very bad news.

My first instinct, therefore, was to run around the office panicking a bit, but I was actually just too lazy to get up, so instead I refreshed the page and the error disappeared.

Whatever Cloudflare was looking for – and which wasn’t there 10 seconds earlier – had reappeared.

I think that it might have been there all along and Cloudflare wasn’t looking hard enough.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well. Which it has. For the moment.