Toots for johnefrancis@mastodon.social account

Written by John Francis on 2024-11-27 at 23:57

Safe travels Mr. Abrahams...one of the creators of some of my favourite #movies

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/jim-abrahams-obit-1.7394888

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Written by John Francis on 2024-11-27 at 03:41

Everyone has written off a 2nd term for Joe Biden. This is the time to put some money on it.

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Written by John Francis on 2024-11-26 at 15:25

Don't be sad #Saskatchewan, you'll probably be able to melt your standard-grade windshield washer fluid on Dec 12. Don't keep leaving it outside!

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Written by John Francis on 2024-11-26 at 03:46

Sometimes I get followed by accounts that look mostly genuine, but I don't feel they have good reason to follow me. Like an account that posts exclusively in German. Or the band promo account follow spam.

Block the account and then unblock. This breaks the follow and is easy to in the #mastodon mobile web ui.

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Written by John Francis on 2024-11-25 at 14:14

Outdated Bitcoin email phishing scams are using outdated templates that don't reflect the recent changes in price.

It reminds me of older email scams that would claim that Kofi Annan was going to give me a wire transfer of the combined GDP of multiple continents. Hundreds of trillions of USD.

Like Dr. Evil's struggled with coming up with a reasonable ransom number as he travelled between the 60's and 2000's.

It could also be a mark-filtering technique to intake only the dumbest marks.

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Written by John Francis on 2024-11-24 at 16:29

A #crow has arrived quite quickly after I filled the crow platform with peanuts and a chunk of frozen hamburger.

The jays will haul off 2kg of peanuts by this afternoon, but it will take quite a while for the #crows to come and eat the hamburger. Usually at least week of pretending not to see it.

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Written by John Francis on 2024-11-24 at 16:18

Sunday #aquarium cleaning.

This one has developed serious "hair algae" problems. Well established with good water params. No measurable ammonium or nitrite. No measurable nitrate unless I put some in. Light population of fish. A few snails. 80F. About 25% of the surface covered by healthy duckweed.

It will grow a very dense population of stringy hair algae within a couple of weeks. Like 2kg drained but wet algae. Zero slime algae or cyano tho.

No idea how to reduce it.

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Written by John Francis on 2024-11-24 at 13:39

Went to the #movies last night.

Among the many pre-roll commercials was a confusing commercial for the RCMP. Swat teams safely taking some white people into custody? Wasn't entirely clear if it was a recruiting commercial, or it was something to improve the public perception of the RCMP. But an interesting window into how the RCMP wants be seen, as nice swat teams.

Gladiator II was just OK. Sharks in the Coliseum is wrong. Broken scene.

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Written by John Francis on 2024-11-23 at 19:47

😆

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Written by John Francis on 2024-11-23 at 19:02

Snow tires are on in #ottawa. My summer all-seasons are toast and would be abysmal in any snow. Cleaning leaves, but trying to leave them alone where they won't encourage rodent problems near the house. Tarping yard stuff, so hopefully a dump on snow comes to help keep everything in place. #saturday

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Written by John Francis on 2024-11-22 at 18:37

...which is great. I'm not interested in bricking the ABS, alarm/lock/ignition or ECM.

So I put in a fresh home WiFi password and pulled up nice and close to the house to get a good signal. It connected and downloaded 4y of updates over 2 patch cycles and updated the entertainment unit successfully.

That's good, because some vehicles can be hacked via insecure entertainment unit software.

And I have updated nav maps, if I'm not using Android Auto. And maybe some other new features.

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Written by John Francis on 2024-11-22 at 18:32

After successfully patching the laser printer firmware yesterday, I was feeling good and decided to patch some of the firmware in my car, a Subaru. Subaru Canada kindly sent out some email notices about it...I was very suspicious about them at first, but they proved legit. They are like "patch your entertainment console with the usual documented process", not "patch your car with the attachment in this email" 😆

Entertainment console only... safety critical firmware is not user-patchable...

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Written by John Francis on 2024-11-22 at 04:00

The Lemmites have gone over to mainlining cat pictures, mostly voids.

Cats pics are everywhere on social media, but these cat levels are unprecedented.

[#]fediverse

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Written by John Francis on 2024-11-22 at 00:53

A Moudakis... really nails Putin's expression

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Written by John Francis on 2024-11-22 at 00:50

ICC issuing arrest warrant for Netanyahu clear proof of court's bias against genocidal maniacs - The Beaverton

https://www.thebeaverton.com/2024/11/icc-issuing-arrest-warrant-for-netanyahu-clear-proof-of-courts-bias-against-genocidal-maniacs/

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Written by John Francis on 2024-11-22 at 00:20

...when the magenta runs out, I'll lock it to b&w mode and it should work well for many more years as a mono laser printer. Without spots, since those are colour related. Probably 4000+ pages of black toner left. Many years.

Happy that I won't be throwing it's 20kg e-waste carcass into the bin, and won't be coughing up $500 for a replacement.

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Written by John Francis on 2024-11-22 at 00:17

Spent a bit of time fiddling with my 9 year old Lexmark colour laser printer this morning. It's had an issue with the imaging unit for some time and prints a few unwanted blobs in colour. Magenta is down to 900 pages estimated. This week it actually crashed, reproducibly with a particular pdf, with a little tiny "bsod" on the thumb-sized display.

Went looking for firmware, Lexmark still patching it in 2024, updated, bsod gone....

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